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. New Rose Hotel
    What's on the screen is so dreadful that it inspires the ontological question "What are films and why is this not one of them?"
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Biker Boyz
    Too bad that when the filmmakers aren't busy accommodating cameo models and comedians, they seem to be dozing off at the handlebars. Luckily, we're watching from a different side of the highway.
  3. Just Visiting
    Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.
  4. DysFunktional Family
    It's nauseating, unfunny stuff, unmitigated by the revelation that Griffin's mom physically abused him.
  5. States of Control
    Takes its heroine, Lisa (Van Dyck), to the neurotic brink.
  6. The Charcoal People
    Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.
  7. Brooklyn Babylon
    Levin's Brooklyn Babylon, set during a hot summer in Crown Heights, is an ethnic-strife tract as thuddingly didactic as his previous "Whiteboys."
  8. History Lessons
    Hammer betrays a tiresome attachment to cross-cutting ladyporn with antiquated educational filmstrips, to no real end but snarky giggles.
  9. Big Momma's House
    Ends up waddling its way toward gentler, mistier climes, stopping just shy of "Doubtfire" country. It doesn't run out of smelly steam so much as downshift and become a different movie.
  10. Passion of Mind
    An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.
  11. The Watcher
    Sidesteps any juicy subtext in favor of routine chase-movie thrills.
  12. Loving Jezebel
    An oafish wish-fulfillment wankfest.
  13. On the Run
    A bad one-night stand endured with a jailbroke cad and his put-upon travel-agent pal that hinges somewhat on the characters' impression that Frank Sinatra is still among us.
  14. Empire
    Too bad the central bedfellowship never gels, and Franc. Reyes's script turns a dissection of ambition into "Sleeping With the Enemy"-style nonsense.
  15. Love's Labour's Lost
    Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.
  16. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.
  17. A Piece of Eden
    Mushy and musty itself, A Piece of Eden takes an eternity...this time to cheat and shortcut its way to lesser Frank Capra moments without the gritty touch of, say, a Garry Marshall.
  18. Mifune's Last Song
    Grows increasingly slack and silly.
  19. Orfeu
    Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.
  20. Onegin
    Unable to capture either its wit, psychological acuity, or formal rigor, the movie essentially reduces the schematic, seesaw narrative to doomy clichés.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Story of Us
    Maudlin, irritating marital drama.
  22. Boys and Girls
    A cat-and-dog romantic squabbler so garbled you'd need a centrifuge to sort things out.
  23. The Skulls
    Energetic and thoroughly brainless.
  24. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
    Writers are only interesting for what they've written, and for that you'll have to go read.
  25. Wildflowers
    Wildflowers is the only brand of requiem the '60s get anymore -- worshipful and ass-backward.
  26. The Banger Sisters
    For a few brief moments, it's the bravest work this Hollywood gargoyle (Hawn) has ever done.
  27. Don't Ask Don't Tell
    The would-be cult classic Don't Ask Don't Tell may be a "refried film," but that's no excuse for stale jokes.
    • 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.
  29. Claire Dolan
    Less awful than inert, Claire Dolan comes across as a willfully bad movie.
  30. Just One Time
    An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.
  31. Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire
    In this visually malnourished film, quirks substitute for character.
  32. The Operator
    Can't surmount its own ineptitude.
  33. Maze
    Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.
  34. 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Next Big Thing
    Posner's dishearteningly unsophisticated treatment itself rings false.
  36. Bad Company
    Predictably soulless techno-tripe, this Bruckheimer-in-a-can thriller is leavened only by the ludicrous notion of Chris Rock playing separated twins.
  37. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
    Bloated loquaciousness, damp self-absorption, and defensive reflexiveness on display here.
  38. Gun Shy
    It's the casting of Liam Neeson as the nervous breakdown that turns the movie to asphalt -- it's like watching Andre the Giant play Woody Allen.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Crew
    The humor is even more geriatric than the cast.
  40. Miss Julie
    Figgis's frenetic and grossly self-aggrandizing adaption of Strindberg's worse-for-wear two-hander about the battle between the sexes and the classes.
  41. This Thing of Ours
    Danny Provenzano's mafioso melodrama is the immoral vanity project to end immoral vanity projects.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Friends and Family
    First-timer Coury's fast pace can't outrun Joseph Triebwasser's predictable script, saddled with mobster clichés and queer stereotypes.
  43. Mango Yellow
    A shallow Brazilian trifle.
  44. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Another mystery that gives up its secrets all too quickly, Till Human Voices Wake Us is named for a T.S. Eliot line -- and it proves a woefully evocative title for this snoozy supernatural pastoral.
  45. Down and Out with the Dolls
    With no irony and no plot beyond Girls Have Band, Voss reduces Kali and Fauna to earnest Janus faces of Hole's schizo aesthetic.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Event
    Shot on crummy DV and told via flashbacks, the film largely plays out like a Reagan-era "Citizen Kane." Common sense wrecks even the film's funniest bit, and the director's nausea-inducing camera observes the hysteria in perpetual pan-and-scan.
  47. Stardom
    With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.
  48. Boys Life 4: Four Play
    While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's “Boys Life 3,” this fourth anthology represents a full-blown regression.
  49. All Over the Guy
    A painfully earnest case of generic romance spiced with queerness.
  50. Supernova
    Apparently fallen victim to the transparent damage-control tactics of studios in possession of perceived stinkers.
  51. Sex with Strangers
    Choppy, overlong documentary.
  52. I Dreamed of Africa
    Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.
  53. Get Bruce
    I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.
  54. Full Frontal
    "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.
  55. The Sum of All Fears
    The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea.
  56. Blackboards
    Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.
  57. On_Line
    Indifferently written, passably acted, resourcefully shot in video with enlivening splashes of local color.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Suffers from a serious case of sophomore slump.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    102 Dalmatians
    Cruella is once again bent on collecting enough puppy skins to fashion the frock of her dreams. And once again, yawn.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sugar & Spice
    Sugar & Spice struggles with the existential challenge of individuating five perky white heterosexual girls wearing identical aquamarine miniskirts and halter tops. And that's before they put on their latex "Betty" masks.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Green Card Fever
    Though it's high time for a probing drama that illuminates the labyrinth of America's immigration system, those responsible for Green Card Fever should have their artistic licenses revoked.
  62. Uptown Girls
    Less "Freaky Friday" than just plain freaky.
  63. Hanging Up
    So hackneyed and so condescending to its potential audience (adult women) that even Lifetime might hesitate before running it.
  64. Someone Like You...
    The movie is trite like the ocean is big.
  65. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.
  66. Snipes
    A cockeyed shot all the way.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Diamonds
    With its superficial script, toneless direction, and unadmirable intentions...Diamonds is inappropriate for audiences of all ages.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Manna from Heaven
    It's shot like a Lifetime-influenced student film, and the overall artlessness makes the spoony dialogue all the more glaring.
  69. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Simply less campily moronic than its predecessor, a tired kill-by-numbers.
  70. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.
  71. Under Suspicion
    Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.
  72. Love Forbidden
    Cryptic, pseudo-poetic asides come across as merely pretentious: Repeated cutaways to statues will not make your film "Contempt," nor will fleeting references to serial killers make it "Don't Look Now."
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Don't Tempt Me
    Imagines Heaven and Hell as places so deeply mired in the business-as-usual hassles of earthly life that the battle between good and evil becomes a downright dull affair.
  74. Buddy Boy
    Mark Hanlon's ridiculous and repellent hash of "Repulsion" and "Psycho," with scenic elements of "Seven" thrown in for good measure.
  75. Bully
    The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.
  76. Civil Brand
    Without a scorcher like Pam Grier, the sub-NYPD Blue dialogue and acting dilute what could have been a shrieking wake-up call about for-profit prisons.
  77. The Last Castle
    Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.
  78. The Majestic
    A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.
  79. Best Laid Plans
    A creakily mechanical B-noir.
  80. Rugrats Go Wild
    As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.
  81. Cherish
    The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.
  82. The King Is Alive
    Endearingly pretentious -- as if it swallowed a thick brick of Beckett and can't pass the uncooperative Beckettian stool.
  83. Evolution
    Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.
  84. At First Sight
    The film slips into a coma early on and never awakens.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Anarchist Cookbook
    Cookbook banks on the humor of its caricatures and the heft of its moral dilemma, but because it never develops its characters beyond types, it comes off as flat and forced throughout.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Transporter
    Kills time between car chases and martial-arts bouts with random scuba-diving footage apparently culled from producer–co-writer Luc Besson's "The Big Blue."
  87. Double Parked
    Child abuse, domestic violence, and the struggles of single mothers deserve better treatment than this.
  88. Life or Something Like It
    Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Johnson Family Vacation
    The movie contains exactly two chuckle-worthy moments.
  90. Kate & Leopold
    The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.
  91. Celebrity
    The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.
  92. Showboy
    So amateurish that its awkward Whoopi Goldberg cameo actually adds a touch of class, Showboy is an ill-conceived, often implausible hybrid of fact and fiction.
  93. 50 First Dates
    The barf stream of gay jokes, pussy jokes, fat wife jokes, more gay jokes, and walrus penis jokes ends up making you pine for Lucy's gift of forgetting.
  94. The Claim
    A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.
  95. The Sculptress
    Wright's "British" accent elicits the only shudders.
  96. The Other Sister
    Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Holy Man
    Holy Man's traipse through the wilds of consumerism and higher purpose must have seemed like a chance for the proverbial stretch, but not even Eddie can save this ill-conceived mess of a movie.
  98. My First Mister
    The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.
  99. Tycoon: A New Russian
    Though a relatively sober essay on criminal organization, Tycoon is also thoroughly pulpy -- that is, crass, unimaginative, corner-cutting, and simplistic, with the visual vocabulary of daytime soap.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Perfect Score
    "X is to Y, as this shit is to boring."
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