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. Caught in the Web
    Amid much overacting, Kaige addresses the subjectivity and unreliability of images through this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scenarios that would make Jack Tripper groan.
  2. The Scribbler
    Unfortunately, no amount of softcore titillation can compensate for all the cheap special effects and faux-profundity dispensed by this superhero-self-help dud.
  3. Our Family Wedding
    Might've made for a progressive film if director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar) hadn't pandered to the lowest common denominator with brainless screwball laughs.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fish Without a Bicycle
    Strong performances are marred by a script whose dialogue ranges from cheesy to unspeakably bad.
  5. Jenny's Wedding
    Lazy, schmaltzy, and on-the-nose from its Hallmark-friendly production design to its rancid pop-music cues and naive dialogue.
  6. Going Shopping
    Henry Jaglom's latest study of contemporary female obsessions among a noxious clan of West L.A. bourgeoisie is of more pathological than cinematic interest.
  7. Love's Labour's Lost
    Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Film Geek
    Westby never provides a reason you should pay to spend 70 minutes with Scotty, but he offers at least a dozen compelling ones not to.
  9. Maze
    Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.
  10. Orfeu
    Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Anarchist Cookbook
    Cookbook banks on the humor of its caricatures and the heft of its moral dilemma, but because it never develops its characters beyond types, it comes off as flat and forced throughout.
  12. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    Even in the teen-flick "Sweet Valley" of 1987, there were few places outside John Hughes's brain where paying somebody to be your girl didn't look like prostitution. Yet somebody made the Slow-Times-at-Clueless-High stinker Can't Buy Me Love.
  13. Tasting Menu
    A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.
  14. 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.
  15. The Word
    Attempts to offer the white-knuckle gratifications of a studio procedural with a conspicuous lack of production values, screen talent, plausibility, originality, or a lick of aesthetic flair.
  16. Mission Park
    The tense prologue of writer-director Bryan Ramirez's Mission Park...evokes a tactile, scary reality utterly betrayed by the following 90-minute string of hackneyed, basic-cable plotting and dialogue.
  17. Evan Almighty
    It marks an unfortunate low point in the history of recent American comedy. There goes Steve Carell's perfect game.
  18. For Greater Glory
    It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition.
  19. Around the Block
    Self-serious as an after-school special, subtle, and nuanced as a kick to the face, Around the Block is an exercise in banality -- remarkable only for the sheer number of hokey clichés that it fits in its 104-minute running time.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ethan Mao
    An exhausting exercise in genre mixing.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    CBGB
    CBGB's biggest problem is that it's taken such electrifying source material and done absolutely zilch with it.
  22. Pixels
    Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special.
  23. Billy Bates
    The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.
  24. Kill Switch
    Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.
  25. Sex with Strangers
    Choppy, overlong documentary.
  26. Into My Heart
    Anemic.
  27. My Big Fat Independent Movie
    Feels motivated by envy more than anything else-it's a sour, petty act of mockery that values its own ineptitude over genuine cleverness, travestying Quentin Tarantino and others simply for dreaming up gimmicks that worked.
    • 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.
  29. Skins
    Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Salon
    Where's Al Sharpton's decency parade when you need it?
  31. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    Wallows in the same affected retro stylishness as the earlier film (Croupier), suffers from the same lack of narrative focus, and is just as choked with clichés.
  32. The Smurfs 2
    Its tolerant messages remain buried beneath lame pop-culture references, hectic slapstick, fart jokes, and endless Smurf-puns that—Azaria's funny, over-the-top cartoon villainy aside—make one pine for the Smurfpocalypse.
  33. Reunion
    Not so much a "Big Chill" knockoff as a poor man's Whit Stillman comedy, this pretentious gab-fest from trial lawyer-turned-filmmaker Alan Hruska (Nola) feels like it traveled through a wormhole after someone watched "Metropolitan" in 1990.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tortured
    Lean, nasty, and patently absurd, The Tortured plays like one long scream of agony.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Story of Us
    Maudlin, irritating marital drama.
  36. Double Parked
    Child abuse, domestic violence, and the struggles of single mothers deserve better treatment than this.
  37. The Art of War
    Far more preposterous in its details than the average blam-quip-kerplow, The Art of War isn't helped by the performances.
  38. Shanghai Calling
    Shanghai Calling eventually reveals itself to be just another stale tale about the virtue of morality over ambition.
  39. Abandoned Mine
    Haunted houses come in many shapes and sizes, and the title location in Abandoned Mine is the only fresh coat of paint this one gets.
  40. Deadgirl
    Has more fantastically blunt, clunky, and downright laughable teen-sex dialogue per minute than anything this side of Larry Clark.
  41. On the Run
    A bad one-night stand endured with a jailbroke cad and his put-upon travel-agent pal that hinges somewhat on the characters' impression that Frank Sinatra is still among us.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Choose Connor
    For all the potential of this coming-of-age/political-awakening tale, Choose Connor undoes itself with an egregiously sordid turn.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wild Target
    The whole time I was watching Wild Target, I was trying to figure out just how to explain its weirdly old-fashioned comedic tone. I could talk about its absurd plot...
  44. Don Verdean
    Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way.
  45. Planes
    Can a plane jump a shark when it's already in the air? To Disney, that question is moot. It's so certain that Planes will make a mint in toys, if not in theaters, that it's already slated a sequel for next summer.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Broken Sky
    That's the movie--desperate grasps, huffy affronts, gulping kisses, and one juicy (if silent) sex scene, early in the film, before our senses have been deadened by boredom. Without dialogue, we don't know who the characters are, so we can't care about what they do.
  47. Paranoia
    This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.
  48. Falling Awake
    The film hints at progressive themes...soon disregard both in the service of a hokey gangsta plot.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    36 Saints
    The real problem with this film is that its voiceover at the beginning is its only real attempt at storytelling; there is no central character or quest to latch onto. There is only the senseless curse and its slow but sure fulfillment.
  50. Ghost Team One
    Thanks to the shakiest of shaky-cams, you don't know whether to wince or lose your lunch.
  51. Miss Julie
    Figgis's frenetic and grossly self-aggrandizing adaption of Strindberg's worse-for-wear two-hander about the battle between the sexes and the classes.
  52. Almost in Love
    Almost in Love has audacity and theatrical immediacy working for it. There's also some really impressive sound design. And that's it, pretty much.
  53. Steal Me
    Whether it's the guitar-strum soundtrack, "lyrical" cornfield shots, or arrhythmic performances, Steal Me has at least one indie-film cliché too many.
  54. 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.
  55. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.
  56. Celebrity
    The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.
  57. Rugrats Go Wild
    As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Adored
    The film's witlessness keeps any satirical potential submerged well below soap opera levels. Filiberti's self-casting exacerbates this already shoddy melodrama: Frequent come-hither stares beaming from his patently sub-marquee mug provide one too many non-ironic "Zoolander" moments.
  59. The Osiris Child
    Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.
  60. Mi America
    Fontaine, also the writer and director here, aims high and crashes spectacularly, unable to keep the Jenga tower of a story together — or from being uninteresting.
  61. The Living Wake
    From an opening newsreel biography to a climactic Viking funereal ceremony, the film's absurdity proves oppressive, its linguistic cartwheels so mirthless, and its meticulous Wes Anderson–indebted set design and visual compositions so self-conscious, that the ridiculousness feels petrified.
  62. The Last Castle
    Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.
  63. Delgo
    You'll just wonder why this isn't a video game you can actually play.
  64. Visitors
    Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.
  65. White T
    When choosing to unleash seemingly any desperate comedian they could find willing to work for scale, the creators of White T ensured that almost nothing about White T would make sense.
  66. Dust to Glory
    The movie is monotonous, storyless, and at under 100 minutes, interminable.
    • 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.
  68. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    Patronizing from toe to chin, the film opts continually for self-congratulation and cheesy aphorism, and could've-should've been comfortable slotted into a half hour of airtime on TJC.
  69. The Last Day of August
    The film's delivery system sets itself up for failure.
  70. Aardvark
    Aardvark, the first feature from writer-director Brian Shoaf, is so inane that several times it put this critic into a fugue state. Meandering in message or plot, the film proves to be not just incoherent but excruciatingly boring, quite a feat with a cast that includes Jenny Slate, Jon Hamm, Sheila Vand, and, sure, Zachary Quinto.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.
  72. Gods and Generals
    Shot with the TV-movie blahs, the film itself is nothing more than an elaborate reenactment, perfectly mating box-of-rocks acting (bring rotten fruit for Mia Dillon's Southern matriarch) and repetitious dialogue so scripturally florid Maxwell might qualify for a Comedy Screenplay Golden Globe next January.
  73. S.W.A.T.
    A prototypical new-millennium summer movie, S.W.A.T. is no more than an extended trailer for itself.
  74. Glitter
    A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Resilience
    Bojack has a talent for finding the worst possible angle from which to shoot scenes, and though he claims to want to gauge the resilience of his main character, he only succeeds at testing ours.
  76. Gray Matters
    Coming from the strangely vacuous Graham, in a Manhattan this preposterous, the staid social message is as ludicrous as its surroundings.
  77. Original Sin
    Doesn't even have earnestness going for it -- a tepid, blindly assembled post-noir.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Knockaround Guys
    The only drama is in waiting to hear how John Malkovich's reedy consigliere will pronounce his next line.
  79. Snow Queen
    Snow Queen proves both visually cruddy and narratively muddled.
  80. Against the Night
    Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.
  81. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  82. Detention
    It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.
  83. Price of Glory
    Contrived and contrived sloppily, this self-adoring soap even manages to make its all-Hispanic cast seem unconvincing -- except for Seda.
  84. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Stunning in its guileless self-love, Smith's doodle-movie shows virtually no sign of being made for an audience. The 90-minute by-product of Smith's let's-shoot-a-movie pot party can be mystifying -- we've all stood soberly by as high friends guffaw at nothing in particular, but now we can pay for the privilege.
  85. Deadline
    The fact that real-life deadly racial animus in America is often cartoonish in its manifestation doesn't excuse Deadline's cliché-ridden characterizations of bigotry. Worse, the film has no pulse and no dramatic tension, despite its subject matter. It's a slog to get to its big revelations.
  86. 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.
  87. Lifelines
    The film's befuddling direction and tone, queasy HD interiors, and tin-eared, often preposterous, screenplay prove disastrous.
  88. Prince of Central Park
    A stinky dumpster for sentimental dung about homelessness and the magical mecca that isn't Manhattan.
  89. Excuse Me for Living
    No strand of Excuse Me for Living's frantic, unfunny, and pseudo-thoughtful narrative is well conceived.
  90. The Texture of Falling
    While it’s obvious Allred wanted to make a possibly autobiographical, blatantly meta take on how insane young adults get when they fall in love, The Texture of Falling ends up being one baffling, infuriatingly pretentious exercise in indie filmmaking.
  91. Colossus
    If cinema's most narcissistic actor-filmmakers were swimming in a talent pool, with Vincent Gallo confidently backstroking in the deep end and Eric Schaeffer wading in children's pee, Hendrickson's dipping his toe near Tommy Wiseau.
  92. Nothing Without You
    There isn't the faintest glimmer of lived experience to be found here, not the briefest flash of truth.
  93. Unleashed
    Cloying dreck.
  94. Alex & Emma
    This isn't one for the time capsule--just bury it.
  95. L.A. Slasher
    L.A. Slasher isn't perceptive, shocking, or funny, and if it's remembered for anything, it will be for the tastelessly tone-deaf decision to have the Slasher kill a black actress by dragging her behind a van.
  96. 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.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    Overwhelmingly poor camerawork helps obscure the deficiencies in the dialogue but can't conceal a sparse plot stretched to feature length by an endless parade of lame sketches.
  98. John Dies at the End
    John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old-and, oh, it is terrible.
  99. A Good Day to Die Hard
    The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together.
  100. The Kid
    The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."
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