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. Valley of Tears
    Most of the best moments in Hart Perry's latest documentary can be found in its opening half-hour, a vivid record of a 1979 strike by Mexican American migrant farmworkers in the onion fields of Raymondville, Texas.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Timeline
    Crudely written, haphazardly acted, and improbably fun.
  3. The Cooler
    First-timer Wayne Kramer brings pathos to Bernie and Shelly's fraught relationship, but his film never amounts to more than a cute idea stretched to poker-chip thinness.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Haunted Mansion
    Lamer than Tiny Tim on a damp London day.
  5. The Triplets of Belleville
    The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.
  6. In America
    Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.
  7. Bad Santa
    Bad Santa is a one-joke film; to his credit, Thornton embodies that joke with vicious, vaguely insane conviction.
  8. 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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    El leyton
    Barely elevated telenovela.
  10. Blue Gate Crossing
    Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.
  11. 21 Grams
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gothika
    Quickly abandoning the psychological for the supernatural, the movie collapses its premise into one painfully derivative pitch.
  13. The Barbarian Invasions
    Shear away the film's pretensions, and it's a soap opera of assholes.
  14. The Cat in the Hat
    Comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years.
  15. 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.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Mail Order Bride
    The hapless goodfella-in-training is as unsuccessful at fulfilling his uncle's wishes as the star and co-director, Robert Capelli Jr., is at delivering punchlines.
  17. The Missing
    However bogged down by predictable story rhythms, banally assembled shoot-outs, and climactic mano a mano, The Missing has an acidic period tone, a respect for the reality of violence, and a refreshing dearth of superhuman heroics and easy triumph. For that much, we should be grateful.
  18. Ticket to Jerusalem
    Largely sidesteps sentiment in favor of a tentative hopefulness.
  19. Tupac: Resurrection
    Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.
  20. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    Dante's masterstroke is to make the movie as visually and narratively unhinged as its source material.
  21. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.
  22. Epidemic
    Basically an experimental psychodrama, Epidemic has a pleasingly slapdash, underground quality that recalls early Fassbinder and Wenders -- although, with its cynical premise and frequent infusions of Wagner, it exudes the prankster snarkiness characteristic of von Trier.
  23. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    This is an exercise in civility -- a tasteful "Boy's Life" adventure with plenty of boys aboard to express their appreciation.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anything But Love
    If this is such a cheesy, derivative movie, why did I watch it twice with such delight? Possibly because at its center it's profoundly authentic, and because the star turn by Andrew McCarthy, a moody, mercurial characterization, saves it from fairy-tale bathos.
  25. Hukkle
    Deranging a venerable Hungarian tradition of "village sociology," Pálfi employs a bizarrely associative montage to fashion a portrait of a traditional peasant community -- just a midsummer Sunday on Mars.
  26. A House on a Hill
    Squint through the humbug, and there's some genuine life going on.
  27. Mango Yellow
    A shallow Brazilian trifle.
  28. My Architect
    An inspired homage to his father's work, and a bracing, bittersweet testament of filial love mixed with pain and compassion.
  29. Martin & Orloff
    Mostly, its unearned funnier-than-thou smugness plays like a DIY dorm-lounge homage.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Just an American Boy
    Looking puffier than he did in New York last month, Earle gets his band together, rewrites his play about executed Christian Karla Faye Tucker on the eve of opening night, defends his patriotism (and yours), and flogs the current LP. And then he rocks some more.
  31. In My Skin
    Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie -- easily the year's best debut feature -- illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.
  32. Love Forbidden
    Cryptic, pseudo-poetic asides come across as merely pretentious: Repeated cutaways to statues will not make your film "Contempt," nor will fleeting references to serial killers make it "Don't Look Now."
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Billabong Odyssey
    Pretty much everything here -- tow surfing, hydrofoil boards, token bit on women surfers -- already appeared in this summer's equally halfass "Step Into Liquid."
  34. Gloomy Sunday
    Dissolving four characters' lives into the dank smoke of the bitterest of torch songs, Gloomy Sunday fashions an apocryphal, pretty, and somewhat pat biography of the title ballad.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Elf
    Works best as a rapid-fire series of sight gags and absurd remarks.
