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
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    Desperately overcompensating for the fact that most horror films are already parodies of themselves, Behind the Mask takes a bite out of the dumb "Scream" franchise before devouring its own tail, proving that you are what you eat.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freedom Writers
    Reaction shots of the class's befuddled white boy are played for cheap laughs, but writer-director Richard LaGravenese otherwise keeps it real by recruiting cinematographer Jim Denault from Indieville High and Imelda Staunton--here playing Bitchy Old Department Head.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ever Since the World Ended
    Like Emmanuel Lubezki's phantasmagoric images for "Children of Men," the performances in the film are so remarkable it's easy to ignore the implausibilities that surface. But even as its self-aware approximation of the doc format startles, Ever Since the World Ended lacks vigor.
  4. Fired!
    While "maybe it's for the best" proved happily prophetic for her actor pals, those words of comfort sound more like a clueless bromide when you consider the 30,000 people laid off in Lansing after the film wrapped.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    There's too much going on in Burning Annie but one thing goes remarkably right: Ordynans's exceptionally canny script nails how thoroughly pop culture has colonized our sentiments.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannibal Rising
    This comically fastidious telling of the Hannibal Lecter origin story completes the extreme makeover of grindhouse fare that "The Silence of the Lambs" started 15 years ago. Meaning: Respectable audiences who wouldn't be caught dead at a (sniff!) horror movie still want severed heads; they just want the bloody meal served on Royal Dalton china.
  7. Music and Lyrics
    Music and Lyrics suggests that it's going to be about redemption, the second act in the life of a punchline, but it feels as though it were made to fit a date on a studio's release schedule. (Happy Valentine's Day!) Oh, well, at least the songs are catchy, and the two-tone video for "Pop Goes My Heart" is inspired.
  8. Close to Home
    Though it clearly means to call into question the legitimacy of their work, the movie is formlessly episodic as it meanders from one day to the next, finally losing itself in a forest of coming-of-age clichés.
  9. Amazing Grace
    Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Snake Moan
    Black Snake Moan sho-nuff ain't no "Sweetback." Indeed, long stretches of Brewer's Suthun-fried sophomore slump come down the country road lookin' as haggard as a workaholic ho on a Sunday morning.
  11. The Ultimate Gift
    Directed with accomplished impersonality by Michael O. Sajbel ( One Night With the King), The Ultimate Gift means well, but in the end it's "The Pursuit of Happyness" made from the ivory tower looking down instead of from the street looking up.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adam's Apples
    The melodramas that prolific Anders Thomas Jensen has sculpted over the years have been among the richest works to come out of Scandinavia since Bergman's heyday. But no road is without its pockmarks and Adam's Apples may be the low point of the wunderkind's career.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Iluminados por el fuego
    Tristán Bauer's new war movie has an even more bitterly ironic title in Spanish: "Iluminados por El Fuego" or "Enlightened by Fire."
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    For anyone other than hardcore gore-hounds, this flipbook of deliberately invoked global-unrest horrors, from friendly-fire killings to rape as a breeding weapon, is effectively mean and unrelenting--and pretty far from fun.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TMNT
    Writer-director Kevin Munroe parties like it's 1989, grooving on the extreme-sports set pieces and vintage slang to generally cowabusted effect.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cobra Verde
    It's easy to understand why this was Herzog's final collaboration with the actor (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had "become uncontrollable") but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Snow
    First-time director Fergus's film is more a moody, tedious anti-thriller about ineluctable fate.
  18. Journey from the Fall
    Tran's reliance on declamatory political dialogue and movie-of-the-week inspirationalism feels decidedly old-fashioned and, finally, even phony.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hawk Is Dying
    I won't pretend it makes for a happy night at the cinema, and it may require a leap of faith to succumb to Goldberger's spell. But I leapt, and found it enthralling up to the point where this legitimately weird movie capitulates to the most conventional catharsis. I'd rather watch Goldberger fail than a hundred others succeed.
  20. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Narrative's beside the point in a movie created by two guys who gorge on pop culture's high-fat diet and regurgitate it into something approaching . . . art? Close enough.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreaming Lhasa
    Primped for easy American consumption, this clunkily performed and staged drama concerns a filmmaker's agenda to document Tibetan oppression under Chinese occupation. This becomes spurious pretext for a rather flat Nancy Drew adventure.
  22. Lonely Hearts
    Todd Robinson, grandson of the real-life Elmer, never fully commits to the heartlessness of the genre as Arthur Penn did in "Bonnie and Clyde."
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wedding Weekend
    This uneven romantic comedy is firmly in the Zach Braff–ian mold: It features a group of thirtysomething men who are so terrified of growing up that they behave semi-moronically for the majority of the film.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paris, je t'aime
    Paris, Je T'aime's brimming declaration of love to the City of Lights leaves one breathless but dissatisfied.
  25. Shrek the Third
    Blinded by avarice and all out of ideas, once again, Hollywood can't tell when enough is way more than enough.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Angel-A
    Amiably inconsequential fairy tale.
  27. Gracie
    Firing on all formulaic cylinders, Gracie is heavy with tidy meaning and mealy morality; the most dubious idea here is that if you don't let a girl play soccer, she just may turn to cigarettes, halter tops, and sex with the starting forward
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fifth Empire
    Admirable in retrospect but maddening as it goes (and goes and goes).
  29. La Vie en Rose
    Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman.
  30. You're Gonna Miss Me
    Director Keven McAlester's film is entertaining. But with battered archival footage and celebrity worship, McAlester skimps on perspective and complexity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    There's not nearly enough blood to keep fans of "Suicide Club," or the rest of us, happy.
  32. Nancy Drew
    This tweener goddess--a virtual Batcave of handy accessories packed in her shoulder bag--may prove too annoying for general audiences, particularly as Roberts plays her comically straight.
  33. A Mighty Heart
    Angelina Jolie is the major alienation effect in A Mighty Heart, although she's not the only one. The hectic pizzazz with which hired gun Michael Winterbottom directs this tale of terrifying terrorism is another distraction.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Live Free or Die Hard
    Maybe McClane, in '80s action parlance, is too old for this s---.
  35. Evening
    Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai's Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot's beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel.
  36. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk to Me
    The banality of Talk To Me is only half disappointing; at least it babbles clichés with conviction.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tekkonkinkreet
    It's both too cute and too rambling.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cashback
    The movie is too cute by half, made close to unbearable whenever Ben's narration spews glib pseudo-profundities about memory and temporal stillness. But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    The film takes as many plot-twists as "Pirates of the Caribbean"; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy.
  41. Hairspray
    The movie is visually flat: not pasty and garish in the Waters signature style, but merely serviceable and competent in the worst tradition of Hollywood "professionalism."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fat Girls
    This film goes to some lengths not to be another high-school movie, which means prom stinks and no one can sing. Given Fat Girls' honesty, and its delicately drawn examples of social hopelessness, the sudden, sugary, puzzling finale feels out of character. It's as though the film forgot how to talk to us.
  43. If I Didn't Care
    With their unrelenting, nostalgic clutch on old-school noir rules (a girl and a gun, plans goes awry, an easily spotted macguffin), the Cummings boys paint themselves into the proverbial corner with a cop-out ex machina ending--at which point there is no longer a need for the title's "If."
  44. Stardust
    This is just a silly movie about silly things starring famous people acting all silly.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Signal
    This uneven but impressive shot-on-digital shocker earns a marker in the mausoleum of apocalyptic horror--a genre that's proving (un)surprisingly durable in the new century.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Water
    Co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell have done a commendable job of making Deep Water . . . well, not boring.
  47. The Nanny Diaries
    Like the book, the Nanny Diaries movie never finds a dramatic center.
  48. Resurrecting the Champ
    This isn't great raw material, though Lurie and his screenwriters try their best to portray Erik as some guilt-ridden evildoer who's perpetrated a great fraud.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunflower
    As father and son argue and reunite every few minutes, accompanied by veeery slow violin music, Sunflower plays less like the epic it aspires to be than an episode of "Full House: Beijing."
  50. Romance & Cigarettes
    The bleakly bizarre, uneven aesthetic and direction that is fluid but not quite limber succeed and fail from montage to montage, with the principals doing a sort of karaoke tribute to the likes of Joplin and Springsteen.
  51. Across the Universe
    Across the Universe, which filters the cultural revolt through a blizzard of early Beatles songs, ends up both reductive and smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience.
  52. In the Valley of Elah
    Elah comes packaged as a feverish murder mystery groaning beneath too many subplots and the added weight of a strained David and Goliath allegory.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man of My Life
    The film's arresting beauty--shots of a curtain blowing into a shadowed stairwell, or a meadow of sunflowers, or a head resting on a shoulder--is nearly enough.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Feast of Love
    For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.
  55. Lust, Caution
    Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as "Brokeback Mountain" was gripping and immediate.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Summer Palace
    The director is at his best portraying the dingy dorms and vivid idealism of college life; his film stalls when it meanders away from these particulars toward a sweeping but empty attempt at the epic.
  57. The Good Night
    Director Jake Paltrow's feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man's feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it had its premiere there earlier this year.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Control
    Despite excellent performances from Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson, and the radiant Toby Kebbell, along with a noble effort from pretty newcomer Sam Riley as Curtis himself, Control is like a wake where the guests forgot to bring the booze and, for the most part, have nothing very nice or even particularly interesting to say about the deceased.
  59. 30 Days of Night
    Director David Slade's stab at the story is actually rather ordinary.
  60. Out of the Blue
    There's some nifty soft-focus cinematography and fine performances, but otherwise, not much to resonate on this side of the pond.
  61. Rendition
    Unlike Hood's far more persuasive gangster picture "Tsotsi," Rendition feels generic and lackluster.
  62. Rails & Ties
    Alison Eastwood's debut feature is slow, deliberate, assured, and shot with a graceful feel for place--none of which is enough to overcome the creaky themes that tie this hackneyed domestic drama together with fearsome symmetry.
  63. Darfur Now
    If you evaluate Darfur Now against the goals it sets for itself--as a stirring call to action--it must be considered lacking.
  64. Martian Child
    Martian Child certainly isn't much fun, unless you were desperately awaiting K-PAX with a kid instead of Kevin Spacey.
  65. Lions for Lambs
    The movie is awful--and also oddly touching, even adorable in its dogged sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style.
  66. Slipstream
    Hopkins claims it's a comedy, and perhaps John Turturro's live-action cartoon of a mogul producer suggests so, but what does it all mean? That art can be just as shallow as Hollywood?
  67. Sharkwater
    No matter how much "Jaws"-hugging zeal he brings to the deck, Stewart has made a vain polemic that never addresses the finning industry's deep-seated cultural significance in Asia (where, rightly or wrongly, shark soup is a symbol of economic prestige), nor elaborates on how the disrupted ecosystem affects us humans.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oswald's Ghost
    Riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying documentary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Teeth
    Veteran actor Lichtenstein, the son of Pop artist Roy, rarely finds a workable tone, muffling the splattery mayhem with sluggish pacing and a tendency toward camp. Still, even if the movie's little more than a curio, I love the thought of Lichtenstein at the pitch meeting: "It's Jaws meets The Vagina Monologues!"
  70. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Helm's pacing is as pallid as his palette is vivid, and for a movie that celebrates wonder and strangeness, the whole enterprise feels coy and half-baked.
  71. Grace Is Gone
    The music--a gently jazzy piano-and-strings theme--is just fine, and a good deal less cloying than what was there before. One can only regret that Eastwood didn't offer to reshoot the whole movie while he was at it.
