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. Family Weekend
    Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Next to this, even "Mean Machine's" painless soft-tissue spikings and fast-fixing broken limbs are believable -- and way funnier.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    The only rationale for the production seems to be that the pair were gay, and therein lies the main problem with this uninspired example of queer-film-festival filler.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Downloading Nancy
    The jump cuts and nonlinear narrative are gratuitously stylish, and when you peel away this film's complex performances, at the core of its drawn-out suicide spectacle is pain so extreme, so alienating, and, in the end, so pointless.
  5. Absence
    There are many things absent from this found-footage horror movie, including suspense, logic, and originality.
  6. Barbecue
    Eric Lavaine's midlife-crisis dramedy piles on dreary subplots involving Antoine's grating pals and their one-dimensional romantic and/or financial problems, but his material is unfunny and superficial to the point of inertia.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Ready to Rumble
    Rumble's aim is low and dirty.
  8. 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.
  9. Whipped
    If all-out headache-nausea-braindeath is what you crave, Whipped's available.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Another Year
    I haven't seen a film this year that so openly invited me to revile each and every one of its characters-and I reviewed "The Human Centipede."
  11. The Country Bears
    The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.
  12. Helicopter Mom
    It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.
  13. Biutiful
    Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Eban and Charley
    Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.
  15. Make a Wish
    With its lukewarm gender politicking and clumsy performances, Make a Wish achieves only one real distinction: It has to be the dullest lesbian campout movie ever made.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Underclassman
    British bliss czars, the doughnut-loving LAPD, and bitchin'-hot Spanish profs, no matter how many, how fat, or how bitchin' hot, can't make up for easy double entendres and zero character development.
    • 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.
  18. 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.
  19. Twentynine Palms
    The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."
  20. 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    As predictable as a segment of "MTV Spring Break," which at least doesn't try to hide its voyeurism, Burning looks more like a travel-agency video targeted at people who like to ride bikes topless and roll in the mud than a worthwhile glimpse of independent-community guiding lights.
  22. The Other Side of the Bed
    If Martínez-Lázaro, as he reiterated at the Miami Film Festival earlier this year, wants to expand the U.S. Spanish-language film market, one hopes he'll aim higher than this.
  23. The Pack
    Ultimately, these feral pooches pose no danger that couldn't be solved by staying inside, boarding the windows, and barricading the doors. It's not a bad approach to the film itself.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Multiple Sarcasms
    A vanity production by Branch, previously a studio branding consultant, it's the kind of odious, self-validating wish fulfillment that actually makes you appreciate the more generous self-absorption of Henry Jaglom films.
  25. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    Costner's not a mannered showboat, and what we get isn't a riff—it's a semi-oblivious glimpse of bitter outlaw banality.
  26. Backstage
    High-concept cinema this ain't.
  27. The Good Heart
    A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.
  28. Savannah
    The story overflows with reverence but is drastically short on passion or suspense.
  29. Lucky Numbers
    From the auteur who assaulted us with "Sleepless in Seattle" comes a more punishing film.
  30. 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.
  31. Ordinary Sinner
    As technically amateurish as it is narratively ludicrous.
  32. The In-Laws
    A walking-talking affront to every middle-class middle-ager it intends to sucker, this remake of the 1979 accidental-classic screwball hits every wrong note and trips on every chair leg.
  33. Irreversible
    From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.
  34. Tattoo Bar
    This tale of a sprung tough looking to go straight is so familiar it's faceless.
  35. Venus and Mars
    Painfully contrived, Venus and Mars's dialogue tends toward banal (as opposed to quotably bad), and the rhythm at which lines are read is definitely alien.
  36. The Condemned
    Writer-director Roberto Busó-Garcia's Spanish-language movie is so tame and so completely boring that to advertise it as a horror film is to insult the genre.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Astoria
    It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.
  38. Death of a Tree
    Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.
  39. Just a Kiss
    A convoluted writing exercise gone horribly wrong.
  40. Tales of Erotica
    Whittled down from a series of 36 short films commissioned by a German television network between 1996 and 2000, Erotic Tales leaves you only to ponder the horror of the 33 that didn't make the cut.
  41. Transformers: The Last Knight
    onceuponatimejsogrjdvpvarivpaeimp grfggjsfsfpoemichaelbaycouldbringbeautytoanactionsceneeeevgrhcgg oiwxgamanicpoetryfilledwithkineticgraceandheroismgjvbbp mnfwdwdwkpad3dkkalikewhateverhappenedtoTHATguy
  42. Hell Ride
    Bishop's jumbled, wholly unexciting throwback has very little on its mind beyond mythologizing its maker as a bad-ass biker named Pistolero.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Margaret Cho: Assassin
    Assassin is the listless signature on her career-long comedic suicide note.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    A Man of No Importance
    The film has that made-for-UK-TV-but-theatriucally-released-inthe-US look, The shots are claustrophobic and grainy for no reason. [27 Dec 1994]
    • Village Voice
  45. Clay Pigeons
    It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.
  46. I'm in Love with a Church Girl
    It's hard to quibble with Steve Race's film on theological grounds, though in narrative and aesthetic terms, there's something unholy about its mixture of inane clichés, shallow music-video glossiness, and incessant preaching.
  47. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.
  48. Die Another Day
    Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Girls Will Be Girls
    The situations begin tamely, but escalate to drunken vomiting and drugged rapes—all played for yuks. Or is it yucks?
    • 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.
  51. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Insurgent is so vapid it seems impossible that there's enough story left for another sequel.
  52. The Million Dollar Hotel
    Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.
  53. Who Do You Love
    Goes from awful to insufferable.
  54. Borstal Boy
    Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Order
    This ghost-in-the-Vatican thriller regurgitates enough occult clichés to deserve its own special circle of hell.
  56. Inferno
    Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Silk
    Silk isn’t just bad. It’s utterly mad. It stutters and hiccups from scene to scene, from country to country, but never once does it make narrative or emotional sense.
  58. Atomica
    Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.
  59. Finding Bliss
    It is particularly painful to watch Sobieski--whose unnervingly symmetrical, Botticelli face and supernatural poise can't help but hold the screen--put through the paces of Davis's almost unbearably labored script.
  60. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    Without any engaging small-scale human drama or larger social or culture-clash import, the film comes across as trivial, and too often also indulgent and pretentious.
  61. Need For Speed
    Scott Waugh's moronic flick has multiple personalities — it's the Sibyl of street racing, with a script that doesn't feel so much typed as button-mashed.
  62. Remember the Titans
    Boorish and flatulent.
  63. Alone in the Dark
    An embarrassingly unscary monster mash, is desperate to frighten its laughing audience any way it can.
  64. L.A. Superheroes
    It's a movie by people who lifted almost all their ideas from much better movies, and lean too heavily on "based on a true story" to pave over their film's weaknesses.
  65. Summer Catch
    Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.
  66. Where the Heart Is
    Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.
  67. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    The Brothers Grimm may have come up with some cruel, weird material in their day, but they'd never condone actor abuse like this.
  68. 30 Days
    Thuds away at the now familiar New York turf of Jews and their mating habits.
  69. American Outlaws
    Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.
  70. Paid in Full
    As superficial as his 1999 short film "True," the inspiration for Budweiser's "Whassup?" commercials, Charles Stone III's feature debut is set in a 1986 Harlem that doesn't look much like anywhere in New York.
  71. New Year's Eve
    A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.
  72. Cherry Tree
    This ungainly B movie makes virtually no sense in terms of either mythology or basic plotting.
  73. Among Ravens
    Among Ravens wants to be the The Big Chill with Gen-X assholes, a weird ambition.
  74. Play It to the Bone
    The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.
  75. 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.
  76. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Joyless, offensively stupid end-of-high-school farce.
  77. Language of a Broken Heart
    Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The denouement that sorts it all out moves from predictable tragedy to ludicrous redemption; closing titles confirm that the motivating intent in making In the Land of Blood and Honey was activist rather than artistic.
  79. The Decoy Bride
    Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.
  80. The Man
    Fuu . . . cryin' out loud, this movie's dumb.
  81. Monkeybone
    A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.
  82. Amy
    Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Darkness Falls
    This is horror-flick boo-ya at its most rote.
  84. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
    Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror gives muckraking journalism a bad name. Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy's DV assemblage of talking heads and footage shot in Iraq after the cessation of primary hostilities is low-rent Michael Moore, a poorly argued piece of agitprop.
  86. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]
    • Village Voice
  87. The Woman Chaser
    The queasiness it makes you feel is more like acid reflux than existential nausea.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Dog Run
    Dog Run mistakes milieu for meaning; its succinct title's at least a word too long.
  89. The A-Team
    Convoluted, overstuffed, turned up to 11, and yet, somehow, deadly dull--in other words, white noise.
  90. Second Best
    An ugly, amateurish film that champions mediocrity in a meta-attempt to justify its own ineptitude.
  91. Hôtel Normandy
    There isn't a moment in Hôtel Normandy that isn't painfully contrived, yet, worse still, its mix-ups boast all the inspiration and excitement of a weekend getaway at the local mall.
  92. Zookeeper
    A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.
  93. Juwanna Mann
    This flat run at a hip-hop "Tootsie" is so poorly paced you could fit all of Pootie Tang in between its punchlines.
  94. The Jungle Book 2
    The new tunes sound like Buster Poindexter mainlining Sweet 'n Low, and at a critically song-starved moment, John Goodman's Baloo admits, "King Louie? He split!" Before the third defibrillation of "Bare Necessities," you and your kids might too.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Chasing Papi
    Shamelessly purports to be "the first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America," but the only place you're likely to find such shrill and whitewashed caricatures is in the elitist pages of ¡Hola!
  96. Showtime
    Should come with a disclaimer.
  97. Lullaby
    Rarely has the terminal seemed as interminable as it does in Lullaby.
  98. Breakfast on Pluto
    May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.
    • 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
  100. Love & Sex
    All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.
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