Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Hamlet
    An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.
  2. An American Rhapsody
    Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.
  3. The New Wizard of Oz
    Majesty's reissue is a delirious and loony surprise in this season of nattier ape-suits.
  4. The Turandot Project
    A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.
  5. All Over the Guy
    A painfully earnest case of generic romance spiced with queerness.
  6. American Pie 2
    Hardly works up a decent belly laugh before its characters are happily pairing off with whomever they desire most. The film is like skipping the orgasm and going straight for the cigarette.
  7. Session 9
    The script for Session 9 is so underwritten that even such lively character actors as David Caruso, Peter Mullan, and Brendan Sexton III are left stranded.
  8. The Others
    This is one scary movie, not because we see ghosts or monsters, but because Kidman makes us feel her fear as our own.
  9. Osmosis Jones
    Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.
  10. The Deep End
    Swinton provides her own brand of incandescence, doubling as the film's aching heart and its center of gravity.
  11. Audition
    After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.
  12. Original Sin
    Doesn't even have earnestness going for it -- a tepid, blindly assembled post-noir.
  13. Thomas in Love
    It's squeamish about sex but not, unfortunately, sentiment.
  14. Under solen
    The kind of quotidian pastoral -- about a simple, honest peasant who finds the greatest love of all -- that the Academy invariably finds irresistible.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Diaries
    A modest, enjoyable fairy tale that easily outcharms its animated stablemates of the past decade.
  16. Rush Hour 2
    This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.
  17. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.
  18. Greenfingers
    Owen and Mirren are fun to watch, but the film, despite the many shots of gardens in full bloom, lacks visual distinction.
  19. The Monkey's Mask
    The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tokyo Eyes
    Doesn't so much titillate as irritate.
  21. Fever Heat [re-release]
    The movie is a superb riff with a boffo finale, a terrific, cynical punch line, and a crazy closing image of Bob's Plymouth on an empty beach.
  22. Planet of the Apes
    It's a campy, juiced-up ker-splat, busy with clumsy pyrotechnics and never nearing the vicinity of satire.
  23. Bread and Tulips
    A happy ending is never at issue here -- it's clear where she's going, but there's little clue where she's been.
  24. He liu
    The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.
  25. Wet Hot American Summer
    The film exists in a humid meta-movie ether all its own.
  26. Cure
    Cure has a generic resemblance to "Seven," but it's far more oblique, and that much more troubling.
  27. Jackpot
    Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.
  28. Reykjavík
    Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).
  29. America's Sweethearts
    A lackluster screwball comedy.
  30. Brother
    If nothing else, Brother confirms Kitano's stature as the most original purveyor of on-screen mayhem since Sam Peckinpah.
  31. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    It's this strategy (however unconscious), and not simply a lack of directing talent, that makes Hedwig so relentlessly assaultive, heavy-handed, and emotionally monochromatic.
  32. Ghost World
    Keep your "Lara Croft" and your "Shrek": For me, the summer's reigning icons are Enid, Thora Birch's geek goddess in Ghost World, and her action-movie analogue.
  33. Jurassic Park III
    Drama is minimal and character nonexistent.
  34. Downtown 81
    Doesn't dawdle and, despite some eye-rolling dialogue, is a generally amiable time-trip.
  35. Made
    Handheld sprinting and swish-pans try to enliven the duo's shenanigans: undermotivated fisticuffs, fun with the nutty controls on their limousine (the roof slides open!), Vaughn's endless yapping.
  36. Legally Blonde
    A junk-food movie striving to be nutritious -- it's one of your racier Be Yourself after-school specials crossed with 'Who Moved My Cheese?" for Cosmo girls.
  37. That Obscure Object of Desire
    Elaborate exercise in frustration.
  38. Bully
    The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.
  39. The Score
    Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.
  40. Adanggaman
    Ostensibly factual, helplessly self-conscious -- Adanggaman is being touted as the continent's first film about slavery as it was experienced on African soil—where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples.
  41. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
    The techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes -- it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.
  42. Off the Hook
    Watstein handily directs and edits around his screenplay's sappier elements.
  43. Everybody's Famous!
    Too brisk and plucky to dislike.
  44. Kiss of the Dragon
    A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.
  45. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.
  46. Lost and Delirious
    A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."
  47. Jump Tomorrow
    The relationship between the hysterical Gerard and the careful, compulsive George is classic screwball material and more compelling than the relationship between George and Alicia.
  48. Scary Movie 2
    The Wayans brothers' new bottom-feeder signals its utter exhaustion -- and barely veiled contempt for the audience.
  49. The Closet
    Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.
  50. Pandaemonium
    The exposition is thick, the characterization choppy, the wigs terrible.
  51. The Crimson Rivers
    Never lacks for energy, and the director and his stars stride with focused confidence through the hooey.
