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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  1. Turn It Up
    The staging and performances are awkward, the frequent shoot-outs a snore.
  2. 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.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Miriam
    So bad it doesn't ever approach being good, doesn't even go from bad to good and back to bad again--just bad bad bad, all the way through.
  4. I Hate Valentine's Day
    Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.
  5. Vice
    The film unspools with a momentum that mitigates its artless brutality, kinda, but it's a high-pressure firehose of stupid.
  6. 88 Minutes
    We may have to sit through worse films to come this year, but with any luck, there'll be none as guilelessly, idiotically misogynist as this one.
  7. Best Night Ever
    At best a fascinating sociological document of what happens when an all-male writing and production team portrays a girls' night out, Best Night Ever seems marketed to women but made for frat house consumption.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Extreme Ops
    The mountain would probably recommend that you save your money.
  9. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    The scare tactics are rather ho-hum—suffocation nightmares, disappearing necklaces, loud noises—and the ending is incongruously sentimental. You'll be more frightened walking through a graveyard at dusk.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    It's perhaps the sequel we deserve. But that doesn't mean this dumb, blunt follow-up - both more unspeakably grotesque and less scary than the first film - is worth sitting through. Once Six's conceptual project becomes clear, his escalating audience-mocking torture is increasingly pointless.
  11. 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.
  12. Bless the Child
    A callous piece of work that exploits images of children in pain or jeopardy.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Chooch
    Devoid of Sopranos stereotypes, the film charms with its p.c. portrayal of Italian Americans, yet the depiction of Mexicans veers toward the offensive.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Girls Against Boys
    The obligatory lesbian kiss is checked off like a box on a clipboard, but the B-horror standbys that might rescue the film from self-serious tedium are nowhere to be found.
  15. The Lodger
    Nodding, winking, and sighing, The Lodger lumbers its way to a final twist so anticlimactic and silly as to warrant an incredulous titter.
  16. A Haunted House 2
    It may be a low bar, but Michael Tiddes's A Haunted House 2 is actually an improvement over its predecessor.
  17. Excuse Me for Living
    No strand of Excuse Me for Living's frantic, unfunny, and pseudo-thoughtful narrative is well conceived.
  18. Septembers of Shiraz
    While the film aims for humane evenhandedness, recognizing both Farnez's lower-class condescension and the revolutionaries' hypocrisy, the characters are so skin-deep that we never respond to them as people.
  19. Lost Souls
    Can be blamed foremost on its fire-and-brimstone screenwriter, Pierce Gardner.
  20. If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
    A shoot with Fassbinder actress Irm Hermann signifies Tillmans's desire--and the desire of every high-profile German-speaking artist (hello, Fatih Akin)--to huff the fading smell of RWF's genius. Like the rest of the film, though, it does little to convince the unconverted of Tillmans's own.
  21. Sirius
    Amardeep Kaleka's documentary often seems like little more than preaching-to-the-converted, New Age drivel.
  22. Andron
    The movie gets wilder and weirder as it goes.... But then, at some point, it all gets ponderous, especially all the vague political machinations.
  23. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Simply less campily moronic than its predecessor, a tired kill-by-numbers.
  24. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."
  25. 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.
  26. Authors Anonymous
    Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.
  27. Deuces Wild
    An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Jersey Guy
    Like a spiral perm growing out, Jersey Guy droopily unravels as partial homage to the Balki Bartokamous school of bad acting before collapsing into a mess of fragmentary sermonizing on deceit, commitment, and the meaning of choice.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop III
    The formula has stayed the same, but Murphy isn't the Foley of 10 years ago. The only thing that remains is his patented Chic-let grin. [7 Jun 1994]
    • Village Voice
  30. Followers
    So seamlessly and comprehensively dreadful that its very existence (let alone its appearance in theaters) beggars belief.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Kangaroo Jack
    Virtually every shot of the kangaroo was digitally created, and perhaps that was an insurance policy masterstroke. Forcing a real live one to act opposite these co-stars could have easily constituted animal cruelty.
  32. The Cookout
    Eventually, the pointlessness of The Cookout exudes a modicum of charm, but the simple-minded mess still lacks the wit and moral weight of an episode of "Family Matters."
    • 15 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    My Boss's Daughter
    A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Darkness
    Rarely has a film's tagline been more fitting: "Some secrets should never come to light."
  35. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.
  36. Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn
    Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn's vision of the Mafia comes filtered through a needlessly complex screenplay, as if the creators felt the need to prove they've seen a few Arnaud Desplechin films alongside Goodfellas.
  37. The Layover
    It’s completely unfair to compare these characters to (say) Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, funny women who derive dignity from their friendship. But that’s a show written, created, and performed by women, while this film’s creative trust is a clueless, retrograde sausage festivus.
  38. An L.A. Minute
    Daniel Adams’s An L.A. Minute makes you suffer through it all and never redeems itself, despite the potentially interesting duo of Gabriel Byrne and Kiersey Clemons as leads. The stars seem out of place with each other and in this movie, with creators who have no idea what they want to say.
  39. Eloise
    Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.
  40. To Age or Not to Age
    Too bad Pappas limits any critical perspective on this project to brief, superficial discussions with a handful of wealthy "artists" at their Hamptons homes whose connection to the filmmaker or the documentary's subject remains unspecified.
  41. Wirey Spindell
    Brimming with fatuous "clever" dialogue and gorgeous women swooning over Schaeffer-played boors, the like-sounding titles denoted a vain, smarmy Woody Allen acolyte drowning in his own reflection.
  42. Evidence
    The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dischord
    Writer-director Mark Wilkinson gracefully elides backstories while arranging his converging narratives into a neat fugue, but the overall preciousness of his conception is suffocating.
  44. Rollerball
    McTiernan's Rollerball is a movie masochist's delight.
  45. A Little Bit of Heaven
    A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.
  46. The Offering
    The Offering leaves few horror devices unused.
  47. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died
    That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.
  48. The Sculptress
    Wright's "British" accent elicits the only shudders.
  49. Dungeons & Dragons
    At once laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible.
  50. From Justin to Kelly
    Bury this in the time capsule: a memento of the Clean South, 2003.
  51. Glitter
    A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.
  52. The Killing Jar
    The film has no pulse and feels interminable, with its stilted dialogue, static staging, and usually fine actors who are horrendous here--Amber Benson is all moist-eyed empathy as the waitress while Madsen is laughably bad.
  53. Condemned
    So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.
  54. China Salesman
    China Salesman has got to be one of the most baffling, expensive pats on the back China has ever given itself.
  55. Don Peyote
    At its best, this descent into madness plays out like a millennial stoner's take on Jacob's Ladder. More often, it recalls a sobering truth: Nobody likes listening to someone ramble while high.
  56. Cabin Fever
    Zariwny's conflicted retread is both too harsh and too judgmental.
  57. 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.
  58. Fascination
    Avoiding this lump of low-camp lion poo couldn't be easier, what with MGM dumping it into a lone Manhattan venue, but if you're in the mood for some unscripted belly laughs or a catnap, Fascination should do the trick.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Fair Game
    Cindy Crawford is not the worst thing about Fair Game. Her fully poseable action-figure performance is about what you'd expect: studied and empty at the same time. Far worse is Fair Game's script. [14 Nov 1995]
    • Village Voice
  60. Freddy Got Fingered
    A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.
  61. A Beautiful Life
    Misery pile-up.
  62. Golf in the Kingdom
    From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.
  63. New Best Friend
    Clearly the product of an editing-room scramble, New Best Friend is a self-lambasting farce, despite Kirshner's passionate college try at establishing a third dimension in a brain-dead movie flatland.
  64. Red Hook Black
    Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.
  65. Murder-Set-Pieces
    Depraved, disgusting, misogynistic, ugly, and interminable, Murder-Set-Pieces is the lowest form of cinematic life, a movie so utterly degenerate it makes you wish that indie filmmakers had to prove a basic standard of decency in order to buy a camera.
  66. Nothing Left to Fear
    Any sensible person would gun it right out of the theater.
  67. Oconomowoc
    Like the characters, all conversation and action in the film take turns amounting to nothing.
  68. 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.
  69. The Emoji Movie
    The film is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.
  70. Slackers
    The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.
  71. Jersey Shore Massacre
    Watching the hopelessly vapid get taken out, one by one, has never been more depressing.
  72. The Trouble with Romance
    Can a movie get some "at least we tried" low-budget pity points, man? Move back home, all of you.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    King's Ransom
    Charlie Murphy's hilarious gay gangsta, relegated to the filmic down low, provides a modicum of depth in an otherwise supremely shallow effort.
  74. The Final Project
    Slipshod in every way, The Final Project can't even be bothered to show the important stuff.
  75. Walter: Lessons from the World's Oldest People
    Though the filmmakers undoubtedly had good intentions, their ultimate point—that a long life is the result of moral rectitude—is offensive and imbecilic.
  76. Date Movie
    Pre- credits, Date Movie runs a mere 70 minutes, which increasingly seems like seven minutes, repeated 10 times.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pinocchio
    This faithful, humorless, altogether insufferable (and, by all accounts, hastily dubbed) version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 fairytale about the trouble-causing puppet who longs to be human is the director's lifelong dream.
  78. Scary Movie 5
    Scary Movie V murdered my capacity to feel joy.
  79. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Anti–romantic comedy Some Kind of Beautiful starts with a dialogue scene that baldly explains to viewers what kind of casually chauvinistic narrative it's not going to be. That promise is gracelessly and repeatedly broken thanks to neophyte screenwriter Matthew Newman's clichéd characterizations and helmer Tom Vaughan's incompetent direction.
  80. Fading of the Cries
    No one expects perfect coherence - or competent acting - from a low-budget horror picture, but this convoluted mess sets new lows in underimagined, overplotted narrative - not to mention grade-Z thesping and dimly portentous dialogue.
  81. The Victim
    It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.
  82. Whipped
    If all-out headache-nausea-braindeath is what you crave, Whipped's available.
  83. Harold
    The question of who might find Harold even mildly entertaining looms large.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Mail Order Bride
    The hapless goodfella-in-training is as unsuccessful at fulfilling his uncle's wishes as the star and co-director, Robert Capelli Jr., is at delivering punchlines.
  85. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tortured
    Lean, nasty, and patently absurd, The Tortured plays like one long scream of agony.
  87. Supercon
    More than anything else, Supercon is a drag: The heist plot offers none of the excitement typically associated with the genre. If you find repeated use of the phrase “ball cancer” hilarious, you’ll be well served; if you don’t, well, it’s a tough sit.
  88. Alone in the Dark
    An embarrassingly unscary monster mash, is desperate to frighten its laughing audience any way it can.
  89. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    The movie's so slipshod and half-assed that I almost feel for Rand, whose ideas have proved enduring enough that they at least deserve a fair representation, if only for the sake of refutation.
  90. The Walking Deceased
    There's no more disposable type of comedy than the genre spoof, and no greater example of its general creative worthlessness than The Walking Deceased, an interminable 90-minute goof-off propped up by references to popular zombie-apocalypse fiction.
  91. Meet the Spartans
    Witless, tasteless, formless spoof.
  92. Dirty Love
    A kind of "Sex and the City" for L.A. bottom-feeders awash in clichéd, self-loathing misogyny that would make Howard Stern flinch.
  93. The Price of Air
    Culminates in a second bing-bang-boom triple shoot-out that effectively cancels out the shreds of remaining plot but is shot and cut like a sixth grader's Super-8 struggle for Woo-ness.
  94. Jewtopia
    It's a movie that thinks it stands for openness and cultural understanding, underneath the poop jokes, when in fact it manages to be offensive to almost everyone, including people who like to laugh at something because it's funny, not just because it makes us uncomfortable.
  95. Among Ravens
    Among Ravens wants to be the The Big Chill with Gen-X assholes, a weird ambition.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Perception
    This should be funny or sad, but it's neither, in this incoherent cross between "Riding the Bus With My Sister" and a Christina Ricci vehicle.
  97. Septic Man
    Just as dispiriting as its lack of scares (or sense of humor) is Septic Man’s lack of purpose -- devoid of any commentary, the film pointlessly wallows around in the muck, thereby making itself as valuable as those nasty things routinely flushed down the toilet.
  98. Back in the Day
    It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.
  99. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
    The film combines agonizing scenes of didactic earnestness about gun violence with the absolutely soul-crushing ennui of flaccid marriage jokes.
  100. May I Kill U?
    Too bad that Urban's stab at black-comedy satire is hobbled by the obviousness of his characters.
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