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. Open Water
    Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.
  2. 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.
  3. L'autre monde
    It's too bad that Allouache's insurgent Islamists, into whose clutches Yasmine falls for a time, come off like Indiana Jones villains.
  4. Festival Express
    Ultimate geezerfest and rock-doc holy grail.
  5. Gozu
    Splendidly entertaining.
  6. Thunderbirds
    As the dapper Lady Penelope, Sophia Myles tries to infuse the enterprise with some "Charlie's Angels" verve, but she's only one life vest, and the movie is a downed plane.
  7. The Village
    The screwiest yarn yet from Shyamalan's metaphysical-Limburger career project, a non-horror horror film.
    • 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.
  9. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Winds up a sweetly nonchalant and excellently unwhiny allegory of seeking and gaining entry to the Caucasian fortress that is present-day America, or at least nocturnal New Jersey.
  10. The Manchurian Candidate
    Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better.
  11. Daughters of the Sun
    The filmmaker achieves the desired sense of remoteness and claustrophobic doom, and though the story could be told more economically, her slow approach conveys the distended chronology that attends an indentured servitude resembling slavery.
  12. She Hate Me
    Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garden State
    Braff's naive romanticism is also lovely proof of the film's innocent heart.
  14. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    In its attempt to diagnose a problem, it ends up serving more as a symptom of the left's current, and sadly warranted, anxieties.
  16. Catwoman
    Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.
  17. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member
  18. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive--albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Home at the End of the World
    Cunningham's Cliff's Notes adaptation shrinks the character to a monosyllabic man-child with a puppy-dog stare.
  20. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    A reasonably good Kurosawa pastiche. But overburdened with convoluted flashbacks and interpolated gags, and generally lacking a dynamic sense of cutting, the movie doesn't possess the master's sardonic brio.
  21. 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.
  22. The Bourne Supremacy
    The loss of the first film's hurtling who-am-I? story engine is keenly felt, and too much time is spent observing the characters get on and off planes, trains, and automobiles.
  23. Free Radicals
    An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.
  24. Nola
    Screwball it isn't, but it has screwy down pat.
  25. Make a Wish
    With its lukewarm gender politicking and clumsy performances, Make a Wish achieves only one real distinction: It has to be the dullest lesbian campout movie ever made.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zhou Yu de huo che
    Devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Cinderella Story
    The film lacks the guiltily pleasurable panache (and punch) of other recent chickadee flicks posited as protofeminist fairy tales.
  28. Maria Full of Grace
    It's a remarkably assured and humane feature debut.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Touch of Pink
    Presumably writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid chose Grant because Bogie's been done, but that didn't stop him from lifting Touch of Pink's plot wholesale from "The Wedding Banquet."
  30. I, Robot
    If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.
  31. Flavors
    Unfortunately, the constant cell phone chatter and pervasive split screen do little to prop up a limp, poorly structured screenplay.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
    Despite cloying narration, Fitzgerald's footage and interviews are fantastic.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Get Frank
    Let's Get Frank is hardly frank enough.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Door in the Floor
    Eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Planet Earth: Dreams
    The acting is deliberately bad, directed to an ostensibly dreamlike flatness; and it's also just plain bad.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Much of Monster is just a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how "important" Metallica are and, worse, how much "integrity" they have.
  37. The Inheritance
    The Inheritance is most effective in its first half...But the film falters as it moves closer to home and the heart, veering off into melodramatic and quasi-surreal scenarios.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sleepover
    Nussbaum's attempt to capture the 'tween zeitgeist fails: The Spice Girls–infused soundtrack is dated, and the feel-good progressiveness forced.
    • 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.
  40. Riding Giants
    Peralta has become a more relaxed filmmaker, and when he trusts the haunting sight of a giant wave breaking to speak for itself, the movie reaches the sublime heights of its subject.
  41. Afraid of Everything
    A stifling chamber piece laced with Repulsion-style foreboding and an undercurrent of kink.
  42. King Arthur
    Everything is pre-medieval and unwashed, but with Antoine Fuqua at the steering wheel King Arthur is still a comic book, if a little more "Classics Illustrated" in tone than we'd have the right to expect.
  43. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    A bit naive and formless.
  44. America's Heart and Soul
    When ditching the mawk to follow his daredevil muse, the director delivers stunning shots of cliff dancing and stunt pilotry.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clearing
    Kidnapping movies invariably crescendo to a fever pitch of procedural complexity. At a terse 91 minutes, The Clearing offers the reverse, a movie that only grows more conceptually minimal as the clock ticks down.
  46. Before Sunset
    Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset.
  47. De-Lovely
    Openly gay and overwhelmingly glum.
  48. Spider-Man 2
    As much as I enjoy Spidey's high-flying Cheez-Doodle swoops through the skyscraper canyons of a digitally rearranged midtown Manhattan, I get no kick from his angst, especially since in this incarnation, as opposed to the '60s comic book version, he's more innocuously depressed than defensively paranoid.
  49. 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.
  50. The Notebook
    Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script, Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.
  51. The Intended
    A taut noirish thriller that unfolds in a fever of firelit ambience.
  52. Kaena: The Prophecy
    No "Triplets of Belleville," this French animated feature was hatched as an idea for a video game, and it shows.
  53. Time of the Wolf
    In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Brothers
    As in "The Bear," Annaud eschews animal voice-over and visual F/X in favor of live, almost wordless action. The result is the humanization of animals and the animalization of humans.
  55. White Chicks
    Harmless slapstick fun.
  56. Fahrenheit 9/11
    If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.
  57. 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.
    • 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.
  59. Saints and Sinners
    There's an enforced squareness afoot as the directors contrast the couple with Pride-float revelers, as if testifying in front of a Massachusetts court that these two are as fuddy-duddy as the wholesomest het duo.
  60. Swing
    Repeatedly assuring us that its titular subject is really "a metaphor for life," Swing attempts unsuccessfully to liven up a tired scenario with a touch of Twilight Zone fantasy.
  61. The Hunting of the President
    Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.
  62. Facing Windows
    Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels.
  63. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    Suffice it to say that if you've always wondered how a fish out of water and a band of resourceful yokels would behave in the Quebec hinterlands, this is your movie.
  64. Father and Son
    Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
  65. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    Wallows in the same affected retro stylishness as the earlier film (Croupier), suffers from the same lack of narrative focus, and is just as choked with clichés.
  66. The Terminal
    Making Viktor a Middle Eastern, a South Asian, or even a Bosnian tourist would have given this trite exercise an edge--and a measure of human pathos.
  67. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Matlin's haphephobic character dry-swallows anti-anxiety pills only in instances of extreme duress, but the actress herself looks pained throughout the movie, wincing reflexively at inappropriate moments.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller.
  69. À cause d'un garçon
    Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.
    • 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.
  71. Around the World in 80 Days
    As the tourist on a time budget, the usually brilliant Coogan merely mugs and flails (we can only imagine what Johnny Depp would have done with Fogg), while he and able straight man Chan enjoy scant opportunity to develop any comic rapport.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Anonymous
    Relatively thin on conventional story and acting (the cast ranges from indie thesp Craig Chester to transsexual flaming creature Amanda Lepore) and thick with atmosphere.
  73. Word Wars
    Even the fast-motion effects and flashy graphics can't make this a spectator sport.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    More buff than historian, McKay chats with anyone who can tell him about the good old days, a vaguely defined period that sprawls from the mid '40s to the late '60s.
  75. The Chronicles of Riddick
    Riddick is a preening outer-space costume drama staged as a backdrop for its leading man's muscles.
  76. The Stepford Wives
    Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.
  77. Garfield
    No one can accuse Garfield: The Movie of infidelity to its source: It faithfully conveys the banality of Jim Davis's cartoon.
  78. Napoleon Dynamite
    Thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other.
  79. Imelda
    Entertaining as it is, Imelda seems all too willing to take her at her word.
  80. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Beyond its rare visions of remote vistas, Camel's great charm lies in its seeming simplicity. The camera records the events of the day -- from a little girl's tears to an afternoon sandstorm -- with a childlike clarity and curiosity.
  81. Deadline
    What Deadline lacks in heft it makes up for in common sense.
  82. The Corporation
    A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."
  83. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuarón (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mamá), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.
  84. I'll Sing for You
    The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Firedancer
    Grim headlines aside, FireDancer is hard to recommend, with its haphazard tone, wobbly acting, and cipher-like lead.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer
    If only there were drugs strong enough to make it all bearable: This never ending Learning Annex K-hole provides damning proof that independent film distribution has grown far too accessible.
  87. Bukowski: Born into This
    Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.
  88. Soul Plane
    Coming off a memorable supporting turn in Starsky & Hutch, Snoop Dogg is sadly underutilized as the stoner pilot.
  89. Saved!
    An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.
  90. The Mother
    By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
  91. Baadasssss!
    Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.
  92. 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.
  93. Union Square
    The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.
  94. Wake
    Fraught with sophomoric lost-innocence metaphors and schematic oedipal tensions.
  95. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Successfully amalgamates Henry Jaglom's Hollywood-home-movie aesthetic, ego-skewering satire, and a measured understanding of the kinship between love and risk.
  96. The Five Obstructions
    An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.
  97. Raising Helen
    John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Mother Likes Women
    Fortunately, Leonor Watling (who spent most of "Talk to Her" in a coma) plays the spectacularly neurotic middle daughter with dizzying abandon and single-handedly saves the day.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stateside
    Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Me If You Dare
    The movie's hyperactivity eventually yields to such revelations as Life Isn't a Game and The Biggest Dare Is Love, but the ultimate measure of its conventionality is its soundtrack.
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