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 7.5 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. Reprisal
    It’s downright sad watching Willis go all half-assed in another movie. I guess we’re gonna have to wait for Glass to come out next year to see if Willis can do a movie in whole-assed form again.
  2. An L.A. Minute
    Daniel Adams’s An L.A. Minute makes you suffer through it all and never redeems itself, despite the potentially interesting duo of Gabriel Byrne and Kiersey Clemons as leads. The stars seem out of place with each other and in this movie, with creators who have no idea what they want to say.
  3. Blue Iguana
    From the characters to the purposely perplexing plot, it’s all hollow and artificial to the point of being downright grating. Blue Iguana is another exercise in sarcastic, self-referential, postmodern pulp whose time has so come and gone.
  4. The Happytime Murders
    Some viewers, perhaps, might be shocked at the association of Mr. Rainbow Connection with scenes set in porno shops, strip clubs, and drug dens. What jolted me, though, was seeing the Henson name all over a project that’s so often bland and listless, so tame in its designs, so limited in its imagination, so joyless in its execution.
  5. The Ranger
    By the time the killings start, the film already feels draining, with no characters worth caring about, much less watching.
  6. Love is Tolerance - Tolerance is Love
    Love and tolerance are difficult to argue with, yet this effort seems pointless — not just because it will change few minds, but also because it’s a mess.
  7. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    What’s lost in comedy is not matched by a gain in emotional engagement.
  8. 14 Cameras
    Unfortunately, Archambault’s churlishly over-the-top performance makes it impossible to take 14 Cameras seriously, no matter how you interpret Gerald’s actions.
  9. Siberia
    This movie so badly wants to be a sexy thriller, but it is neither sexy nor thrilling.
  10. Skyscraper
    I almost admire the laziness of the scripting. In this overworked, underpaid country of ours, why begrudge a screenwriter seizing the chance to knock off early?
  11. Black Water
    Criminal negligence of Dolph is far from Black Water’s only sin — there’s also the sluggish pacing, murky musical score, and somnambulant lead — but it might be its most egregious.
  12. China Salesman
    China Salesman has got to be one of the most baffling, expensive pats on the back China has ever given itself.
  13. SuperFly
    For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps.
  14. The Valley
    In her feature debut, Kariat has touched upon important themes — the immigrant experience, ageism in tech, the performance of traditional family roles, and the toll of depression — but the way she has combined them too often feels slapdash.
  15. The Texture of Falling
    While it’s obvious Allred wanted to make a possibly autobiographical, blatantly meta take on how insane young adults get when they fall in love, The Texture of Falling ends up being one baffling, infuriatingly pretentious exercise in indie filmmaking.
  16. Dark Crimes
    This is one very ugly movie at its heart, not for how Englert photographed it but for how bleak and unrelenting the violence is — even that ending can’t dig Dark Crimes out of its dark hole.
  17. The House That Jack Built
    As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.
  18. Always at The Carlyle
    A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.
  19. Born Guilty
    This movie is just a stockpiled compendium of terrible decisions, both behind and in front of the camera.
  20. Terminal
    Compounding the manic energy of the editing is dialogue that muses mostly on long-winded ideas that don’t lend themselves to any kind of visual representation.
  21. Overboard
    Overboard is a manipulative mindfuck dressed up as a lightweight, heartwarming comedy.
  22. Strangers on the Earth
    Pilgrimages have potential: Geoffrey Chaucer gave us 24 good yarns in his Canterbury Tales. But there isn’t even one in the otherwise gorgeous documentary Strangers on the Earth.
  23. Bad Samaritan
    There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.
  24. Modern Life Is Rubbish
    For those who delight in candy-coated nostalgia, writer Philip Gawthorne’s familiar, cliché-heavy script offers a twee jaunt down memory lane. For everyone else, even a killer Britpop soundtrack teamed with the leads’ palpable chemistry can’t save the film from overtrodden territory.
  25. Supercon
    More than anything else, Supercon is a drag: The heist plot offers none of the excitement typically associated with the genre. If you find repeated use of the phrase “ball cancer” hilarious, you’ll be well served; if you don’t, well, it’s a tough sit.
  26. Super Troopers 2
    The sequel is so profound a buzzkill they could sell it at GNC as a detox kit. No high can survive it. It slays fun dead, grinds cannabinoids to dust, and maybe even wipes the mind of the warmth you might hold for the original Super Troopers.
  27. Aardvark
    Aardvark, the first feature from writer-director Brian Shoaf, is so inane that several times it put this critic into a fugue state. Meandering in message or plot, the film proves to be not just incoherent but excruciatingly boring, quite a feat with a cast that includes Jenny Slate, Jon Hamm, Sheila Vand, and, sure, Zachary Quinto.
  28. Krystal
    What this tiresome, out-of-pocket-ass movie actually does is create a painfully kooky, mad world where the only good thing about it is that Rosario Dawson can still turn men into idiots with her presence.
  29. Submergence
    Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.
  30. Dead on Arrival
    Writer-director Stephen C. Sepher’s thriller is so convoluted that it’s hard to care about its trail of dead bodies.
  31. Back to Burgundy
    There doesn’t seem to be a romantic-comedy cliché missing from the bland French domestic Back to Burgundy, a wholly contrived post-adolescent coming-of-age yarn.
  32. The Hurricane Heist
    The Hurricane Heist delivers what it promises on some basic level; it’s got plenty of hurricane, and it’s got plenty of heist. But those looking for Sharknado-style idiocy will probably be disappointed, as will those looking for anything that makes sense. That might be the film’s fundamental problem.
  33. They Remain
    They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.
  34. The Forgiven
    Unfortunately, this movie has so many damn things percolating all through it that it ultimately seems unfocused and painfully earnest.
  35. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    The Vanishing of Sidney Hall fails to give its characters depth, leaving viewers with little more than a shallow white guy troubled by his fame.
  36. Red Sparrow
    With Lawrence (the director) and Lawrence (the actor) so professionally in tune over the course of three Hunger Games films, you might have hoped that the pair would deliver an off-the-rails, more mature action film with a nuanced female protagonist. But instead, they’ve delivered a lifeless peep show.
  37. Monster Family
    Nothing matters in this movie; stuff just happens.
  38. Lies We Tell
    As much as director–co-writer Mitu Misra wants to show the oppression and repression that still have a stranglehold on Muslim communities in Britain, he does what a lot of first-time filmmakers do their first time out — he overplays his hand.
  39. The Clapper
    The Clapper unsuccessfully attempts to be sincere and embrace the absurdity of its characters’ lives.
  40. Stratton
    The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.
  41. Pitch Perfect 3
    The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.
  42. Hangman
    Even with all its grisly, gory absurdity, Hangman actually tries to be a sincere salute to all the badge-wearing men and women who risk their lives on the regular to catch bad guys. But you may not take a single frame of this movie seriously.
  43. November Criminals
    What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.
  44. Hollow in the Land
    The stench of needlessly convoluted derivativeness lingers throughout this flick.
  45. Porto
    All of this is attractive, yet I felt nothing for these people, their pain, or their possible lost future.
  46. No Stone Unturned
    Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.
  47. The Osiris Child
    Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.
  48. Assholes
    What begins as revolting and off the rails peters out into a weak-sauce final payoff presented as an intervention-themed reality show, so tired and quaintly stupid it no longer offends.
  49. Surviving Peace
    As amateurish as its 1990-grade VHS title graphics, Surviving Peace is possibly the clunkiest — and most one-sided — film ever made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  50. Last Rampage
    Even though this dusty bit of true crime is limp and flimsy as hell, Last Rampage does give a few seasoned actors the opportunity to chew all the scenery they can in a 93-minute movie.
  51. Against the Night
    Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.
  52. Alina
    It’s all rather implausible, as is how all those cinema luminaries Barenholtz once nurtured seem to have no impact on his style-free storytelling.
  53. The Layover
    It’s completely unfair to compare these characters to (say) Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, funny women who derive dignity from their friendship. But that’s a show written, created, and performed by women, while this film’s creative trust is a clueless, retrograde sausage festivus.
  54. Bushwick
    Bushwick is a hollow, ultimately unsatisfying exercise in organized chaos.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ghost House
    Beyond the film’s ethnic stereotypes and flat characters, it needs to be scary, and it fails on that front as well.
  56. Ripped
    Much of the humor in Ripped fails to inspire more than a mild chuckle at best, in part because Epstein’s deliberate pacing sucks the air out of countless scenes.
  57. The Dark Tower
    Outside of its actors, the film is unremarkable.
  58. Brave New Jersey
    Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.
  59. Chronically Metropolitan
    Director Xavier Manrique’s film fails to drum up more than clichés about rich-people problems.
  60. The Emoji Movie
    The film is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.
  61. It Stains the Sands Red
    What could have been a wordless slog is inventive and even buoyant, as Molly crosses the baked Nevada landscape. And then, like a dog turd lurking in the middle of a jelly doughnut, a needless, brutal rape scene poisons the whole experience.
  62. VooDoo
    Writer/director Tom Costabile's found-footage conceit is painfully hackneyed, although not nearly as enervating as his actual drama.
  63. Transformers: The Last Knight
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  64. The Book of Henry
    The Book of Henry is just a lunkheaded tearjerker that you’ll wish was even half as smart as its allegedly gifted protagonist.
  65. Lucky
    Compounding the action’s lack of originality are both the amateurishness of every performance and the wobbly-camera aesthetics. Worse, though, is the wholesale absence of any political point of view on its immigrant-horror-story subject matter, leaving the film feeling like the thinnest type of retread.
  66. Kill Switch
    Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.
  67. The Hunter's Prayer
    Even though the movie tries to sneak in some subtext about children paying for the sins of their fathers, the biggest sin The Hunter’s Prayer commits is being too dumb to enjoy.
  68. Camera Obscura
    Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.
  69. The Mummy
    The Mummy turns out to be a drab, nonsensical affair that squanders its potential for humor, atmosphere and sweep.
  70. Black Butterfly
    Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.
  71. 96 Souls
    That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.
  72. The Drowning
    The deeper Tom wades into this psychological morass, the more Danny's volatile behavior seems dictated by the screenwriters' convenience rather than by any plausible depiction of a tortured mind.
  73. Dead Awake
    Under the direction of Phillip Guzman, the whole affair plods along in by-the-numbers fashion, and the characters are all types, displaying little evidence of interior lives.
  74. Take Me
    While the film, to its credit, doesn't become a trite morality play, the ending is thin and contrived nonetheless.
  75. Rupture
    Rupture is a sci-fi abduction thriller that leaves little to be thrilled about.
  76. Black Rose
    Let’s cut straight to the chase: Black Rose is a bad film — amazingly, astoundingly, supercalifragilisticexpialidociously bad.
  77. Mine
    The co-director/co-writer team of Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro are none too subtle, and their reliance on hallucination sequences suggests a (misguided) lack of faith in Hammer to pull this off by himself.
  78. Despite the Falling Snow
    So tasteful it’s torturous, Despite the Falling Snow is a Cold War espionage thriller for those who like their period-piece action airless and derivative.
  79. CHIPS
    CHIPS is so all-around masturbatory, it’s hardly a surprise when we learn that Ponch has to constantly pull over because he needs to find a bathroom and rub one out. Much like him, this revved-up orgy of raunch and sweet rides never stops jerking itself off.
  80. The Dark Below
    The problem — aside from the movie being simple and gimmicky — is in the execution — Schulze's, not the villain's.
  81. Wilson
    Inevitably, his generic disgruntlement will soften: Amerindie dyspeptic-comedy formula dictates that the man who rants two times too many against the addiction to phones and the internet will, by film’s end, have a heart-stirring video chat.
  82. Actor Martinez
    Whether the real-life Martinez is this hotheaded and quick-tempered is left a mystery, but it matters not a whit, because even five minutes in the company of this Martinez is excruciating.
  83. Atomica
    Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.
  84. The Belko Experiment
    Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.
  85. Don't Kill It
    Those who favor gore above all else will be at home amid the blood and guts, but others should heed the obvious warning invited by the title: don't watch it.
  86. Get the Girl
    By the time the final half-hour rolls around, the film descends into twist-ridden, ridiculous madness. It becomes as messy and unattractive as the blood and brain matter that gets scattered throughout.
  87. Fifty Shades Darker
    Despite the nonstop banality, Johnson remains the sole source of allure: Her sleepy eyes suggest nights devoted to pleasure inconceivable to James.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rings
    No matter how hard anyone tries to save her, this soggy nightmare just keeps on creeping out of the TV like it’s her job. It’d be even better if everyone just let her be evil.
  89. Don't Hang Up
    Basically, Don't Hang Up is a hire-me sign masquerading as a slasher film.
  90. Eloise
    Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.
  91. My Father Die
    From homophobic start to misogynistic finish, My Father Die is a parade of thrift-store images and scenarios as dull as they are repugnant.
  92. I Am Michael
    Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.
  93. A Dog's Purpose
    Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.
  94. Gold
    In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.
  95. Bad Kids of Crestview Academy
    There’s very little fun to be had with the camp of Bad Kids.
  96. The Crash
    Of the many disheartening things about The Crash — a script filled with platitudes, casting an able-bodied actor as a wheelchair-bound tech expert, near-criminal underuse of Maggie Q — the worst is its habit of slapping the audience over the head with symbolism.
  97. Go North
    Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.
  98. Underworld: Blood Wars
    Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.
  99. Arsenal
    The main enticement is getting to see Cage go full bore. And he does, gesticulating wildly and assuming an unplaceable accent, but as the only combustible element in this otherwise lackadaisical film, his energy ends up bouncing around with nowhere to go.
  100. Assassin's Creed
    The Assassin's Creed movie is about all the parts you might skip in the games.
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