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. Gerrymandering
    It gets complicated: Re-districting in Chicago gave Obama a clear advantage in his Senate election, an inconvenient truth that Reichert leaves open to debate. A clearer example of gerrymandering's mendacity is offered by Tom DeLay, who rides his black heart into yet another political documentary and fills, as ever, the role of the indisputable villain.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie
    Perhaps the fly-on-the-wall approach of Esrick's mentor (and this film's executive producer) D.A. Pennebaker would have been more revealing. Instead, we get just a mystery man in white.
  3. Like Crazy
    Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.
  4. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    As ever, he has the last laugh. This is How Stella Got Her Groove Back, for the Pop-Tart crowd, a wish-fulfillment weepie that not only narrowly clears Perry's low bar, thanks mostly to McLendon-Covey and Brown, but has already sold the TV sitcom rights to Oprah.
  5. The Sisterhood of Night
    It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.
  6. The Little Death
    Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.
  7. Ikland
    Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.
  8. Passione
    Works best when its director tamps down his impulse to enhance the performances with florid narratives, focusing on just the singer and the song.
  9. Staten Island Summer
    The best that can be said about teen sex comedy Staten Island Summer is that it goes down easy.
    • 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.
  11. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Deschamps never ventures below the surface of Redzepi's wildly successful experiment, and while the pictures are pretty, no one judges food on appearance alone.
  12. My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
    Corfixen celebrates her husband for being open in his work, but never shows us how his real-life concerns translate into commendable creative risk-taking.
  13. Bad News Bears
    Hardly the kids'-sports movie we need, but maybe it's as much as we can handle.
  14. A Better Life
    Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason are unable to commit fully even to this sudsy vision, tacking on a coda that completely undermines their already timid message.
  15. Signs & Wonders
    Pretension looms, and for many the web of symbolism will be too thick. But Rampling, to her credit, helps hold the nuthouse together.
  16. Failure to Launch
    Failure to Launch has all the gravitas of a midseason-replacement sitcom.
  17. The Ground Truth
    The details are eye-opening (or ear-opening, in the case of marching songs taught to the new Marines about slaughtering Arab schoolchildren), but soon Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner.
  18. It Had to Be You
    The film takes a few jumps in time and employs some mildly experimental techniques. Unfortunately, most of the humor doesn't stick.
  19. Sonny
    Amid the cliché and foreshadowing, Cage manages a degree of casual realism.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Even if the speechifying is cringingly trite, and even though it's evident from Colin's first frame onscreen that 21 will be Ally's lucky number, at least her roundelay through exes allows for a few scant moments of inspired lunacy, led by Faris's cartoon-perfect vocal talents.
  21. Journey from the Fall
    Tran's reliance on declamatory political dialogue and movie-of-the-week inspirationalism feels decidedly old-fashioned and, finally, even phony.
  22. Anonymous
    Emmerich's movie is sporadically enjoyable trash with better performances than it has any right to: Hogg's verminous villain leaves a trail of cold, oozing hisses.
  23. Joy
    Russell enthusiasts — and I consider myself one — often applaud the director's abiding interest in the messiness of his characters' lives, most vividly on display in American Hustle, a movie animated by flamboyant dissemblers and depressives. But the disorder found in Joy is a reflection not of any quicksilver dynamics among the actors but of the odd tonal shifts in the film itself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Boys Are Back
    Carr's original anecdotes don't supply much storyline, so Hicks spans the gaps with golden-lit montages set to Sigur Rós. They're a great advertisement for Australian vacations. And vasectomies.
  25. When in Rome
    Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rick
    Rick (Bill Pullman) is an embittered cad who fails to earn the audience's sympathy, so the film falls short of its source's tragic dimensions. That aside, Daniel Handler's script and Curtiss Clayton's direction hit all the right notes, especially in the final act.
  27. Empire of Silver
    It's decent, exoticized pulp with a porcelain veneer, and should be consumed idly.
  28. Sade
    Too bland and fustily tasteful to be truly prurient, Sade moves along at a reasonable clip, goosed by claps of gothic lighting, solemn chords, and amplified sound effects.
  29. Scary Movie 4
    The jokes miss more than they hit, but there are a lot of them, and when they work, it's gold.
  30. Circumstance
    Keshavarz's earnest, well-intentioned first feature on women's oppression in Iran has trouble resisting its own heavy hand.
  31. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    Even its most interesting human subjects can't compare to the beauty and enigma of the wild horses who, after a life of running free, find themselves forced to two-step and bow to bizarre commands.
  32. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    A competent if overlong blend of policier, sci-fi conspiracy thriller, daikaiju eiga (giant monster) stompfest, and tragic romance. It's also anime (short for "cheaper than live-action").
  33. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary could use a shot of the mania that fueled Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." As deadpan as he is, Depp could use a crazed Benicio Del Toro to complement his cool.
  34. Please Stand By
    The film itself is often flat, akin to a very well-directed after-school special crafted exclusively to dramatize what it might be like to either live on the high-functioning end of the spectrum or care for someone who’s there.
