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. 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.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    When a Stranger Calls
    This version is a thin, protracted study in shifting Hollywood strategies. The original, while dramatically spotty, was an almost experimental concoction of horror and thriller. The 2006 model, in contrast, is straight-up formula.
  3. Playing for Keeps
    Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fog
    Making concessions at every turn to the youth-horror market, the film slashes the ages of its protagonists by some 15 years, and its IQ follows suit.
  5. Let's Go to Prison
    Much funnier and weirder than you think.
  6. Taxi
    Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin.
  7. The Musketeer
    East/West fusion aside, The Musketeer is a stale Euro-pudding.
  8. Viktor
    Aside from some inspired uses of chiaroscuro lighting, the movie around Depardieu is mostly derivative.
  9. 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.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simply Irresistible
    Scores points for oddball charm.
  11. View from the Top
    The film, meanwhile, goes for that choppy, air-pocket sensation, veteran helmer Bruno Barreto directing like he's never made a movie before, and never wants to again.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Hospital
    Sluggish, tonally uneven -- In fact, it doesn't even rise to the level of 1991's Soapdish, with the feverishly mugging Elisabeth Shue sending up TV's cesspool of sentimentality.
  13. 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.
  14. The Anomaly
    The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Miss Wonton
    As genre comeuppance, this might have been nasty fun, but the movie barely makes sense, with its unbelievable naïveté and arbitrary flashbacks.
  16. Little Fockers
    Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.
  17. I.T.
    Whatever cautionary point I.T. may be trying to make about privacy gets lost in the formulaic ugliness, and not even the constant stream of facepalm moments make it entertaining or watchable.
  18. How to Rob a Bank
    So objectively awful it ceases even to be a reflection of writer- director Andrews Jenkins's non-talent, How to Rob a Bank calls into question the distribution filtration process that should protect delicate consumer eyes from things like this.
  19. Speciesism: The Movie
    Ultimately, Devries seems to want to impress viewers with his anger.
  20. Fantastic Four
    The model here isn't adventure pulp. It's dystopian Y.A., junked up with scenes of medical horror too scary for kids and too unpleasant to be enjoyed by anyone.
  21. Brooklyn Babylon
    Levin's Brooklyn Babylon, set during a hot summer in Crown Heights, is an ethnic-strife tract as thuddingly didactic as his previous "Whiteboys."
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Twisted
    No mystery here: Twisted is D.O.A.
  23. The Life: What's Your Pleasure?
    The subjects can be amusing, chilling, or tragic -- but in the end, they offer few surprises.
  24. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The rotting corpses, projectile insect vomit, and creepy geezers in black arrive pretty much on cue, as does the great Cicely Tyson as the obligatory old blind woman who "sees" more than most people with two good eyes. It's her upper bridge, though, that's truly the scariest thing in the whole movie.
  25. Because I Said So
    Like nearly all of Lehmann's post- "Heathers" work, it's lazy and disinterested--a hack-for-hire job any number of film-school grads could have put through its uninspired paces.
  26. Everybody Wants to Be Italian
    Less a movie than a charm offensive beamed at those who thought "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a masterpiece.
  27. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Temptation’s refusal to find nuance in its didactic worldview ensures that the film will ultimately only succeed for audiences already in agreement with it.
  28. Trixie
    As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.
  29. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    This movie's got everything except gravity or a sense of emotional coherence.
  30. Rio, I Love You
    Even more than in Paris, Je T'Aime and New York, I Love You, this latest omnibus in producer Emmanuel Benbihy's "Cities of Love" franchise might leave viewers wondering whether these needed to be set in Rio de Janeiro at all.
  31. The Reunion
    The resultant smorgasbord is a misshapen mess, short on humor, tension, or chemistry among its bickering protagonists.
  32. Basic Instinct 2
    Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist).
  33. Patch Adams
    The year's most repugnant movie.
  34. The Squeeze
    Like many, many films starring Christopher McDonald, the best thing about The Squeeze is Christopher McDonald.
  35. Tideland
    Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Memory
    While the mystery doesn't engage, Davlin keeps you off guard with his film's weird rhythms, bouncing from family drama to romance to macabre mood piece without much warning. How he and Zane manage to make such dreck almost tolerable is the real mystery here.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fish Without a Bicycle
    Strong performances are marred by a script whose dialogue ranges from cheesy to unspeakably bad.
  38. Waiting for Forever
    Strangely unaware of its overt creepiness.
  39. The Best and the Brightest
    Drearily shot with cheesy skyline pans, oppressively scored with Hallmark cutesiness, and oddly filled with filthy one-liners.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Supercross
    Not since Burt Reynolds's "Stroker Ace" has a racing movie provided so many laughs, intentional or otherwise.
  41. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Visually incompetent to a painful extreme and almost never funny, but, worst of all, it doesn't have the courage of Max's unadulterated convictions. If you're going to offend the easily offended, at least go big.
  42. 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.
  43. Friended to Death
    You can sense the director, Sarah Smick, gearing up to make a point. It proves rather obvious: Real connections are meaningful and too much Facebook is bad. But isn't the real problem more insidious?
  44. Against the Night
    Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.
  45. I Melt with You
    Stylish cinematography and an awesome punk-and-new-wave soundtrack make the early, music-video-like montages of debauchery at least trashy entertainment, but the film's second half couldn't be more contemptible.
  46. 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.
  47. Alien Outpost
    The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.
  48. Stratton
    The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.
  49. Filth and Wisdom
    There's an undeniably funky charm and abiding can-do spirit to this loose-knit portrait of three London flatmates trying to make their way in the world.
  50. The Other Side of the Ice
    Too much of the movie is just people being crabby (or, later, dumb!) in fascinating places, which is less enthralling than the places themselves.
  51. No One Lives
    Director Ryûhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) is too talented for material this retro-junky, but he and screenwriter David Cohen keep the action coming hard and fast.
  52. Shadow Hours
    Isaac Eaton wrote and directed; he evidences little talent in either department.
  53. Nola
    Screwball it isn't, but it has screwy down pat.
  54. Taken 3
    Taken 3 isn't brilliant, but it's a hell of a lot of dumb, head-smacking fun.
  55. 2016: Obama's America
    The only true surprise here is D'Souza's haplessness in constructing both film and argument.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Salon
    Where's Al Sharpton's decency parade when you need it?
  57. Innocence
    Hilary Brougher's YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn's novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody spook-out images, and a movie-wrecking hypoglycemic listlessness.
  58. Pavilion of Women
    Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.
  59. Hatchet III
    There's no shortage of visceral, gross-out thrills.
  60. The Diabolical
    It might be asking too much for The Diabolical to fully live up to its cheesy-ominous title, but the sheer unadulterated inanity of these proceedings suggests that it'll soon be teleported to the far corners of the B-movie streaming-video abyss.
  61. 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.
  62. September Dawn
    Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.
  63. The Million Dollar Hotel
    Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The One
    In The One the maze of death leads only to exhaustion -- a solipsistic extension of Bruce Lee pacing the room of mirrors at the end of "Enter the Dragon."
  65. Bad Johnson
    Bad Johnson is probably the most thoughtful movie possible about a penis that takes human form.
  66. Georgia Rule
    There's almost no rescuing this wobbly movie from its showdowns and insights. Except, that is, when Lohan's around.
  67. Hell Ride
    Bishop's jumbled, wholly unexciting throwback has very little on its mind beyond mythologizing its maker as a bad-ass biker named Pistolero.
  68. License to Wed
    Dreadful excuse for an unromantic comedy.
  69. 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.
  70. American Outlaws
    Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.
  71. Drowning Mona
    Bette Midler and Danny De Vito mug more shamelessly than usual.
  72. The Big Bang
    Though the setup is pure Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, specifically), the film's bleary, neon glamour and penchant for the bizarre suggests an attempted-and wayward-homage to David Lynch.
  73. The Identical
    A cardboard cutout of a movie.
  74. Extraction
    Extraction constantly tries to score a flashy TKO — but never lands a decent body blow.
  75. Honeyglue
    [An] unintentionally hilarious tragic romance.
  76. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return fails to make us care about the characters or their journeys, and the animation is shoddy and occasionally creepy.
  77. Moms' Night Out
    Outrageously enough, the moral of Moms' Night Out seems to be that moms should never get a night out.
  78. The Next Best Thing
    A vanity project -- hell-bent on playing barely human characters as themselves, they've created something quitebewilderingly ugly in the process.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Cinderella Story
    The film lacks the guiltily pleasurable panache (and punch) of other recent chickadee flicks posited as protofeminist fairy tales.
  80. 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.
  81. When in Rome
    Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.
  82. The Letters
    Riead's reverential portrait belies Teresa's thorny complexities and turns her into a single-minded proponent of work hard, pray hard.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Memorial Day
    Placing the onus of the war on the troops, Fox follows "Redacted's" vile moral playbook, only without Brian De Palma's self-reflexive, formalist gestures.
  84. R.I.P.D.
    Unfortunately, the interesting drabness of the afterlife’s police department is paired with the colorless paucity of the film’s heavies...The deados, unmemorable CG brutes, spout generic bad-guy dialogue undistinguished by humor or characterization.
  85. 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.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Modigliani
    Sadly, instead of situating the l'amour fou in the artistic ferment of the period (1917-1920), Davis twists the period to fit the story.
  87. The Man on Her Mind
    The Man on Her Mind has a terminal case of the cutes.
  88. Dragonfly
    The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.
  89. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    An honorable but dull attempt to translate a neglected literary source to the screen.
    • 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.
  91. The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman
    The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.
  92. Americons
    Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.
  93. After
    The final revelation of the big secret that haunts the family -- hinted at throughout the movie -- is more than a little maudlin, and the dedication feels like nothing so much as ass covering. Until then, After is a frequently absorbing miserablist family drama shot in appropriately chilly winter tones.
  94. Welcome to the Jungle
    Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Rob Meltzer from a script by Jeff Kauffmann, is satanically bad.
  95. Smiley
    Tell a die-hard horror-movie fan that the latest scary movie is the worst thing ever, and that fan will nod respectfully but still make plans to go see it. Horror fans must always see for themselves. All of which makes it a bit pointless to declare Smiley the year's dullest scare flick (thus far).
  96. Wrong Cops
    Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.
  97. Monday at 11:01 A.M.
    Instead of beckoning viewers to follow along, Agron's script drags us toward its conspicuous landmarks.
  98. Other People's Children
    Nothing ever feels like it's at stake — the drama here is whisper-thin.
  99. Revolver
    It's no return to rock, this, but rather Ritchie's soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as Tati's Mr. Hulot.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Abduction
    A blockhead espionage thriller from director-for-hire John Singleton.
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