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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    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    La visa loca
    Billed as a "satirical comedy about the American dream," La Visa Loca doesn't have anything to say about that eternal subject and is excruciatingly unfunny.
  2. Reaching for the Moon
    Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.
  3. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Strange how dreary it all is, and how tired Fraser seems.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    W.E.
    Certainly, W.E. is the work of a woman who apparently hasn't spent time with normal human beings in a while. But Madonna's anachronistic use of music is the least of her movie's problems. It's basic storytelling that stymies her.
  5. Krystal
    What this tiresome, out-of-pocket-ass movie actually does is create a painfully kooky, mad world where the only good thing about it is that Rosario Dawson can still turn men into idiots with her presence.
  6. Afraid of Everything
    A stifling chamber piece laced with Repulsion-style foreboding and an undercurrent of kink.
  7. Cat Run
    Janet McTeer, at least, delights as MI6's cruelly capable answer to Mary Poppins. She's a whiz at testicular vivisection, yet she still cannot save this film.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fantastic Four
    The action sequences reek of drudgery rather than adventure, and with the exception of Chiklis's remarkably soulful performance beneath 60 pounds of orange Thing makeup, all of the characters are flatter than their two-dimensional counterparts.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Men, Women & Children
    In 2014, Men, Women & Children feels like a sermon. It's obvious and mundane, "Chopsticks" pounded on the piano.
  12. The Tall Man
    Once you get through the flaming, Bowser's Castle–like gauntlet of the rest of the story's implausibilities, you end up in a different movie than the one on the creepy poster.
  13. Snow Falling on Cedars
    Trying to act in this movie is like trying to stand upright in a blizzard.
  14. 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.
  15. From Justin to Kelly
    Bury this in the time capsule: a memento of the Clean South, 2003.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alex Cross
    There's not a moment in Alex Cross that doesn't function splendidly as comedy. Which means that for all his cool-cat preening and heroic soul-searching, Tyler Perry must have felt right at home.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Entertainer
    The boredom of British film realism is indescribable. I was yawning, and turning around, and fidgeting--what an experience! [08 Dec 1960, p.11]
    • Village Voice
  18. I Love Your Work
    Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity.
  19. Drift
    The crookedness of the narrative is compounded by the film's failure to display its characters' great pleasures (surfing and drugs) in visually expressive ways.
  20. I, Robot
    If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.
  21. Peter and Vandy
    Ritter and Weixler do share an easy-at-being-uneasy chemistry, mostly because his performance is downright distinguished compared to her blandness, but DiPietro's screenplay is emotionally myopic.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Merci Docteur Rey
    Litvack offers a cameo by Vanessa Redgrave as proof that there's a prestige picture within all this frivolous melodrama. Non, merci.
  23. Linsanity
    Linsanity doesn't—and shouldn't—hide its star's religious beliefs. But the doc should have the courage to explore them.
  24. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism.
  25. Rio 2
    Rio 2 wants to be a musical, but instead of timing songs to, say, the emotional peaks of the characters, director Carlos Saldanha opts for high-intensity intervals of singing every four minutes.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stealth
    Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.
  27. Left Behind
    Perhaps Cage flipped a coin before Armstrong called “Action!” and decided to play this role straight. Alas, he has robbed the irony-attuned audiences of their only reason to go.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Biker Boyz
    Too bad that when the filmmakers aren't busy accommodating cameo models and comedians, they seem to be dozing off at the handlebars. Luckily, we're watching from a different side of the highway.
  29. Clouds
    Has nice, pearly, black-and-white cinematography, but it also has the shocking temerity to run over 100 minutes. Sweet air is required.
  30. August
    August seems to be missing something essential--a prologue? Or maybe it's not what's missing that's the problem, but what's here.
  31. After Fall, Winter
    Schaeffer can't be trusted or believed as a broken man - he's got no humility.
  32. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    As if written by a robot whose frame of reference wasn't human reality but merely fairy-tale romantic comedies, Love, Wedding, Marriage strips genre tropes down to their scrawny, brittle bones.
  33. One Direction: This Is Us
    Even calling the film a documentary feels deluded.
  34. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    So pandering and pebble-brained you'd guess it had been test-screened on barnyard animals.
  35. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Tattoo
    This plodding serial-killer procedural grafts hand-me-down malevolence onto a standard rookie-veteran police yarn, the results of which yield nary a fright, let alone a goose pimple.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Story of the Eye
    This skin-deep flick is merely art-school sophomoric, unwittingly cornball, and counterrevolutionary.
  38. Get a Job
    A wretched excuse for a comedy.
  39. My First Mister
    The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beneath the Darkness
    Unfortunately for Quaid, director Martin Guigui's pathetic thriller doesn't even have the pulse-pounding excitement of a second-tier Scooby-Doo mystery.
  41. The Barbarian Invasions
    Shear away the film's pretensions, and it's a soap opera of assholes.
  42. The Lifeguard
    From concept to execution to tone, writer-director Liz W. Garcia's The Lifeguard is a lifeless misfire.
  43. Battle: Los Angeles
    Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive courtesy of a cornball motivational speech by Eckhart's hero.
  44. Stardom
    With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Johnson Family Vacation
    The movie contains exactly two chuckle-worthy moments.
  46. Born Guilty
    This movie is just a stockpiled compendium of terrible decisions, both behind and in front of the camera.
  47. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    Every Thing Will Be Fine is torturously slow and hopelessly mannered.
  48. Love is Tolerance - Tolerance is Love
    Love and tolerance are difficult to argue with, yet this effort seems pointless — not just because it will change few minds, but also because it’s a mess.
  49. Assassin's Bullet
    Fans of incessant flashbacks and endless whooshing zooms into close-ups will find much to love about Assassin's Bullet; less satisfied, alas, will be those with a fondness for lucid plotting, compelling intrigue, and credible performances.
  50. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The dull Adventures of the Penguin King is definitely the laziest of the waddle-coms to win theatrical release.
  51. Romeo & Juliet
    It’s all rote, dashed through, and somewhat detestable.
  52. Always at The Carlyle
    A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.
  53. Awakened
    This needlessly incoherent thriller treats its convoluted nonsense with grave seriousness. It's mawkish, maudlin, and tongue-tied — countless scenes end with characters excusing themselves to go to bed, and you may want to join them.
  54. Black Water
    Criminal negligence of Dolph is far from Black Water’s only sin — there’s also the sluggish pacing, murky musical score, and somnambulant lead — but it might be its most egregious.
    • 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.
  56. Casanova
    Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.
  57. The Unknown Woman
    Repellent piece of garbage.
  58. Garden Party
    Trivial, commercially calculated ensemble drama (porn! pot! rock music!), which plays like a non-musical "Rent," or a faux-edgy "Shortbus" for kids raised on "American Pie."
  59. The Big Shot-Caller
    An overaffected, preachy drama.
  60. Loudmouth Soup
    This micro-budget amateur-acting exercise plays like "The Anniversary Party" without the frisson of marquee performers behaving badly. We get F-listers playing at being marquee performers behaving badly.
  61. The Women
    Isn't so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled.
  62. The Time Machine
    If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.
  63. 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.
  64. Year of the Fish
    Year of the Fish is the kind of really bad movie it takes a lot of misplaced conviction to make.
  65. Impolex
    Can only be appreciated if you don't let guileless amateurishness, or chronic mumbling, ruin your evening.
  66. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Like a hot tub itself, it looks inviting, but all too soon you've had enough.
  67. How to Seduce Difficult Women
    It is, perhaps, best not to expect too much from the directorial debut of Grace Kelly's ex-hairdresser; still, How to Seduce Difficult Women is woefully incompetent and ugly.
  68. A Clockwork Orange
    Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy...The last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing.
  69. All Over the Guy
    A painfully earnest case of generic romance spiced with queerness.
  70. Labor Day
    A well-intentioned but dull, video-ugly documentary if it weren't partly financed by its subject, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); that just makes it a crappy infomercial.
    • 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.
  72. Evidence
    The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Hangover Part II
    It's hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II.
  74. Father of the Bride
    Martin's grin-and-don't-bare-it performance lifts the picture above sitcom level. [31 Dec 1991]
    • Village Voice
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ghost House
    Beyond the film’s ethnic stereotypes and flat characters, it needs to be scary, and it fails on that front as well.
  76. Just Like a Woman
    A multicultural mini–Thelma and Louise but far duller than that description implies, Just Like a Woman peddles feminist empowerment with one-note didacticism.
  77. 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.
  78. The Girl Next Door
    Any resonance from that real-life atrocity gets smothered by a script that interlaces clichéd dialogue so tightly as to block out any glint of recognizable human behavior.
  79. The Watcher
    Sidesteps any juicy subtext in favor of routine chase-movie thrills.
  80. Passion of Mind
    An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.
  81. Boogeyman
    It's difficult to remember a recent movie with less regard for spatial or temporal coherence. With the bar set so low, one wouldn't think the ending could possibly come as a letdown. Believe me, it does.
  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.
  83. 1915
    Because atrocious backstage drama 1915 is meant to address a great global tragedy -- the Turkish government–mandated extermination of 1.5 million Armenians -- the film's creators smother its putting-on-a-show narrative with ponderous diatribes about "denial," "ghosts," and "acting."
  84. The Squeeze
    Like many, many films starring Christopher McDonald, the best thing about The Squeeze is Christopher McDonald.
  85. The Upside of Anger
    The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.
  86. The Charcoal People
    Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.
  87. Reprisal
    It’s downright sad watching Willis go all half-assed in another movie. I guess we’re gonna have to wait for Glass to come out next year to see if Willis can do a movie in whole-assed form again.
  88. Showboy
    So amateurish that its awkward Whoopi Goldberg cameo actually adds a touch of class, Showboy is an ill-conceived, often implausible hybrid of fact and fiction.
  89. Alien Girl
    Romanycheva exudes cunning carnality, yet her wiles are as rote as the rest of this B-grade genre flick, which feigns interest in post-Communist Eastern European power dynamics but favors listlessly staged shoot-outs and heists devoid of emotional, psychological, or sociopolitical substance.
  90. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.
  91. Uptown Girls
    Less "Freaky Friday" than just plain freaky.
  92. Mango Yellow
    A shallow Brazilian trifle.
  93. Full Frontal
    "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.
  94. Bully
    The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.
  95. Satan Hates You
    The film's one-note premise is only as fitfully affecting as watching caricatures hit rock bottom over and over again.
  96. Mini's First Time
    Mini is impossible to like, especially since she delivers some of the worst narration ever spoken, and her final lines are like a big middle finger to viewers foolish enough to enjoy the film.
  97. Demi-Soeur
    The film indulges in much wannabe-funny wailing, shrieking, and flopping about by Nénette and Paul, only to then lace its buffoonish material with semi-serious undercurrents.
  98. Under the Bed
    The real bogeyman is incomprehensible plotting in director Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed, which matches narrative incoherence with one of the most over-the-top portentous scores in horror-cinema history.
  99. The Life of David Gale
    Going through the motions of a liberal-Hollywood polemic with the sweaty, mounting hysteria of a bad liar, The Life of David Gale is foremost an overheating gotcha machine, scripted by first-timer Charles Randolph with seams showing and red herrings stinking up the joint.
  100. Grown Ups 2
    A few decent one-liners notwithstanding, the movie comes off as willfully uninspired.
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