  36. 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.
  37. Hidden in Plain Sight
    John H. Smihula's compelling video documentary aims for both hearts and minds.
  38. The Matrix Revolutions
    No less than the rankest demagogue, The Matrix Revolutions insists on the primacy of faith over knowledge. Once it locks and loads, however, the triumphant visuals short-circuit anything resembling abstract thought.
  39. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    In addition to reporting a scoop, Bartley and O'Briain do an excellent job in deconstructing the Venezuelan TV news footage of blood, chaos, and rival crowds.
  40. Suspended Animation
    Alternately tense and cheesy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Die, Mommie, Die!
    Though Natasha Lyonne as bratty daughter and Philip Baker Hall as the disposable spouse impress, it's Busch's heartfelt Joan Crawford homage that enthralls. Busch can transcend even the smog, making hazy camp seem fresh.
  42. Shattered Glass
    The Sarsgaard slow burn is only marginally more compelling than the Christensen simper; like its subject, the movie is self-important yet insipid.
  43. The Human Stain
    Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
  44. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.
  45. Girlhood
    Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system.
  46. Sister Helen
    Perhaps if Sister Helen had been released when filming was completed in 2000, its tough-loving Irish nun, who gives hell to male drug addicts in a Mott Haven "safe house," might have passed for endearing.
  47. The Singing Detective
    The problems come in the shadow world, where everything's a jumble, where Dark's compositional strategy ("all clues and no solutions") eventually becomes wearing, and Gordon's direction can't hold it all together.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Radio
    Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.
  49. Brother Bear
    Tykes may giggle at the Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas–voiced moose, but there's little for adults.
  50. Elephant
    Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scary Movie 3
    Vigorously date- and time-stamped, Scary Movie 3 boasts a cultural half-life of about five seconds, but for those seeking a return on their weekly multiplex pilgrimages, this movie is The One.
  52. Beyond Borders
    It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.
  53. Last Party 2000
    Hoffman has no particular argument to make, and neither does the movie -- just befuddled disgust with The System in general and the right wing in particular.
  54. In the Cut
    Aggressively grim and gory.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Sun
    Gripping, relentlessly tragic retelling of life in revolutionary times.
  56. The Hired Hand (re-release)
    A film of considerable ambition and period piquance.
  57. Sylvia
    A handsome, mostly tasteful production on par with 2001's Bayley-Murdoch impersonation "Iris."
  58. Veronica Guerin
    A pre-programmed mediocrity, a slave to its clichés.
  59. Runaway Jury
    Not nearly enough time is spent in court--that is, on the movie's ostensible subject. (Besides, the down-to-the-wire deliberation scene is risibly unconvincing and abbreviated.)
  60. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Returner
    A shamelessly recycled vision of decrepit high tech.
  62. Pieces of April
    Manipulative and cloying, Pieces of April turns into something altogether creepier, even pathological, whenever first-time filmmaker Peter Hedges (screenwriter of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy") brings up race.
  63. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    The film scores points needling the guys' lingering insecurities.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Porn Theater
    In its own quiet if overly studied way, Porn Theatre mourns a time when, for better or worse, we could all get off together.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dopamine
    The premise (does modern neurochemistry debunk love?) is fresh enough, but too much would-be banter falls flat, and the story is woefully schematic.
  66. The Flower of Evil
    Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Good Boy!
    Former SNL-ers Molly Shannon and Kevin Nealon play the kid's Stepford parents in this Jim Henson Pictures happy meal.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flesh for the Beast
    It's all gleefully over the top, but neither particularly campy nor scary. For those who like a little t&a with their blood and gore, however, Flesh for the Beast serves up ample portions of each.
  69. Intolerable Cruelty
    Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's-man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill, and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Girls Will Be Girls
    The situations begin tamely, but escalate to drunken vomiting and drugged rapes—all played for yuks. Or is it yucks?
  71. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Fun and smart, but undeniably thin, the first installment of Tarantino's action epic is a fanboy fever dream. The clichés are out in maximum force, tempting any critic fool enough to go one-on-one with the master. (The prize: a Ph.D. in Tarantinology.)