  52. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels.
  53. Pootie Tang
    Weirdest, funniest studio release of the summer so far and a bona fide cult object in the making.
  54. Crazy/Beautiful
    Overproduced as a Super Bowl soft-drink commercial, so much so that even its potentially insightful moments seem like movie fakery.
  55. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (re-release)
    Too priggish to earn a place alongside its better-known contemporaries "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House on the Left," Lemora is nevertheless surprisingly well made.
  56. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza.
  57. Come Undone
    Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.
  58. Lumumba
    As cliché-rich as it is compelling.
  59. Baby Boy
    Pretty much a mess, but it also has a couple of long stretches that are extremely daring in that they reveal black family dynamics we've never seen on screen before.
  60. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    A superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.
  61. The Princess and the Warrior
    Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.
  62. Dr. Dolittle 2
    It's dispiriting to watch him (Murphy) stand patiently by and concoct reaction shots for quipping raccoons and dancing bears.
  63. The Fast and the Furious
    (You) might be charmed by the film's blend of kineticism, car-culture rituals, and hilariously flat-footed dialogue.
  64. Saudate for the Future
    Infectious city symphony.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life and Debt
    Devastating, artful, and intelligent documentary.
  66. Le tombeau d'Alexandre
    The Last Bolshevik, considered by some to be Marker's masterpiece.
  67. The Adventures of Felix
    A wafer-thin, sweetly sentimental picaresque with semiserious overtones.
  68. Auggie Rose
    Amid the awkward pacing and gaping plot holes, the film's chief point of interest is Goldblum's morbidly fascinating performance: equal parts Walter Neff and Captain Kirk.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Dirty Cop No Donut
    Uses brutality, booze, and boobs to sell its social commentary; it's as drunk on fake blood as Friendly is on police power.
  70. Songcatcher
    The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.
  71. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    So pandering and pebble-brained you'd guess it had been test-screened on barnyard animals.
  72. Russian Doll
    The cheesy idiot-twin of Pawel Pawlikowski's superb "Last Resort."
  73. Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch
    A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
  74. Sexy Beast
    There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.
  75. Let It Snow
    An inert and inept romantic comedy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    The bulk of the Atlantis scenes in situ are as involving as a chakra workshop.
  77. Evolution
    Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.
  78. Bride of the Wind
    A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?
  79. The Anniversary Party
    The film's greatest failure, however, is the absence of any convincing emotional or sexual relationship between Sally (Leigh) and Joe (Cumming).
  80. Swordfish
    The story -- is just what fills in the gaps between slow-motion fireballs, Matrix-style frozen mayhem, and Halle Berry's notoriously undraped breasts.
  81. Divided We Fall
    In its compassionate absurdism and underlying dark humor, the movie seeks to reestablish contact with the Czech new wave.
  82. 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.
  83. A Love Divided
    Brady and Cunningham share a volatile, symbiotic chemistry, sketching in elegant shorthand the rhythms of a lusty, combative marriage.
  84. Big Eden
    Stupefyingly benign.
  85. Rape Me
    Wit is in short supply -- although this journey to the end of the night derives a certain amount of punkish energy from its crude editing, cruddy-looking close-ups, strident soundtrack, and overall volatility.
  86. A Real Young Girl
    A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.
  87. What's the Worst That Could Happen?
    I'd rather watch a forgotten houseplant dehydrate and die.
  88. Farewell, Home Sweet Home
    The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.
  89. Himalaya
    Himalaya lacks such lightness, humor, and grace, offering instead the surface beauty of an ancient and inviolate culture.
  90. The Man Who Cried
    The Man Who Cried is like a Yiddish generational tearjerker told from the perspective of the lost child rather than that of the bereaved parent.
  91. The Road Home
    The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.
  92. Pearl Harbor
    The chaos is convincing, but, less ruthless than Steven Spielberg, Bay eschews D-day panic and mutilation.
  93. Our Song
    The patient camera leans in closely on the three lead actresses -- extraordinary first-timers all.
  94. Fast Food Fast Women
    In his film's better moments, Kollek makes us laugh at these visions while also revealing their grace and frailty.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Fits of Passion
    Flawlessly acted, Strange Fits of Passion could be a female equivalent of "The Year My Voice Broke," only in contemporary gear.
  96. Petits frères
    Doillon's ease with young performers is again seamlessly evident.
  97. Angel Eyes
    A tearjerking romantic confection that, thanks to a reliance on unrestrained psychobabble and melodramatic one-upmanship, is only partially digestible.
  98. Moulin Rouge!
    A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie --hoovering up a hundred years' worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum.
  99. Shrek
    Desperately avoiding the risk of even a half-second of boredom, the movie is wall-to-window-to-door noise, babbling, and jokes.
  100. Striporama
    An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »