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 7.6 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. 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.
  2. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Before it descends into Percy Jackson and the Things That Happen in Movies Like This, the adventure at times clicks into the inventive groove of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, which at their best are touched with the high strangeness of the ancient tales that inspire them.
  3. We're the Millers
    This film's eagerness to please functions as a slow poison, draining The Millers of its vitality by rendering its characterization uneven, its potential undeveloped, and its plot predictable and stupid.
  4. Breaking the Girls
    A decently acted, often drolly funny, tautly directed thriller that proves to be a Russian doll of motivations, coincidences, and plot-twists; it would have been more satisfying if it weren't so unnecessarily convoluted.
  5. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.
  6. Elysium
    Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.
  7. Rising from Ashes
    Rising from Ashes is not just about a cycling team; it's a testament to what happens when human beings care for one another.
  8. Our Children
    Can a film that holds no surprises be of value? In the case of Our Children, which masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide, the answer is decidedly yes.
  9. Drift
    The crookedness of the narrative is compounded by the film's failure to display its characters' great pleasures (surfing and drugs) in visually expressive ways.
  10. Breakup at a Wedding
    Those who believe weddings to be exorbitant, empty spectacles have a fair-weather friend in writer-director Victor Quinaz, whose inventive debut, Breakup at a Wedding, attempts an aloof, smirking pose but surrenders to sentimentality in the end.
  11. Cockneys vs Zombies
    Weightless as a bag of crisps, this matinee fare offers more laughs than scares. Its longest-lasting contribution, however, might be the cheery earworm of a fight song that plays over the end credits, infectious as a zombie bite.
  12. The Artist and the Model
    Treating one's audience like ignorant children in need of lecturing is hardly a way to win fans, or display one's own artistry.
  13. Europa Report
    Simply put, the care and thoughtfulness that goes into footage-faking has not been applied to the film's script or structure.
  14. 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.
  15. 2 Guns
    This is a here today, gone tomorrow trifle, albeit one with lots of gunplay. In midsummer, that may be enough, but it's still a shame that 2 Guns shoots so many blanks.
  16. The Spectacular Now
    Director James Ponsoldt gives us long, loose, single-shot courtship scenes, each a marvel of staging and performance.
  17. The Canyons
    People who don't understand movies often speak of them as escapism, a kind of passive fantasy. Lohan's performance in The Canyons, so naked in all ways, is the ultimate retort to that kind of idiocy: To watch it is to live in the moment.
  18. The Wolverine
    The Wolverine—despite being an improvement on Gavin Hood’s muddled 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine—isn’t worthy of Jackman’s gifts. It’s a reasonably engaging summer diversion, a semi-rousing adventure that doesn’t make you feel robbed of two hours of your life.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Time Being
    The characters are as leached of tone as the film's chiaroscuro sets and grisaille paintings, although Langella is certainly game.
  20. Wasteland
    Athale has a flair for guy-pal banter; here, the talk is funny and profane, silly and profound, often in the same breath.
  21. Terraferma
    It's all very predictable, very Hollywood. Storytelling cliché, it would seem, knows no borders.
  22. Stranded
    Trite dialogue, stock characters, and bad-to-middling special effects make Stranded more tedious than scary or nerve-wracking.
  23. Neander-Jin: The Return of the Neanderthal Man
    Director-producer Florian Steinbiss's German-set, largely German-cast comedy mixes genres with all the quality control of a fourth-grader dispensing every soda flavor into one cup.
  24. Frankenstein's Army
    The film itself works best once most of the soldiers have been dispatched—too often in the first half, the constant running and discharging of firearms proves too similar to watching a first-person-shooter video game.
  25. First Comes Love
    Wise, warm, funny, open, and more interested in life as it's actually lived than any other to debut this summer.
  26. Cavedigger
    The line between creative ambition and risky obsession is sharply drawn—or rather, carved out of New Mexico sandstone—in the life and work of wholly motivated artist Ra Paulette.
  27. Drug War
    Drug War might arguably be [To's] best film for this reason—it doesn't attempt to raise the stakes on its genre, but instead fully exploits what's there, piecing together an elaborate narc campaign tale out of classic clichés and tight-knot plotting, and letting the disaster of balls-out crime make its own statement.
  28. Blue Jasmine
    Blue Jasmine is so relentlessly clueless about the ways real human beings live, and so eager to make the same points about human nature that Allen has made dozens of times before, that it seems like a movie beamed from another planet.
  29. The To Do List
    Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey's debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off.
  30. Centro Histórico
    A rich, artful quartet of shorts mirroring the diverse idiosyncrasies of four significant auteurs.
  31. R.I.P.D.
    Unfortunately, the interesting drabness of the afterlife’s police department is paired with the colorless paucity of the film’s heavies...The deados, unmemorable CG brutes, spout generic bad-guy dialogue undistinguished by humor or characterization.
  32. The ROMEOWS
    Artistry isn't the business of this film, and neither, to any great extent, is grasping the details of the anecdotes these men tell; like any meal, it's the flavor that matters.
  33. 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.
  34. RED 2
    Red 2, disappointing in so many ways, isn't torture to watch, in part because Mirren has even more to do than she did in the first installment.
  35. Girl Most Likely
    Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan.
  36. Nicky's Family
    It's a shame the way the film's narrative is undermined by long stretches of soulless re-enactments, by a well-meaning but energy-sapping final tribute, and by haphazard storytelling.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ways to Live Forever
    A cute kid dying of cancer is usually a surefire way for filmmakers to get the tears flowing, but despite a few powerful moments, this children's-book-turned-movie isn't designed to make its audience cry.
  38. Under the Bed
    The real bogeyman is incomprehensible plotting in director Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed, which matches narrative incoherence with one of the most over-the-top portentous scores in horror-cinema history.
  39. Turbo
    Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.
  40. Only God Forgives
    Refn may be taking himself too seriously or not taking anything seriously enough—it's hard to tell. But Only God Forgives, so brazen in its double-scorpion-bowl vision, is at least good for a giggle or two. Its sins are many, but after a while, it's not even worth keeping count.
  41. Evidence
    The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.
  42. Dealin' with Idiots
    Years of HBO seasoning has given Garlin and his cast a sure touch and great timing...but the whole project is mean-hearted and lazy, and it dawdles in repetition and dead air as if it's got a 14-show TV season to spin out.
  43. Computer Chess
    So far the funniest, headiest, most playfully eccentric American indie of the year, Bujalski's perceptive avant-garde comedy...teases out unanswered existential and behavioral questions about mankind's curious obsession with artificial intelligence and automation.
  44. Broken
    Unfortunately, Broken lives up to its mawkish title, and the slice-of-life tragedies of the film's first half devolve into manipulative melodrama in the latter part. When society breaks, the spell does, too.
  45. Big Words
    Drumming doesn't quite have the skills to finesse the varying tones demanded by his textured script...and he could have taken one more pass on smoothing out character arcs, which are too truncated to be believable in a few cases. Still, the ensemble cast is fantastic, and Drumming is a talent to watch.
  46. Blackfish
    The movie is revealing, wrenching, and important, a reminder that what feels wrong in our gut—the effort to turn free-roaming and unknowable beasts into caged vaudevillians—is always worth investigating.
  47. Beneath
    Beneath may be an earnest goof, but any intended irony is so spiked with rainy-day-matinee movie love that the result is an oddly guileless horror exercise, unscary but rather adorable.
  48. The Act of Killing
    More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.
  49. The Conjuring
    The Conjuring's problem, beyond its lack of a conjuring, is how its otherworldly hokum is stubbornly of this world.
  50. Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    Intentions and effect are at odds throughout Jorge Hinojosa's one-note documentary.
  51. Grown Ups 2
    A few decent one-liners notwithstanding, the movie comes off as willfully uninspired.
  52. Exit Elena
    Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.
  53. Les Coquillettes
    Letourneur captures film fests' buzz of self-congratulatory promiscuity but never makes the many parties and mishaps compelling.
  54. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    A wide-ranging, if shallow, exploration of intrusive government surveillance practices.
  55. Still Mine
    [A] pitch-perfect, deeply affecting film.
  56. The Shine of Day
    The Shine of Day shows strangers rockily building a family together.
  57. Viola
    The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.
  58. V/H/S/2
    There isn't a scare to be found in the series's second installment.
  59. Pawn Shop Chronicles
    Director Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, Crossing Over) makes plain his cartoon-comedy intentions early and often via comic-book-panel-style title cards. The presiding atmosphere of over-the-top zaniness, however, is of a broad, banal sort involving little people, rampant nudity, and quasi-religious nonsense.
  60. Israel: A Home Movie
    Lilti tells a fine story, but he doesn't always look closely enough at what he's saying.
  61. The Hunt
    Unlike in The Celebration, the cruelty and suffering in The Hunt feel both overly schematic and intellectually muddled.
  62. The Hot Flashes
    The raunchy, feminist-revenge jokes are the best part of this feel-good, you-go-ladies sports comedy.
  63. Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station is intimate in the best way, thanks largely to Jordan's deft, responsive performance.
  64. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting—beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties—while never letting us forget its formidable perils.
  65. Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim is big and dumb in a smart way.
  66. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    The film is often beautiful and appealingly light. Every clear-eyed insight into why pushy people insist on pushing is matched by loose ensemble humor and lyric reveries.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Way, Way Back
    The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness but satisfying all the same.
  68. Stuck in Love
    Writer-director Josh Boone populates Stuck in Love with smart characters breaking from emotional holding patterns of varying contours.
  69. The Look of Love
    Coogan's portrayal is heartfelt, but The Look of Love rarely exploits its star's comedic dexterity.
  70. Just Like a Woman
    A multicultural mini–Thelma and Louise but far duller than that description implies, Just Like a Woman peddles feminist empowerment with one-note didacticism.
  71. Absence
    There are many things absent from this found-footage horror movie, including suspense, logic, and originality.
  72. A Girl and a Gun
    Since the conversation is unfocused and there's no real thesis, we get a girl and a gun but not really a movie.
  73. Despicable Me 2
    There are so many ways Despicable Me 2 could have gone wrong, and so many things it does right.
  74. Copperhead
    Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.
  75. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
    Big Star may not be the best introduction for those who don't yet have at least some passing familiarity with the bruised-knee wistfulness of songs like "Thirteen," or the quavery undersea despair of "Kangaroo." But for anyone already curious, Nothing Can Hurt Me delivers the goods.
  76. The Lone Ranger
    The Lone Ranger has it all, but what you end up with is not much. It's an extravagantly squandered opportunity.
  77. The Heat
    The movie -- too much of it -- is spent testing the boundaries of how loud and obnoxious McCarthy can be. Feig doesn't hand this able comic actress the gift of freedom; he simply gives her enough rope, which isn't nearly the same thing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Magic Camp
    Real drama, from a storytelling perspective, is scarce, but that's as it should be.
  79. 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.
  80. Compulsion
    The game of wills that ensues between the two women isn't terribly interesting, much less suspenseful, and in fact, it's not clear that director Egidio Coccimiglio and screenwriter Floyd Byars ever settled on whether they were making a thriller or a satire about food and celebrity.
  81. Assaulted: Civil Rights Under Fire
    A surprisingly thoughtful, well-researched attempt to give both sides of the argument respect while illuminating the long history of tensions surrounding gun ownership in America.
  82. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    If you somehow manage to stay dry-eyed through the concert numbers, the end should set you bawling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Band Called Death
    A beautiful tale of life, love, music, and family, of things not working out but also working out just as predicted.
  84. White House Down
    Often, the hilarity is indisputably intentional. If you think you'll laugh and clap, try it; if you know you'll hate it, you're right.
  85. Gideon's Army
    Porter's film is dramatic, unsettling, despairing, and in the end thrilling -- at some point, it grows from a portrait of this country's problems into a celebration of a possible solution.
  86. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    It's a smart, funny, tough-minded film crammed with data and personal anecdotes, each illuminating the other, each sketching in the staggering costs—and not just financial—of the ways authorities in this country have shaped the drug issue. It's far from glib.
  87. Museum Hours
    The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.
  88. Some Girl(s)
    A final twist stamps this as a companion or corrective to The Shape of Things, this time with the man as the monster. This isn't as bracing as that film, but it's far from the horror show LaBute's detractors often accuse him of writing.
  89. The Secret Disco Revolution
    The film isn't as smart on the issue of race as it needs to be, and its feminist read of the music and scene feels forced in places, but as an entry-level conversation starter, it gets the job done.
  90. Laurence Anyways
    The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.
  91. 100 Bloody Acres
    Playing like a Down Under Elmore Leonard novel, 100 Bloody Acres features lucky breaks and quick reverses; a persistent soundtrack of Aussie oldies helps keep the mood cheery, despite a literal vatful of blood.
  92. Byzantium
    Byzantium isn't Jordan's first movie about bloodsuckers—that would be 1994's Interview with the Vampire—but it's the right vampire movie for today, poetic and elegant in an artfully tattered way.
  93. I'm So Excited
    I'm So Excited! is characterized by a distinct brand of unsuccessful yet ambitious storytelling, the kind often found in minor works by major masters.
  94. Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth
    This picture may not have the structure of a more practiced documentary, but what it lacks in delivery it compensates for with fervency.
  95. Bert and Arnie's Guide to Friendship
    Enjoyment of Jeff Kaplan's film will vary given your capacity to simultaneously laugh and wink at the hijinks of two of the least palatable characters to share screen time in recent years.
  96. Rushlights
    The endless hidden connections and coincidences eventually become ridiculous.
  97. Downloaded
    The doc is only about as revealing as a middling magazine article on the subject.
  98. The Attack
    The Attack is most avowedly "about" terrorism. But that's a subject, not the subject. The film, an arresting and upsetting one, is also about love, trauma, and trust, both within one particular marriage and within entire cultures.
  99. Somm
    The film maintains a sluggish calm, like its mellow jazz soundtrack, and suffers from following four players with similar stories.
  100. Three Worlds
    An overdrawn soap opera about everyone's simultaneous fear of and longing for consequences.
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