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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    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Abduction
    A blockhead espionage thriller from director-for-hire John Singleton.
  2. The Family Jams
    Only a true fanatical follower of the "freak folk" musical scene with a high tolerance for artless verité camerawork will find much merit in Kevin Barker's extended home video.
  3. Scream 4
    The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Virginia
    A bonkers tragicomedy that blandly mocks the red-state family-values charade.
  5. The Five Senses
    Beautifully shot and littered with disquieting character business, the film is hog-tied by its own bad Big Idea.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Doing Time for Patsy Cline
    Writer-director Chris Kennedy delights in torturing his poor protagonist--what are the odds that a massive Aussie line dancers' convention would take place in the abandoned train yard right across the street from his jail?--but enduring this oddly humorless "comedy" is even harder on the audience.
  7. Beloved
    A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.
  8. XX/XY
    A movie that's two-thirds flashback (and could have been called "Ex, Ex, Ex, Why?").
  9. The Love Guru
    Now and again some pungent writing leaks through to poke fun at the excruciating banality of guru wisdom. But mostly it’s dreary dick jokes and elephant poop, slack directing by Marco Schnabel, and, of all fatal errors, Mike Myers, shooting for cuddly.
  10. Lantana
    The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.
  11. 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.
  12. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Cube is still adorable, but the potentially poppin' battle between the shop and big-box competitor Nappy Cuts gets obscured by sloppy chronology and flat, cartoonish politicos.
  13. Generation Um...
    Reeves is able to make such potentially silly material as this strangely compelling, but his hard work is ultimately a drop in an otherwise empty bucket.
  14. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The incessant tumult drowns out any real message for the kids - or pleasure for their parents. It's a film so obnoxiously frantic that its most restrained element is a banjo-strumming elementary school teacher played by none other than '90s tween-mugging icon Jaleel "Urkel" White.
  15. Rock of Ages
    A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.
  16. Paris 36
    Like Amélie's scrubbed-up "City of Lights," Paris 36 is an antiseptic arthouse trifle, so eager to soothe that it only numbs.
  17. The Conspirator
    The film is a burdensome two hours.
  18. Simpatico
    A decked-out mediocrity with a high-octane cast.
  19. One Last Kiss
    The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.
  20. All Is Bright
    Maudlin and mirthless, it's a film misbegotten enough to almost make one hate Christmas.
  21. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only the supporting actors have any bite.
  22. Last Love
    Scene after scene is defined by blunt exposition and gooey maxims, not to mention cornball visual metaphors.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Scream of Fear
    No thrill, no suspense, no direction, bad in every way. [31 Aug 1961, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  24. 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.
  25. Around the Bend
    Veers deep into male-weepie territory.
  26. Man of Tai Chi
    The film is stale Chinese popcorn from the get-go, with only Chen's wiry guilelessness and wicked athletic skills to keep it remotely edible.
  27. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.
  28. Homecoming
    Glued together with shards from much better movies, the humorless plot offers no mystery about who's doing what to whom, or why.
  29. 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.
  30. The Seventh Dwarf
    The original Brothers Grimm stories were hardly feminist, but The Seventh Dwarf's female characters are deplorably retrograde on both the script and design levels; they have little to do except be rescued, and Snow White is a vain, buxom sexpot whom the dwarfs leer at.
  31. Sundowning
    Role reversals, many mirrors, and a lesbian brushstroke indicate someone involved might have recently taken film courses on female melodrama; other thematic red herrings flip-flop, too irritatingly clichéd to recount.
  32. Kiss of the Damned
    Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    15: The Movie
    The collision of neorealist casting with in-your-face visual pyrotechnics is jarring to say the least, and 15 quickly wears down the viewer with its barrage of strobe effects and attention-deficit editing.
  34. The Odd Way Home
    Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.
  35. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    This sequel comes off as both sillier and crueler than the original, mixing sight gags and labored puns with a vicious assault on a sex-ed teacher, and, well, "duck rape."
  36. For Colored Girls
    The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given.
  37. Free the Mind
    Ambo's argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude.
  38. Riding in Cars with Boys
    Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.
  39. Crossing Over
    And so it goes, with Kramer--who doesn't really seem to like people very much--failing to muster even the superficial empathy the makers of the similarly programmatic "The Visitor" and "Rendition" showed toward their own cardboard-cutout imperiled illegals.
  40. Duets
    A road movie, though there's a decided lack of forward motion.
  41. The Girl and Death
    It's time to return this old painting to the attic.
  42. Is That You?
    This is a maudlin, manipulative film, and while it's never aggressively annoying, that's only because it severely lacks energy. It registers like a pesky little sister who's doped out on Vicodin.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    It's a thriller, it's a strip-club soap opera, it's an inner-child reclamation inspirational - it's really unpleasant to look at.
  44. Beside Still Waters
    Lowell hews so close to the reunion-film formula he ends up stifling anything new that may otherwise have resulted.
  45. Angels Sing
    There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.
  46. Dark Matter
    First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there's not a single credible performance here, not excluding Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Returner
    A shamelessly recycled vision of decrepit high tech.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    Malone reveals himself to have a stunningly low opinion of his audience's powers of bullshit detection.
  49. Project X
    "There's a midget in the oven!" is about as inspired as the dialogue and set pieces get in this queasy-making entertainment.
  50. Lovely Molly
    It can't sustain interest in the endless unraveling of Molly's psyche, which, as handled by Sánchez, has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester.
  51. The Killing of John Lennon
    Director Andrew Piddington's fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "Murderous narcissists are people, too." (He's a victim of our celebrity-fixated culture? Oh, shut up.)
  52. Red Roses and Petrol
    Tamar Simon Hoffs's bland-as-boiled-cabbage adaptation of Joseph O'Connor's play finally hobbles into theaters.
  53. Pop Star on Ice
    Pop Star offers zero that enthusiasts didn't know already and nothing for the rest of us.
  54. Little Lili
    True to Chekhov's dictum, a gun does fire near the end -- by which point eye-rolling audience members may be up in arms too.
  55. Where the Money Is
    A caper film hardly worthy of his (Newman's) presence.
  56. Friends with Benefits
    What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Walking Tall
    The plot is so absurdly perfunctory that preview audiences snickered at its TV-drama slapdashness; the producers should have pushed the straight-camp potential much further and retitled this weak bruiser Sporting Wood.
  58. Electoral Dysfunction
    The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.
  59. Scream at the Devil
    Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Next Friday
    A calculated teen gross-out flick that owes more to "American Pie" than its own progenitor.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Slutty Summer
    First-timer Casper Andreas approaches his subject with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Tired jokes are repeated over and over.
  62. Martyrs
    The co-directing brothers Goetz prove adept at building escape-the-bad-guy action sequences, but they continually run up against the story's Marquis-de-Sade underpinnings.
  63. 1982
    Written and directed by Tommy Oliver, 1982 is a ham-fisted morality tale about love, marriage and the fallout of the ‘80s crack epidemic as though told by someone whose intel on all three came primarily from pulp sources.
  64. Virgin
    Kampmeier's muddled, miserable first feature about maculate conception will make you look back fondly on 1985, the year Godard's "Hail Mary" and Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God" came out.
  65. Traded
    The film likens prostitution to a continuation of the slavery that was eradicated two decades earlier by a certain Proclamation, but never bothers letting any of the working girls emancipate themselves.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    House of D
    Marred by a rambling voice-over at one end and a pat therapeutic resolution on the other, the film has a nice half-hour patch somewhere in the middle.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Who Copied
    In spite of some genuinely charming performances, The Man Who Copied is about as engaging as a paper jam.
  68. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    Coelho's writing may be "more [widely] translated than [Shakespeare's]," as the coda claims, but Paulo Coelho's Best Story never successfully pins down its subject's genius.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Irina Palm
    Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of U.K., Belgian, French, German, and Luxembourgian film financing represents a true coalition of the witless.
  70. Law Abiding Citizen
    If the filmmakers meant a word of it, they'd quit making films and do something more useful. "Saw" with a conscience is not what the world needs.
  71. Suspect Zero
    None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins.
  72. A Promise
    No bodices were harmed in veteran French filmmaker Patrice Leconte's chaste and bloodless English-language debut.
  73. The Maid's Room
    Too low-stakes for horror, too lamebrained for satire, and too incoherent to be didactic, The Maid's Room simply uses Drina and then throws her away.
  74. Aroused
    Aspires to be a consciousness-raising documentary but is only as deep as a tube of lipstick.
  75. Undrafted
    With characters who range from mildly aggravating to out-and-out intolerable, and revolving around a game whose outcome is of no meaningful consequence, this underdogs-make-good fairy tale is a dramatic and comic rainout.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cleaver's Destiny
    [An] underwhelming little film entirely ill-equipped to deal with its serious and important themes.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Queen of the Damned
    Aaliyah fans, as well as fans of charisma, sex, and violence, will be sorely disappointed.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Reset
    At least Bojack had the decency to bring this turgid, self-indulgent doodle in at a slim 79 minutes.
  79. Breathe In
    Drake Doremus's Breathe In is a star-crossed romance where your enjoyment level will depend on your tolerance for what feels an awful lot like potential statutory rape.
  80. Grown Ups
    While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.
  81. Some Body
    The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.
  82. Concussion
    Its characters are all too easily determined but never specific—or memorable.
  83. 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.
  84. 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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Honey
    If you doubt whether Honey can scrape together the dough, this is probably the movie for you.
  86. Saint John of Las Vegas
    Mostly, Saint John traps good comic performers--including Malco and Peter Dinklage as John's boss--in airless editing and an unproductive, unresolved, sludgy tone.
  87. Cursed
    The scariest thing in the movie is a cameo by Scott Baio.
  88. Argento's Dracula 3D
    Unfortunately, Argento never acknowledges he's in on the joke, nor is the film quite ridiculous enough for us to coast enjoyably on derision. When it comes to B-movies, sometimes anything less than way too much isn't nearly enough.
  89. 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.
  90. Baghdad Texas
    Hickey's overarching arguments about war, diplomacy, and American intelligence aren't just muddled, but altogether nonexistent, leaving his comedically challenged film Iraqi-desert-level barren.
  91. Vice
    The film unspools with a momentum that mitigates its artless brutality, kinda, but it's a high-pressure firehose of stupid.
  92. Off the Map
    Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Man Apart
    As limited as Diesel's movie persona may be, the actor has been notable for projecting a certain gentleness and warmth. That, along with logic and any sense of urgency, gets lost here amid the longueurs of a tired vengeance plot.
  94. The Longest Week
    Lacking any significant character arc or motivation, The Longest Week is little more than a series of insipid conversations between bored aristocrats who snark at each other in monotone.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Automatons
    Automatons is what happens when "Eraserhead" and "Tetsuo the Iron Man" bong themselves into oblivion and collaborate on a minimalist avant-garde sci-fi cheapie shot in a toolshed.
  96. Speed Racer
    Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.
  97. Highway
    The degree to which Highway candies up Veera's slumming toward freedom feels so fundamentally out of touch with the realities of poverty that it skirts into offensiveness.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (re-release)
    Slowly devolves to the inept "warm bodies shine together in the darkness."
  99. Malevolence
    Laughably unscary.
  100. High School
    John Stalberg Jr.'s dismal stoner comedy does little to inject any sense of joy or laughter into its depiction of teenage pot antics.
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