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. 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.
  2. The Guardian
    The Guardian is neither serious enough to take seriously nor flashy enough to get by on thrills alone. Jerry Bruckheimer, where art thou?
  3. In Time
    A pleasing, often rousing movie for the 99 percent, In Time is not without flaws.
  4. Our Brand Is Crisis
    David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seamless
    Though the film is a sober account, the subject alone ensures numerous moments of inspired hilarity.
  6. Kill the Poor
    Shot on a modest DV budget, Kill the Poor isn't pretty, but it's a balanced look at the dirty politics of gentrification.
  7. Redacted
    The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Grace
    A muddled, logic-starved provocation, Grace avoids smugness by refusing to play its body horror for sh**s and giggles, but its resonance is purely atmospheric.
  9. A Love Divided
    Brady and Cunningham share a volatile, symbiotic chemistry, sketching in elegant shorthand the rhythms of a lusty, combative marriage.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tokyo Eyes
    Doesn't so much titillate as irritate.
  11. Bounce
    It's been smoothed over plenty, but this is one creaky, rigged contraption.
  12. Charlie's Angels
    The cheesy disco action scenes are topped only by the movie's ripe double entendres and continual cheesecake.
  13. Barenaked in America
    A pleasant if overlong road show starring five witty, sweet, humble guys.
  14. The First Basket
    The First Basket is more than a triumphalist screw-you to those who think Jews don't play sports.
  15. One Day on Earth
    Ultimately, a collage film is only as good as its constituent parts, and, with a few exceptions, the brief snippets from this particular day on earth are far too prosaic to be illuminating.
  16. The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.
  17. Six Million and One
    All the while, Fisher and his kin's incessant, contentious bickering exposes the ongoing difficulty of reconciling with inherited trauma, though such squabbling's protracted prominence also, ultimately, suggests the need for a bit more editorial trimming.
  18. In the Name Of
    A nuanced, character-driven critique of the Catholic Church and its regressive stance on homosexuality.
  19. 5 to 7
    There's no credibility to Arielle and Brian's romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn't? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif she treats like a slow child?
  20. Snowtime!
    Co-directors Jean-François Pouliot and François Brisson progressively heighten the scale of the battles, but the emotional tenor is pitched at innocence and fun. The filmmakers attempt a transition toward a more bitter rivalry, but they just don't have the heart to make this children's war ugly.
  21. Kaleidoscope
    Jones and Reid are hemmed in by the screenplay’s schematic nature.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Although it's unlikely that Englishman Hough has connected with the auto culture that has made his latest film the darling of the drive-ins, Hough at the same time has connected with the perfect vehicle for his mechanized, dehumanized concerns. [01 Aug 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
  23. Submission
    You know that moment about fifteen minutes before the end of most American narrative features, when the protagonist is brought to his or her low point, and it looks as if there’s no possible way things could get better? Something has probably gone wrong if viewers are cheering that.
  24. 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.
  25. Man of Tai Chi
    The film is stale Chinese popcorn from the get-go, with only Chen's wiry guilelessness and wicked athletic skills to keep it remotely edible.
  26. The Nativity Story
    There are a few quietly affecting scenes here, in which we see Mary and Joseph as the terribly frightened newlyweds they probably were, unsure of what to make of their extraordinary circumstances. But too often, the actors register as little more than set dressing and, despite Hardwicke's resolve to give us the realNativity as we've never seen it before, much of the movie smacks of convention.
  27. Anger Management
    Consistently wacky and sometimes nearly surreal.
  28. Stonehearst Asylum
    With Stonehearst Asylum, director Brad Anderson doles out a vintage Halloween treat — a straightforward Poe adaptation of the sort that Vincent Price used to star in — and gives it a freshness and complexity that make it a delight.
  29. Formosa Betrayed
    Neither the investigation nor the suspense (hobbled by editorializing) have much impact; the movie, necessarily shot in Thailand, plays like secret-history tourism, complete with archival footage haunting the screen.
  30. Front Cover
    Come for the breezy chemistry, stay for the thoughtful exploration of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia via a cross-cultural love affair.
  31. The Ordeal
    The movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.
  32. LUV
    Although Common and Rainey make a well-matched duo, their chemistry is frequently squandered by a script that boxes them into impossible roles in one clichéd scene after another.
  33. My Old Lady
    It sounds like a recipe for comedy (and Kline seems to think so too, waltzing and prat-falling through Mathias's alcoholic foibles), but Horovitz's screenplay guns instead for an emotionally and financially tangled melodrama, and ends up feeling aggravatingly inconsistent.
  34. Wild Side
    Lifshitz successfully maneuvers his trio of outcasts toward a state of grace: His vision of misfit utopianism, in its own quiet way, is as defiant as anything in Fassbinder.
  35. Orfeu
    Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.
  36. XX/XY
    A movie that's two-thirds flashback (and could have been called "Ex, Ex, Ex, Why?").
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wood
    A diverting but uneven nostalgia trip.
  38. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Although there's no evidence of sexual chemistry on the screen, the stars share a certain physical defensiveness that occasionally makes them seem simpatico; most of the time, however, they just look bored to death.
  39. Down with Love
    Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.
  40. Don't Tell
    As is typical of contemporary Italian movies, every one of Comencini's women seems on the verge of a hysterical collapse.
  41. Hollywood Dreams
    The movie buzzes with the quirky rhythms of Jaglom's patented improvisational shooting style, and those of Frederick herself, whose go-for-broke zaniness recalls that of a former Jaglom ingenue, Karen Black.
  42. Sexy Baby
    There might be something new to say about sex after all, and it's said in Sexy Baby, a snazzily edited documentary by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus.
  43. The Holiday
    Meyers can write a good zinger, and she has a knack for casting actors who not only look good in bed, but are talented enough to rise above the material and, in some cases, nearly transform it (save Diaz). But make no mistake: We're a long way here from Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    YellowBrickRoad
    The film is caught in the fatal demographic desert between the "Scream" and "Baghead" crowds - neither funny nor quirky enough to sustain interest during its long march.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Snake Moan
    Black Snake Moan sho-nuff ain't no "Sweetback." Indeed, long stretches of Brewer's Suthun-fried sophomore slump come down the country road lookin' as haggard as a workaholic ho on a Sunday morning.
  46. The Good Doctor
    The film is anchored and greatly bolstered by Bloom, who delivers a performance of quietly escalating madness.
  47. The Magic Gloves
    Martin Rejtman's 1999 "Silvia Prieto" fashioned a deadpan farce from the aimless circulation of objects and identities around its unsmiling title character. The Magic Gloves, the Argentine writer-director's 2003 follow-up, is a similarly absurdist smart-com featuring another depressed protag navigating a yuppie Buenos Aires milieu.
  48. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.
  49. The Girl from Monaco
    The modest pleasure of the film issues chiefly from the performances.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Elsa y Fred
    The problem isn't the acting; both actors are superb. It's Elsa's character that is so difficult to take. Only the hopelessly romantic will be able to tolerate her.
  51. Hot Summer Days (Chuen sing yit luen - yit lat lat)
    While the film is slight, predictable, and familiar, it's great popcorn fare.
  52. Vulgaria
    The broadness of the film's comedy might be largely attributable to the conventions of Hong Kong cinema, but to American audiences, the film has an exaggerated notion of its own raunchiness.
  53. Mr. Right
    Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse senses of the phrase. It's often kind of awful but also weirdly effervescent, a movie that salves, with its stars' radiance and charisma, even as it grates.
  54. Blackhat
    There’s visual thinking everywhere you look in Blackhat, which is great until you realize that it’s bled into a kind of overthinking — the movie is too much of a good thing, an exercise that flattens any potential exhilaration or excitement into the sensation of grading a term paper.
  55. Comet
    Sam Esmail’s first film has a visual assurance that suggests the arrival of a gifted director, but the characters he’s created are so off-putting that viewers aren’t likely to appreciate the beauty surrounding them.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Three Days of Rain
    The real subversion is director Michael Meredith's insistence on not capturing interactions between human beings in a frame; with some forethought he could have filmed the actors individually and spliced.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dorian Blues
    Inhabiting the breezeway between the sweet sincerity of "Beautiful Thing" and the didacticism of an ABC "Afterschool Special," this upstate New York coming-out saga will warm PFLAG hearts and kindle empathy in those who've had to tread the family-drama-churned waters of small-town gaydom.
  58. The City of Your Final Destination
    Best is Linney, conquering scenes as the acrid and touching Caroline, her regal bitterness a shield against nostalgia, dressed Park Avenue posh to drink alone.
  59. Remember
    Though it dodders engagingly at its antihero's pace, Remember is not subtle.
  60. Fay Grim
    As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.
  61. The Mothman Prophecies
    A diverting pulp time-waster.
  62. Greendale
    A bargain-basement musical extravaganza.
  63. The Independent
    It lacks the coherent internal logic that distinguishes the best mockumentaries.
  64. Blade II
    Appallingly violent.
  65. Made-Up
    A ham-fisted satire on the American obsession with appearance, Made-Up is ultimately self-defeating and even offensive.
  66. Little Boxes
    While racist slights remain unfortunately common, Little Boxes doesn't exactly use them to illuminate the nuances of suburban life.
  67. Little Manhattan
    Who is this movie's target audience, anyway? Preteens will be bored stupid, while adults are unlikely to want to revisit puppy love in such grueling detail. The lingering, soft-focus, slo-mo shots of Rosemary that punctuate the action suggest a constituency I'd rather not contemplate.
  68. Insidious: Chapter 3
    Tepid ghost story Insidious: Chapter 3 tries and fails to emphasize character-driven drama over cheap, jump-scare-intensive thrills.
  69. Who Do You Love
    Goes from awful to insufferable.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Switch
    Saddled with the responsibility of carrying the film, Bateman acquits himself admirably by playing it straight, developing a genuinely convincing and affecting chemistry with Robinson and taking his character's repression seriously.
  71. Citizen Koch
    Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's scattershot agitprop doc takes the perfidy of the billionaire Koch brothers as its given, offering up montages of Tea Party screamers rather than investigative reporting or rigorous argumentation.
  72. Kill Your Idols
    Kill Your Idols pulls a few punches, tempering its respect for No Wave values like extremity and contentiousness with a more 2006 concern for not actually offending anyone in particular.
  73. Cuban Fury
    Frost can play lovable losers in his sleep, but to succeed, Cuban Fury has to make him dance. A fat man falling down gets a cheap laugh; a fat man with magic feet makes us cheer. Director James Griffiths splits the difference between ridicule and respect, and the resulting comedy is as trite and cloying as a rum and coke.
  74. Mad As Hell
    If Napier hadn't shown up with a camera, Uygur would likely have continued filming himself, because his "firebrand" commentary is only ostensibly about politics; it's mostly about projecting the world onto his own ego and making it Cenk Uygur–shaped.
  75. Sunset Edge
    The way the two story lines come together, involving paintball guns and morphsuits, is more mundane and less spooky than the tone up to that point suggests, but the point of Sunset Edge isn't really the surface narrative.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gridiron Gang
    Never mind the obvious parallels to "The Longest Yard" and "Remember the Titans"; what we get here is one huge, indigestible sports movie platitude.
  77. Pusher (2012)
    Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 Danish crime saga while missing its nasty, grungy spirit.
  78. The Machine
    If the proceedings prove far too familiar, director Caradog W. James delivers a few striking images... as well as a sinister cautionary-tale finale made all the more unsettling by its use of a sterling John Carpenter-style synthesizer score.
  79. Boulevard
    Director Dito Montiel aspires to sensitive drama, but Douglas Soesbe's script too often mires Williams in pat situations.
  80. The Lake House
    Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Stop for Paul
    Crisply shot on a lightweight camcorder, Last Stop for Paul leaves the prevailing impression of an amiable, homespun travelogue done in the style of Bruce Brown's "Endless Summer."
  82. Deadfall
    There are hints of a fun, trashy film beneath the surface, but that film is always subservient to the dull one Dean and Ruzowitzky were more comfortable making.
  83. Bare
    Natalia Leite, here making her feature directorial debut, does have a knack for capturing a sense of place. Both the Nevada landscapes and a supermarket where Sarah works early on have a pleasing clarity and recognizable feeling of malaise. The environment says more than the characters ever do.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That's the Way I Like It
    Writer- director Glen Goei, a London stage actor, ably guides his likable cast through this by-the-numbers story, but he is hobbled by the film's lifeless soundtrack.
  85. Cotton Mary
    Brought to life by the weirdness of its subject matter and the risks Madhur Jaffrey takes in her brilliant performance.
  86. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
    In its best moments, it has the qualities of a ribald folk tale. But it's a slight work, slackly directed, that gets a needed boost from Braga's endearing performance and Chico Buarque's intoxicating score.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    Beefcake's messiness has real charm, and its tribute to Mizer is both appropriately complicated and poignantly sexy.
  89. The Next Three Days
    Once the second act begins with a title card announcing "The Last 3 Months"-the amount of time John spends cooking up labyrinthine plans to spring Lara-Haggis's film becomes interminably nonsensical.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    Although its subject is never less than captivating, Jonathan Furmanski's film is frustratingly unfocused, a scattershot collection of candid footage and biographical information. Thankfully, Blowfly's world is weird as promised.
  91. Maggie
    While zombie drama Maggie seems intended as a showcase for Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting range, the star's performance is smothered by the film's deeply affected style.
  92. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    All the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the stiffness of the bourgeoisie.
  93. My Worst Nightmare
    Whether this is an argument for or against marriage probably depends on the viewer's own experience.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bomb the System
    A needlessly circuitous plot twist leaves a bitter taste, but not before the film's scruffy charm does its work.
  95. London Boulevard
    Monahan's debut has verve and charisma, but, in the end, the tension of a late-night pub shrug.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bobbi Jene
    Bobbi Jene gives you a taste of how a choreographer works, but mainly registers how she feels. The mostly-female production team stays rigorously focused on her effort to have it all, and on the price she pays.
  97. The Hills Have Eyes
    The net effect would be doze-inducing if in fact the Dolby didn't attempt to wake the dead.
  98. Murder on the Orient Express
    Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling, where coincidences are extremely likely, everyone somehow knows a countess, and a man puts honor above all else.
  99. Magnus
    Ree makes things easy for people who don't play chess, deftly pacing Carlsen's triumphs and failures and milking the suspense as "the Mozart of chess" employs his intuition to win, in an age when many players depend on computers to hone their skills.
  100. Nanny McPhee Returns
    McPhee's latest saga neither conjures the humanistic heart of "Babe" nor addresses father-son separation issues with the sobriety of "The Water Horse." Instead, it's merely a compendium of photocopied elements, cartoonish special effects, and easy-bake happily-ever-afters.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »