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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Secondhand Lions
    The self-consciousness is unintentionally touching, but it wet-blankets the film into a thirdhand lark.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fighting Temptations
    The camera loves Beyoncé, but her acting coach may harbor more ambivalence; if she could convert the imperious urgency of her best singing to screen presence, we might stop wishing Whitney would come back from her own private netherlands.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Underworld
    Speedman's such a nonentity here I worried that the theater air-conditioning would blow him off the screen.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Emerald Cowboy
    The filmmakers may have aimed for doc-like authenticity, but the result is more like a QVC fabulous fake.
  5. Millennium Actress
    Flashbacks integrate with scenes from her films, and it becomes difficult to discern between the two -- cinema is equated with memory. Unfortunately, the trippy disorientation ultimately devolves into outright confusion.
  6. 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.
  7. Luster
    The climactic shocker is far too exacting, but Lewis nails the milieu, and has the sense to not spell out every motivation in capital letters.
  8. So Close
    A resolution gifting world-surveillance software to the cops, plus slo-mo action over the oft reprised "Close to You," stretch past bullet time into nap time.
  9. Matchstick Men
    Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.
  10. Cabin Fever
    Roth never fully exploits the woods around him, and the homes of the locals are far too middle-class, but because so many clichés are discarded amid the flesh rot, even the patented "Night of the Living Dead" coda feels sharp-edged and genuine.
  11. Lost in Translation
    As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."
  12. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    Having already looted the Peckinpah and spaghetti-western archives, the director now quotes his own quotations, in service of not a sequel but a vociferous reiteration.
  13. Warrior of Light
    The best moments feature Uerê's children themselves.
  14. The Same River Twice
    It's a generous document of cultural passage, and not incidentally, the sexiest naturally nudist American movie since Murnau's "Tabu." Moss, however, keeps himself out of the picture and neglects massive amounts of context that might've made Same River a stunner.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where's the Party Yaar?
    This breezy comedy deconstructs the struggles of assimilation, satirizing the stereotypical "culture clash" Indian-American identity narrative.
  16. Carnage
    Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Order
    This ghost-in-the-Vatican thriller regurgitates enough occult clichés to deserve its own special circle of hell.
  18. Home Room
    Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."
  19. Party Monster
    Party never gets rolling.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Obtuse and creepy.
  21. Taking Sides
    Flawed but fascinating.
  22. Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Backyard
    Though filled with violent smackdowns, slackjawed interviews, and bizarre characters, Hough's doc never rises above the level of first-year student project, hobbled by scattershot editing, badly written intertitles, and useless directorial voice-over.
  24. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (re-release)
    Sargent's whole enterprise doubles as a '70s archaeological dig.
  25. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.
  26. Civil Brand
    Without a scorcher like Pam Grier, the sub-NYPD Blue dialogue and acting dilute what could have been a shrieking wake-up call about for-profit prisons.
  27. The Other Side of the Bed
    If Martínez-Lázaro, as he reiterated at the Miami Film Festival earlier this year, wants to expand the U.S. Spanish-language film market, one hopes he'll aim higher than this.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jeepers Creepers II
    An apparent Atkins devotee, he eschews the carb-heavy corn fields, opting for protein-rich human flesh, primarily a high school basketball team returning home on a lonely highway.
  29. Suddenly
    A humane, unassumingly quirky rumination on chance and caprice.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    My Boss's Daughter
    A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.
  31. Dust
    Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square's reflection in a windshield. But in reaching for a cubist style of storytelling, he sacrifices character and motivation.
  32. The Medallion
    This outing, Jackie doesn't bring much humor or personality to his role, which is essentially the same one he played in the Rush Hour movies.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Babí léto
    The reconciliatory finale comes with a sad footnote: Czech New Wave veteran Brodsky killed himself shortly after the film was released in his native country –- an eerie rebuke to the movie's spunky and life-affirming vision of old age.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    Serves up a gripping look at skate history through an investigation of one of its darker moments.
  35. Rana's Wedding
    It's tempting to read Abu-Assad's view of his ostentatiously wealthy heroine and her debutante narcissism as satirical of a certain cross-section of modernized Palestinians amid the occupation, but the placid, earnest way her dilemma takes up emotional space in his film suggests half-bakery.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Green Card Fever
    Though it's high time for a probing drama that illuminates the labyrinth of America's immigration system, those responsible for Green Card Fever should have their artistic licenses revoked.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Robin Hood (re-release)
    Robin Hood is movie pageantry at its best, done in the grand manner of silent spectacles, brimming over with the sort of primitive energy that drew people to the movies in the first place.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Don't Tempt Me
    Imagines Heaven and Hell as places so deeply mired in the business-as-usual hassles of earthly life that the battle between good and evil becomes a downright dull affair.
  39. Venus Boyz
    Baur's doc earnestly -- if not altogether adroitly -- examines masculinity as a performance, demonstrating that biology is not destiny.
  40. The Battle of Shaker Heights
    The characters talk like smart, unpredictable people, and Kelly Ernswiler is one of a kind.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Marci X
    Moving beyond stultifying to stupefying.
  42. Dog Days
    Dog Days adheres dogmatically to the school of sado-miserablism that Seidl's compatriots Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner have turned into something of a national industry (non-Austrian adherents abound too, from Gaspar Noé to Harmony Korine).
  43. Thirteen
    Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut is less a damozel-in-distress fetish flick than a bird-flipping plunge into coded girl-cult communication.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Catching Out
    Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.
  45. Uptown Girls
    Less "Freaky Friday" than just plain freaky.
  46. Passionada
    There's much to admire here, including an often witty script and a cast that includes Theresa Russell, Seymour Cassel, and the irrepressible Lupe Ontiveros (Celia's mother-in-law).
  47. Freddy vs. Jason
    About as threadbare as a favorite childhood plushy. What's more, trying to keep the story line of strained meta-sequel Freddy Vs. Jason straight requires too much of a cogitative investment.
  48. American Splendor
    Clever, engaging, and cannily faux populist.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Shaolin Soccer
    Crammed with wild action, obvious but well-mounted gags, and playful effects, the film is refreshingly silly.
  50. Open Range
    The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.
  51. Grind
    A logo-laden celebration of the joys of sponsorship wrapped inside an innocuous teen-pic package.
  52. OT: Our Town
    Kennedy takes pains to illuminate aspects and insights that buck cliché.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Le divorce
    Entranced by the natives, Le Divorce reduces the knowing ditziness of Johnson's novel to vapid, exchange-student wonderment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Blade
    Yuki's streamlined revenge story (the furious, elegant choreography is by HK maestro Donnie Yen) has in its modest dimensions a surprising grace.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Step Into Liquid
    Like many late-franchise attempts, it stretches its material thin and grasps at novelty, overstaying its welcome despite a handful of requisite dude-that-is-so-fucking-cool moments.
  56. S.W.A.T.
    A prototypical new-millennium summer movie, S.W.A.T. is no more than an extended trailer for itself.
  57. Seaside
    Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Freaky Friday
    The situation -- a mother-daughter mind-body switcheroo -- is as enduringly appealing as it is absurd, and the comedy flows therefrom.
  59. Zero Day
    The simulation of shaky camera amateur DV is a narrative ploy that often taxes the filmmakers' ingenuity. Still, the movie has a creepy authenticity.
  60. Boys Life 4: Four Play
    While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's “Boys Life 3,” this fourth anthology represents a full-blown regression.
  61. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    Has little to offer beyond muzzy kismet and generalized amnesia, a bit of National Geographic and a lot of cocktail jazz.
  62. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Unlike those in the not dissimilar “American Beauty,” Dentists' characters are needier than the actors who play them -- and therein lies the problem.
  63. The Magdalene Sisters
    This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Wedding
    The deliriously overacting Scott is game for anything, too much really, but as a one-man army against the tide of Z100-scored banality, he's the closest thing the movie has to a savior.
  65. Gigli
    Gigli berates, insults, dismisses, throttles, and bellows at Bartha's meticulously aped retard, and then turns sensitive and warm—it's hard to decide which attitude is more insulting.
  66. Bugs!
    As with the more glamorously photographed "MicroCosmos," the climbing, scurrying, and munching eventually grows tiresome, but the film is not without its highlights.
  67. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    It wouldn't be fair to gripe about the hundreds of plot holes; the whole thing is hole.
  68. Mondays in the Sun
    It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.
  69. Buffalo Soldiers
    In its post-Vietnam cynicism, Buffalo Soldiers feels almost avant-garde.
  70. Hotel
    As usual, Figgis coaxes moon-shooting performances, but all the furious improv lacks any sort of map.
  71. Seabiscuit
    More mystical than mysterious, Seabiscuit is a proudly cornball sentimental epic -- a reverential paean to a vanished America that's steeped in inspirational uplift and played for world-historical pathos.
  72. Lucía, Lucía
    It lacks the toughness and social insights of its Mexican new wave predecessors like "Amores Perros." And even as the story of one woman's midlife crisis, it's a bit lightweight.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    SK3D, alas, banks it all on a dead-end VR aesthetic, albeit one emitting a certain black-hole fascination.
    • 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.
  75. Masked and Anonymous
    Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.
  76. Cuban Rafters
    Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.
  77. This Thing of Ours
    Danny Provenzano's mafioso melodrama is the immoral vanity project to end immoral vanity projects.
  78. Johnny English
    Smug with timely zingers like "The only thing the French should be allowed to host is an invasion," the movie's recommended strictly for Bush advisers.
  79. The Embalmer
    Skillfully directed and adroitly acted.
  80. How to Deal
    As Mom, Allison Janney easily dominates every scene she graces, as does Morning Zoo jock papa Peter Gallagher.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Sea Is Watching
    Though The Sea (and the sea) wants to capture some elemental, unruly truths, it's ultimately an over-lacquered jidai-geki curio, something for the appendix of the next book on Kurosawa.
  82. Dirty Pretty Things
    Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Anarchist Cookbook
    Cookbook banks on the humor of its caricatures and the heft of its moral dilemma, but because it never develops its characters beyond types, it comes off as flat and forced throughout.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bad Boys II
    Martin Lawrence's Marcus is the Costello to Smith's Abbott.
  85. September 11
    It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.
  86. Garage Days
    Spotting trains that left the station a few years back.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Injury to One
    A deft, ambitious exercise in old-school socialist agitprop crafted with the precise multimedia flair of a corporate PowerPoint presentation, Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One retells the gritty class struggles of the previous century through smoothly contemporary digital means.
  88. A Housekeeper
    In a flawless performance, Bacri lets us glimpse the tender desperation beneath his character's harsh, curmudgeonly exterior.
  89. Km. 0 - Kilometer Zero
    Aiming for Almodóvar lite, the flick is more reminiscent of "The Love Boat" -- drenched this time in cheery polysexuality. Everyone is an angel (and a horny little devil) in this breezy earthly trifle, even if the zaniness never quite takes wing.
  90. Northfork
    Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cuckoo
    Well-intentioned but sugarcoated anti-war allegory.
  92. I Capture the Castle
    Sweet and sleepy, I Capture the Castle might feel most comfortable in a Sunday-afternoon slot on the BBC.
  93. The Holy Land
    This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.
  95. Madame Satã
    It can feel a bit slight and, given the epic sweep of its subject's life, somewhat underplotted. But there's no denying the incendiary power of Ramos's performance -- he's present in nearly every scene. The movie is as much the story of his transformation into Madame Satã as it is João Francisco's.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    Convoluted but diverting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Tattoo
    This plodding serial-killer procedural grafts hand-me-down malevolence onto a standard rookie-veteran police yarn, the results of which yield nary a fright, let alone a goose pimple.
  98. Confusion of Genders
    The characters exist in single dimensions (trapped in a noxiously misogynist role, even the fearless Richard stands no chance), and in an effort to keep the plates spinning, the movie quickly devolves from risqué to risible.
  99. La Commune (Paris, 1871)
    Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action.
  100. Gasoline
    Devoid of originality, Gasoline is at least a model of modesty -- a road movie that goes nowhere slowly, and ends up where it began.
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