  35. Hail, Caesar!
    The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Just an American Boy
    Looking puffier than he did in New York last month, Earle gets his band together, rewrites his play about executed Christian Karla Faye Tucker on the eve of opening night, defends his patriotism (and yours), and flogs the current LP. And then he rocks some more.
  37. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    This is one of the greatest missed opportunities in recent cinema history: Del Toro looms more impressively on camera than he does in the marketing material, embodying a wicked man's perverse sense of family, honor, and self-interest.
  38. Space Station 76
    Sympathetic audiences may be diverted by Space Station 76's period design and skilled performances, and by the mystery of what exactly the filmmakers are going for. (The less sympathetic may just ask what the point is.)
  39. The Other Son
    Ham-fisted dialogue and clichéd characterizations trump genuine chemistry in The Other Son, a contrived Franco-Israeli drama about two 18-year-olds, an Israeli and a Palestinian, accidentally switched at birth.
  40. Like Crazy
    The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.
  41. Sikandar
    Despite the cliché-riddled translation and super-corny sound design, writer-director Piyush Jha presents an affecting account of the Kashmir conflict through the struggles of its children.
  42. Meeting Spencer
    Though it's a big thrill that the world's finest character actor has his very own lead role, one wishes there were more meat on the elegant bones of Meeting Spencer to justify his cheerfully offhand wit.
  43. Death of a President
    Dramatically inert but a minor techno-miracle, Range's movie is a faux documentary with fake talking heads and seamless digital effects.
  44. Pusher (2012)
    Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 Danish crime saga while missing its nasty, grungy spirit.
  45. Whip It
    Highlights: Andrew Wilson as the roller girls' coach (ah, so there's the Wilson brother who can act) and the roller-derby vets (played especially well by Juliette Lewis and Kristen Wiig) about whom we learn just enough to wish the movie was focused on them instead.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Callas Forever
    Sadly, this camp drama, a eulogy by one of Callas's closest friends, pales in comparison to the four minutes of "La Mamma Morta" in Philadelphia.
  47. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    It’s still worth watching at least once, just to see what can go wrong when funny people aren’t allowed to be funny.
  48. The Visit
    The last scenes contain so many moral and spiritual turnarounds that Alex (Harper) -- and the film -- are all but buried in the uplift. Harper, in a fierce, nuanced performance, deserves better.
  49. Special Treatment
    That's why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep as hers.
  50. Black November
    Oddly, that extra star power makes Black November look cheap. It's threadbare for an action flick... The story Amata wants to tell is much simpler, and he might have been more successful sticking to his own guns and staying with his sturdy, empathetic heroine.
  51. R100
    You'd expect more yucks from the country that bequeathed tentacle porn unto the world.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bedtime Stories
    While no one was expecting the live-wire daring of "Punch-Drunk Love" or even "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," the Adam Sandler who shows up in Bedtime Stories is that most unnecessary of movie-star guises: the benign family-comedy guy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Scott's redo comes up short in almost every regard against the '74 model--against David Shire's knuckled-brass score, against its mugs' gallery of '70s New York character actors, against Peter Stone's serrated script, and certainly against its wordless punchline.
  54. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    A bit naive and formless.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babies
    Is Babies a good movie? Of course not. But that's missing the point--like asking if a porn video is a good movie. Babies gets the job done.
  56. The Hunt
    Unlike in The Celebration, the cruelty and suffering in The Hunt feel both overly schematic and intellectually muddled.
  57. Bittersweet Motel
    As homey as old sweats.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9
    Those who fear that the mainstream of contemporary art has become little more than an extension of fashion will find no comfort in Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney's latest big-budget ejaculation of ritual self-involvement and superficial foofery.
  59. Live by Night
    Somewhere inside the 128-minute Live by Night is a reasonably solid 168-minute movie struggling to get out. No, that’s not a typo: You can sense the contours of an absorbing story as writer/director/star Ben Affleck’s slapdash and fragmented assemblage limps along. Most of the pieces are there, but they remain pieces.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cashback
    The movie is too cute by half, made close to unbearable whenever Ben's narration spews glib pseudo-profundities about memory and temporal stillness. But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun.
  61. Taken 3
    Taken 3 isn't brilliant, but it's a hell of a lot of dumb, head-smacking fun.
  62. Dial A Prayer
    Director Kiley is mostly successful at keeping Hallmark banalities at bay, relating Cora's crime in a series of tense flashbacks, and populating the film with funny characters played by a top-notch cast.
  63. Complete Unknown
    While [Rachel Weisz] is a compelling performer, the film is ultimately a Hitchcock-inspired thriller without too many real thrills.
  64. Dust
    Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square's reflection in a windshield. But in reaching for a cubist style of storytelling, he sacrifices character and motivation.
  65. Tully
    The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.
  66. The Italian Job
    Zesty in a workmanlike sort of way, providing supporting henchmen Jason Statham and Mos Def with pleasingly unsensational characters given to subtle twitches of idiosyncrasy.
  67. If You Build It
    Creadon unveils his story in a haphazard, backwards-unfolding way.
