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. Lantana
    The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Another Year
    I haven't seen a film this year that so openly invited me to revile each and every one of its characters-and I reviewed "The Human Centipede."
  3. The Big Short
    McKay's bumptious movie awkwardly combines fourth-wall-breaking gimmickry and flaccid indignation with the goofball energy that defines his comedies.
  4. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.
  5. Baran
    Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.
  6. Blue Jasmine
    Blue Jasmine is so relentlessly clueless about the ways real human beings live, and so eager to make the same points about human nature that Allen has made dozens of times before, that it seems like a movie beamed from another planet.
  7. Last Orders
    The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.
  8. A Clockwork Orange
    Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy...The last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing.
  9. Children of Heaven
    Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.
  10. La grande strada azzurra
    The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.
  11. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only the supporting actors have any bite.
  12. Man on the Train
    Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.
  13. Lost in La Mancha
    The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.
  14. Roger Dodger
    First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.
  15. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    The movie's only discernible purpose is as publicity for the book. An admitted egomaniac, Evans is no Hollywood villain, and yet this grating showcase almost makes you wish he'd gone the way of Don Simpson. Instead, he'll probably get an Irving Thalberg award.
  16. Kate Plays Christine
    Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.
  17. About a Boy
    Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.
  18. Inception
    It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    About the only thing to praise in Daughters is the way Seyrig looks: she is stunning in soft focus, chiffon, and egret. The dialogue and plot demands are unsurmountable burdens even for an actress as accomplished as she is. [01 Jul 1971, p.51]
    • Village Voice
  20. Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
  21. Exhibition
    A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.
  22. Three
    70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.
  23. Bronson
    Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."
  24. Rain
    The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.
  25. The Barbarian Invasions
    Shear away the film's pretensions, and it's a soap opera of assholes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Entertainer
    The boredom of British film realism is indescribable. I was yawning, and turning around, and fidgeting--what an experience! [08 Dec 1960, p.11]
    • Village Voice
  27. Audition
    After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.
  28. Pieces of April
    Manipulative and cloying, Pieces of April turns into something altogether creepier, even pathological, whenever first-time filmmaker Peter Hedges (screenwriter of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy") brings up race.
  29. Lars and the Real Girl
    Lars and the Real Girl wobbles in a slow, toneless no-man's-land between mawkish and schmaltzy while trafficking shamelessly in heartland stereotypy.
  30. The Cruise
    The Cruise is being hailed as a harbinger of a future in which indie film will be liberated by low-cost technology. If this is where we're going, I want off the bus.
  31. The Pawnbroker
    A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.
  32. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.
  33. Performance
    Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Becket (re-release)
    Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket's rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film's innuendo might have seemed daring; today it's close to ridiculous.
  35. Off the Map
    Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.
  36. My King
    The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.
  37. Notting Hill
    It is not, the filmmakers stress, a sequel to "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (which writer Richard Curtis was also responsible for), but it fits the latter-day Hollywood definition of the term -- same movie, only worse.
  38. Kite
    Less Bollywood than Generic Asian Family Drama Lite, when it's not a flat-out sunset-choked infomercial for Ahmedabad and its annual rooftop kite-flying festival.
  39. Hamlet
    An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.
  40. The Book of Life
    The film's rote right-makes-might fantasy wouldn't be so obnoxious if pandering to the lowest common denominator wasn't its default mode.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flanders
    Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his.
  42. The Candidate
    But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.
  43. Something's Gotta Give
    Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.
  44. Me You Them
    Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.
  45. Beyond the Clouds
    It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.
  46. Bend It Like Beckham
    Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Tattoo
    This plodding serial-killer procedural grafts hand-me-down malevolence onto a standard rookie-veteran police yarn, the results of which yield nary a fright, let alone a goose pimple.
  48. Maelstrom
    Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Snowtown Murders
    This slog adds up to nothing other than the shocking truism that average people will do horrible things primarily because someone tells them to.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Buried
    Rodrigo Cortes keeps the action bound to the box, limiting his lighting to naturalistic approximations, so that much of Reynolds's performance consists of him grunting and heaving in the dark.
