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. The Grudge
    The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    The film's flashy you-are-there qualities only underscore the bittersweet gulf between NASCAR's seemingly self-actualized, life-risking gladiators and their softly padded, toddler-toting, ticket-buying fans.
  3. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    The film scores points needling the guys' lingering insecurities.
  4. Così ridevano
    Exploring a specific generational moment in mid-century Italy's social weft, Amelio's family saga might be his grimmest film, if only for the tragic exploitation of fraternity.
  5. The Merchant of Venice
    Pacino simply wipes the cobblestones with the rest of the cast: His beautifully calibrated performance is lucid, commanding, and genuinely tragic.
  6. Meet the Parents
    Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ella Enchanted
    Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.
  8. Vanilla Sky
    For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.
  9. Bad Santa
    Bad Santa is a one-joke film; to his credit, Thornton embodies that joke with vicious, vaguely insane conviction.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Camp
    Camp is self-conscious when the teens aren't singing, but the quote marks fall away as soon as they lift their voices.
  11. The Day After Tomorrow
    Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.
  12. Flight of the Phoenix
    This Phoenix screams hack job.
  13. Freddy Got Fingered
    A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Grand Theft Parsons
    Neither a satisfying exploration of ’70s culture, nor a madcap "Weekend at Bernie’s" caper, nor an informative paean to Parsons's legacy, Grand Theft stumbles toward all three possibilities, backpedals, then stalls, left to coast as an insipid road movie.
  15. Ladder 49
    Not as snort-worthy as "Backdraft," Ladder 49 is a serviceable testament to the firemen who would bravely risk their lives to protect the safety of others.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Waltz
    Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz proves Andrew's point by gathering so much talent into one theater that the stage buckles and the subject drops out of sight.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    National Treasure
    Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Polar Express
    When it comes to the "humans," the atmosphere collapses. Unnervingly smooth, mouths moving in strange, even frightening formations, the Polar people are the least convincing things on-screen, glaring impostors amid the otherwise painstakingly rendered scenery.
  19. Ray
    Hackford's movie falls into a meandering saunter. As the music grows dull, so does the movie.
  20. Secret Things
    Neil LaBute on his worst day couldn't devise a scenario so primitive in its psychology and predictable in its sense of sin.
  21. Shower
    It's far too soggy a confection for my taste.
  22. Team America: World Police
    Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.
  23. The Life: What's Your Pleasure?
    The subjects can be amusing, chilling, or tragic -- but in the end, they offer few surprises.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    As parody, it's toothless and often smug, but as random Ferrellspeak generator, it has its delights.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Intimate Strangers
    A bland chamber drama for those who like their French cinema tame, talky, and just a little titillating.
  26. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.
  27. Wimbledon
    The appealing leads have strong chemistry, but it's the wrong kind: an affectionate big-brother/little-sister rapport that leaves a discomfiting taint on their more amorous clinches.
  28. Chicago
    It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.
  29. Collateral
    Collateral is a slim drink of thin beer, remarkable only as evidence that Mann might have a modern masterpiece in him if he were cut loose and allowed to roam around in his own obsessions.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Going on 30
    Anyway, the thirtysomething in me was all, gag me with a spoon, but the kid in me was like, this movie's rad to the max.
  31. Black Cat, White Cat
    Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Fat Albert
    The animated scenes conjure aromas of the stilted "Clifford," and the overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.
  33. Finding Neverland
    Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.
  34. Love Actually
    When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.
  35. Troy
    Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.
  36. The Aviator
    The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.
  37. Blade: Trinity
    Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.
  38. Mrs. Winterbourne
    Lake was fab in John Waters's films, especially Hairspray, but Fraser is more adroit in this screwball mode. Lake by now may be too brash and over-the-top for the big screen: too much her own persona. [23 Apr 1996]
    • Village Voice
  39. Live Flesh
    A soap opera as convoluted as it is overdetermined. [20 Jan 1998]
    • Village Voice
  40. Father of the Bride Part II
    Martin's performance is as impeccable as the set decoration, though one wishes he'd stop wasting his skill. Keaton flaunts her matronly hips, daring us to remember Annie Hall, but despite a jawline that's tighter than it was a decade ago in Baby Boom, she looks past the age of conception (no cosmetic surgery for wombs). [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  41. The Disappearance of Finbar
    [Rhys Meyers] remains trapped in an enervating road movie - shelved so long that Rhys Meyers still appears to have baby fat - summed up when Finbar, who turns up in Finland (natch), asks whey-faced Danny, "You couldn't find anything better to do than to come find me?!"
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dinner for Schmucks
    Paramount Pictures and director Jay Roach would like to invite you to a dinner they're hosting, at which you are welcome to laugh at these poor jerks. That's a little messed up.
  43. The Killer Inside Me
    This withholding actor's (Affleck) impish smile and mild, pale-eyed stare--not to mention the Clintonesque hoarseness with which he spins his convoluted lies--are sufficiently convincing to keep The Killer Inside Me from being just a steamy, stylish, punishing bloodbath.
  44. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Yet Newell, he of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure, his direction--while slightly eschewing modern genre practitioners’ penchant for slicing-and-dicing skirmishes into visual incoherence--is too pedestrian and partial to clumsy slow-mo effects to truly energize the story.
  45. Shrek Forever After
    It takes the film a deadly long time to kick in, and when it does, it largely retreads formula: ironic use of pop standards, musical numbers with contemporary choreography played for maximum laughs, risque one-liners.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kick-Ass
    Never as shocking as it thinks it is, as funny as it should be, or as engaged in cultural critique as it could be, Kick-Ass is half-assed.
  47. The Joneses
    What plays hard and dark for the film's first half goes squishy and blindingly bright as calamity and then outright tragedy lead to the saw-it-coming resolution writer-director Derrick Borte thinks is more sincere than it actually plays.
  48. Journey to Western Xia Empire
    A reticent, primarily visual experience.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    It all seems an advertisement -- ostensibly for a retrograde vision of the R.O.C.K.
  50. Barenaked in America
    A pleasant if overlong road show starring five witty, sweet, humble guys.
  51. Striporama
    An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ouch
    If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.
  53. Close, Closed, Closure
    Loevy, who made this documentary with an Israeli and Palestinian crew, supplies a self-conscious voice-over.
  54. Echoes
    Funahashi's visual mood-making is an object lesson in how to create a sense of intimate anomie with next to nothing.
  55. The Bulls' Night Out
    A likable, earnest character study with a rare sense of purpose.
  56. Bombay Eunuch
    A happy ending of sorts arrives out of nowhere -- against unfathomable odds, the string of awful ironies ends, for now, with sweet justice.
  57. Acts of Worship
    The opposition of Christian spirituality and the bad religion of drugs is enough to send you down to the feel-good bodega just on principle.
  58. Cuba: Island of Music
    An odd blend of passionate performance footage and maddeningly shallow analysis of Cuba's music and politics.
  59. El bonaerense
    Still, the vapor traces of farce and policier that waft from this terribly earnest film never coalesce -- perhaps our own cultural remove allows what plays straight at home to be experienced as slightly daffy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eat This New York
    Though the filmmakers had a great time following the Manhattan restaurateurs around, they abandoned the untidy Brooklyn story before the inevitable downward spiral that might have been our payoff as filmgoers.
  61. Born to Be Blind
    Berliner captures the eerie beauty of their music alongside their strange dignity. But his mannered style (colored filters, multiple exposures, jump cuts) leaves an uneasy impression about the balance of power in his relationship to his subjects, women of surprising strength and enduring frailty.
  62. The Path to Love
    Culminates in a pilgrimage to Genet's tomb--a sweetly respectful gravestomp, to be sure, though one suspects the almost apologetic demureness of the central relationship would have irked him to no end.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghostlight
    Real history and raunch poke through, but the thirtysomething Move is too vital to be Martha in her dotage. Amusing for insiders, Ghostlight may confuse everyone else.
  64. Clockstoppers
    If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Grainy video and gimmicky editing give this documentary an amateurish feel, but Samir's charming, rueful interlocutors shine through.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    Hits just the right balance of pop and political. Though flat by cinematic standards, Beaufort's TV aesthetics--sonorous Telemundo-style narrator, black-backgrounded talking heads, and gaudy titles--nevertheless befit the story.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Evergreen
    Though the acting is tentative at times, with performances not quite landing on the same page, Evergreen is a compassionate slice of Pacific Northwest misery.
  68. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Claims to sort the bad guys from the good, which is its essential problem.
  69. The Child I Never Was
    Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.
  70. Imelda
    Entertaining as it is, Imelda seems all too willing to take her at her word.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq
    An interesting cross between a Frontline exposé and "World's Scariest Weapons Inspections Videos."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Muhammad: The Last Prophet
    Though noble in its intent to portray Islam as a peace-loving faith, the narrative flow remains compromised by its catechistic asides and displaced hero.
  73. Magnifico
    If Michiko Yamamoto's screenplay overdoes Magnifico's holy-fool virtue to the point of hysteria, de los Reyes's fluid compositions, dead-on pacing, and knack for eliciting naturalistic performances make the story uncommonly cathartic.
  74. Freak Weather
    Kuryla has her prole banter down, and moments like McKenzie's desperate dance on her jalopy hood when Turturro locks her out move beyond literary sting into kinetic and sympathetic gutter picaresque.
  75. The Red Orchestra
    Worth sticking around for: the triumphant end credit sequence of each Red Orchestra mug shot morphing into the next one.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sheriff
    There's so little meat to his likable subject that the endeavor proves less "Cops" and more "The Andy Griffith Show."
  77. Santa Santita
    Melodramatic Filipino coming-of-ager concerns the budding sexuality of a young girl in a devoutly Catholic culture.
  78. Voices in Wartime
    Poorly organized mishmash of archival war films, scholarly chatter, and literary quotations.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Best appreciated for Ruben Santiago-Hudson's convincing performance as a man possessed by a quartet of supernatural beings.
  80. Stalin's Wife
    Tsukerman is not interested in disproving or discounting theories, but merely assembling them.
  81. March of the Penguins
    The Central Park Zoo is cheaper, you can walk away from the penguins after 10 minutes, and it has snow monkeys and beer.
  82. Yau doh lung fu bong
    The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.
  83. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Frustratingly little here grapples with the day-to-day realities of life in Chechnya and the surrounding areas.
  84. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    It's all fascinating, but must Kalatozov's careening angel of cinema be laid bare?
  85. Exist
    Exist is prone to posturing. Demonstrating a noble if wishy-washy faith in activism's power to save the world, the film amounts to a brief, earnest howl against apathy--easily dismissible for those unsympathetic to its views and basically useless for everyone else.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El carro
    Part fluff, part social farce, and all foregone conclusion.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beyond Honor
    This mélange of softcore porn, overheated melodrama, and harrumphing moralizing transcends taste--its lurid insanity goes beyond good and bad, right and wrong.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9
    Those who fear that the mainstream of contemporary art has become little more than an extension of fashion will find no comfort in Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney's latest big-budget ejaculation of ritual self-involvement and superficial foofery.
  89. Havana Suite
    It's all pleasant enough, but the pretty pictures, languid pacing, and endless stretches of mood music eventually combine to soporific effect.
  90. Light from the East
    Grappell implicitly uses the juxtaposition with the martyred Kurbas to gauge her commitment to her own art. Light From the East drinks freely from the triumphalist cup of the glasnost era.
  91. Favela Rising
    All in all, the movement turned out to be a godsend for Rio natives, but the film is merely a pep rally.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    La tropical
    When Turnley ventures into broader political or sociological commentary, one wishes that he'd step back and let the music, uniformly and ass-shakingly irresistible, take center stage.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Following Chong to the clink by way of a few well-timed stand-up gigs, this genial doc sprinkles Reagan and Nixon soundbites over its vintage stash of C&C clips for a suitably fuzzy squint at America from '69 to the buzzkill present.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A sincere but sapless attempt to meld personal and political documentary.
  95. The Groomsmen
    Fatally conventional in nearly every respect, the movie would be easy to dismiss were it not for Burns's frustrating knack for inserting unexpectedly truthful moments amid all the dross.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conventioneers
    Unlike in "Medium Cool," the most telling and dramatic events aren't shown.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exit: The Right to Die
    Filmed and edited with near anesthetic calm, Fernand Melgar's documentary meditation on the work of Swiss euthanasia outfit Exit ADMD doesn't so much argue for the legalization of assisted suicide as recline comfortably in the knowledge that this firm's devoted "escorts" are here to direct terminal patients toward that shining light down the hall.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Pollock drags when Horton's offscreen, and with its NPR-inflected narration and executive producer Don Hewitt, the film might have fared better as a PBS special.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
    Settles for a stilted design and mode of performance that suggests a bloodless screen adaptation of Edward Gorey illustrations.
  100. Urbanscapes
    The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.
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