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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lola Versus
    More than subverting or satirizing the modern lady-in-crisis movie, he has made a big, broad stoner comedy, shot and performed naturalistically, from a woman's point of view. Narratively, it's not a huge shock where the film ultimately goes, but there are a number of fun surprises along the way.
  2. The Promise
    As drama and spectacle, it’s not quite first-rate — I rarely feared for these characters or believed that I knew their souls, and George is too much of a humanist to wring real-life tragedy for cineplex suspense. But as a moral corrective and a call to decency it moved me.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crazy Like a Fox
    Whether you find the protagonist of Richard Squires's comedy-drama--a dangerous Confederate crackpot or an exemplar of principled defiance likely depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you see the movie.
  4. Me, Myself & Irene
    This is the first movie I've ever seen -- porn included -- in which a guy gets coldcocked with a dildo.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zhou Yu de huo che
    Devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Thorn in the Heart
    It's a shock, then, that The Thorn in the Heart, Gondry's documentary about his own family, is so unimaginative and inaccessible.
  7. A Christmas Horror Story
    The anthology is a mixed stocking; if you reach inside, something's likely to grab you.
  8. Thérèse
    If the banality of life within the Bordeaux gentry is the point, then the ensuing oppressiveness is immaculately depicted through precise performances and camerawork—just don't call it emotionally engaging drama.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nomad
    With commendable sincerity but also an unfortunate Hollywood veneer, Nomad is a poor man's "Gladiator."
  10. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Granito becomes both a humanitarian legal thriller and a quest to find justice through cinema.
  11. Nine
    Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity. It's the only point at which Nine seems more than a total zero.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    30 Minutes or Less
    A comedy that knows it has to move with all due dispatch to keep from disappointing the customer.
  13. The Happy Sad
    The cast—and Evans's deft hand with them—makes it worth checking out.
  14. They Remain
    They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.
  15. Soul Men
    Mac and Jackson carry the show--particularly Mac, who's at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet.
  16. Silent House
    Silent House does superficially spiff up the haunted-house movie, but it's not built to last.
  17. Dark Matter
    First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there's not a single credible performance here, not excluding Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hart's War
    Seriously off balance.
  19. Dr. Dolittle 2
    It's dispiriting to watch him (Murphy) stand patiently by and concoct reaction shots for quipping raccoons and dancing bears.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Emperor's Club
    Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.
  21. K-PAX
    K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.
  22. The Price of Milk
    A shaggy, appealing parable involving two lovers, some gorgeous heifers, gentle Maori gangster-golfers, and a dilapidated suitcase packed with used baby shoes, The Price of Milk throws itself onto the magic-realist sword with aplomb.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Resilience
    Bojack has a talent for finding the worst possible angle from which to shoot scenes, and though he claims to want to gauge the resilience of his main character, he only succeeds at testing ours.
  24. The Happy Poet
    Off-handed and yet quite artfully observed, The Happy Poet's winsome deadpan offsets its skewering of class and sustainability issues, right through to a tricky ending that, like Bill himself, may not be what it seems.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mechanic
    Jason Statham bares his six-pack before speaking his first line in this humorless, efficient remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson hitman movie.
  26. The Over the Hill Band
    Enthoven and his screenwriters walk a fine line between celebrating the vitality of the elderly and asking us to laugh at their youthful affectations, twice embarrassing his three septuagenarians by forcing them to sing along to Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam."
  27. Protektor
    Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.
  28. Mars at Sunrise
    Using its narrative as a launching pad for abstract visuals, the picture reminds viewers that even the most striking images demand context to create anything like drama.
  29. Elsa & Fred
    This occasionally charming November-December romance has elements of a Douglas Sirk woman's weepie... but the movie eventually goes into Woody Allen territory in the best way possible.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suburban Gothic
    Despite the cast's genuine charm, Suburban Gothic's script and characters are too familiar and sophomoric to sustain half its runtime without the gross-out death sequences that define its genre.
  31. Dixieland
    Writer-director Hank Bedford delivers some tactile, human details.... But the film is slow and often agonizingly predictable.
  32. The God Cells
    The God Cells isn't the first documentary to take on a controversial subject, but through some impressive rhetorical jujitsu, it might be one of the few to change some minds.
  33. Gold
    In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.
  34. 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.
  35. Griff the Invisible
    An Australian misfits-in-love story manufactured from whole quirk, Griff the Invisible is more mannerism than movie.
  36. Souvenir
    While there’s poignancy to be found in Souvenir’s depiction of aging and work, the sexual politics leave something to be desired.
  37. Rio 2
    Rio 2 wants to be a musical, but instead of timing songs to, say, the emotional peaks of the characters, director Carlos Saldanha opts for high-intensity intervals of singing every four minutes.
  38. Haunter
    Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.
  39. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scary Movie 3
    Vigorously date- and time-stamped, Scary Movie 3 boasts a cultural half-life of about five seconds, but for those seeking a return on their weekly multiplex pilgrimages, this movie is The One.
  41. Oldboy
    Colorless and soulless in the extreme, it bears no one's fingerprints at all. There's no reason for this Oldboy to exist. It's so DOA, you stumble out of it wanting to eat something alive.
  42. Inkheart
    It all smacks of that overdone "passion for literature" common in English teachers who send any healthy-minded kid running from books.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Return to Never Land
    The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.
  44. Scotland, Pa.
    The irrepressible Walken smiles benignly down on his colleagues, secure in the knowledge that his antics have capsized sturdier vessels than this. Playing a supposed health-food nut, he enters the movie chewing and doesn't stop until he's devoured every scene down to the props.
  45. Down and Out with the Dolls
    With no irony and no plot beyond Girls Have Band, Voss reduces Kali and Fauna to earnest Janus faces of Hole's schizo aesthetic.
  46. Romance
    A dark and unsparing study of female masochism and a brittle sex comedy of manners, Romance is unsettled in tone, to say the least.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pitch Black
    (Diesel's) Riddick, a silver-eyed, musclebound escaped killer, is the most sequel-worthy sci-fi creation since the Terminator.
  48. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    A glorified informercial, complete with enough blandly upbeat guitar-cues to power all 22 seasons of "Real World" intros.
  49. Pop Star on Ice
    Pop Star offers zero that enthusiasts didn't know already and nothing for the rest of us.
  50. Cake
    Aniston gives the character personality and heft, but the script gives the character nothing to do.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Angel-A
    Amiably inconsequential fairy tale.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Run, Fatboy, Run
    Pegg has staked out a peculiar slant on genre material that ventures beyond irony toward rehabilitation--and nobody plays blithe humiliation with more style.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scoop
    So flat, dull, and off form that it seems to have been conceived in a fog. It not only lacks the verve and energy of Allen's best New York–based work, it feels culturally adrift, like some bewildered tourist trying to read a city map held upside down.
  54. The Judge
    The Judge has its funny moments but is far more serious at heart, and much more of a slog, too.
  55. Missionary
    The tension in Missionary is surprisingly effective, especially given how easy it should be to put out an APB on a guy on a freaking bicycle, and there are enough scares to remind you to keep the chain latched when those polite young men in the slacks and neckties drop by.
  56. Spiral
    Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.
  57. Ardor
    Too bad that Ardor's arrhythmic editing and glacial pacing make it impossible to get lost in its jungles — or to invest in its pseudo-mystical ambiance.
  58. A Lot Like Love
    Interjections from perennial second bananas Kathryn Hahn (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and Kal Penn (winning even when not conjuring vivified bags of pot) generate the only sparks.
  59. Believe Me
    The movie loses its zip as it becomes more dramatic.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    In some ways Goon: Last of the Enforcers actually manages to improve upon its forebear, connecting on jabs at a rate roughly equal to that of the earlier film but this time — if you’ll pardon yet more in the way of this figurative pugilism — mixing in some gut-punches, too.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Secuestro express
    A focus on a timely social problem paired with an archetypal class-war tale would be a winning combination for Secuestro Express, were it not for the movie's strangely exploitative nature.
  62. Titan A.E.
    Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.
  63. Scarlet Diva
    What a world we'd live in if Argento's Hollywood counterparts -- say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, or even Christina Ricci -- had this much imagination and nerve. Few of them, at any rate, have Argento's reserves of lonesome passion and unspigoted woe.
  64. The Banger Sisters
    For a few brief moments, it's the bravest work this Hollywood gargoyle (Hawn) has ever done.
  65. Charlotte Gray
    The narrative is unexpectedly sleepy, excepting the occasional flashy set piece.
  66. Kingdom Come
    Demands high tolerance for low comedy.
  67. Brothers in Arms
    The less-is-more approach to Kerry's war heroics (the incident that led to his Silver Star is covered only briefly) allows the crewmen to dominate.
  68. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.
  69. Remember the Titans
    Boorish and flatulent.
  70. Ride
    There's a wry sweetness to this picture.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We the Party
    Van Peebles's heart is probably in the right place, but his attempt to wed his kids' generational moment to a classic coming-of-age template falters in its message-obsessed execution.
  72. Decoding Deepak
    Following the celebrity guru into Thailand for his ordainment as a Buddhist monk, the film is at its best when Gotham can't help but see through his father, who seems entirely restless without an audience and a smartphone through which to be reminded of their adoration of him.
  73. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Lackluster screenwriting and the absence of actorly communion are breezed past with monotonous banter, as is the fleetingly visible plot.
  74. Made in America
    There's no type of documentary as shallow as those covering modern music festivals, a fact reconfirmed by Made in America.
  75. Stay
    The film's quiet demeanor, exacerbated by wide shots of lonely, sprawling bogs, sometimes comes off as dull rather than reflective. Still, it does capture the maddening silence of waiting for an absent lover to make contact.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dynamite Warrior
    Director Chalerm Wongpim's skull-buster makes up in wild-eyed insanity (and excessive, arbitrary slow motion) what it lacks in acting, pacing, and coherence.
  77. Autoerotic
    Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard's latest exploration of amorous urban collisions, is only sporadically a good sex comedy, in part because the flat affect favored by its young Chicago cast of hipsters looks an awful lot like, well, seriousness.
  78. 4 Minute Mile
    The narrative is so formulaic as to feel immediately contrived, with seemingly every plot device taken from another film.
  79. October Gale
    The performances in October Gale subvert genre expectations: Clarkson displays toughness and resolve without turning into Liam Neeson, and the distressed Speedman is as vulnerable as he is determined.
  80. The Beauty Inside
    Worse than the latent silliness of such a premise is how little the filmmakers ultimately do with the world of narrative possibilities it presents; in attempting to show the universality of love, The Beauty Inside succeeds in showing the opposite.
  81. Bartleby
    The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.
  82. My First Mister
    The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.
  83. Brother Bear
    Tykes may giggle at the Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas–voiced moose, but there's little for adults.
  84. Bush's Brain
    The campaign's latest scare doc takes its title, Bush's Brain, and much of its argument from the portrait of political operative and bogeyman Karl Rove published last year by a pair of Dallas newsmen.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Saw III
    This is laughably absurd, but unlike the first "Saw," the third installment gives no indication that its humor is intentional.
  86. The Muslims Are Coming!
    One part stand-up comedy concert film (think Kings of Comedy) to two parts social outreach activism, documentary The Muslims Are Coming! works somewhat better as the latter than the former.
  87. Ted 2
    MacFarlane's comedy may not be sophisticated on its face, but the mechanisms behind it are delicately calibrated.
  88. All We Had
    The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.
  89. The Theory of Flight
    Earnest and misguided in equal measure, The Theory of Flightis ostensibly a bold and rare attempt at depicting disabled people as sexual beings, but the notion is couched in such spurious and schematic terms that the film never really stands a chance.
  90. Divergent
    It'd be easier to root for lead Tris's (Shailene Woodley, the go-to girl for drab roles with grit) quest to escape her Abnegation roots and those ghastly gray skirts to prove herself a worthy Dauntless if director Burger felt committed to the concept.
  91. The Greatest Showman
    Hugh Jackman is charming as ever, and two dance scenes are mildly inventive and well-executed, yet Jackman’s goodwill and a splash of inspired choreography are not enough to earn the greatest in the title.
  92. And While We Were Here
    It's a bummer that the movie settles for such an oft-mined vein of bummed-outedness—for a few minutes, Coiro really had me going.
  93. Last Vegas
    The film’s hidden asset is the luminous Mary Steenburgen, funny and gorgeous as an empty-nest mom turned lounge chanteuse who beguiles the dudes with age-appropriate flirting and arch humor.
  94. Trudell
    Unfortunately, Rae's film is split down the middle, and the appeal of its latter half depends on your tolerance for earnest politico-poetry set to wailing rock guitar and Native American chants and extraneously endorsed by celebrity talking heads. The backstory portion of the film, though, is riveting.
  95. HairBrained
    Billy Kent's charming HairBrained comes from a long legacy of collegiate comedies but still finds its own identity.
  96. The Lullaby
    The filmmakers do an effective job at making a clever horror show out of postpartum depression. So it’s a shame the movie goes off the deep end in the final act, as the story literally comes to a bloody, tragic finish.
  97. The Bang Bang Club
    Silver treads around and too heavily on the moral ambiguities involved in documenting atrocities, moving between frantic, poorly explained scenes of African conflict and the equally familiar, benumbing aesthetic of boys making a macho game of war.
  98. Spanglish
    The beauty of Sandler's performance -- a superbly modulated suite of crestfallen groans and grimaces -- is he often seems to be reacting not just to his crazy wife but also to the dismal movie he's stuck in.
  99. My Amityville Horror
    Whether it was all a haunting or a hoax is left unanswered, but the film leaves little doubt that Amityville's greatest source of evil was, fundamentally, parental in nature.
  100. Elizabeth Blue
    Elizabeth inspires empathy, but it often feels like we’re being told to feel a certain way by being shown so much rather than being allowed to naturally warm up to her.
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