  68. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A less offensive concoction than Luketic's "Legally Blonde," Win a Date is nevertheless an oddity, unsure of its tone and even of what period it's set in.
  69. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Like the first two Millennium movies, this final installment feels thoughtlessly put together, its script unpruned and rushed through, all to capitalize on the staggering worldwide popularity of its dead author.
  70. Night at the Museum
    The first half-hour's too slow; the last half-hour's too manic, as if to compensate. But at least it entertains, thanks in large measure to the buddy-pic relationship between Owen Wilson's miniature cowpoke and his Roman pal Steve Coogan.
  71. All We Had
    The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.
  72. Diana
    Diana is a Lifetime movie in sensible pumps, at once too silly to be taken seriously, yet so self-serious it rarely allows us to giggle.
  73. Darfur Now
    If you evaluate Darfur Now against the goals it sets for itself--as a stirring call to action--it must be considered lacking.
  74. Sweet November
    If the movie works on its own insipid level, it's because of high-gear star power -- 50 times the captivator Dennis ever was, Theron is terrific at creating adorable intimacy with little help from the script or director and exudes more guileless élan than any of the film's many puppies.
  75. How to Start a Revolution
    How to Start a Revolution plays like a Nobel Prize–campaign film and never once demonstrates an understanding of the distinction between encomium and inquiry.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World Order
    Neither a call to alarm nor a laugh-at-the-loonies yukfest, the doc charts a temperate middle course through its subjects' heated rhetoric.
  77. The Pulitzer at 100
    It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.
  78. The Zero Theorem
    Too bad the story tucked around all that production design is such a futuristic drag.
  79. Margin Call
    Unlike "The Company Men," which successfully explored the moral conscience and despair of its corporate titans and middle managers, Margin Call's bids for sympathy for its most conflicted character, Spacey's Sam, fail.
  80. Nancy Drew
    This tweener goddess--a virtual Batcave of handy accessories packed in her shoulder bag--may prove too annoying for general audiences, particularly as Roberts plays her comically straight.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Samehada otoko to momojiri onna
    Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.
  82. After Louie
    Its subject matter is interesting, and it’s right to remind viewers of the need for different generations of queer people to communicate, but After Louie is burdened by narrative and dialogue clichés that undermine its emotional appeal.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome to the Rileys
    Try as Stewart might, she can't turn this Manic Trixie Nightmare Girl into a real person.
  84. Off the Lip
    Succeeds at being laughably highfalutin.
  85. How to Train Your Dragon
    Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.
  86. Imaginary Heroes
    Despite Weaver's wise instincts for the thoughtful pause, we're stuck with yet another ass-kicking female actor struggling to shade in the contours of a wispy sketch.
  87. The World Is Not Enough
    Makes the strongest case for retirement since late-period Roger Moore.
  88. For Ellen
    Dano, with his remarkably guileless meta-teen puss, is thoroughly convincing, which is more than can be said for the film's shameless climactic steal from "Five Easy Pieces."
  89. Storage 24
    The eventual appearance of creature fodder in the form of a crazy old coot who lives in the storage facility, as well as a sequel-promising closing note borrowed from innumerable predecessors, ultimately exposes Storage 24 as a monster from a familiar mother.
  90. The Last New Yorker
    Considering how meticulously Wang location-scouted the project--documenting all the barely surviving (or since closed down) luncheonettes, Irish pubs, hosieries, and shoe repair joints of yesteryear--it's a shame he couldn't stick to his shutterbug roots and shoot a documentary instead.
  91. The Man Who Fell to Earth
    Undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kinky Boots
    Boots is unforgivably tame; only foot fetishists (or possibly Imelda Marcos) could get off on such desexualized, PG-13-rated fare.
  93. Hannie Caulder
    The humor isn't much here either despite a trio of classic bad goon performances by Jack Elam, Strother Martin, and Ernest Borgnine. [06 Jul 1972, p.49]
    • Village Voice
  94. Stevie
    Foreigners often comment on the peculiar American combination of superficial friendliness and profound indifference. Stevie epitomizes a related national trait -- the belief in the curative powers of publicity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    With all the mumbo jumbo of necromancy and visual pyrotechnics, there is little real magic, and in the absence of any central organizing presence, the film needs more of Zappa's punctuating wit. [25 Nov 1971, p.79]
    • Village Voice
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    Americanized through western showdowns, shadowy film noir, gangster shootings, sci-fi, Bruckheimer explosions, slapstick, and soaps, Bebop aims to transcend its own genre by emulating all genres, and it falls short only in the melodrama.
  97. Son of a Gun
    Like so many meathead action thrillers, it's too busy fogging the windows with hot air to see the big picture.
  98. Open Grave
    The road to the finale is littered with dead bodies and red herrings, but Open Grave is more notable for its laid-back approach to storytelling than for its plot twists. That's a kind way of saying it's sort of boring.
  99. Tony Manero
    Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.
  100. Deep Blue
    Those looking for a refresher course on the workings of the food chain should be in heaven. All others may yearn for a sushi break.
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