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. Downfall
    Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the House
    The movie's not so much bad as it is chillingly uninventive.
  3. Face
    Never really finds a fresh groove.
  4. Walk on Water
    The complex questions Walk on Water raises receive only confused answers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Millions
    Danny Boyle's Millions is not what we'd expect from the "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" director. It's essentially a gentle, kid's-eye parable.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ice Princess
    The surprisingly twisty plot skates along with zero friction, giving new meaning to "Disney on Ice."
  7. Fifty-Fifty
    A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.
  8. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.
  9. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    Leitman's interviews are lax and inconclusive.
  10. Beauty Shop
    Breezy, sporadically funny.
  11. Control
    Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie-literally or figuratively.
  12. Fever Pitch
    But the ickiest thing about Fever Pitch is its reverential Field of Dreams music.
  13. Major Dundee (re-release)
    What rescues Major Dundee in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Amityville Horror
    A Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.
  15. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Lots of Dowse's ideas work well--the ringing tinnitus, the conversion of sound to visible waves, the trimming of treble and bass for underwatery effect, the removal of ambient noise entirely. But as the humor flags, It's All Gone Pete Tong starts to feel more like an exercise.
  16. Torremolinos 73
    Its Saul Bass-y credits suggest an Almodóvarian flamboyance, but this impotent '70s-set comedy mostly skimps on discoteca stylishness.
  17. A Lot Like Love
    Interjections from perennial second bananas Kathryn Hahn (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and Kal Penn (winning even when not conjuring vivified bags of pot) generate the only sparks.
  18. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tunnel
    Director Roland Suso Richter skillfully wields the wall as a metaphor for isolation, but his pacing needs work: He cuts from an emotional death to a rowdy scene of sex on a kitchen table. Well, that's one way to mourn.
  20. House of Wax
    Only a nominal remake...Nevertheless, for gore aficionados (and probably no one else) the murders are worth the wait.
  21. Brothers
    Brothers emerges as no less or more than Bier's claustrophobic compositions and unimaginative choices.
  22. A Hole in One
    First-time writer-director Richard Ledes's mystical tone and pervasive swipes from David Lynch tend to suffocate his satire, and stunt casting doesn't help.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kicking & Screaming
    Even the intermittent laughs undermine Kicking and its winning-isn't-everything message.
  24. Monster-in-Law
    "Legally Blonde" director Robert Luketic bumbles along with typically clumsy blocking and framing, and the misogyny inherent in the three-ring spectacle of bitch slaps, barbiturate covert ops, and wedding plan hysteria does rankle.
  25. My Mother
    Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.
  26. Layer Cake
    What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Even setting aside the clumsy inconsistency of its interior logic, Sith is an underachievement of escapist entertainment.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    Future analysts of American culture...will no doubt ponder why an incarceration-crazy society ends up rooting for the objects of its own control anxiety as comedic underdogs.
  29. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.
  30. The Ninth Day
    Plays best as a dry exercise in historical doublespeak and rationalization.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Saving Face
    Despite a fairly explicit lesbian boobfest (projected attendance just went up!), the film is more good-natured than provocative.
  32. Rock School
    Don Argott's lively documentary, ostensibly a paean to alternative pedagogy, extends its subject a long leash, and he in turn does his damnedest to sabotage the project. Rock School ends up being a movie about just how little fun rock 'n' roll can be.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Apres Vous (After You)
    Praised be the gods that this rom-com is French. If not, we'd be haunted by visions of a Focker-ish Dustin Hoffman rescuing a suicidal Tony Shalhoub then orchestrating the TV germophobe's reunification with ex Lisa Kudrow. Vive la France!
  34. Deep Blue
    Those looking for a refresher course on the workings of the food chain should be in heaven. All others may yearn for a sushi break.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wheel of Time
    Patient and fascinated, but never succumbing to abstraction, Wheel of Time can be seen as the middle installment of a trilogy against nature.
  36. King of the Corner
    An average film starring an average character actor, but maybe that's the point. This is a story about the benefits of just showing up. Even at its most sentimental, Riegert's pet project possesses a lived-in integrity that nearly offsets the staleness of the material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Mogul
    Avrich's Wasserman is less a man than a list of accomplishments, a Kane without a hint of a Rosebud and nary a whiff of significant criticism.