  72. Maurice Richard
    As Richard, Roy Dupuis's tight-clutched performance easily holds down the screen, when he's not hooked by an inelegant script that leaks mythologizing flatus.
  73. Look
    Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.
  74. The Great Debaters
    The film avoids potentially interesting frictions by always letting the team debate (and win) on the "correct" side of every issue--that which aligns with generally accepted modern liberal sympathies. The kids follow their party line all the way to the big game, a ridiculous, fallacy-riddled face-off against Harvard.
  75. Cassandra's Dream
    Feels like one of Allen's laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype--marionettes in a miserablist puppet theater.
  76. Steep
    Blandly beautiful, inarticulate extreme-skiing documentary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    This burlesque of biopic clichés flounders from one setup to the next without the engine that drives the genre: a strong central character.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    I'm sure the pot-laced antics of these trashy dudes are, like, totally hilarious on Canadian TV, but they don't translate well to America or the big screen.
  79. In Bruges
    Bruges may be the movie's rather too-long-running joke, but Farrell's shaggy brow is easily the most entertaining thing in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's first foray into the crime caper.
  80. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    The doc provides plenty of backstory (meeting the comics' families offers generous context to material heard earlier in the film). But in the end, it's the bits involving Vaughn and his celeb guests that linger.
  81. Be Kind Rewind
    Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn't have the same pathos as "The Science of Sleep." (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)
  82. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    What makes Watson's novel a delight is its guilelessly homoerotic subtext. By downplaying that, the movie argues the case for Watson's innocent sensuality--and against its own worldly update.
  83. The Hammer
    Former "Loveline" and "The Man Show" co-host Adam Carolla brings his self-deprecating, improvisational, regular-dude deadpan--as well as his former Golden Gloves status--to this semi-autobiographical comedy with ambitions so low that one might call it charmingly mediocre.
  84. Meet the Browns
    Surprisingly half-decent--surprising because Perry’s not about to switch up his hardly revelatory but consistently bankable box-office signature:
  85. Leatherheads
    For its entire two hours, Leatherheads is rarely less than very promising--and also rarely more.
  86. My Blueberry Nights
    The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese--but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Street Kings
    Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it.
  88. The Visitor
    McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he's made one of those incredibly naïve movies that gives liberals a bad name, and which does more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it.
  89. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.
  90. Chaos Theory
    Reynolds, called to 180 from anal nebbish to feral beast, is beautifully committed, but he gets no help on the other side of the camera.
  91. Baby Mama
    Ultimately, that's all this shrugging disappointment is: a "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched a good hour past its breaking point of no return.
  92. Then She Found Me
    In short, it's the kind of film that only a mother, which is to say my mother, would love.
  93. Fugitive Pieces
    Fugitive Pieces is a cerebral excavation into history, written in lush cadences meant to be read or recited. It may be unfilmable, and in pursuit of sensitivity, Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa hollows out the novel's urgency in favor of a vaguely spiritual morbidity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mister Lonely
    Co-written with his brother Avi, Mister Lonely is startlingly straightforward compared to his earlier work. But, like that work, it stands or falls on each single, self-contained scene.
  95. XXY
    It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it, though Inés Efron, as Alex, gives a committed centerpiece performance with a nice, slightly lupine grin.
  96. Noise
    Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.
  97. Surfwise
    Whether you call this a Rousseau-ian paradise or "Capturing the Friedmans" by the Sea will depend on where you stand on hippie living--up to a point.
  98. The Children of Huang Shi
    A tale as ploddingly familiar as it is good-looking and worth telling.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Jihad for Love
    Muslims, Jews, and Christians may have their, oh, occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes early in Parvez Sharma's documentary, there is one point on which the world's divine religions agree: Homosexuality is a crime.
  100. Sex and the City
    Though Sex and the City is every bit as busy as its HBO progenitor was, it's virtually plotless, not to mention pointless.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »