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. Peeples
    While she doesn't quite achieve the screwball zaniness she strives for, Chism deserves commendation for crafting a farcical work that feels like it concerns real characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Unfortunately for Schemel, director P. David Ebersole seems to think these pop-up video footnotes are a substitute for narrative development and, more or less, forgets to edit down the rest of the tediously paced rockumentary.
  3. Labor Day
    Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the work of a pod person. Humans, film lovers, and fans of Reitman's till-now-flawless filmography: We've gotta fight back.
  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. We the People: The Market Basket Effect
    In his rousing — if at times syrupy — documentary, director Tommy Reid captures this stranger-than-fiction feel-good tale and bottles it in rosy glass.
  6. The Interview
    The more desperately a comedy tries to be outrageous, the less likely it is to be outrageous -- or even just funny. And that's the fate that befalls The Interview, which offers a few moments of casual brilliance... but otherwise trips itself up in the threads of its contrived absurdity.
  7. RoboCop
    Every bit of it is more advanced: The actors are better, the plot is tighter, the special effects sleeker, the messages more heartfelt. Yet it lacks Verhoeven's bloody, biting scream.
  8. Saint Laurent
    It's rare to see process — the making of anything — dealt with as clearly and poetically as it is in Saint Laurent. It's too bad the movie feels like a confusing, misshapen muslin.
  9. Touching Home
    Incidentally, the film has an Inspirational True Story (and tie-in book) behind it, which comes across not at all in the rather formulaic stuff that's actually onscreen.
  10. Linsanity
    Linsanity doesn't—and shouldn't—hide its star's religious beliefs. But the doc should have the courage to explore them.
  11. Beautiful Creatures
    Director Richard LaGravenese, who also adapted the novel, lavishes the material with greater wit than its demographic demands, and the central love story feels warm-blooded—the air prickles between the leads.
  12. I Am Secretly an Important Man
    Sillen ennobles the havoc of his life with a measure of down-and-out romance, but no moments really puncture a viewer, and the darkness is all too easily shaken off.
  13. 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.
  14. Rebels with a Cause
    Garvy has worked hard to weave the interviews into an exciting narrative, but the focus is perhaps too narrow for the film to be as politically effective as it could have been.
  15. Haiku Tunnel
    It's unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.
  16. Seeing Other People
    While lacking a knockout scene, the script is full of solid laughs punctuated with pangs of emotional insight.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    800 Bullets
    Though the high-noon climax drags somewhat, Álex de la Iglesia's charming comedy celebrates the resilient power of dreams, memories, and the movies.
  18. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Gebbe never asks us to believe in Tore's god, but she asks us to honor his beliefs. She's found an incredible conduit in Feldmeier.
  19. The Intern
    The spongy subtext of this and every Meyers movie is "We're being serious, but we're also being FUN!" No viewer must ever be made to think too much, feel too much, or be left out. She doesn't so much tell a story as lead a team-building exercise.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Highwater
    Sure to become a sacred text to surf-movie enthusiasts, but surprisingly watchable even for those who think "goofy-footing" is a new Southern hip-hop dance craze.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Doing Time for Patsy Cline
    Writer-director Chris Kennedy delights in torturing his poor protagonist--what are the odds that a massive Aussie line dancers' convention would take place in the abandoned train yard right across the street from his jail?--but enduring this oddly humorless "comedy" is even harder on the audience.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    96 Minutes
    The narrative machinery grows creakier as the plot advances, and the film is a bit too strident about some of the issues at play, but 96 Minutes is admirably knotty nonetheless.
  23. Kuso
    Kuso is an astounding feat of animation, humor, and practical effects.
  24. Love, Marilyn
    Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.
  25. Woman Walks Ahead
    The good intentions it carries out to the plains don’t make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist’s clear vision.
  26. The Golden Compass
    In drawing and quartering much of the novel's intent, Weitz ends up with a film that feels not just unfinished but undone.
  27. Skateland
    If Skateland is the sort of work Ritchie's future holds, it's proof that some talents are better off staying home.
  28. A Walk in the Woods
    It has its charming, lively moments, but also many that just feel tired and listless, as if the filmmakers were working off a checklist of all the things two well-past-middle-age travelers would say and do while trekking through the wilderness.
  29. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    It looks and feels familiar, and in an era where studio filmmaking has increasingly become an extension of brand management, that should make a lot of people happy. But I can’t say it made me particularly happy.
  30. First Descent
    Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.
  31. Zizek!
    Taylor traipses around after Zizek on a continent-hopping lecture tour, and we get a face full of the man's tireless analysis, in a style that can only be characterized as hyperactive grizzly bear, complete with spit-spewing speech impediment.
  32. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
    The spectacle of two dudes mucking about in the primal forest becomes tedious.
  33. An American Rhapsody
    Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.
  34. Windtalkers
    At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés.
  35. Cherish
    The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.
  36. Quiet Chaos
    Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.
  37. Mammoth
    Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.
  38. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    If La Soga feels neither gritty nor poignant enough to hit that sweet spot, it's not for a lack of sincerity.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    By the time this fawning documentary gets to Foster's CG-animated rendering for a $15 billion planned city in Abu Dhabi (a movie within the movie), you realize it's essentially an infomercial for the company he unsuccessfully tried to sell before the 2008 crash.
  40. Sassy Pants
    With its positive gay images, and even a perfectly executed two-step line dance, Sassy Pants is a feel-good movie for girls of both sexes.
  41. The Sheik and I
    The Sheik and I is funny and visually inventive, which leavens its often bleak vision of the state of freedom in the some parts of the world.
  42. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    The feudal revenge drama sacrifices thrills in favor of moral reflection in the unspoiled French countryside, keeping most of its violence at arm's length.
  43. The Short Game
    The film works not just because it makes golf enjoyable to watch, but also because, by the end, you get to know these kids. It would be nice to see how they're doing in seven years.
  44. Detonator
    An insightful, often funny, never glib character-driven tale about class angst, withered dreams, and the costs of adulthood.
  45. Underwater Dreams
    The film is dismayingly formless, every point is made too many times, and there's too little drama or revelation here.
  46. Boychoir
    Hoffman, naturally, makes his character interesting in the way that genius actors always do. Yet the film's storytelling struggles to match his level of skill.
  47. The Neon Demon
    Whether or not you connect with Refn's brand of over-the-top violence, you can't deny that his attention to color, texture, and music is nearly unmatched by other directors working today.
  48. Gurukulam
    In their equanimous portrait of an Indian religious community, Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal contemplate enlightenment through an earthly source. They capture the quiet activity of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, an ashram in the lush hills of Tamil Nadu, with an observational documentary style that trades dispassionate distance for sympathetic immersion.
  49. Quitters
    What do you do with a loathsome hero? Noah Pritzker isn't sure. His aimless first feature (co-written with Ben Tarnoff) is built around slippery teenage manipulator Clark Rayman (Ben Konigsberg), who goes from a little Machiavellian to big-time creepy with no rhyme or reason.
  50. This Beautiful Fantastic
    There is such a thing as too sweet, and after this film, you'll feel a toothache coming on.
  51. Wanderland
    There’s no rhyme or reason to Alex’s journey, which makes the whole of it equally disarming and daffy.
  52. Contraband
    No one, however, could mistake Contraband for anything but what it is: a shift-job genre movie - not a bad day's work, content to match the blocky trudge of its star rather than attempt panache.
  53. Breathe
    The film lives up to its own characters’ thesis: that disability need not define a person — or even the film about that person.
  54. The Brothers Grimm
    Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."
  55. Bullet Head
    A gonzo ten-minute standoff between Adrien Brody and a man-eating pitbull single-handedly justifies the existence of the otherwise uninspired heist thriller Bullet Head.
  56. Cesar Chavez
    The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.
  57. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    In the end, listing this sequel’s flaws and charms is a loser’s game, and I throw up my hands: I just had fun, maybe mostly because watching these actors brings me so much joy. There’s nothing second best about that, or about them.
  58. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.
  59. Self Medicated
    Self-Medicated reveals itself as a narcissistic fantasy about the misunderstood kid with a heart of gold who finally figures out how to get his shit together: "Good Will Hunting" with a side of Capracorn.
  60. Five Dances
    If only verisimilitude equaled quality. But unfortunately, schmaltzy music and drab melodrama drag down the otherwise graceful moves of Five Dances.
    • 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.
  62. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    That You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not more dull is due in large part to the adorably flamboyant Punch (late of Dinner for Schmucks and Hot Fuzz).
  63. Trust Me
    The film isn't as biting as The Player or Swimming with Sharks, and neither Howard's struggles nor Lydia's mystery is a match for the electricity of the supporting actresses in their brief roles.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Due Date
    Fast, lazy, and out of control in a manner that's basically commendable.
  65. Te Ata
    Nathan Frankowski’s biopic has the saccharine, deliberate feel of a Hallmark movie, that doesn’t make the woman at its center any less inspirational.
  66. How to Be Single
    No matter how much fibrous real talk it's wrapped in, How to Be Single has a heart made of sugary-sweet white chocolate.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl, Interrupted
    Contains some nicely restrained turns, like Clea Duval as Kaysen's Oz-obsessed roommate, but mainly it's a showcase for Ryder's winsome victim
  68. The American Astronaut
    Rarely funny and straining to reach feature length, The American Astronaut achieves sweetness via its straight-faced take on utter gobbledygook.
  69. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.
  70. For the Plasma
    For the Plasma finds genuine, almost innocent-seeming delight in its own swerves in style and rhythm.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Baxter
    A sign of The Baxter's charm is that it's essentially spoiler-proof: We know from the get-go which couples will pair off, and the pleasures lie in the spring-stepped vibe, the natty throwback wardrobe, and the intricate goofball patter.
    • 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.
  73. The Man with the Iron Fists
    If Iron Fists is sometimes badly made, it is refreshingly badly made. It has a homemade charm that comes from a sense of having gestated in a lifelong obsession.
  74. Love
    The couplings have an artful intensity lacking in pornography, which favors athleticism and disconnectedness, and the lighting — well, the best thing in the movie is the look of it all, which in a tony sex-flick counts for a lot.
  75. Jack the Giant Slayer
    By the standards of today's bombastic "event" movies, this is a refreshingly modest endeavor—one in which the main event is the skillful holding of our attention, all the way from "Once upon a time" to "Happily ever after."
  76. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    Valerian is at times so mind-meltingly beautiful and strange that I’m still not sure I didn’t just dream it all.
  77. Desierto
    Sam's racist behavior may be intended to make him a menacing sign of our times, but such unbelievable mustache-twirling makes him as threatening as a C-grade Freddy Krueger knockoff.
  78. Live From New York!
    Fortunately, Live From New York! isn't all overblown hagiography.
  79. Asylum
    Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the "DSM-IV."
  80. A LEGO Brickumentary
    A largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad.
  81. The Legend of Pale Male
    Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.
  82. Kaaterskill Falls
    The filmmakers skillfully evoke the sense of menace that nature holds for many urban dwellers. -- Sometimes, though, the editing is choppy, and the film could use more of a script.
  83. Birthday Girl
    It may not be particularly innovative, but the film's crisp, unaffected style and air of gentle longing make it unexpectedly rewarding.
  84. Km. 0 - Kilometer Zero
    Aiming for Almodóvar lite, the flick is more reminiscent of "The Love Boat" -- drenched this time in cheery polysexuality. Everyone is an angel (and a horny little devil) in this breezy earthly trifle, even if the zaniness never quite takes wing.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Le divorce
    Entranced by the natives, Le Divorce reduces the knowing ditziness of Johnson's novel to vapid, exchange-student wonderment.
  86. Fleeing by Night
    This dreadfully earnest inversion of the "Concubine" love triangle eschews the previous film's historical panorama and roiling pathos for bug-eyed mugging and gay-niche condescension.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Naked in Ashes
    Naked reads, in places, like a street fair on the Santa Monica Pier. But it's utterly sincere about the practices it depicts.
  88. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    [An] intense and dazzling new documentary.
  89. Mamma Mia!
    It's little more than droopy ditties draped around a threadbare plot.
  90. Think Like a Man
    Enduring a day-long session of couples' therapy is more fun (and flies by faster) than this film.
  91. Snitch
    Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    She's All That
    Amid all the cameos (Anna Paquin, Usher, Lil' Kim), only Prinze, who has the ethereal, gentlemanly quality of a young Anthony Perkins, gets enough screen time to really make an impression.
  93. Skyscraper
    I almost admire the laziness of the scripting. In this overworked, underpaid country of ours, why begrudge a screenwriter seizing the chance to knock off early?
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Aquamarine
    The film's true focus is the friendship between the two girls, although this tends to get lost between Elizabeth Allen's jittery direction and the screenplay's contrivances.
  95. My Date with Drew
    When our hero finally does get his moment in the sun--c'mon, would someone have bought the movie if he didn't?--My Date With Drew offers the surreal spectacle of pursuer and pursued pleasantly gabbing, obliviously immersed in a mutual PR stunt.
  96. The Face of Love
    Bening and Harris have excellent chemistry.
  97. God's Pocket
    The story... could have worked well as a pitch-black comedy, but first-time director John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) takes the material so seriously that the mood never changes much after leaving the funeral home.
  98. 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.
  99. Risen
    Cliff Curtis is appealingly low-key as Christ, humble in a way that the film around him would have done well to emulate.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transporter 3
    The movie has more lags in action than either of the previous episodes, and somehow the dialogue is even more daft
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »