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. Set Fire to the Stars
    An energetic, well-acted, handsomely mounted b&w literary tell-all whose script would be laughed out of the room by its famous subjects.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Queens
    The seasoned actresses are grand enough, but what a waste: Rather than elevate the material, they amplify its banalities.
  3. TRON: Legacy
    Given the movie's graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.
  4. Auggie Rose
    Amid the awkward pacing and gaping plot holes, the film's chief point of interest is Goldblum's morbidly fascinating performance: equal parts Walter Neff and Captain Kirk.
  5. Sidewalks of New York
    Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.
  6. The 6th Day
    Offers director Roger Spottiswoode a chance to have the worst actor in Beverly Hills play scenes with himself.
  7. Tycoon: A New Russian
    Though a relatively sober essay on criminal organization, Tycoon is also thoroughly pulpy -- that is, crass, unimaginative, corner-cutting, and simplistic, with the visual vocabulary of daytime soap.
  8. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
    The techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes -- it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.
  9. Empty Nest
    Dark and light invariably go hand in hand in Burman's work, but this tender, goofily circular portrait of how we fill up the cavernous space once occupied by children begins and ends, beautifully, with an image of a man and a woman floating head to head on water--hapless, helpless, happy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Thing
    As written by Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5), the new Thing lacks much wit or self-awareness. It's more of a "final girl" formula film, but on ice. Still, why did it take 29 years to create this solid double-feature? And will they unfreeze Russell for a trilogy?
  11. The High Cost of Living
    Deborah Chow's ridiculously implausible yet still predictable tale of guilt and redemption is so bipolar in tone that when it's not a more linear rip-off of Guillermo Arriaga's grim and gritty melodramas (21 Grams, Babel), it's the kind of quirky indie romance that made Braff's name.
  12. Beyond the Black Rainbow
    At heart, the film is no more (or less) than a brilliantly executed lark, but it's not often that we're reminded with such potency that movies are most delightful as sensory experiences.
  13. The Fifth Estate
    The issues at play here are fascinating, but Condon and Singer never let any argument about journalism or the philosophy of free information last longer than a couple ping-ponged lines between master (Assange) and student (Domscheit-Berg).
  14. Starry Eyes
    The film is far less successful once it delves into body horror that makes Sarah's transformation as ghoulishly physical as it is mental.
  15. Den of Thieves
    Between the candy of the Federal Reserve robbery itself — which features a marvelous running bit about the process of delivering Chinese food in a government-surveilled building — and the merry nonsense of Butler chugging Pepto-Bismol during a strategy session, Den of Thieves earns a nice spot in the watch-forty-minutes-on-a-rainy-day canon.
  16. American Reunion
    Taken altogether, the Pie movies offer a cohesive worldview, showing each of life's stages as the setting for fresh-yet-familiar catastrophes, relieved by a belief in sex, however ridiculous it might look, as a restorative force.
  17. Krampus
    Krampus, sad to say, is a disappointment. It's alternately funny and intense (don't take the wee ones), but never enough of either to form a cohesive whole.
  18. Desert Dancer
    The film plays too safe with its narrative. Fortunately, like its characters, it's most daring when it's in motion.
  19. The Best Offer
    Vertigo this ain’t, but there’s some quasi-Gothic charm in the baroque premise and eccentric marginal details, including a mathematically gifted dwarf.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas.
  21. New York, I Love You
    As with its predecessor, "Paris je t'aime," there are hits and misses.
  22. Big Sur
    Not exactly a hagiography, Polish's film isn't a tragedy, either -- it's just an uneventful afternoon spent with a dozing rummy.
  23. People Like Us
    Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.
  24. Texas Killing Fields
    The plot is a chaos of underdeveloped relationships and frayed loose ends, but every so often, Mann does something so right that it makes this seem less a matter of narrative disorganization than a commentary on the anarchy intrinsic to any investigation.
  25. 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.
  26. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    In this densely populated ensemble piece, Reeves stands out as the only actor whose damaged character evokes sympathy and avoids cliché. Pippa, played by Wright Penn in near-permanent Stepford Wife mode, isn't much more than a vehicle for false epiphanies and forced rapprochements.
  27. Shoot 'Em Up
    Extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller.
  28. 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."
  29. The Business of Fancydancing
    Seymour returns to the Spokane Indian Reservation after a 16-year absence for a friend's funeral. The predictable conflicts ensue, often in histrionic dialogue declaimed through clenched teeth.
  30. Big Bad Love
    Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Good Boy!
    Former SNL-ers Molly Shannon and Kevin Nealon play the kid's Stepford parents in this Jim Henson Pictures happy meal.
  32. The Way of the Gun
    Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.
  33. The Grudge
    The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Benji: Off the Leash!
    This unwarranted iteration of the '70s shaggy-dog tale pales in entertainment value compared to its website, which features a rant from the mutt's creator, Joe Camp.
  35. Can We Take a Joke?
    Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.
  36. Terminator Salvation
    Among the many things junked in McG's chop-shop is the notion of pleasure.
  37. The Mummy
    Crudely remaking the 1932 Universal original.
  38. Hancock
    It doesn't take itself as seriously as it should, and undercuts a final act that should have and so could have packed a mighty emotional wallop.
  39. Mary Shelley
    Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab.
  40. The Favor
    As an unconscious parody of everything that's wrong with Indiewood, Eva Aridjis's The Favor is brilliant. Otherwise, it's an unwatchable nightmare that brought back bad memories of NYU screenwriting classes.
  41. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    Without any engaging small-scale human drama or larger social or culture-clash import, the film comes across as trivial, and too often also indulgent and pretentious.
  42. Lila Lila
    The appealing performances from Brühl and Herzsprung, as well as the film's surprisingly clean sense of composition...keep Lila, Lila moving. But it ultimately suffers from poor characterization.
  43. Burt's Buzz
    Shapiro seems far more invested than his subject in telling the story, which sometimes makes the film feel a bit underhanded.
  44. Falcon Rising
    Beyond isolated moments of dickish charm — and his climactic four-way fight involving a sword, a crucifix, and two steel pipes — Chapman just comes across like another pseudo-heroic American behaving badly abroad.
  45. Maya the Bee Movie
    Maya the Bee Movie does what it does very well, moving along at a brisk pace and with a strong underlying message for its young audience.
    • 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. Antichrist
    Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience--the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.
  48. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Treading on a shameful piece of French history, Bosch bizarrely intercuts scenes of Hitler, Himmler, and Hess working out the logistics of the exportations, in vignettes that smack of "Inglourious Basterds" farce, but otherwise, she's got a steady grip on the tear-jerking, if that's your awards-season cocktail.
  49. Four Brothers
    What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.
  50. Sleuth
    Whatever pleasure can be wrung from Sleuth lies in the black comedy of Caine and Law's sinuous symbiosis.
  51. Mars Needs Moms
    Imagination is in short supply, with rubbery heroes repeatedly plummeting (down chutes, primarily) or hopping and running in slow motion-images that (to state what has now become the obvious) are seldom enhanced by pedestrian IMAX 3-D effects.
  52. Django
    Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flannel Pajamas
    At a full two hours, Lipsky's talky movie is more compelling in its second half, when the spouses finally get around to being themselves.
  54. Frankenstein's Army
    The film itself works best once most of the soldiers have been dispatched—too often in the first half, the constant running and discharging of firearms proves too similar to watching a first-person-shooter video game.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Who Copied
    In spite of some genuinely charming performances, The Man Who Copied is about as engaging as a paper jam.
  56. Harrison's Flowers
    A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.
  57. Harvard Man
    Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.
  58. Bedazzled
    It might be worth enduring the Limburger to see Fraser morph from freckled-faced Rod McKuen dweeb to seven-foot albino ball star and never miss a beat.
  59. Words and Pictures
    Owen and Binoche's vigorous, battle-scarred performances, prop up Words and Pictures even when its plotting resorts to unbelievable devices.
  60. Stars in Shorts
    Sequencing is crucial to any anthology, and Stars in Shorts wisely opens with two of the strongest films.
  61. The Catcher Was a Spy
    Lewin’s film is directionless, so muddied by Berg’s bloated résumé that the payoff never comes. Berg was an enigmatic and underappreciated Renaissance Man, and we leave the film not especially enlightened.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Whore's Son
    The grave comic presence of Miki Manojlovic (from Kusturica's Underground) as Ozren's worldly uncle stabilizes the movie's tantalizingly uncertain tone, at least until its bizarre closing plunge into Oedipal catharsis.
  63. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    The costumes are gorgeous, and the settings are plush, but the acting is merely serviceable, and the film lacks either the wit or the energy of its predecessors. Long before it ends, you find yourself indifferent to the fate of the mismatched lovebirds or anyone else in the tale.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tristan and Isolde
    Myles deserves better, but acquits herself as admirably as one can mired in medieval muck.
  65. V/H/S/2
    There isn't a scare to be found in the series's second installment.
  66. The Wannabe
    Director Nick Sandow relies on a drab color palette that suits the generally humorless script.
  67. The Last Shaman
    On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.
  68. Formula 17
    It might be, empirically speaking, the gayest movie ever released.
  69. Tickling Leo
    Davidson weaves deeper questions of who a Jew is into this powerful tale of a clan shredded by the rage and hatred passed down through three generations.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Humorless, incoherent, and ugly as sin, this Christian-friendly production is as tragic as the candle wax that resembles a glob of man jam and opens Pa Grape's eyes to the meaning of his adventure.
  71. Stuck in Love
    Writer-director Josh Boone populates Stuck in Love with smart characters breaking from emotional holding patterns of varying contours.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Think I Love My Wife
    Rock capably directs a screenplay graced with one or two chuckles ("You stare at a soccer mom too long and they'll post your name on the Internet") and soured by a whole lot of misogyny.
  73. Great Directors
    Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.
  74. Riddick
    The only reason to root for Riddick is that his name is on the ticket stub. But he's so dull and the hunters so weird that we're literally cheering for the movie to kill off its personality, one throat slash at a time.
  75. Cooties
    Infectious horror-comedy Cooties is an energizing juggernaut until its seemingly inexhaustible ensemble cast members are outpaced by their respective characters' quirks.
  76. The Monkey's Mask
    The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.
  77. Green Dragon
    Green Dragon's portrait of refugee angst is decidedly glossy; the grief and lostness are glimpsed rather than explored.
  78. Men in Black II
    However cool, Smith's lovable braggadocio and Lee's practiced deadpan don't exactly make them Laurel and Hardy.
  79. Around the World in 80 Days
    As the tourist on a time budget, the usually brilliant Coogan merely mugs and flails (we can only imagine what Johnny Depp would have done with Fogg), while he and able straight man Chan enjoy scant opportunity to develop any comic rapport.
  80. Father of the Bride Part II
    Martin's performance is as impeccable as the set decoration, though one wishes he'd stop wasting his skill. Keaton flaunts her matronly hips, daring us to remember Annie Hall, but despite a jawline that's tighter than it was a decade ago in Baby Boom, she looks past the age of conception (no cosmetic surgery for wombs). [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  81. GMO OMG
    A documentary that is by turns exasperating, illuminating, and intentionally infuriating.
  82. Everybody Has a Plan
    An identity crisis is at the heart of Everybody Has a Plan—but it's the film's. Even Viggo Mortensen's movingly enigmatic performance as identical twins can't help first-time Argentinean director Ana Piterbarg decide whether she is making an existential tone poem or a brutish thriller.
  83. The Black Dahlia
    Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).
  84. The Ultimate Gift
    Directed with accomplished impersonality by Michael O. Sajbel ( One Night With the King), The Ultimate Gift means well, but in the end it's "The Pursuit of Happyness" made from the ivory tower looking down instead of from the street looking up.
  85. Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
    An ungainly hybrid of straight-up documentary and ingenuous reenactment.
  86. Welcome to the Punch
    When bullets aren't flying, the movie offers yesterday's goods in shiny new packaging.
  87. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    There are too many vaguely defined interpersonal dynamics and marginal characters (hi, Liv Tyler and Judy Greer!) that distract needlessly from the earnest tone of an outrageous set-up.
  88. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Curiously drab and airless, tinted to a distracting bluish miasma that suggests an advertisement for antidepressants, Peter Landesman’s Mark Felt is the wrong movie at the right time.
  89. An Unfinished Life
    As with the director's other films, all that keeps Unfinished from being a complete, treacly bore is its robust performances.
  90. Imagine Me & You
    Not only is there not enough panting to bunch any panties, this polite romp could use more of that other L-word: laughs.
  91. Hatchet II
    This time out, Green is not as self-aware, devoting a solid hour of his film's 90-minute running time to pre-mayhem character development so witless and dull that Hatchet II might as well be "Friday the 13th, Part 14."
  92. Blood Done Sign My Name
    An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).
  93. Stalingrad
    Lush with feeling that could easily be mistaken for sentimentality, Stalingrad is more like a 19th-century novel than a 21st-century blockbuster. It's theatrical and intense, sometimes in an overbearing way, but it's never boring.
  94. The Good Night
    Director Jake Paltrow's feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man's feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it had its premiere there earlier this year.
  95. Sold
    All the characters are broadly sketched, though well acted. Beyond that, the innate tension of the subject matter — and the shamelessly manipulated emotions — carries the film to its uplifting ending.
  96. The Children of Huang Shi
    A tale as ploddingly familiar as it is good-looking and worth telling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stagedoor
    Shiva has a sensitive eye for rarefied outcasts.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    Frindel can't rescue Kagel from marginalization as a New Agey preacher man, but he does portray this hippest of all Krishnas as someone who deeply believes in the self-sacrificing mantra he chants, even if the very act of starring in a film seems to threaten it.
  99. Azumi
    If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.
  100. Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
    Jean-Paul Jaud's indignant doc is equally worthless for preaching the merits of organic chow via an emotionally reactive argument instead of an investigative one.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »