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 7.6 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
view
per page
  1. Home
    While Close's testimony is sufficiently terrifying, moving toward an apocalyptic vision of climate-change catastrophe, the urgency of her tone is belied by the placidity of the film's visuals.
  2. Walk on Water
    The complex questions Walk on Water raises receive only confused answers.
  3. Trash Fire
    Bates (Suburban Gothic) plays with horror tropes, juggling black comedy and suspense in scenes that tease a gory release but ultimately only emphasize how much members of the creative class can underestimate their backward kin.
  4. One Chance
    The film shoehorns Potts's life story into a familiar underdog template, populating the world with near-mythological threshold guardians who exist to assure the hero that he isn't good enough.
  5. Across the Universe
    Across the Universe, which filters the cultural revolt through a blizzard of early Beatles songs, ends up both reductive and smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience.
  6. L'ennemi intime
    With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.
  7. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    Cirque du Soleil's campy, crackbrained, and in no way unenjoyable 3-D IMAX pageant Journey of Man might be the oddest movie offering of the year so far.
  8. End of the Spear
    Spear has all the earmarks of a middling Indiewood product, from its competent second-tier cast (including "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" hunklet Chad Allen in a dual role as a slain missionary and his grown son) to its earnest plotting and leaden pacing.
  9. As Above, So Below
    As Above, So Below is sometimes creepy but mostly silly, which is too bad because the film's cramped subterranean setting is inherently unnerving.
  10. Waking Ned Devine
    It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.
  11. Beauty and the Beast
    The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.
  12. Hidalgo
    The screwball antics recall "Cannonball Run" more than David Lean.
  13. Champs
    There's nothing especially new or vital to these familiar scenes; ditto a late excursion into the realm of concussions — undoubtedly an epidemic for athletes of all stripes, but one that further muddles an already unfocused film.
  14. Blade: Trinity
    Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.
  15. Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.
  16. Once in the Life
    While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.
  17. My Reincarnation
    Fox's briskness leaves certain questions gaping open. As in, how cynical and derisive is she deliberately being of Rinpoche's teachings, since all we get are trite homilies and vague advice?
  18. The Day After Tomorrow
    Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.
  19. Southern Baptist Sissies
    Southern Baptist Sissies might have benefited from some judicious editing.
  20. The Way Back
    His (Weir) hardship drama is stolidly old-fashioned, more extreme travelogue than exercise in visceral horror.
  21. Rock School
    Don Argott's lively documentary, ostensibly a paean to alternative pedagogy, extends its subject a long leash, and he in turn does his damnedest to sabotage the project. Rock School ends up being a movie about just how little fun rock 'n' roll can be.
  22. The Promise
    You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Center Stage
    Pays lip service to the seriousness of craft but won't let us watch the dancing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mundo alas
    Actual insight into these people's hearts and minds is replaced with skin-deep montages of cheery tour-bus road-tripping, hanging out with friends, and writing songs in the studio.
  25. Runaway Jury
    Not nearly enough time is spent in court--that is, on the movie's ostensible subject. (Besides, the down-to-the-wire deliberation scene is risibly unconvincing and abbreviated.)
  26. Danger Close
    By focusing on Quade’s absolute respect for military service and authority, Salzberg and Tureaud miss an opportunity to explore her pragmatic conservatism, lyrically expressed in her profiles of unquestioning heroism.
  27. Pitch Perfect 2
    The story is stuffed with subplots and gags that are sometimes fun by themselves but don’t quite cohere into a whole — the picture has a melismatic waywardness, as if it’s singing as fast as it can yet is never quite sure where it’s going.
  28. Poltergeist
    The remake grows less interesting as it goes, with final scares dipping into surprising lameness.
  29. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Distractingly tortured metaphors are given a distractingly affected narration by Maya Angelou.
  30. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    A compelling but ultimately unsatisfying film.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adam's Apples
    The melodramas that prolific Anders Thomas Jensen has sculpted over the years have been among the richest works to come out of Scandinavia since Bergman's heyday. But no road is without its pockmarks and Adam's Apples may be the low point of the wunderkind's career.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bad Boys II
    Martin Lawrence's Marcus is the Costello to Smith's Abbott.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    T2 Trainspotting
    It's as if the filmmakers recognized the wanness of the material and settled on a strategy of padding it out with empty high style on the one hand and clever meta awareness on the other.
  34. The Circle
    Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.
  35. Sky
    Fabienne Berthaud's Sky is a road movie that never quite makes the right turns.
  36. A Civil Action
    A slick, shameless job that takes way too long to make its point.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    As full of flickering warmth as it is bereft of larger insight.
  38. Live Flesh
    A soap opera as convoluted as it is overdetermined. [20 Jan 1998]
    • Village Voice
  39. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.
  40. Otelo Burning
    Tiresomely simple, the film introduces a subplot involving betrayal and political informants in the eleventh hour, but by then you're either smitten by these guileless Zulu lads experiencing "freedom" on the waves or you've checked out.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    I'm sure the pot-laced antics of these trashy dudes are, like, totally hilarious on Canadian TV, but they don't translate well to America or the big screen.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghostlight
    Real history and raunch poke through, but the thirtysomething Move is too vital to be Martha in her dotage. Amusing for insiders, Ghostlight may confuse everyone else.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Raspberry Reich
    A lovingly overblown piece of terrorist-chic trashfilm.
  44. The Housemaid
    Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.
  45. The Connection
    It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crazy Like a Fox
    Whether you find the protagonist of Richard Squires's comedy-drama--a dangerous Confederate crackpot or an exemplar of principled defiance likely depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you see the movie.
  47. The Network
    Rather than investigating the harrowing circumstances surrounding each day's broadcast, Orner is content to let each inspiring aspect of the network speak for itself.
  48. St. Vincent
    Some moments still work after the movie grows mawkish.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Better Luck Tomorrow
    Seeing BLT has been positioned as a political act. Alas: The film in question seems hardly worth the fuss.
  50. Special
    All that's left then is a miserablist analogue to M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," a sad portrait of paranoid delusion with wipe-out stunts played for the comic wincing of "Jackass."
  51. Sex Tape
    Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Feast of Love
    For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.
  53. Broken City
    Broken City slogs through such fatigued plot "twists" as having one character confess to another without realizing he's being recorded. The actors look generally unhappy to be here, most of all Crowe, who seems even more miserable than he did in "Les Misérables."
  54. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 aims to please with breathtaking set pieces that’ll convince you to delete all your old diatribes about CGI ruining the movies. But no matter how funny writer-director James Gunn wants this film to be — the one-liners move at lightspeed — too many of the punch lines are referential.
  55. Five Minutes of Heaven
    The production design is spot-on, but Hirschbiegel tries way too hard to create tension, making every occurrence--a record needle dropping, a car door slamming--an unsubtle potential bomb, fraying your nerves like a cheap horror movie.
  56. Echo Park
    Echo Park doesn't circumvent expectations, but it's worth a watch for those small moments of two humans relating to each other on a realistic plane. Just don't expect to learn anything about Echo Park, its residents, or how people deal with gentrification.
  57. Yau doh lung fu bong
    The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Into the Blue
    Granted, the cast has a certain rumpy charm, and setting four-fifths of the movie underwater keeps the pesky surfer-speak to a minimum, but the film is less about thrills than punishing the wicked.
  59. Lolita
    Kubrick goes through the motions with a hula hoop and the munching of potato chips, but there is nothing intuitive or abandoned about the man-nymphet relationship. The Director's heart is apparently elsewhere. [05 Jul 1962, p.11]
    • Village Voice
  60. Bugs!
    As with the more glamorously photographed "MicroCosmos," the climbing, scurrying, and munching eventually grows tiresome, but the film is not without its highlights.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cobra Verde
    It's easy to understand why this was Herzog's final collaboration with the actor (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had "become uncontrollable") but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk to Me
    The banality of Talk To Me is only half disappointing; at least it babbles clichés with conviction.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabbit Hole
    Becca and Howie's extracurricular relationships are the saving grace of a movie that's otherwise a sledgehammer of plot and score.
  64. An Unfinished Life
    As with the director's other films, all that keeps Unfinished from being a complete, treacly bore is its robust performances.
  65. Shottas
    Writer-director Cess Silvera claims he's trying to "show the gritty life of Jamaican immigrants," but Shottas is no more a social-issue film than "Scarface."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blood Diamond
    De Beers can relax; the only indignation stirred up by Blood Diamond won't be among those who worry about where their jewelry came from, but with audiences incensed by facile politics and bad storytelling.
  67. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ella Enchanted
    Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.
  69. Shadow Magic
    Properly picturesque but lacks subtlety and substance in blending Chinese and Western history, ideas, and cinematic conventions.
  70. Fifty-Fifty
    A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Inconvenient Truth
    An Inconvenient Truth does restore one's faith in the value of documentary-as-lecture, not least by extolling the virtues (rare as clean water these days) of politician-as-teacher.
  72. Catch Me If You Can
    DiCaprio is far more successfully cast here than in Gangs of New York: His performance is all about acting; it's a mild kick to see how he'll manage to talk his way out of nearly every scrape.
  73. State and Main
    State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thickheaded as its supposed targets.
  74. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    Not fully understanding its own merits, Easy Money is accidentally fascinating in some moments, but purposefully formulaic in many more.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gabi on the Roof in July
    I know that people like this exist, but, in terms of characters on the screen, I'm never shown why they need to.
  76. Hot Guys with Guns
    Hot Guys with Guns has the occasional spark of a clever comedy, but the lack of focus makes it too limp on laughs to fulfill its potential.
  77. Constantine
    Fans of Hellblazer are bound to be disappointed.
  78. The Infiltrator
    Unfortunately, as he performs the acting equivalent of triple backflips, Cranston isn't given much of a safety net from the script or direction.
  79. Just Looking
    Marshall Karp's script is clever and funny, though studded with anachronisms.
  80. Under solen
    The kind of quotidian pastoral -- about a simple, honest peasant who finds the greatest love of all -- that the Academy invariably finds irresistible.
  81. Forever Strong
    Though director Ryan Little puts together a clean, professional package, at bottom this is a nearly-two-hour scrum of therapeutic direct encounters.
  82. Borg vs. McEnroe
    The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.
  83. Time to Choose
    If An Inconvenient Truth served to scare us, then Time to Choose offers hope, presenting what amounts to an hour-and-45-minute commercial for renewable technology that might inspire confidence in scientific progress even as it reminds us that it isn't cheap being green.
  84. The Dressmaker
    Unfortunately, The Dressmaker does not deliver on this early promise.
  85. 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.
  86. Mumford
    Mumford is good for a few chuckles and not nearly as egregious or cloying as it might have been.
  87. The Free World
    Jason Lew's lost-soul drama The Free World offers a modest exploration of innocence and guilt, with occasional interludes of both violence and romance
  88. Botso
    Too bad the filmmaking never rises to the level of its subject.
  89. Out of the Blue
    There's some nifty soft-focus cinematography and fine performances, but otherwise, not much to resonate on this side of the pond.
  90. The Big Bounce
    The best Elmore Leonard adaptations ("Jackie Brown," "Out of Sight") play behind the beat, and although The Big Bounce isn't top-shelf Dutch, the film finds its own pace.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Swell Season
    To viewers without a preexisting emotional relationship to the couple and their saga, that everyday angst is just banal.
  92. Veronica Guerin
    A pre-programmed mediocrity, a slave to its clichés.
  93. Southpaw
    Southpaw is an exhausting brutalist melodrama, but if nothing else, Fuqua always works with fine actors, and he's got a passel of them here.
  94. Monsters, Inc.
    But Monsters, Inc. -- directed by Pixar soldier Pete Docter, not by master digital comic John Lasseter -- turns out to be stingy on context, commentary, and the prism-ing view of pop culture that made the earlier films mint.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Emperor's Club
    Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.
  96. From Nowhere
    The naturalistic, handheld camerawork aims to create an intimate space for human connection, but the film only skims the surface, taking cues from other touching dramas without ever reaching its own original core.
  97. The Book of Eli
    The Book of Eli's plastic parable isn't much more advanced than "Insane Clown Posse" theology.
  98. The Patsy
    Considerably weaker than The Nutty Professor. [10 Sep 1964, p.17]
    • Village Voice
  99. Art Bastard
    Victor Kanefsky's documentary nonetheless manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.
  100. Hungry Hearts
    Hungry Hearts owes much to early Polanski (especially Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), but Costanzo prizes ambiguity over tension.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »