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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. I Hate Valentine's Day
    Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.
  4. The Candidate
    But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.
  5. 7 Minutes
    Unlike guilty-pleasure Guy Ritchie crime films, in which vivid characters and unlikely subplots converge in lush visual mayhem, 7 Minutes is humorless and perfunctory, its heavies and protagonists never so much as aspiring to transcend or challenge the stereotypes they represent.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ace the Case
    A caper movie runs on calibrated chaos. Too much randomness makes the gears grind; too little and it feels overdetermined. Ace the Case has both problems.
  7. The Victim
    It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.
  8. Eloise
    Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.
  9. Mojave
    Is Mojave's twisty purposelessness showing how producers ruin the work of screenwriters, or is it evidence that screenwriters often need another set of eyes?
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Half Past Dead
    Morris Chestnut, known for his "Best Man"-style nice-guy roles, is surprisingly effective against type as the evil commando leader, but he's handcuffed by a script that never adequately explains his motivations.
  11. Divorce Corp
    Despite the film's hyper but insubstantial presentation of its information, there likely is a story here.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taking Lives
    If the Naqoyqatsi-lite score by Philip Glass doesn't exactly make sense of the film's sketchy identity politics, it does complement its utter ridiculousness.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Snowtown Murders
    This slog adds up to nothing other than the shocking truism that average people will do horrible things primarily because someone tells them to.
  14. The Hunting of the President
    Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.
  15. Third Person
    When the head-scratching impossibilities are more irritating than intriguing, does the last-second explanation outweigh the two hours we've spent rolling our eyes?
  16. Kate Plays Christine
    Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.
  17. The Wannabe
    Director Nick Sandow relies on a drab color palette that suits the generally humorless script.
  18. The Mist
    A lumbering and depressing movie.
  19. Ride Along
    Forget going soft — Ride Along proves Ice Cube's got bigger image problems than kiddie movies and Coors Light commercials.
    • 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.
  21. Nine
    Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity. It's the only point at which Nine seems more than a total zero.
  22. Mooz-lum
    Solemn, unsubtle, and terminally self-conscious.
  23. Angel Eyes
    A tearjerking romantic confection that, thanks to a reliance on unrestrained psychobabble and melodramatic one-upmanship, is only partially digestible.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flanders
    Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his.
  25. Summer in February
    The characters are broadly defined and tedious, which makes sitting through the film's 100 minutes something of a chore.
  26. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    In the end, all NOW reveals is that talented people did a difficult thing in far-off places — and that now they have a video scrapbook.
  27. Capital C
    This is essential viewing for those who prefer their documentaries nearly 100 percent tension-free.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Reno 911!: Miami
    The TV show excels with its short squad-car bursts of random inanity; here, the plot -- stretched out to 84 minutes -- feels like a dime bag tossed aside by a fleeing perp.
  29. Anguish
    There's not much to be said about Sonny Mallhi's languid psychological drama — moonlighting as a possession-centered horror film — that hasn't already been said by the title.
  30. Killers
    Amateurishly realized sensationalism trumps character-driven drama throughout Killers.
  31. Brothers
    Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.
  32. 13 Cameras
    Mild schadenfreude aside, however, the film inspires almost no feeling at all — even the Friday the 13th movies bother giving the bad guy a backstory.
  33. Emoticon
    Emoticon ;), a vanity project written, directed, starring, and sung by Livia De Paolis, is a grown-up's weird idea of how kids behave.
  34. Mission: Impossible II
    A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.
  35. Segunda piel
    Apparently reassembled from the cutting-room floor of any given daytime soap.
  36. Courageous
    Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.
  37. 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.
  38. Manny
    Throughout, the complexities of the charismatic fighter's life are only cursorily referenced so that the celebratory tone may not be marred, with Manny ultimately content to treat its subject with kid gloves.
  39. Wonderful World
    It's heartbreaking to see Lathan, an underemployed actress whose talents were last put to good use in 2006's "Something Else," in such a ridiculous, impossible role.
  40. Wrath of the Titans
    What it lacks are the very elements that made the first movie such a surprise: wit and nerve.
  41. Warcraft
    In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.
  42. Farmland
    There's no drama illustrating the thanklessness of their jobs, and potential wisdom about fiscal instability, animal welfare, or GMOs waft by without much argument.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Whole New Thing
    Half-new at most, this "Running With Scissors"–type tale of a precocious, effeminate teen who gets hot for teacher while prepping for a life in the arts isn't evidently autobiographical. Neither is it funny--or poignant or insightful or remotely worth one's time.
  44. The Dark Tower
    Outside of its actors, the film is unremarkable.
  45. The Devil's Rejects
    By rubbing your nose in this hillbilly mayhem, Zombie all but dares you to acknowledge your liberal elitism, simply because just now, in Dubya's America, you don't happen to find anything particularly funny or lovable about stupid, dangerous provincials.
  46. Fear of Fiction
    Ahearn's maddening game of connect-the-dots is content to collapse inward with honking, preening abandon.
  47. The Apparition
    The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.
  48. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    These 2-D characters might as well be wearing T-shirts that say things like "Predatory College Professor" and "Self-Obsessed Father" on them.
  49. Remarkable Shades of Gay
    Politically simplistic (if not naive) and aesthetically sterile.
  50. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Knight and Day
    There's never been a particularly crisp line between intense, SUPER-AWESOME Tom Cruise and the characters he plays. In Knight and Day, his age-old cool curdles into motormouthed neediness.
  52. Bound to Vengeance
    Bound to Vengeance strains credibility (seriously, she never calls the cops?) and swerves dangerously close to exploitation often enough that its semi-clever premise can't keep it on course.
  53. Gangster No. 1
    The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.
  54. Choke
    They explain and explain again the genesis of Victor's demons, to the point where the novel and movie play almost like parodies of novels and movies in which a character has to get in touch with his feelings in order to become a better man.
  55. They're Out of the Business
    The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.
  56. Free Ride
    The film is content to merely document certain happenings and hope you find them as interesting as it does.
  57. 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.
  58. Love Ranch
    Hackford's pacing throughout is continuously off, with scenes extending several beats too long, his two leads adrift and bored.
  59. This Is Where I Leave You
    The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.
  60. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Nearly every scene is clunky, and the film's commentary about TV as the unifying glue of American culture is embellished through lame incidents of sex and violence that eventually validate the Chinese tourists' anti-U.S. critiques.
  61. Hysteria
    Proceeds as a tedious, clumsy diddle, constantly reminding viewers how much progress has been made since the Victorian era.
  62. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.
  63. Life of an Actress: The Musical
    A timid and slapdash musical.
  64. Submergence
    Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.
  65. The Brass Teapot
    Wearing out its welcome long before its moralizing finale, the film...does manage to mine contemporary fears about the increasing worthlessness of a college degree.
  66. The Samaritan
    Weaver's story slowly begins to buckle under the weight of its own self-seriousness and familiarity, concluding with a showdown and resolution marked by one implausible and unsatisfying been-here-done-that twist after another.
  67. Kikujirô no natsu
    An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.
  68. Gangster Squad
    The proximity of horrible headlines scarcely matters - released on any day of any calendar year, Gangster Squad would be a crime against cinematic sensibility.
  69. 1st Night
    The depressingly predictable script—and tendency of everyone involved to jump to ridiculous conclusions—suggests a combination of Noises Off at best, and at worst, Three's Company.
  70. Secret Window
    "The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity.
  71. Aloha
    Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire.
  72. Deliver Us From Evil
    Despite the screaming gore, the movie is so rote that it can’t even rouse us for the de rigueur exorcism.
  73. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    Seriously, if this is the best promotion of itself that the free market can manage, it really would benefit from the help of a Ministry of Culture or something.
  74. Penguins of Madagascar
    Plays like a sampler of Dreamworks Animation's worst creative impulses: sugar-rush pacing, pandering meta-gags, and a slick, flavorless animation style.
  75. BearCity
    Only an old pro like John Waters could pull off an awkward bathtub threesome that ends in a golden shower and a head injury.
  76. Dot the I
    The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations.
  77. 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?
  78. Brooklyn Rules
    As a longtime writer on "The Sopranos," Terence Winter has steered clear of most of the hoary organized-crime clichés. Instead, he's poured them all into director Michael Corrente's anemic urban drama.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    City with No Mercy
    Flash Point treats its audience like dogs, making us suffer through routine, almost inscrutable plot points and inconsequential characterizations to get to these episodes, and as such reveals itself as nothing more than a dumb action picture with delusions of Johnnie To–dom.
  80. The Day Silence Died
    Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.
  81. Langrishe Go Down
    Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.
  82. The Baytown Outlaws
    A stew of cartoon stereotypes, violence, and "Freebird" cast in a skuzzy "Sons of Anarchy" mold.
    • 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!
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog.
  85. State Property 2
    When this flick is honest about its pimping, it has that Rat Pack charm. But attempts at real ruggish posturing--like that de rigueur sideways-gatted, full-body-exposure firing stance--are just plain laughable.
  86. The Beach
    Barely a movie.
  87. The Mummy
    Crudely remaking the 1932 Universal original.
  88. Antwone Fisher
    Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zus & zo
    As a study in sororal emasculation, Zus & Zo ("This and That") is neither funny nor particularly punch-drunk.
    • 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.
  91. The Second Meeting
    The meeting itself is genial but sparkless, with an air of artifice.
  92. Memoirs of a Geisha
    Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.
  93. Iceman
    The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.
  94. Pawn Shop Chronicles
    Director Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, Crossing Over) makes plain his cartoon-comedy intentions early and often via comic-book-panel-style title cards. The presiding atmosphere of over-the-top zaniness, however, is of a broad, banal sort involving little people, rampant nudity, and quasi-religious nonsense.
  95. The Sisters
    A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Man on a Ledge
    Worthington wouldn't know how to behave if the film were a comedy; and poor Banks, after a promising, "Young Adult"–style introduction, isn't allowed to goose the script or push beyond the glass ceiling of her character.
  97. A Green Story
    Vlahakis's tale should be compelling, but a weak script and mostly dull performances (one exception: Billy Zane . . . I know!) make A Green Story more monotonous than mythic.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Crossroads
    You spend a lot of time wondering, "Better or worse than Glitter?" You think if the projectionist cranked the volume a little you could actually sort of get into this.
  99. Dogma
    A tediously childish exhibition.
  100. Maid in Manhattan
    Really, any wit at all would have helped balance the playful but crass butt-seeking money shots.
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