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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    • 7 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Hottie & the Nottie
    Crass, shrill, disingenuous, tawdry, mean-spirited, vulgar, idiotic, boring, slapdash, half-assed, and very, very unfunny.
  2. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    The script is often ludicrous (gratuitous digs at feminism; muddled commentary on war and the military), the sets look like sets, and the acting-aside from Helsham and Plunkett-doesn't even rise to the level of student films.
  3. Prince of Swine
    A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Dirty Cop No Donut
    Uses brutality, booze, and boobs to sell its social commentary; it's as drunk on fake blood as Friendly is on police power.
  5. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").
  6. Vulgar
    Sure to appear in everyone's worst-of lists at year's end, to say nothing of a few bad dreams, Bryan Johnson's Vulgar is an unclassifiably awful study in self- and audience-abuse.
  7. Strippers
    One of a barely acknowledged sub-breed of indie: howling-vanity amateur-work.
  8. Black Rose
    Let’s cut straight to the chase: Black Rose is a bad film — amazingly, astoundingly, supercalifragilisticexpialidociously bad.
  9. Contract to Kill
    Even the most masochistic filmgoers should avoid Waxman and Seagal's latest collaboration, a boring vanity project that doesn't even competently flatter its star.
  10. Tied to a Chair
    Loren's performance is as tonally off as the rest of Bergmann's jokey lark, which strings together characters and twists with amateurishly chaotic abandon.
  11. 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.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Not Cool
    Not Cool is a cautionary tale of how being able to make videos that go viral does not necessarily make someone a filmmaker.
  13. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    The whole film is pretty enraging, hideously acted apart from the main quartet, and ends up viewing like a particularly racy Lifetime Original.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    United Passions
    As propaganda, United Passions is as subtle as an anvil to the temple. As drama, it’s not merely ham-fisted, but pork-shouldered, bacon-wristed, and sausage-elbowed.
  15. Chaos
    Chaos lacks the audience-implicating boldness or howling political outrage of that landmark (Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left"); where Last House was provocative, Chaos is merely disgusting.
  16. Stryker
    The dead-end social points Gonick is making are so blunt they're hardly points at all anymore, but the galleon anchor that's weighing down this well-intentioned homey is the amateur acting.
  17. Shockproof
    For a disposable entertainment, Shockproof has an intensity that sticks to the mind--yours, mine, or Richard Hamilton's.
  18. The Pied Piper
    More affecting than affected.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fifth Empire
    Admirable in retrospect but maddening as it goes (and goes and goes).
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mala Noche
    Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Inner Life of Martin Frost
    What starts out as a clever exploration of consciousness quickly descends into underplotted folly.
  22. Maurice Richard
    As Richard, Roy Dupuis's tight-clutched performance easily holds down the screen, when he's not hooked by an inelegant script that leaks mythologizing flatus.
  23. Christmas on Mars
    As a Lips completist, it's at least worth enduring for its homegrown resourcefulness, all General Electric stoves and found industrial objects, but that's the thing about experimentation: Sometimes it's destined to fail.
  24. Bob Funk
    With all due respect to Leo Tolstoy, all unhappy film families in which someone ascends those "12 steps" are exactly alike.
  25. Powder Blue
    In a movie full of egregiously overdramatic stupidities, the ultimate insult is to Patrick Swayze, who plays Biel's manager as an especially-poorly-preserved Bret Michaels.
  26. Love, etc.
    The admirable Gainsbourg refrains from overacting, but her leading men never quite transcend the emptiness and inanity of their characters' dilemma.
  27. Le tombeau d'Alexandre
    The Last Bolshevik, considered by some to be Marker's masterpiece.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Under Hellgate Bridge
    "Sopranos" vet Dominic Chianese is squandered as a banal father confessor.
  29. The New Wizard of Oz
    Majesty's reissue is a delirious and loony surprise in this season of nattier ape-suits.
  30. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
    Mad Songs saves its most memorable image for its hard-earned climax, which molds the ambiguous, hallucinatory spectacle of a combusting effigy into a viewer-implicating demonstration of crowd psychology and a harrowing cri de coeur.
  31. Intern
    Smartly written, unevenly executed.
  32. The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield
    The feature itself remains a grotesquely enjoyable turn through the pulp-cinema wringer; hell, it could prove to be Mansfield's most enduring work.
  33. The Hired Hand (re-release)
    A film of considerable ambition and period piquance.
  34. The Golden Age
    Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them.
  35. Once Upon a Time in China II (re-release)
    More concentrated and svelte than its precursor, Once Upon a Time II also has the benefit of fights staged by Master Yuen Wo-Ping that show Jet Li -- another camera-age hero -- to even greater advantage.
  36. Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
    As documentary filmmaking, it's cheap and suspect. As advocacy, it's necessary.
  37. The Phantom of Liberty (re-release)
    Albeit scattershot, Phantom does cohere as a satire of keeping up appearances in which everything is as it appears.
  38. Stripped
    Self-involved, amateurish, and unoriginal.
  39. King of Hearts (re-release)
    As a movie, King of Hearts is more pageant than story. As a cultural artifact, however, the movie is less a relic than a symptom.
  40. Once Upon a Time in China (re-release)
    Gets better as it goes along, building up to a prolonged shipboard finale.
  41. Night and the City (re-release)
    However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.
  42. Town Bloody Hall
    What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past.
  43. Blink of an Eye
    If you're in prison, it's best to stay there. 'Cause if you don't, as Blink of an Eye makes clear, you're fucked -- Outside the safety of your cell, a vicious world of cliché lies in wait to claim you.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
    Created by an artist soon to enter his eighth decade, finds a secret paradise in the rich harvests of a lifetime's memories.
  45. Gibel Otrara
    Enigmatic from the get-go, The Fall of Otrar builds to a series of spectacular battle scenes, but the mood is never less than sardonic.
  46. Born to Be Blind
    Berliner captures the eerie beauty of their music alongside their strange dignity. But his mannered style (colored filters, multiple exposures, jump cuts) leaves an uneasy impression about the balance of power in his relationship to his subjects, women of surprising strength and enduring frailty.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Anonymous
    Relatively thin on conventional story and acting (the cast ranges from indie thesp Craig Chester to transsexual flaming creature Amanda Lepore) and thick with atmosphere.
  48. The Path to Love
    Culminates in a pilgrimage to Genet's tomb--a sweetly respectful gravestomp, to be sure, though one suspects the almost apologetic demureness of the central relationship would have irked him to no end.
  49. The Season of Men
    A very beautiful film, but its bleached desert colors and flatter perspectives are less inviting, and the back-and-forth between present and past can occasionally be confusing.
  50. No Sex Last Night
    Compelling viewing, even if there's nothing pretty (pictorially or emotionally) about it.
  51. Wall Street: A Wondering Trip
    Surprisingly lacking in depth and overall political perspective.
  52. Santa Santita
    Melodramatic Filipino coming-of-ager concerns the budding sexuality of a young girl in a devoutly Catholic culture.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Usher
    Flush with evidence of Harrington's trademark blend of the strange and the sublime.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life, Translated
    Kiefer Liu's eccentric bit of teen sigh candy is veined with enough chewy oddities to give it texture, but its sappy center isn't sustainable over 100 minutes.
  57. Toro negro
    As his story emerges-rape, assault, manslaughter, prison, and torrential self- destruction-it becomes clear that Pacheco is some kind of sociopath, and the movie evolves into a monstrous portrait of economic annihilation on the outskirts of the global village.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A sincere but sapless attempt to meld personal and political documentary.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Satellite
    Nice low-budget cinematography and authentic New York City locations aside, there's little to engage viewers over the course of 100 wandering minutes.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    They're Just My Friends
    For such a poorly made autobiopic to earn a theatrical release, Nwamu must have some friends in high places.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    As the Call, So the Echo
    In the end, though, Keir can't resist glorifying his dad, with a final shot seeped in a tone of self-congratulation that the rest of the film so nimbly evades.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Deeper Than Y
    The interviews are lively, though not all documentary subjects are created equal.
  63. Reminiscing in Tempo
    Keys's tribute to a tribute is a charming riff on an epic figure.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sacrifice
    The effect is not unlike a Terrence Malick "Real Sex" episode -- only Bruno thwarts any viewer who craves titillation in a plain brown wrapper of moral outrage.
  65. Urbanscapes
    The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Color of Olives
    The Color of Olives attempts to reach the political through the mundane, documenting blocks of lost time as the family lazes in front of wire fences, but director Carolina Rivas aestheticizes the Amers' plight, using them as actors for her tone poem on displacement.
  67. Modern Man
    Swibel can't keep his HD camera still enough to find poetry in this profound hunk of nothingness, his observational in-and-out zooms as meandering as co-writer Becker's on-screen attention span.
  68. Canary
    Writer-director Akihiko Shiota's dramatic strategies are limited to the point of monotony.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bachna Ae Haseeno
    Two and a half hours of this will try anyone's patience.
  70. All of Us
    Brooklyn filmmaker Emily Abt's well-meaning, pro-feminist doc offers little new insight in seeking to raise awareness that black women are disproportionately at high risk for HIV infection.
  71. Mary
    Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Buried
    The movie serves up gory killings and kinky peripheral shenanigans without any satirical thrust, blunting its death-equals-profit subtext with a snickering tone better suited to an afternoon of Clue.
  73. Cargo 200
    Regardless of intent, Cargo 200 is beautifully filmed and completely disturbing for its entire running time.
  74. Mutant Chronicles
    A film this monotonous will make you zone out.
  75. Home
    Using cinema as self-therapy might be a selfish way to treat audiences, but Harden and Scheel's chemistry makes the mother-daughter dynamic universal.
  76. Offshore
    Cheklich's insipid, cheapjack dramedy--about a flagging company's decision to outsource--isn't potent enough to even be called a lukewarm-button movie.
  77. Sikandar
    Despite the cliché-riddled translation and super-corny sound design, writer-director Piyush Jha presents an affecting account of the Kashmir conflict through the struggles of its children.
  78. The Painter Sam Francis
    For aficionados, the evidently rare footage of Francis squatting on hairy thighs, scampering ahead to stay intuitive before intellectual, will justify the film.
  79. Skiptracers
    The primary source of comedy is tiresome pottymouthing.
  80. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
    The resulting experience could very easily be described as off-putting -- which well suits the uneasiness of the subject.
  81. Fatal Promises
    Outlines a culture of cross-border corruption that preys on poverty and has become so widespread that it can now be mentioned in the same breath as the drug trade. The film also critiques the willful ignorance of law-making bodies that turn a blind eye to these atrocities.
  82. Paradise
    Steadily maintaining momentum and a meditative mood without narration or editorialization is itself a feat, but more vitally, Paradise appreciates and shares the curious mysteries in the seemingly banal.
  83. Do Knot Disturb
    Contemporary B'wood movies are not for all tastes, and rarely do they show potential to appeal to mainstream American sensibilities, but Do Knot Disturb is so boorish and shrill that it's easy to mourn all of the great, unfinished films that could be made for just the cost of its item-number budget.
  84. The Heretics
    For a movement that was "fundamentally leaderless," Braderman's film gives its participants an opportunity to rightfully claim: "We thought we could change things--and, in fact, we did."
  85. Eulogy for a Vampire
    This is one gay vampire film that's surprisingly anemic.
  86. 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.
  87. Word Is Out
    Extraordinary, groundbreaking documentary.
  88. Promised Lands
    Promised Lands is the only western documentary made about the war, but today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political filmmaking.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights
    For his part, Jack works it out onstage, in some of the most subtly shot and well-recorded concert footage ever from a band not named the Rolling Stones.
  90. Ghost Town
    I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.
  91. Ramchand Pakistani
    In the end, however, Ramchand Pakistani sadly negates its intentions with frequent TV producer Jabbar's soapy storytelling and too-clean production values.
  92. Entre nos
    The postscript reveal that Entre Nos, which follows a newly single immigrant mother as she ekes out a living on the streets of New York, is based on the filmmaker's own story is more affecting than anything that made it to the screen.
  93. Visionaries
    Visionaries' heedless montage brought back the sense of crazy possibility that excited me when, as a teenage kid from Queens, I first encountered Mekas's world.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone with the Pope
    It's gloriously, hilariously offensive, including all manner of racist and sexist jokes and one sequence of WTF? grotesquerie worthy of John Waters.
  95. Convention
    The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.
  96. Nightfall
    Not only a nifty late noir but a model of economical filmmaking--well-sketched atmosphere, deft characterizations, and a 78-minute running time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    12th & Delaware
    The terrific documentary 12th & Delaware gets its name from a volatile intersection in a small Florida town: On one side of the street is an abortion clinic, while on the other sits a pro-life facility that counsels pregnant women to keep their unborn children while encouraging protesters to harass the neighbor's business.
  98. The Girlfriends
    Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure.
  99. The Law
    A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Contenders
    A mystery with nothing to reveal, a drama without consequence, an elegy of dispassion. Lacking wisdom or even earnest intent, the film's flaws of execution become more apparent.
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