  72. Small Voices
    Despite its affinity for whimsy over realism, Small Voices effectively captures the embittered desperation and ragged dedication of its exploited teachers.
  73. Bus 174
    Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.
  74. Mystic River
    An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.
  75. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Casting Tokyo as a neon wilderness thick with aged "perverts" and teenage pimps, the movie frames a critique of socially permissible pedophilia as indelible as Harada's eavesdropping mise-en-scène.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Event
    Shot on crummy DV and told via flashbacks, the film largely plays out like a Reagan-era "Citizen Kane." Common sense wrecks even the film's funniest bit, and the director's nausea-inducing camera observes the hysteria in perpetual pan-and-scan.
  77. Out of Time
    In apparent atonement for whatever wayward thinking led him down the Freeman-Judd path, Franklin has transformed Out of Time into a highly felicitous comedy of infidelities and busted-up romances.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Concert for George
    Both a heartwarming tribute to the late Beatle and a study of hair patterns in the aging British male, Concert for George, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall a year to the day after Harrison's death, manages both reverence and joy.
  79. The Station Agent
    Manages to explore the darker facets of friendship without being dark.
  80. Wonderland
    Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good -- the simple story of a doomed hop-hog over his head in bad shit could've hit the nerve if left to tell itself.
  81. School of Rock
    Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Southlander: Diary of a Desperate Musician
    The script doesn't give the cast much to play aside from vague eccentricity, and movies like this one rise and fall on the vividness of their weirdos.
  83. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Life Without Me
    What's annoying and eventually absurd is writer-director Isabel Coixet's decision to have her heroine keep the diagnosis a secret.
  85. 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Duplex
    A bitter little fable of rent control and its discontents, Duplex moves rapidly into darkness and claustrophobia.
  87. The Rundown
    To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Under the Tuscan Sun
    Only Sandra Oh, as the wisecracking lesbian Asian pregnant best friend, provides a bright spot. Get this sidekick her own sitcom!
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bubba Ho-tep
    Though unpainfully entertaining, its greatest dose of otherworldly mojo must have been spent warding off straight-to-video status.
  90. Luther
    How did this rude monk, prey to depression and satanic hallucinations, change the course of history? Luther offers scant illumination, for the big brown eyes that served Joseph Fiennes so well in "Elizabeth" are little help with the spirit of Reformation.
  91. Yossi & Jagger
    At 71 minutes, the movie is scarcely more than an anecdote. But vivid as it is in establishing a specific milieu, its economy is its strength.
  92. 7 Year Zig Zag
    Green, saucer-eyed, cokey, frying in flop sweat, gives the viewer the shrill thrill of being in someone else's nightmare. But the songs? Swung, man, swung.
  93. Demonlover
    However glitzy, clever, and luridly philosophical, Demonlover is still mainly an old-fashioned thriller.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    Pitched for a sympathetic American audience, the documentary goes for shock with the filmmakers' first trip to "the altar of the world" in 1987, when they happened to be caught in an uprising of monks that was violently crushed by the Chinese army.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cold Creek Manor
    CCM's dissipated endgame borrows soggily from "The Ring," resulting in something that wouldn't make it past the first script meeting for Scary Movie 4.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mambo italiano
    Old annoying ethnic family stereotypes meet new annoying gay-relationship stereotypes in this candidate for "Kiss Me Guido's" heretofore uncontested niche.
  97. In This World
    Winterbottom was set on bare-bones realism, and so the scalding lyricism of ferocious terrain and sociopolitical absurdity seen in, say, "Kandahar" or "A Time for Drunken Horses," is never resourced.
  98. Anything Else
    I have a friend who insists Allen should make a western, if only because the demands of genre might force the birth of new ideas. His movies do create and service an innovation-free comfort zone that makes most TV sitcoms seem adventurous.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Casa de los babys
    The screenplay's clutchy banter (interspersed with arias of teary confession) feels distinctly Oprah, but Sayles extracts unexpected life from his wooden setups.
  100. To Be and to Have
    Full of observed life, the movie is also a bit of a vacuum, and once we register our admiration for Lopez, we can hardly help contemplating the cold equations of the students' futures, their uneducated families, and the rapturously desolate farmland around them.
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