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. Momentum
    Longtime camera operator Stephen S. Campanelli's directorial debut is frustratingly by-the-book, with all the trappings of a movie marketed to rowdy fifteen-year-old boys.
  2. 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.
  3. Narcopolis
    There's simply too much going on to establish characters.
  4. Dixieland
    Writer-director Hank Bedford delivers some tactile, human details.... But the film is slow and often agonizingly predictable.
  5. 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.
  6. Lost in the Sun
    While his images have been composed with care, Nelson's screenplay is a far less impressive invention.
  7. The Funhouse Massacre
    Amateurish direction and generic characterization make a light premise — serial killers slaughter a rural carnival's haunted-house patrons while pretending to be carnies — feel like a slog.
  8. The Wannabe
    Director Nick Sandow relies on a drab color palette that suits the generally humorless script.
  9. Hot Sugar's Cold World
    Over the course of the film, Koenig, a sallow, heavy-lidded youth who looks like he could be aged anywhere between 19 and 36, is revealed to be both an unspiring artist and an odious protagonist.
  10. Hyena Road
    This anti-war movie is more passionate about CB radio communication than the horrors of bloodshed.
  11. American Hero
    The filmmakers blend tones like a child mixing fountain drinks into one unidentifiable flavor.
  12. Funny Bunny
    Funny Bunny may be effectively alienating, but never in a commendable way.
  13. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The film absolutely delivers on the scenery-chewing front. And yet the movie is still hollow and joyless.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Other People's Children
    Nothing ever feels like it's at stake — the drama here is whisper-thin.
  17. The Abandoned
    Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.
  18. Forsaken
    Amid Kiefer's narrow-eyed glowering, Donald's exhausted-sage routine, and Moore's approximation of rural homeliness, only Wincott seems to fit in, exuding a poised, laconic cold-bloodedness that stands in stark contrast to the film's inert phoniness.
  19. JeruZalem
    Not much substance is buried beneath the irritating style.
  20. 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.
  21. Creative Control
    This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.
  22. Convergence
    Convergence ends up squandering too much of its setup time and rushing to a largely unsatisfying conclusion instead of actually coming together in a meaningful way.
  23. Monday at 11:01 A.M.
    Instead of beckoning viewers to follow along, Agron's script drags us toward its conspicuous landmarks.
  24. Mother's Day
    By far the highest concentration of actual humor comes during the blooper reel over the end credits; free of the script’s saccharine constraints, the performers immediately demonstrate their chops.
  25. Backtrack
    Between the generic shadowy cinematography and a gothic score that manages to telegraph even the film's jump-scares, there's no tangible tension by which to build an effective climax.
  26. 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.
  27. The Preppie Connection
    Toby's eventual comeuppance feels as preordained and empty as the preppie/townie dichotomy regurgitated here from so many outdated teen-media artifacts.
  28. A Strange Course of Events
    Its emotions prove curiously inconsistent, hinting at darkness but never committing fully.
  29. The Brainwashing of My Dad
    The film so diligently eschews any tempered analysis that it eventually comes across as akin to the very thing it's decrying.
  30. Valley of Love
    Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.
  31. 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.
  32. The Dog Wedding
    The film never reconciles the incongruities of its constituent parts, which hang together like toothpaste and orange juice
  33. 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.
  34. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.
  35. The Girl in the Photographs
    [A] grim, film-school-sloppy horror-thriller.
  36. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
    Vaxxed is, in the words of Sheriff Bart, the last act of a desperate man. It’s Andrew Wakefield’s Hail Mary, thrown — I hope — as his time in the public arena finally runs out.
  37. Temps
    The film's tone is all over the map, with weird bursts of casual racism toward its ethnic supporting cast and unnecessarily explicit sex scenes that approach a The Room level of ickiness.
  38. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.
  39. 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.
  40. Cell
    King's decision to co-write the script and turn it into a CliffsNotes version of The Stand only makes things worse.
  41. Welcome to Happiness
    As we plod along, attempting to figure out how the sprawling ensemble players all fit together, the mystery and symbolism of what's truly behind the door grows less profound and more irritating.
  42. 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.
  43. Ghost Team
    The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.
  44. Spaceman
    Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.
  45. 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.
  46. Three
    70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.
  47. Can We Take a Joke?
    Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.
  48. Let's Be Evil
    Co-writer/director Martin Owen downplays his conceit's most intriguing aspects — where are these kids' parents? — and instead focuses on monotonous chase scenes.
  49. 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.
  50. Office Christmas Party
    As dull and impersonal as a sheaf of open-enrollment insurance forms, Office Christmas Party brings together — and underutilizes — several funny performers from TV shows (Silicon Valley, Veep, SNL) that pinpoint what this dim comedy does not: the specifics of workplace environments and their particular pathologies and joys.
  51. The Brooklyn Banker
    Unfortunately, this low-budget production comes up short in many places: limited performances, barely developed characters, a muddled script. The movie also has a sluggish, lumbering pace, effectively offsetting the paranoid, anxious vibe of Garity's performance.
  52. The Good Neighbor
    A film that — from its basic set-up to its dearth of tension — plays like the tedious inverse of Don't Breathe.
    • 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.
  54. 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.
  55. Summer of 8
    Summer of 8 may be as sincere as a Hughes movie, but it's as shallow as a kiddy pool.
  56. 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.
  57. Flock of Dudes
    Lifeless bromantic comedy Flock of Dudes has all the celebrity cameos and latent sexism of Judd Apatow's adult coming-of-age stories but none of the lowbrow wit and sensitivity.
  58. Life on the Line
    The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.
  59. Houston, We Have a Problem!
    The underlying point of this elaborate stunt is that modern audiences are all too willing to believe (and be manipulated by) anything sold in a familiar nonfiction package. No matter how valid that theory might be, there are surely more compelling ways to offer it than via a one-note, 88-minute-long joke.
  60. A Billion Lives
    Demonstrating an egregious contempt for science, Biebert and his subjects attack the call for research into the effects of electronic cigarettes as nothing more than shilling for tax collectors and Big Pharma.
  61. 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.
  62. Behind 'The Cove'
    The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
  65. Go North
    Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. Eloise
    Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.
  71. Don't Hang Up
    Basically, Don't Hang Up is a hire-me sign masquerading as a slasher film.
  72. 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.
  73. The Dark Below
    The problem — aside from the movie being simple and gimmicky — is in the execution — Schulze's, not the villain's.
  74. 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.
  75. Take Me
    While the film, to its credit, doesn't become a trite morality play, the ending is thin and contrived nonetheless.
  76. Porto
    All of this is attractive, yet I felt nothing for these people, their pain, or their possible lost future.
  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. 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.
  79. Camera Obscura
    Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.
  80. 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.
  81. 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.
  82. 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.
  83. 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.
  84. 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.
  85. 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.
  86. 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.
  87. 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.
  88. Bushwick
    Bushwick is a hollow, ultimately unsatisfying exercise in organized chaos.
  89. 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.
  90. Stratton
    The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.
  91. Chronically Metropolitan
    Director Xavier Manrique’s film fails to drum up more than clichés about rich-people problems.
  92. Submergence
    Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.
  93. 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.
  94. 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.
  95. November Criminals
    What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.
  96. 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.
  97. Cleopatra
    It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]
    • Village Voice
  98. 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.
  99. 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.
  100. Hollow in the Land
    The stench of needlessly convoluted derivativeness lingers throughout this flick.
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