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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    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Time Being
    The characters are as leached of tone as the film's chiaroscuro sets and grisaille paintings, although Langella is certainly game.
  2. Tasting Menu
    A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.
  3. Burning Blue
    Honorable in intent but risible in execution.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Red Riding Hood
    RRH veers between monotonous, soapy seriousness and camp.
  5. Rock the Kasbah
    The film often plays like everyone making it agreed that some on-set idea was so funny it had to be included, whether or not it suited the story.
  6. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Hector is trying to say something true about a generation of quietly dissatisfied demi-adults who are terrified to take emotional risks. At least it left its comfort zone and tried.
  7. Shirin in Love
    There's very little to distinguish this from every other characterless rom-com with a demographically marketable hook.
  8. Hating Breitbart
    A shapeless, uncritical documentary.
  9. Blue Moon
    A real midlife crisis might be more enjoyable.
  10. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.
  11. The Aryan Couple
    Feel-good historical fiction, The Aryan Couple insultingly seeks to soothe and comfort against the reality of atrocity.
  12. Literally, Right Before Aaron
    The film ends with a riff on the final moments of The Graduate, a frustrating suggestion of a much better work.
  13. Wildflowers
    Wildflowers is the only brand of requiem the '60s get anymore -- worshipful and ass-backward.
  14. I Am Sam
    Actual concussive cranial abuse would be preferable to Jessie Nelson's I Am Sam.
  15. 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."
    • 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.
  17. Stigmata
    Despite exposition delivered so redundantly and witlessly you think you're in a Kaplan class, Stigmata manages to be incoherent.
  18. 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.
  19. The Colony
    The Colony has modest rewards: It's decently acted, delivers some well-executed jolts, doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, and is mercifully free of ironic distance.
  20. The Other Sister
    Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.
  21. Bunraku
    Insular and indulgent as it is, though, the movie is never less than a visual treat.
  22. The Unspoken
    This film is in dire need of some atmosphere and a rewrite to make the twists work.
  23. A Good Day to Die Hard
    The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together.
  24. Hick
    Too odd to be funny, too cold-hearted to be tragic, Hick is an infuriating muddle.
  25. Ghost Ship
    Despite a couple of inventive CGI effects (one involving mass evisceration), the results are more predictable and less frightening than a Con Ed bill in mid August.
  26. Love and Honor
    Between the cast's modern hairstyles and attitude, and the paint-by-numbers set design and period costumes...the action comes across as a prolonged, dreary game of dress-up. That director Danny Mooney shoots his material like a TV show doesn't help.
  27. Love Sick Love
    Attempts to transform meet-cute romance into an absurdist fatal-attraction thriller, but ends up neither fish nor fowl.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Nobel Son
    Director and co-writer Randall Miller is so ill at ease with the basic building blocks of the genre that Nobel Son quickly announces itself as one of those misbegotten clunkers where almost every creative decision isn't just wrong but tone-deaf.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inside Out
    This WWE-produced thriller is the best kind of bait-and-switch, auguring cranium-crushing action but instead delivering a meandering, eccentric, downright adorable existential crime yarn.
  30. 47 Ronin
    This Hungarian-shot bore is so indistinct it reeks of no place more than Hollywood, where the fascinating specifics of history and legend are ground into universal mush.
  31. Lifelines
    The film's befuddling direction and tone, queasy HD interiors, and tin-eared, often preposterous, screenplay prove disastrous.
  32. If I Were You
    If I Were You is a screwball comedy for Canadians—not LOL funny, but as crazy as you might expect Toronto to get.
  33. London Has Fallen
    The action never stops once the first car bomb is triggered, but the second half of London Has Fallen takes place mostly in the dark, where nobody can see the budget.
  34. The Big Shot-Caller
    An overaffected, preachy drama.
  35. Passion of Mind
    An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Third World Cop
    Cop is an energetic portrayal of mean-street ghetto life.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Adored
    The film's witlessness keeps any satirical potential submerged well below soap opera levels. Filiberti's self-casting exacerbates this already shoddy melodrama: Frequent come-hither stares beaming from his patently sub-marquee mug provide one too many non-ironic "Zoolander" moments.
  38. Just Married
    Unlike Reese Wither-your-spoon, stagy Murphy actually does deserve her own "Philadelphia Story," or "Singin' in the Rain." She's obviously a camp genius (see "Clueless," not "8 Mile"), but this dopey script, topped with too-pretty Kutcher's rote 70's Show blowups, ain't it.
  39. Some Kind of Hate
    Like so much teen-targeting modern horror, it opts for dull angsty brooding over the very sort of grim-and-gruesome sleaziness that might have made its premise interesting.
  40. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Unexciting, incoherent, lamely acted, and carelessly written.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eating Out
    The best straight-plays-gay, straight-goes-gay flick since "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
  42. 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.
  43. Kalamity
    Though Hausler's sincerity is palpable, his efforts at world-weary ennui seem premature, and his wisdom about what motivates random violence in the youth of today proves too callow for a satisfying climax.
  44. Immigration Tango
    Less forgivable is the fact that this is a film in which characters are flung out of character solely for cheap laughs and rarely actually listen or talk to one another.
  45. Maladies
    The social construction of illness is certainly a worthy topic, but Carter situates his characters far from any semblance of a plot and even further from his heart.
  46. The Divide
    Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.
  47. The Big Wedding
    Many Hollywood films are founded on privilege, but few are as open and nasty about their racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
  48. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    See You in Valhalla
    See You in Valhalla struggles to assemble a cohesive conflict for its ensemble cast to overcome.
  50. Happily N'Ever After
    Director Paul J. Bolger and screenwriter Rob Moreland have drained the affectionate wit out of the Shrek franchise's satire, giving us instead a barely sketched out story line and quantities of unimaginative CGI.
  51. Field of Lost Shoes
    The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.
  52. Eternity: The Movie
    The jokes are slow and obvious, and the editor lingers over every one like a sleepy drunk over a basket of tater tots, stoically holding the shot long after any reasonable person would have concluded that a punchline had occurred.
  53. Supremacy
    [A] dour, dreary drama.
  54. Lost in Florence
    While writer-director Evan Oppenheimer's tale of love, sport and Italian culture captures the landscape with a pleasant sheen and certainly makes Florence look like a lovely vacation destination, its narrative contains little emotional pull and too few surprises.
  55. Chronically Metropolitan
    Director Xavier Manrique’s film fails to drum up more than clichés about rich-people problems.
  56. The Bag Man
    The trouble is that Grovic's attempts to generate suspense by keeping character identities and motivations unknown leaves the proceedings feeling vague and slapdash.
  57. White Hotel
    Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.
  58. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    With neither the moral bite of satire nor a voluptuary surrender that really basks in shallowness, this is a vague, unsatisfying work.
  59. Hangar 10
    Found-footage horror flicks laboriously source the provenance of every shot, letting us know which camera each image comes from, but they demand that we never wonder who has edited those images together — and to what purpose.
  60. Deck the Halls
    Though DeVito and Chenoweth bring a rough plebeian charm to the proceedings, it's nothing short of tragic to see the great Ferris Bueller relegated to grimacing straight man.
  61. Gentlemen Broncos
    Hess deserves credit, I suppose, for so effectively channeling his inner seven-year-old. Personally, I preferred spending two hours in the company of Spike Jonze's.
  62. Rage
    You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you may not, as Rage offers exactly what you think a Nic Cage movie called Rage would, except maybe for continually inspired lunacy.
  63. Survivor
    The overarching sense is of a thriller awkwardly stitched together in the editing room, and still failing to fix its many flaws.
  64. McCanick
    [A] numbingly inert series of dirty-cop clichés that abruptly builds to an ephemerally poignant climax.
  65. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    Director John Irvin, whose hapless 40-plus-year résumé runs from early Schwarzenegger to late Harold Pinter, never gets in the way, but the resulting sangria cocktail is mild, unchallenging, and kinda dull.
  66. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    The funniest Madea film in a fair stretch... It's also, of course, not good by any definition.
  67. Pixels
    Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special.
  68. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
    Writers are only interesting for what they've written, and for that you'll have to go read.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Head Over Heels
    Head Over Heels is dopey but nontoxic. If you are 17, there are worse date movies.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pokémon Heroes
    The pied piper of shameless kiddie-marketing strikes for the fifth time in as many years.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Rockets Redglare!
    A bloated, intermittently coherent mess.
  72. Stranded
    Trite dialogue, stock characters, and bad-to-middling special effects make Stranded more tedious than scary or nerve-wracking.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Peep World
    Thick with stale "We're Jewish!" and inconvenient-boner jokes, the film's a post-"Office," shaky-cam sitcom pilot stretched to feature length.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Perfect Man
    The result is like a Nike commercial without a shot of the sneakers.
  75. Last Knights
    While Kiriya can shoot a sword fight, his preferred pace is glacial. He wants to make sure the audience feels every plot point.
  76. Sweet November
    If the movie works on its own insipid level, it's because of high-gear star power -- 50 times the captivator Dennis ever was, Theron is terrific at creating adorable intimacy with little help from the script or director and exudes more guileless élan than any of the film's many puppies.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Revoloution
    Proving the old adage about the road to hell, Revoloution at least has its heart in the right place.
  78. Delgo
    You'll just wonder why this isn't a video game you can actually play.
  79. Garfield
    No one can accuse Garfield: The Movie of infidelity to its source: It faithfully conveys the banality of Jim Davis's cartoon.
  80. 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.
  81. Hello Herman
    The dialogue is all surface: Emotions are laid out on the autopsy table for the audience to dissect and analyze, but rarely feel.
  82. Mortdecai
    The hard part will be convincing audiences to shake off their Depp fatigue and embrace a film that's daffy, dated, and precisely as intended.
  83. Nina
    The filmmakers have denied us their subject's voice and then sunk their lead by adding distancing layers between the audience and her chief instrument, her face. Even the script exhibits little confidence in this Nina's ability to communicate to us what matters.
  84. 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.
  85. I Spit on Your Grave
    When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.
  86. Are We There Yet?
    Levant and his screenwriting posse attempt to wring maximum hilarity from this setup, but it's just too schizoid.
  87. Sex and the City 2
    Like its predecessor, SATC2--with a script that's basically a sack full of not very funny gag-lines wrapped in strung-together episodic mini-scenes--is not suited to be a movie.
    • 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.
  89. The Majestic
    A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guy Thing
    In her role as Becky the half-assed tiki girl, Stiles's left-footedness can finally be named, only one of the many pleasures tugging this girl-snatches-guy-from-altar comedy a notch above standard.
  91. Catwoman
    Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.
  92. Cherkess
    In addition to the droll baby talk, any emotional resonance is undercut by the lead actress's rather unfortunate Snooki-esque hair and makeup.
  93. Wild Hogs
    This shallow comedy imagines itself as an amalgam of "St. Elmo's Fire," "The Wild Bunch," and "Deliverance."
  94. Transformers: The Last Knight
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    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Whatever her limitations, Argento the actor makes certain that Argento the director doesn't lack for "action"--and that the audience doesn't lack for pain.
  96. The Spy Next Door
    Immediately forgettable family entertainment, suitable for release only in the dung-heap month of January.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Now & Forever
    At least the title's accurate: This is a viewing experience that feels like it will never end.
  98. Coyote Ugly
    I'd rather eat ball bearings.
  99. Open My Heart
    Those looking for a smarter précis on sex and shame with one-thirtieth the running time are encouraged to seek out the other Madonna's "Open Your Heart" video on VH1.
  100. The Women
    Isn't so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled.
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