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. Swimming Pool
    Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.
  2. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Adept and generally enjoyable.
  4. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    A movie of many stupid pet tricks and one basic joke: As in the original, Elle's intelligence is consistently -- if understandably -- underestimated.
  5. Friday Night
    Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.
  6. On_Line
    Indifferently written, passably acted, resourcefully shot in video with enlivening splashes of local color.
  7. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.
  8. 28 Days Later...
    On one hand a seat-o'-pants digital-video quickie designed for blunt trauma, and on the other a veritable index of classic genre-stuff, Boyle's film creates an acute sense of movie-viewing danger.
  9. War and Peace
    Immersed in popular culture, War and Peace makes it clear that India's nuclear mania appeals not only to religious chauvinism, primitive nationalism, and a desire for modernity but, even more dangerously, to a festering sense of inferiority.
  10. Human Weapon
    Religious fanaticism gets even scarier in this hour-long doc.
  11. My Terrorist
    Her (Gerstel's) apparent marginalization in Israeli society renders this political psychodrama all the more depressing.
  12. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol's movie is lovely, large, and tedious, subscribing blindly to storybook stereotypes (this warrior is brave, this prince is noble, this consort is evil) and acted, for the most part, in a passionless monotone.
  13. Alex & Emma
    This isn't one for the time capsule--just bury it.
  14. Hulk
    Nolte's exploding patriarch jacks up the story's antisocial wish fulfillment into a Nietzschean-anarchist's wet dream, but one can only vainly hope that the preordained sequel will head in that dastardly direction.
  15. From Justin to Kelly
    Bury this in the time capsule: a memento of the Clean South, 2003.
  16. Manito
    Unusually impassioned indie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hard Word
    Convoluted yet simple-minded, the movie frequently equates verbosity with wit.
  18. Pistol Opera
    Suzuki has made the ultimate meta-movie, a self-parodying, surrealist gangster daydream as intoxicating and insubstantial as an absinthe swoon.
  19. The Nazi Officer's Wife
    A powerful account of living in isolation and constant terror.
  20. Jet Lag
    The writerly restraint that confines them to the airport is admirable, though the fairy-tale ending in Acapulco seems like a throwaway.
  21. The Heart of Me
    Madeleine's such a cold bitch that the adulterous lovers' anguished scruples scan like inert masochism.
  22. Hollywood Homicide
    Hollywood Homicide knows it's a dog, and it ain't too proud to beg.
  23. Rugrats Go Wild
    As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.
  24. Tycoon: A New Russian
    Though a relatively sober essay on criminal organization, Tycoon is also thoroughly pulpy -- that is, crass, unimaginative, corner-cutting, and simplistic, with the visual vocabulary of daytime soap.
  25. Love the Hard Way
    If this adaptation of Chinese punk-lit writer Wang Shuo's fiction doesn't survive its Bronx trick-out, you can't really blame Brody, whose luminous autodidact seems caught between camp and coolsville.
  26. The Eye
    Given that The Eye plays out without so much as a single new idea or real surprise, it's a testament to the Pangs' knack for composition and editing -- or Orange Music's merciless Psycho-tronic score -- that the movie goes boo as effectively as it does.
  27. Wattstax (re-released)
    Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    2 Fast 2 Furious
    The script, and the actors' breezy performances, work inasmuch as they get us to the chase on time.
  29. Whale Rider
    Like the film, Pai's character is muddily conceived and ill-focused, but the coltish, tremulously delicate Castle-Hughes is a hypnotic camera subject.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garmento
    The story has too many characters, about whom we know too little.
  31. The Weather Underground
    One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.
  32. The Three Marias
    He's (director Abranches) so focused on creating a strikingly mannerist visual style that he forgets to flesh out his plot and characters.
  33. The Era of Vampires
    The finale is a near-abstract mess (decapitation, impalation, "Alien" birth) -- in an empathic gesture, the filmmakers end it all with a few sticks of TNT.
  34. Together
    Mawkishly clichéd as it is, Together is an odder hybrid than it first appears -- at once populist and deeply cynical about the price of popularity.
  35. The Italian Job
    Zesty in a workmanlike sort of way, providing supporting henchmen Jason Statham and Mos Def with pleasingly unsensational characters given to subtle twitches of idiosyncrasy.
  36. Capturing the Friedmans
    I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Finding Nemo
    Stuffed to the gills with surprises.
  38. The In-Laws
    A walking-talking affront to every middle-class middle-ager it intends to sucker, this remake of the 1979 accidental-classic screwball hits every wrong note and trips on every chair leg.
  39. That's My Face
    The movie might test your tolerance for the mystical, but its whispery vagueness is of a piece with the luxuriantly grainy atmospherics.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    John and John, it cannot be denied, are charming, witty, adorable, and quite capable of rocking.
  41. Grazia's Island
    It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bruce Almighty
    A looking-glass cover version of "The Truman Show," the maudlin Jim Carrey vehicle Bruce Almighty lets the comedian ply his rubber-limbed shtick as well as indulge his pursuit of sappiness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ichi the Killer
    Underneath the spillage and flow of this gonzo activity, Miike layers a blood-stained commentary on a toxic world in which men offer protection to men but really end up dooming them to exist within a spasmodic, shambolic, and hypermasculine sphere of violence.
  44. Beyond Vanilla
    The cheerful how-to aspect ("cut and file your nails!") adds to the sense that the whole thing seems to have drifted in from some late-night infomercial netherland.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Writer-director Bose shows depth when he deals directly with Xen's loneliness. The scenes that show him after-hours, as he gazes yearningly at the nightclub patrons across the street, are especially moving.
  46. The Sea
    Baltasar Kormákur's wacky version of "King Lear," set in an Icelandic village where virtually everyone plays the fool.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Friends and Family
    First-timer Coury's fast pace can't outrun Joseph Triebwasser's predictable script, saddled with mobster clichés and queer stereotypes.
  48. Cinemania
    Built on a foundation of cinephilia, Cinemania is a valentine of sorts to this movie mecca (you have to love a city, and a film culture, that can sustain such bottomless appetites).
  49. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.
  50. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Slesin's film is a profound meditation on the resilience of children -- their ability to take sustenance from whatever love is available -- and on the persistent presence of the child hidden within each grown-up.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pokémon Heroes
    The pied piper of shameless kiddie-marketing strikes for the fifth time in as many years.
  52. A Woman Is a Woman
    Godard light, but not lite: Its breezy postures front for melancholia.
  53. Sweet Sixteen
    In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."
  54. The Matrix Reloaded
    Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.
  55. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Attitude
    Nilsson's handheld lensing is a blend of smooth home-movie closeness and expressive formal compositions.
  57. Washington Heights
    One-upping Latino immigrant movies like "Luminarias" and "Tortilla Soup," Washington Heights zeroes in on go-getters (mostly of Dominican lineage) whose ambitions are transformed by familial demands.
  58. Only the Strong Survive
    I'd have welcomed more archival footage (Pennebaker did, after all, document Otis Redding's epochal performance at the Monterey Pop Festival), but that would be asking for another movie.
  59. The Trip
    Steals every trick in the gaysploitation book down to the Alexis Arquette glorified cameo, but the end result -- compulsively horrible and full of unintentional poignant hilarity -- is its own mutant creature.
  60. Man on the Train
    Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Daddy Day Care
    Lighthearted if shy of a lark.
  62. King of Hearts (re-release)
    As a movie, King of Hearts is more pageant than story. As a cultural artifact, however, the movie is less a relic than a symptom.
  63. The Shape of Things
    In its costumes, line readings, and structure, the movie faithfully preserves the stage production -- a provocative, if meretricious, evening of theater that ends in a paroxysm of LaButality with a bear swipe to the spectator's head. It is, however, more difficult to rattle a movie audience -- at least with words -- and, despite its streamlined presentation, The Shape of Things is not nearly as effective on-screen.
  64. Down with Love
    Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.
  65. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    What seems like a nut-on-a-bar-stool rant morphs into a triumphal evocation of the emotional-political bluster of that time.
  66. Charlotte Sometimes
    Using vagueness as a crutch, Charlotte Sometimes makes a fetish of opacity. Still, whether or not it's a pose, the film's poised reticence is refreshing in context -- a rebuke to the contemporary crop of blabbermouthed American indies.
  67. X2: X-Men United
    Funny, reasonably crazy, and unpretentiously faithful to its source.
