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. Bounty Killer
    Bounty Killer feels like the adaptation of a video game that doesn't exist.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taxman
    A wintertime crime caper that truly leaves you cold.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Young Girl and the Monsoon
    Neither particularly romantic nor especially funny.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Lucky Break
    Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall deftly shades in the designated goner, fellow "Still Crazy" alum Bill Nighy is sweetly wispy as the capable fop, and anger-management counselor Olivia Williams trembles pleasantly as usual.
  5. The Gatekeeper
    The DIY approach entails significant limitations, including barely TV-quality visuals and the Seagal-like stiffness of Frey's performance, but the truly hellish portrayal of the workers' post-crossing indentured servitude in a meth lab makes up for a sluggish opening act.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Adept and generally enjoyable.
  7. 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.
  8. Virgin
    Kampmeier's muddled, miserable first feature about maculate conception will make you look back fondly on 1985, the year Godard's "Hail Mary" and Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God" came out.
  9. Tears of the Sun
    This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.
  10. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Bumrushed onto American screens like late-breaking news, the Japanese TV doc Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times is a relatively thin slice of Chomskiana -- a chapter from any of the man's many interview volumes, or even an hour of his C-SPAN dialogues, has more political substance.
  11. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.
  12. Every Day
    Levine, previously a writer for "Nip/Tuck," sets the bar low, content to work within the shopworn crises, lazy epiphanies, and eye-rolling moments of redemption that have become standard formula in Amerindie family dramedies of the past 20 years.
  13. Jungle
    While the horror director successfully distills Ghinsberg’s spare prose into a succession of terrifying images, McLean can’t seem to help straying into the tackier elements of horror.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    The exception to a listless cast is Murray Hamilton as the oil-develper villain, an eloquently indirect Southerner with enough shifts in mood to make one whis he had a larger part, but not regret the movie's one payoff--his well staged and satisfactory demise. [14 July 1975, p.58]
    • Village Voice
  15. The Counselor
    The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth.
  16. Song One
    Hathaway's performance is brave, strong, wistful, and misty, and she's especially affecting when being wooed, gently, by Flynn, playing an indie-folkstar.
    • 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.
  18. Red Hook Summer
    An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.
  19. Solomon Kane
    It is, for a contemporary CGI-fraught fantasy-slash-living-video-game, not at all bad, dotted with moments of Bosch and steady on its storytelling feet.
  20. Paris Can Wait
    Imagine The Trip meets Lost in Translation (Coppola’s daughter Sophia’s debut), but with stale dialogue and neither much romance nor comedy
  21. The Oh in Ohio
    First-time feature director Billy Kent seems proud that his movie deals with sex in such frank fashion. But if you're going to brag about your explicit sexuality, it doesn't quite work to go out of your way avoiding skin.
  22. Yonkers Joe
    Lahti burns through a thinly written role with a surprising level of warmth and humanity.
  23. Final
    A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Janice Beard
    Playful and sentimental, with comic-book characterization and a half-orphaned, filially righteous head case, Janice Beard resembles a British "Amélie."
  25. Martin & Orloff
    Mostly, its unearned funnier-than-thou smugness plays like a DIY dorm-lounge homage.
    • 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.
  27. Prey for Rock & Roll
    Unfortunately, despite pretty-on-the-inside performances from the four kickass Clamdaddies, too many extra shake-ups end up crowding out the characters, and distract from the easy camaraderie and slice-of-life intimacy that lures us into their van to begin with.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Card Player
    Ingenious but relatively tame thriller.
  29. Rush Hour 2
    This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.
  30. Scary Movie
    A big, stupid bull with bodacious tits, but that's not to say it doesn't dish out some lite hardy-hars.
  31. Lost for Words
    Fortunately, there's far more to his slickly directed film than mere virtual tourism.
  32. Contracted
    There's no payoff to the paranoia.
  33. Backstabbing for Beginners
    The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.
  34. Hannie Caulder
    The humor isn't much here either despite a trio of classic bad goon performances by Jack Elam, Strother Martin, and Ernest Borgnine. [06 Jul 1972, p.49]
    • Village Voice
  35. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    A time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot.
  36. Emperor
    Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.
  37. Tomb Raider
    I admire the seriousness with which everyone involved treats these characters, and the smart ways that the script (from Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) on several occasions dashes expectations to the rocks. I have hopes for a sequel.
  38. Chicken Little
    The usual pop-culture jokes, disco tunes, and sarcastic narrator are on hand to prevent atrophy, but by the time the sky really does start "falling"--courtesy of an alien invasion-- Chicken Little's frantic efforts to stay farm fresh have started to wear on the nerves.
  39. 21
    A movie that wastes a lot of time and money and really, REALLY shoulda stayed in Vegas.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Civic Duty
    Expected ironies about homeland security, racial profiling, and fears of the Other land like a rain of anvils, and director Renfroe matches Krause's worked-up performance with a jiggly, flashy approximation of off-brand Tony Scott.
  41. Hit and Runway
    A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.
  42. 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.
  43. Vertical Limit
    Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.
  44. Orange County
    Hardly the idiosyncratic Mickey Finn you'd expect from the men behind 1998's underrated "Zero Effect" and 2000's discomfort-splooge "Chuck & Buck."
  45. Super Troopers
    Close enough in spirit to its freewheeling trash-cinema roots to be a breath of fresh air.
  46. Some Girl(s)
    A final twist stamps this as a companion or corrective to The Shape of Things, this time with the man as the monster. This isn't as bracing as that film, but it's far from the horror show LaBute's detractors often accuse him of writing.
  47. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Rise of an Empire might have been essentially more of the same, but for one distinction that makes it 300 times better than its predecessor: Mere mortals of Athens, Sparta, and every city from Mumbai to Minneapolis, behold the magnificent Eva Green, and tremble!
  48. Lockout
    Lockout is, not unexpectedly, a potluck of derivative references.
  49. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    Picasso and Braque's primary merit is its archive-raiding evocation of the period discussed through vintage nitrate images.
  50. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    It is suggested that Trungpa was in possession of yeshe chölwa-the title's "crazy wisdom" - and, as a sort of holy fool, his apparent misbehavior could be read as a manifestation of higher spiritual truths. If you're determined to see something, it's easy to find it - so those inclined to interest in Tibetan Buddhism will discover something here.
  51. Carnage Park
    Much of Carnage Park is merely a sun-bleached desert creepshow, a murky soup of a murderer toying with his victims simply because he's cra-a-azy.
  52. Flock of Four
    It’s atmospheric, and all the music is lovely, but unfortunately nostalgia can only do so much of the heavy lifting.
  53. Straight Into a Storm
    The messy but charming concert doc Straight Into a Storm works best if you treat unfocused on-camera interviews with the members of Rhode Island–based folk/grunge-rock group Deer Tick like an unintrospective but affectionate video memoir of the group’s rise to alt-rock prominence.
  54. Bullet to the Head
    Stallone looks great (even if his face doesn't quite move when he talks), while Hill (48 Hours, The Warriors) brings lean economy to the film's bloody, unapologetic mayhem.
  55. The Sicilian Girl
    The facts are more gripping than the filmmaking in Marco Amenta's routine docudrama about tenacious teen informer Rita Atria.
  56. The Den
    The Den's commitment to its presentational conceit leads to a number of implausible scenarios, but what's more disheartening is the gore-fest it turns into once the curtain is thrown back on the mystery propelling both Elizabeth and the narrative.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly--what's the proper cinematic terminology?--batshit-crazy finale.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tau man ji D
    Another oil-slick ode to man-on-auto lust, Initial D offers enough full-speed money shots to eke out a victory over its barrage of clichés.
  59. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    His lightning-fast fingers can't fail to impress even those unschooled in the classical idiom, but when not center stage, Heifetz proves a far more elusive figure, firmly out of the grasp of Rosen's film.
  60. Kiss of the Damned
    Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I'm Still Here
    At once deeply felt and devastatingly cynical, I'm Still Here's bone-dry satire couldn't exist without the celebrity media feedback loop. But its apparent attack on the Hollywood machine is so insidery, so vicious, that to us-the everyday consumer-it's just not clear why this stunt needed to exist at all.
  62. The Girl on the Train
    The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.
  63. Angels & Demons
    Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for whacked-out male conspiracy theorists.
  64. Journeys with George
    Although largely devoid of dramatic interest, Journeys With George does convincingly document the horror of life within the campaign "bubble."
  65. Dummy
    It has Adrien Brody in his last pre-"Pianist" role, leading one to assume that the film -- which veers torpidly from antic humor to mortifying sentimentality -- would have remained shelved were it not for his Oscar coup.
  66. High Crimes
    Secret trials and buried atrocities are no match for a plucky (and rich, and svelte) young heroine, least of all Ms. Ashley Judd, who eyebrow-cocks her way through Carl Franklin's witless High Crimes.
  67. Shallow Hal
    Not only light on laughs but discomfitingly didactic in its disgust.
  68. Incantato
    If you can suspend your disbelief regarding Nello's naïveté, this film offers some quiet pleasures.
  69. Orgazmo
    A ridiculous soft-core kung-fu porn film about a ridiculous hard-core one, Orgazmo is the kind of movie that improves according to the lateness of the hour.
  70. Casino Royale
    Things pick up a little bit when Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen stumble into the scene, but the total experience remains boringly incoherent.
    • 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.
  72. Alien Trespass
    The pleasures of genre depend on invention within margins, not just prop department scavenger hunting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Day
    For an entry in a genre of films that frequently work as guilty pleasures even at their most formulaic, One Day doesn't offer much pleasure.
  74. Angel of Evil
    In many ways reminiscent of "Mesrine" but suffers greatly in comparison. It hits many of the same marks -- but the scenes unfold almost elliptically, never really building or illuminating character, and never sparking narrative momentum.
  75. Writer of O
    Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.
  76. Gerontophilia
    Though its imagery is tame by LaBruce's standards, Gerontophilia follows his fascination with taboo sexual behavior.
  77. Hungry Hearts
    Hungry Hearts owes much to early Polanski (especially Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), but Costanzo prizes ambiguity over tension.
  78. The Rider Named Death
    All the same, The Rider Named Death is curiously anemic; rather than passion, outrage, and danger, we're contemplating the sotto voce conspiracy love of a quaintly distant age, when results weren't quite as emotionally important as commitment and camaraderie.
  79. American Gun
    All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.
  80. Wonderful World
    It's heartbreaking to see Lathan, an underemployed actress whose talents were last put to good use in 2006's "Something Else," in such a ridiculous, impossible role.
  81. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    Unfortunately, its tale is so slight and simple that it also fails to say anything particularly poignant about life.
  82. 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.
  83. The Perfect Host
    First-timer Nick Tomnay has expanded his movie from a short, and the point where he ran out of ideas looms like a cliff edge.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Step Up
    Fletcher ably blends ballet and hip-hop, but the filming itself is often clumsy, and Tatum's relentless African American impersonation quickly wears out its welcome.
  85. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    In the actor’s final role, Landau’s expressive power plays out in the soft folds of his gaunt face. Weiner offers a comforting vision of unlikely friendship and the peace an important man can find by embracing his ordinariness.
  86. Penelope
    Ricci is appealingly human, and some acknowledgement of the importance of female friendship, in addition to romance, is faintly touching.
  87. Porto
    All of this is attractive, yet I felt nothing for these people, their pain, or their possible lost future.
  88. Admission
    Weitz, an openhearted director if not always a precise one, can't bring himself to whet the knives. Only Fey drills to the center of what Admission might have been—her performance has more layers of emotion than the picture does.
  89. Womb
    The glacial pace is only quickened for seconds at a time with evocative ideas and hints of satire.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3 Needles
    In terms of simple provocation, nothing in this melodramatic mosaic of global suffering comes close to matching director Thom Fitzgerald's press kit prediction that "the AIDS pandemic will be seen in retrospect as much more significant than the ongoing jihad." A film about THAT could be compelling; this one is merely content to suggest, cleverly and often, that it recognizes far more than we ever could the pain and cruelty of disease.
  91. Particles of Truth
    In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.
  92. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    As earnest and smart-alecky as an entire season of Designing Women, Ya-Ya is sure to score with its redemptive family melodramatics and stock eccentric characterizations.
  93. No Regret
    A tiny, specific film admirable in its focus, competent digital cinematography, and lack of sentimentality. Too bad it turns into Extreme Korean Romance.
  94. Mooz-lum
    Solemn, unsubtle, and terminally self-conscious.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seducing Charlie Barker
    In adapting her recent play The Scene, Theresa Rebeck can't find a consistent tone for her material or players.
  96. Somewhere Slow
    Gilsig's transformation is quietly convincing, but the film itself is flatter and less cinematically gratifying than most television dramas.
  97. Patrick: Evil Awakens
    It's a techno-thriller of brain-dead proportions.
  98. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! feels like a manic ensemble drama that should have been a tight three-man show.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The FP
    Infinitely better as a beer-goggled pitch than as a feature film, The FP never gets beyond the studied novelty of its own pose.
  100. Martian Child
    Martian Child certainly isn't much fun, unless you were desperately awaiting K-PAX with a kid instead of Kevin Spacey.
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