Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Remember the Titans
    Boorish and flatulent.
  2. Amy
    Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.
    • 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
  4. Butterfly Kiss
    This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 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
  6. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    The film isn't short on ideas, it's just that those ideas are dumbfoundingly pretentious and trite.
  7. 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
  8. The A-Team
    Convoluted, overstuffed, turned up to 11, and yet, somehow, deadly dull--in other words, white noise.
    • 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.
  10. White Hotel
    Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Astoria
    It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.
    • 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.
  13. The Woman Chaser
    The queasiness it makes you feel is more like acid reflux than existential nausea.
  14. 30 Days
    Thuds away at the now familiar New York turf of Jews and their mating habits.
  15. Rocky Road
    This perky would-be consciousness-raiser dilutes a potentially interesting subject -- interracial marriage -- with half-baked platitudes, self-conscious acting, and a plot trite enough to be rejected by the PAX channel.
  16. Tattoo Bar
    This tale of a sprung tough looking to go straight is so familiar it's faceless.
  17. 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.
  18. Boricua's Bond
    Despite its incoherence and inaudible dialogue, this slice-of-life film manages to be simultaneously thuggish and platitudinous.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Loners
    Contains exactly three decent jokes, all stuffed in the last 15 minutes.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  23. 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.
    • 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
    • 25 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Memorial Day
    Placing the onus of the war on the troops, Fox follows "Redacted's" vile moral playbook, only without Brian De Palma's self-reflexive, formalist gestures.
  26. Lifelines
    The film's befuddling direction and tone, queasy HD interiors, and tin-eared, often preposterous, screenplay prove disastrous.
  27. 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.
  28. Who Do You Love
    Goes from awful to insufferable.
  29. The Good Heart
    A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.
    • 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.
  31. 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.
    • 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."
  33. 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.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Now & Later
    Worse, all of this sex is so garishly lit and unimaginatively framed that it's not even fun to watch.
  35. Zookeeper
    A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.
  36. New Year's Eve
    A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.
  37. 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.
  38. The Best and the Brightest
    Drearily shot with cheesy skyline pans, oppressively scored with Hallmark cutesiness, and oddly filled with filthy one-liners.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    What to Expect When You're Expecting
    For all the fear, loathing, and overthinking that Murkoff's bedside text engenders, its journey ends with the hopeful beginning of a new life, whereas the movie leaves you hoping for a swift end to your own.
  40. 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.
    • 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.
  42. 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.
  43. Brother's Justice
    Like an overlong episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with none of the wit and twice the irritation, co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard's impotent, largely unscripted showbiz satire is yet another goof on clueless filmmakers who don't know how to make a film.
  44. Detention
    It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.
  45. The Decoy Bride
    Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.
  46. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  47. A Good Day to Die Hard
    The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together.
  48. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    There isn't enough visual beauty to forgive the screenplay's ugliness, but Bay does brave a daring new standard in product placement.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. The Internship
    For those of you on a really tight entertainment budget, you'll be paying at least 8 cents per minute not to laugh. Your money is better spent on beans and rice.
  53. 2016: Obama's America
    The only true surprise here is D'Souza's haplessness in constructing both film and argument.
  54. Knight Knight
    Making fun of such an inoffensive, amateurish production would be easy and mean, like punching a baby.
  55. Excuse Me for Living
    No strand of Excuse Me for Living's frantic, unfunny, and pseudo-thoughtful narrative is well conceived.
  56. Oldboy
    Colorless and soulless in the extreme, it bears no one's fingerprints at all. There's no reason for this Oldboy to exist. It's so DOA, you stumble out of it wanting to eat something alive.
  57. 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.
    • 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.
  59. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The rotting corpses, projectile insect vomit, and creepy geezers in black arrive pretty much on cue, as does the great Cicely Tyson as the obligatory old blind woman who "sees" more than most people with two good eyes. It's her upper bridge, though, that's truly the scariest thing in the whole movie.
  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. 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.
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. V/H/S/2
    There isn't a scare to be found in the series's second installment.
  65. Holla II
    Dumb as they're written, even Holla II's characters are smart enough to want to exit this clunker as fast as they can.
  66. Absence
    There are many things absent from this found-footage horror movie, including suspense, logic, and originality.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. Savannah
    The story overflows with reverence but is drastically short on passion or suspense.
  70. Morning
    It's a mannered, over-the-top approximation of real anguish and hopelessness that's so phony that it's borderline insulting to those who've truly experienced such tragedy.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. Snow Queen
    Snow Queen proves both visually cruddy and narratively muddled.
  75. 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.
  76. Merry Christmas
    What's really absent from this fiasco is a sense of purpose or an interest in character, as the participants in this weekend-getaway contest are ciphers defined mainly by their degree of obnoxiousness.
  77. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Insurgent is so vapid it seems impossible that there's enough story left for another sequel.
  78. Wrong Cops
    Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.
  79. Interior. Leather Bar.
    It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.
  80. Hollywood Seagull
    Guinzburg's retool is full of unintentional humor, high-school-theater level acting, and shoddy writing.
  81. The Cobbler
    The Cobbler has invented a new category of terrible: cruel schmaltz.
  82. Authors Anonymous
    Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.
  83. 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.
  84. Nothing Without You
    There isn't the faintest glimmer of lived experience to be found here, not the briefest flash of truth.
  85. Lullaby
    Rarely has the terminal seemed as interminable as it does in Lullaby.
  86. Murder101
    It's the very definition of direct-to-video schlock.
  87. Among Ravens
    Among Ravens wants to be the The Big Chill with Gen-X assholes, a weird ambition.
  88. Audrey
    Billed as a comedy but nothing more than a shallow and exasperating portrait of female self-loathing, Dean Pollack's Audrey puts its protagonist through hell -- and its audience along with her.
  89. 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.
  90. Exists
    Against all good sense, Exists plays its material straight, possibly proving itself the year's most laughably derivative and dreary film.
  91. 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.
  92. 108 Stitches
    Its utterly predictable narrative and lazy sexism make for a toxic combination.
  93. Brush with Danger
    Almost nothing makes sense in Brush With Danger, a bewilderingly incompetent and inexplicably racist Indonesian action film.
  94. Field of Lost Shoes
    The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.
  95. Inferno
    Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.
  96. Little Boy
    Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.
  97. 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.
  98. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    The film is as vacuous and undeserving of regard as any of its characters.
  99. 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.
  100. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    It’s as if somebody wrote out the basic setup, figured they would flesh out the character bits and plot twists and jokes later … and then never got around to it. It’s dispiriting and infuriating all at once.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »