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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    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mr. and Mrs. Iyer
    The actors appear game, yet director Aparna Sen, who conceived the film in the wake of September 11, resorts often to hokey pseudo-lyricism and prefers sound-bite ballyhoo to sociological depth.
  2. Switch
    A methodical, occasionally remedial survey of the energy crisis and its possible solutions, Switch fits a subject often treated polemically into a more benign, continuing education mold.
  3. 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.
  4. Time Lapse
    That Bradley King's debut Time Lapse half-succeeds is a small miracle.
  5. Northmen: A Viking Saga
    The battles, occurring every fifteen minutes or so, are brisk and bloody, but in them Northmen leaps too quickly from image to image, sometimes not giving us time to make sense of the mayhem. But the chases, and the Jacksonian sense of an epic journey across a time-lost landscape, will please devotees of the genre, and the flourishes are grand.
  6. The Night Eats the World
    Unfortunately, the best and worst thing about director Dominique Rocher and his two co-writers’ scenario is its familiarity.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    Long before the third, fourth, or fifth climax in this endless, obligatory summer diversion, I slunk into my seat in a passive, inattentive stupor, fully submitting to the fact that I hadn't the slightest idea what the hell was going on.
  8. How About You ...
    The only crowds this stodgy little movie is likely to please tend to be home on a Saturday night, watching PBS.
  9. Boundaries
    Where Feste best succeeds in Boundaries isn’t in the father-daughter relationship, which finds her straining for a tight resolution, but in the mother-son one, where the two actors vibe easily and persuasively off each other.
  10. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    This is basically self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more "politically conscious" when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough. Right now, you're better off just watching the news.
  11. Trash
    Trash's creators never say anything thoughtful or useful about the extreme violence they liberally — and irresponsibly — use to characterize third-world adolescence.
  12. Therapy for a Vampire
    The strongest aspect of Therapy for a Vampire is its exquisite visual homage to the vamp films of old, and also the screwballs.
  13. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    A misguided tribute to the woman his (Shainberg's) film identifies among "the greatest artists of the 20th century."
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Campaign
    Like past-his-peak Perot, The Campaign is basically a footnote, a goof on our broken political system that's good for a certain novelty, but as a challenge to the dominant order? It's ultimately impotent.
  15. Storytelling
    The leanest and meanest of Solondz's misanthropic comedies, feasts on the anguish of adolescence and confusion of college -- white suburban-style.
  16. Garage Days
    Spotting trains that left the station a few years back.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Letters to Juliet
    Gary Winick's flat direction does the material no favors: If Egan and Seyfried have any chemistry, it's framed out of their awkwardly staged climactic kisses.
  18. Hood to Coast
    Because the runners' standings in the race are never really established, and are largely beside the point, the film keeps cutting back to these increasingly sentimentalized accounts of hardship overcome.
  19. The Island
    This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lottery Ticket
    The theme of this formulaic but vibrant ensemble comedy could best be described as a paraphrase of Biggie's well-worn credo: Mo' money, mo' problems-but mo' money, yeah, definitely.
  21. The Ten
    More often than not, you'll laugh, and that's all you can hope for in what might as well be a prolonged episode of "The State," from which several of the cast and creators sprang.
  22. Look
    Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blast from the Past
    Most fun when it's locked up with daddy.
  24. Off-White Lies
    An intermittently engaging tale of father-and-daughter bonding (and non-bonding) set against the backdrop of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War.
  25. Child of God
    As it stands, Child of God is brazenly, outstandingly bad, as vague, pretentious, and pointless as its sorry title. But it's certainly memorable, full of inadvertent howlers and destined to create a whole new subgenre of burlesque, audience-torturing cinema.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shit Year
    Barkin is often fascinating in playing a character who, in both her heroic bitchery and hysterical sadness, is more of a concept than a person, in a film that ultimately seems to be "about" nothing more or less than the actress' magnetic face.
  28. As I Lay Dying
    Franco adapted a book that often reads like joyless homework into a film that feels the same way.
  29. Twelve Thirty
    A film more satisfying in occasional isolated moments than as a coherent dramatic entity.
  30. Lovely Molly
    It can't sustain interest in the endless unraveling of Molly's psyche, which, as handled by Sánchez, has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester.
  31. Deterrence
    Begins and ends with footage of FDR intoning "I hate war," something the film takes two interminable hours to say.
  32. Straight-Jacket
    Jacket's shrill, Necco-colored sets and distractingly awful CGI long shots almost mask the movie's real coup: Letscher's physique.
  33. Poseidon
    An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.
  34. Now You See Me
    When functioning like a magic trick, this breathlessly entertaining picture delights in its showmanship, but the more entertaining the trickery, the tougher the explanation, and when the truth is revealed the answer can't help but fail to satisfy.
  35. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Durst and Elkoff deliver a nuanced scenario of class assimilation and resentment, then flub the ending.
  36. Operation Chromite
    The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.
  37. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Yet Newell, he of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure, his direction--while slightly eschewing modern genre practitioners’ penchant for slicing-and-dicing skirmishes into visual incoherence--is too pedestrian and partial to clumsy slow-mo effects to truly energize the story.
  38. Bel Borba Aqui
    Now he's famous, and the production of the documentary Bel Borba Aqui, practically a montage of color, music, and Borba's constant laughter, coincides with his local acclaim.
  39. 28 Hotel Rooms
    Not showing us every aspect of their lives is a fine, even novel, approach, but merely telling us about them instead feels like a fruitless middle ground.
  40. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change
    After speaking to several environmental experts, hiking for hours through the Amazon, and discovering just how momentous the threat of climate change is to humanity as we know it, documentarian Josh Fox made a film about himself.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Elles
    It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal.
  42. Cowboys & Aliens
    Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.
  43. The Purge: Anarchy
    It's better than the first.
  44. Mickey Blue Eyes
    The last half hour bogs down badly, with a cynical fake-out ending and a final scene that borders on non-sensical.
  45. Where the Money Is
    A caper film hardly worthy of his (Newman's) presence.
  46. The Four Feathers
    Feels both tiresomely old-fashioned and disturbingly topical.
  47. The Crimson Rivers
    Never lacks for energy, and the director and his stars stride with focused confidence through the hooey.
  48. B. Monkey
    B. Monkey is crawling with smart actors saying things they don't quite mean.
  49. The Ballad of Bering Strait
    Echoes the trajectory of the post-Communist-bloc region itself, unmoored and at the mercy of pitiless capitalist forces.
  50. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (re-release)
    Too priggish to earn a place alongside its better-known contemporaries "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House on the Left," Lemora is nevertheless surprisingly well made.
  51. Alfie
    Indeed, remake hack Charles Shyer (who processed the Parent Trap and Father of the Bride updates) plays coy with most matters sexual -- an odd and puritanical approach to a character who molds his entire existence around the procurement and enjoyment of sex.
  52. Behind Enemy Lines
    Though Wilson gives a customarily sympathetic, engaged, and unpredictable performance, his work is drowned out by pyrotechnics and orchestral paroxysms of patriotism.
  53. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreaming Lhasa
    Primped for easy American consumption, this clunkily performed and staged drama concerns a filmmaker's agenda to document Tibetan oppression under Chinese occupation. This becomes spurious pretext for a rather flat Nancy Drew adventure.
  55. The Mighty Macs
    Appears to have been made on a budget equivalent to the cost of a WNBA fleece hoodie. But even at that price, the first feature by Tim Chambers is profligate with sports-movie clichés.
  56. 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.)
  57. Cassandra's Dream
    Feels like one of Allen's laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype--marionettes in a miserablist puppet theater.
  58. Chloe
    Thanks to Egoyan's trademark mix of detachment and prurience, the fun is more cheesy than queasy.
  59. Wilson
    Inevitably, his generic disgruntlement will soften: Amerindie dyspeptic-comedy formula dictates that the man who rants two times too many against the addiction to phones and the internet will, by film’s end, have a heart-stirring video chat.
  60. The Killing of John Lennon
    Director Andrew Piddington's fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "Murderous narcissists are people, too." (He's a victim of our celebrity-fixated culture? Oh, shut up.)
  61. Escape Plan
    With its fun script and cheap visuals, Escape Plan evokes the halfwit cheesiness of 1980s-era Cannon films, but it also recalls the deft pacing and legibility of their action sequences.
  62. Kidnapped
    The long takes and lack of theatrical affect are presumably meant to heighten the realism by dispensing with film - fiction artifice, but in the process, everything that might lure a viewer - the seduction of style and plot or an engagement with characters - is forgotten.
  63. Nabbeun namja
    Bad Guy, one of the seven films in Kim's fascinating back catalog, is another kind of cocktail--simple, bitter, served straight and in an unwashed glass.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guess Who
    The script's lack of nerve fails to challenge him (Mac) or its audience with enough dangerous humor.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sex Drive
    Remains faithful to a portrait of teens as they see themselves.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Daddy's Little Girls
    Perry's indifferent direction flattens everything out: You might fall asleep if his heavy-mitted music cues didn't keep cattle-prodding your ass.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Meeting Resistance
    Ultimately, Meeting Resistance is just one more doc about the monumental screw-up that is the U.S. campaign in Iraq.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    In its attempt to diagnose a problem, it ends up serving more as a symptom of the left's current, and sadly warranted, anxieties.
  69. S1m0ne
    Niccol has no gift for comedy. His ongoing exploration of modern celebrity results in an industry satire that's less funny than half-empty and hyper-designed.
  70. 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.
  71. Starbuck
    The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.
  72. 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.
  73. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer captures the feel of action flicks of yore -- unsurprising, given that some of them were directed by Hyams himself -- in a way that only limited-release and straight-to-video titles seem allowed to these days (aside from the latest Riddick, that is).
  74. Always at The Carlyle
    A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.
  75. Edtv
    It's a lot of plot but none of it is particularly funny or compelling. What keeps the film chugging along and also gives it a depressive aftertaste is a middle-aged male sexual anxiety subtext that intermittently sputters to the surface.
  76. The Good German
    However flavorsome though, The Good German is seriously deficient in the stars' star power and narrative excitement. The movie is lovingly framed, carefully lit, and fatally insipid. The direction is slack; the pacing is perfunctory.
  77. All I Wish
    The jump-skip format renders the chemistry between Senna and Adam so incoherent that by the time you watch them have their big first kiss, then break up, then get back together again, it plays less like a real movie and instead one of those memory slideshows your iPhone photo album generates for you.
  78. Henry's Crime
    Caan and Farmiga give more to the material than it can return, but it sure is fun to watch them tangle.
  79. Demolition
    Gyllenhaal and Watts's yin-yang performances help things along.
  80. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    Anyone who's seen a martial-arts picture expects a certain amount of thumb-twiddling between the big numbers, but director Andrew Lau's handling of exposition is markedly poor, distended with rubbish plotlines, flashy sadism, and overwrought jingo.
  81. 2012
    The two-hour-and-40-minute 2012 is overstuffed with special-effects, but the Curtis clan's mad dash out of town is the closest the movie gets to actually being fun.
  82. Neighbour No. 13
    Because the metaphysics driving it are so fuzzy, this is the rare horror film where even sludgy viscera elicit only yawns.
  83. A Man's Story
    The result often plays more like a satire of the fashion industry than a serious look at one of the humans inside it.
  84. Mystery, Alaska
    Slack, saccharine script.
  85. Paid in Full
    As superficial as his 1999 short film "True," the inspiration for Budweiser's "Whassup?" commercials, Charles Stone III's feature debut is set in a 1986 Harlem that doesn't look much like anywhere in New York.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Reckoning
    Emphatically acted, ponderous, and ultimately a little silly.
  87. Jackpot
    Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.
  88. Loitering with Intent
    This is an indifferently filmed, sloppily conceived story that finds infrequent life through resourceful production design (Gigi's house is strewn with Modelo, Red Bull, and scribbled-on note cards) and on-edge work from Tomei and Rockwell.
  89. 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.
  90. Shadows
    A prolonged and overemotional take on the putting-lost-souls-to-rest drama.
  91. Helena from the Wedding
    The group is frequently drunk, but writer-director Joseph Infantolino's handling is lucid, a necessity to keep up the sense of vague dread and walking-on-eggshell egos.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jane's Journey
    Spectacularly photographed and journalistically lame, Jane's Journey blows a 105-minute kiss to Dr. Jane Goodall.
  93. The Sacrament
    Restaging the 1978 Jonestown massacre for a present-day suspense movie is by most definitions tasteless, although The Sacrament infuses the past with ghoulish immediacy.
  94. Beauty Remains
    The film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget: It's all soft focuses, sax flourishes, and silky slo-mos.
  95. Body
    On the surface a typical exercise in horror-film cliché, Body turns out to be a far more thought-provoking creature, a parable of adulthood and a stinging indictment of white-girl privilege.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Al Franken: God Spoke
    Unfocused but brisk.
  97. Love Is in the Air
    Wrapped in slick direction (including plenty of split-screen), this goes down easy, but it's wholly unbelievable. Worse, it's instantly forgettable.
  98. Just Like Us
    The film is largely effective as a breezy travelogue. Still, Ahmed plays the "Muslims, they're just like us" bit a little too hard, pointedly ignoring the obvious parallels between the "freedom" provided by imported stand-up and the endless McDonald's signs that flicker throughout the region.
  99. One Direction: This Is Us
    Even calling the film a documentary feels deluded.
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