  38. Rebound
    Surprisingly bearable family comedy.
  39. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no "Fingers."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dark Water
    It fails to deliver the narrative thrill twists its origins would promise.
  41. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Florida-born folksinger Jim White serves as guide on this musical tour of the rural South, conceptualized less as a state of mind than as an atmosphere.
  42. Wedding Crashers
    Amiable and hollow.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Warrior
    Visual grandiloquence more than makes up for the bare-bones dialogue. But while high on mysticism and vast in scale, The Warrior seems more poised than poetic, and ultimately landscape proves to be the film's real grabber.
  44. Bad News Bears
    Hardly the kids'-sports movie we need, but maybe it's as much as we can handle.
  45. 9 Songs
    Winterbottom never provides the empathic connective tissue we expect. Love it or not, 9 Songs amounts to a common human rite fastidiously caught in amber, giving off no heat or joy but crystallized for the future.
  46. The Edukators
    The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.
  47. November
    Like a jigsaw that's more fun to assemble before you know how all the pieces fit, Greg Harrison's brain-teasing meta-thriller November is less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oyster Farmer
    A quirky dramedy.
  49. My Date with Drew
    When our hero finally does get his moment in the sun--c'mon, would someone have bought the movie if he didn't?--My Date With Drew offers the surreal spectacle of pursuer and pursued pleasantly gabbing, obliviously immersed in a mutual PR stunt.
  50. Four Brothers
    What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.
  51. Asylum
    Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the "DSM-IV."
  52. The Goebbles Experiment
    The master propagandist comes across here as a brooding, insecure megalomaniac--or at times, a bitchy member of a particularly malevolent high school clique, an effect enhanced by some of narrator Kenneth Branagh's English line readings.
  53. Valiant
    The main problem with this Disney release--which also wastes the voices of Ricky Gervais and Jim Broadbent--is its refusal to recognize the war as anything but an excuse for tomfoolery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    At its most ludicrously self-referential, the film achieves the perfect meta-moment when Toledo, seeking pointers on how to get away with murder, buys a copy of "Dial M for Murder" (released in Spain as Perfect Crime) and notices the title scans incorrectly as Ferpect Crime.
  55. This Divided State
    Develops into a lively but simpleminded valentine to liberal tolerance.
  56. Formula 17
    It might be, empirically speaking, the gayest movie ever released.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Transporter 2
    Choreographer Corey Yuen's use of a fire hose is far more creative than anything in the stale kidnapper plot.
  58. A Sound of Thunder
    The movie recovers from a sluggish opening act to pack some real suspense in its second half.
  59. 3 Dancing Slaves
    For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.
  60. An Unfinished Life
    As with the director's other films, all that keeps Unfinished from being a complete, treacly bore is its robust performances.
  61. Proof
    John Madden's competent, monotonous film version, not exactly stagebound but hardly freewheeling, only underscores its mechanical nature.
  62. Campfire
    The timelier elements of Campfire, which cleared house at Israel's Academy Awards this year, are too salient to dismiss.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Green Street Hooligans
    Hunnam, whose cockney ranges from dodgy to downright Caine-ian, mutes Gary Oldman's bestial mouth-froth (in Clarke's 1988 The Firm), becoming the prettiest, most articulate, bloodthirsty thug ever to put lip to lager.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stupid Boy
    The result is a better-late-than-never coming-of-age tale that is by turns earnest and corny, though never stupide.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crazy Like a Fox
    Whether you find the protagonist of Richard Squires's comedy-drama--a dangerous Confederate crackpot or an exemplar of principled defiance likely depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you see the movie.
  66. Roll Bounce
    Bow Wow isn't bad. But he and the dudes who fill out X's crew never quite nail the desired What's Happening!! vibe.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dorian Blues
    Inhabiting the breezeway between the sweet sincerity of "Beautiful Thing" and the didacticism of an ABC "Afterschool Special," this upstate New York coming-out saga will warm PFLAG hearts and kindle empathy in those who've had to tread the family-drama-churned waters of small-town gaydom.
  68. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Ouimet versus Vardon probably was the greatest golf game ever played, and Paxton and Frost do it justice, but I wouldn't sit through another simulated hole of it for Tiger Woods's salary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Into the Blue
    Granted, the cast has a certain rumpy charm, and setting four-fifths of the movie underwater keeps the pesky surfer-speak to a minimum, but the film is less about thrills than punishing the wicked.
  70. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting...
    A day in the life at chain restaurant Shenanigan's, Waiting . . . makes a predictable pit stop to elaborately mess with a creep patron's food but otherwise exceeds expectations by handling the real, soul-sucking fears of the double shift.
  72. Zombie Honeymoon
    If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.
  73. Elizabethtown
    Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dark Hours
    Devine's giddy sex offender nearly rivals William Hurt's preposterous gangster in "A History of Violence" for absurdly enjoyable line readings.
  75. Nine Lives
    In yet another roundelay that, like "Crash" and "Heights," follows the "Short Cuts" template of cosmic interconnection.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doom
    As dumb as they come, the entertaining Doom might warrant a place in cinema history as the first movie in which someone rips off their own ear.
  77. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Adults will be restless as stabled bucks, but even children may need unusually high Ritalin doses to slog through the visual and dramatic indifference on display.
  78. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    May be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard's tail for him and one-upping the classic anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a cunning entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie never moves from square one.
  79. Jarhead
    One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gay Sex in the 70s
    Lightly entertaining, but--not unlike the cheap action it chronicles--leaves one wanting something much more substantial.
  81. Derailed
    Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zathura: A Space Adventure
    One thing: Perhaps my studio-cynic hackles are raised imprudently, but either Favreau reimagined the boys' teenage sister to read as matinee sex bomb, Tootsie Rolling around in pink boxers for half the film, or children's books have become a lot hotter since I put down Seuss and Sendak for Encyclopedia Brown.
  83. Bee Season
    The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.
  84. Christmas in the Clouds
    Few clichés go unexercised, but there's also something quietly amazing going on here: For once, American Indians are portrayed not as spiritually attuned mystics or powerless patsies but as ordinary working stiffs, or at least the cinematic equivalent thereof.
  85. Ellie Parker
    A clumsy spoof of Hollywood, EP always roots for its hapless heroine. But where this trifle fascinates most is in its connections to David Lynch's masterpiece.
  86. The Comedians of Comedy
    Only works when the subjects are onstage. Watching the quartet doing laundry, playing arcade games, or getting haircuts evokes the banality of road life far too accurately, and at 105 minutes, the film hardly leaves us wanting more.
  87. Walk the Line
    In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.
  88. Private
    Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.
  89. Zizek!
    Taylor traipses around after Zizek on a continent-hopping lecture tour, and we get a face full of the man's tireless analysis, in a style that can only be characterized as hyperactive grizzly bear, complete with spit-spewing speech impediment.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rent
    Instead of bringing a universal love story to the living present, the film traps it in a frozen past like a prehistoric bug in amber, as removed from moviegoers' experience as a dusty diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.
  91. The Libertine
    The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Loving but frank, Brown, by refusing to judge her film's subject, never falls into this trap. Too frequently, however, the side-of-the-road montages that are meant to mesmerize offer only blurry filler instead.
  93. Match Point
    A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Days of Santiago
    Méndez contrasts his protagonist's highly subjective journey with a neorealistic visual style. If the movie lacks narrative originality, it leaves a singularly raw impression of having spent time inside someone's sweaty, ill-fitting skin.
  95. Munich
    The film is sluggish and repetitive, yet it exerts a certain clinical fascination.
  96. The Promise
    You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.
  97. Hostel
    Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.
  98. Kill the Poor
    Shot on a modest DV budget, Kill the Poor isn't pretty, but it's a balanced look at the dirty politics of gentrification.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory Road
    As Coach Haskins would have put it, "It's activity without accomplishment."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That Man: Peter Berlin
    Tushinski must spin Berlin's self-portrait photography and well-documented peacocking as more than predictable narcissism.
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