  51. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    It's hard to tell whether Spielberg and Lucas are trying too hard or trying at all--the thing's such a mess, such an unmitigated disaster, that damned is the scholar stuck with the unfortunate task of deciphering this cynical, clinical gibberish in decades to come.
  52. One Last Kiss
    The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    X-Men: First Class
    A cameo from an old-school X-Man only serves to remind how stylish and witty the first installment was a decade ago. Lacking a single memorable joke or striking image, First Class is as perfunctory and passionless as would-be franchise resurrections get.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Scream of Fear
    No thrill, no suspense, no direction, bad in every way. [31 Aug 1961, p.8]
    • Village Voice
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies.
  56. Wild Grass
    An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.
  57. Cadillac Records
    With everything so wrong, how can there be anything right about Cadillac Records?
  58. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.
  59. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]
    • Village Voice
  60. 8 Women
    For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.
  61. Blackboards
    Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.
  62. Identity
    The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.
  63. You Kill Me
    The past decade has been less kind to Dahl, and though his latest, called You Kill Me, has the outward appearance of a return to form, it may in fact be the worst thing he's ever done--an inert, tone-deaf mélange of "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under."
  64. The Road
    Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.
  65. The Princess and the Warrior
    Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.
  66. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Plays like something crafted in a lab by 54-year-old hucksters trying to sell shit to the kids under the cheerless guise of "alternative." The only thing it's an alternative to? Good.
  67. Chocolat
    Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.
  68. One Bright Shining Moment
    Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.
  69. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.
  70. A Cat in Paris
    Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.
  71. Dear Frankie
    Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.
  72. Friends with Benefits
    What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.
  73. First Winter
    Even when things start to go awry for our group (thanks to jealousy, illness, a dwindling food stock) Dickinson's anti-dramatic methodology proves ill-suited to the task of generating narrative interest.
  74. Open Water
    Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.
  75. Happy Times
    Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.
  76. The Upside of Anger
    The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Allegro
    Unmotivated jitters and flash-zooms abound, needlessly complicating a flagrantly elaborate premise.
  78. Sugar Town
    Neither as lively nor as tough as the original, and compared to the hardcore punk of "Border Radio," the score for Sugar Town sounds like Muzak.
  79. Happy, Texas
    Sputters to a dead halt right out of the gate. One labored scenario follows another.
  80. Dogma
    A tediously childish exhibition.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jesus Camp
    The doc these kids would make with flea market camcorders couldn't possibly be as ugly as this absurdly hypocritical critique of the far right's role in escalating the culture war. The classier indoctrination to which Gap-shopping urban Democrats subject their kids might look damn spooky, too, but it probably wouldn't sell.
  82. What Alice Found
    Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.
  83. Ocean's Thirteen
    See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.
  84. Antwone Fisher
    Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    American History X
    A mess of a film.
  86. The Claim
    A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.
  87. Visitors
    Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.
  88. Baghead
    It's an indie about indies--meta, right?
  89. Saved!
    An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    A Man of No Importance
    The film has that made-for-UK-TV-but-theatriucally-released-inthe-US look, The shots are claustrophobic and grainy for no reason. [27 Dec 1994]
    • Village Voice
  91. Murder on the Orient Express
    Murder on the Orient Express falls down so badly as escapist entertainment that it is as if it were designed to prove the proposition that movies and mysteries don't mix.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Face
    Furiously intent on celebrating male love, Gibson and company try to refuse the erotics of friendship and miserably, wonderously fail. [[31 Aug 1993]
    • Village Voice
  93. Butterfly Kiss
    This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]
    • Village Voice
  94. Crazy/Beautiful
    Overproduced as a Super Bowl soft-drink commercial, so much so that even its potentially insightful moments seem like movie fakery.
  95. September 11
    It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mail Order Wife
    Less a film, more a series of ragtag gags.
  97. Cool It
    The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.
  98. Get Bruce
    I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.
  99. Dust to Glory
    The movie is monotonous, storyless, and at under 100 minutes, interminable.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Freeway
    As it is, Witherspoon's sweet-as-peach-pie Southern accent only grates and writer-director Bright's incessant winking at the audience bespeaks a project that was running on empty before shooting started. [22 Oct 1996, p.88]
    • Village Voice
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