  68. The Dancer Upstairs
    Initially engrossing, The Dancer Upstairs slackens in its second half.
  69. Owning Mahowny
    Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.
  70. Blue Car
    Blue Car gets so much of the hard stuff (including Meg's Plath-via-Tori poetry) that it assumes the easy stuff will take care of itself. It doesn't.
  71. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    Disney's big-screen expansion of their hit TV show is nirvana for the pubescent crowd.
  72. New Suit
    Despite frequent cuts to mambos and cha-chas, this insulated tale of rich interns swindling rich studio bosses has no “Clueless”-style SoCal breeze (or righteous “Working Girl” gotcha).
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Spellbound
    In their randomness, the bee words take on an oracular quality--shades of kabbalistic gematria, or the "Sortes Vergilanae," the supernatural attributed to symbols on paper.
  74. Marooned in Iraq
    This lusty, heartfelt movie has a near Brueghelian visual energy and a humanist passion as contagious as its music.
  75. Returning Mickey Stern
    The notion of grievingly happening upon your dead beloved, young and lovely again, is simple and potent, but the film's airless amateurism, belabored ethnicism ("Oy gevalt!"), and trite dialogue kill it in the water.
  76. The Real Cancun
    There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.
  77. House of Fools
    For world-class lapses of judgment, Andrei Konchalovsky's House of Fools is a berserk overachiever.
  78. City of Ghosts
    Musters gobs of atmosphere and touristy menace without attending much to story or character.
  79. A Decade Under the Influence
    Does attest to the once-upon-a-time existence of a Hollywood counterculture, but it's so reverentially heavy-handed in evoking the era that it can't help playing like "Forrest Gump" without Tom Hanks.
  80. Manic
    Often the script (co-written by Michael Bacall, who plays sardonic bipolar rich kid Chad) rings clear with mouths-of-babes declamations that all pained kids spew before downing adulthood's suck-it-up Kool-Aid.
  81. Confidence
    Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.
  82. Identity
    The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    It Runs in the Family
    Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.
  84. People I Know
    Although a marked improvement over Algrant's nightmarishly whimsical debut, "Naked in New York," People I Know is perfumed less by the sweet smell of success than the musty aroma of the Miramax vault.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mr. and Mrs. Iyer
    The actors appear game, yet director Aparna Sen, who conceived the film in the wake of September 11, resorts often to hokey pseudo-lyricism and prefers sound-bite ballyhoo to sociological depth.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Jersey Guy
    Like a spiral perm growing out, Jersey Guy droopily unravels as partial homage to the Balki Bartokamous school of bad acting before collapsing into a mess of fragmentary sermonizing on deceit, commitment, and the meaning of choice.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Onmyoji: The Yin Yang Master
    Succeeds in visual splendor (it was shot on location in Kyoto) but falls flat on characterization.
  88. Medea
    Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.
  89. Winged Migration
    Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Holes
    Brims with storytelling flourishes and gently deployed life lessons that even accompanying adults may dig
  91. Lilya 4-Ever
    Forget "Irreversible," this is the season's most piercingly feel-bad movie.
  92. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Most Wanted isn't aiming for social commentary, but it isn't too difficult to enjoy its good-natured humor.
  93. Venus and Mars
    Painfully contrived, Venus and Mars's dialogue tends toward banal (as opposed to quotably bad), and the rhythm at which lines are read is definitely alien.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Samehada otoko to momojiri onna
    Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.
  95. Love and Diane
    From first shot to last, Dworkin's movie is a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it's not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism.
  96. A Mighty Wind
    Another unforetold career acme: Christopher Guest's seductive and brilliantly modulatory A Mighty Wind, which trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bulletproof Monk
    Some reliably vertiginous fight sequences (rope bridge, rooftop signage) and modest flight experiments liven up the mix, but for all the leads' individual appeal, they seem to occupy slightly different films.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Chasing Papi
    Shamelessly purports to be "the first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America," but the only place you're likely to find such shrill and whitewashed caricatures is in the elitist pages of ¡Hola!
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    Fight footage is kept to a minimum; in this film, the boxer's best one-two's don't hit inside the ring. Clay's ingenious hype-baiting moxie drives the first half, cut to a nouvelle pop beat.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Young Unknowns
    Numbing but effective debut.
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