Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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  1. The Time Machine
    If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Miss Wonton
    As genre comeuppance, this might have been nasty fun, but the movie barely makes sense, with its unbelievable naïveté and arbitrary flashbacks.
  3. Esther Kahn
    This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.
  4. Stolen Summer
    Made with no discernible craft and monstrously sanctimonious in dealing with childhood loss, it might as well be called "Pray It Forward."
  5. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism.
  6. Borstal Boy
    Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.
  7. We Were Soldiers
    Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
  8. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Roughly splits the difference between "Six Days, Seven Nights" and "9 1/2 Weeks." Which is something like the nth-order derivative of an infinite regression.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Next to this, even "Mean Machine's" painless soft-tissue spikings and fast-fixing broken limbs are believable -- and way funnier.
  10. The Cherry Orchard
    Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.
  11. Big Bad Love
    Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
  12. Maryam
    Serry perfectly captures the peculiar climate, creating uncanny echoes with today's situation. Persian stars Shaun Toub and Shohreh Aghdashloo are extremely convincing as Maryam's parents.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Revolution OS
    Less a revolutionary tale than a simple recounting of the recent past -- as staid as the pages in a history book.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mean Machine
    The most off-key notes here are the sentimental ones: When David Kelly shows up, reprising the wise-trustee role he had in the horticulture-behind-bars movie "Greenfingers," it's as though some twee script gremlin sneaked in and meddled with the Guy Ritchie schematics.
  15. Monsoon Wedding
    An air-conditioned bus tour of Punjabi ritual. Nair stuffs the film with dancing, henna, ornamentation, and group song, but her narrative clichés and telegraphed episodes smell of old soap opera.
  16. Dragonfly
    The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Queen of the Damned
    Aaliyah fans, as well as fans of charisma, sex, and violence, will be sorely disappointed.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Return to Never Land
    The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scratch
    Scratch's strongest moments are the live performance sequences, where hip-hop becomes an ultra-rhythmic spiritual experience, with roots in West African trance ritual and South Bronx gang solidarity.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Last Man
    If The Last Man were the last movie left on earth, there would be a toss-up between presiding over the end of cinema as we know it and another night of delightful hand shadows.
  21. Wendigo
    Grounded in Fessenden's handheld camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained through the surprisingly somber conclusion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hart's War
    Seriously off balance.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Crossroads
    You spend a lot of time wondering, "Better or worse than Glitter?" You think if the projectionist cranked the volume a little you could actually sort of get into this.
  24. Umberto D (re-release)
    It's too bad that the film is sporadically crude (a moment of suicidal angst is illustrated with a shove-zoom to the pavement), prone to mega-Italian extroversion, and far too in love with stupid pet tricks.
  25. Super Troopers
    Close enough in spirit to its freewheeling trash-cinema roots to be a breath of fresh air.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    John Q
    Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.
  27. Much Ado About Something
    It's a pleasingly Hollywood notion that plays well with Rubbo's interpolated quotes from "Shakespeare in Love."
  28. Scotland, Pa.
    The irrepressible Walken smiles benignly down on his colleagues, secure in the knowledge that his antics have capsized sturdier vessels than this. Playing a supposed health-food nut, he enters the movie chewing and doesn't stop until he's devoured every scene down to the props.
  29. Rollerball
    McTiernan's Rollerball is a movie masochist's delight.
  30. Collateral Damage
    Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.
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