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. Elektra
    The pedestrian Elektra offers no surprises, and whether or not you'll appreciate its modest charms depends entirely on whether you too have been anticipating Garner's new outfit.
  2. Killer Bees
    Unfortunately, the narrative focus constantly shifts and never coalesces.
  3. The Magic of Belle Isle
    With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.
  4. Generation Startup
    It looks like the recruitment appeal that it is; it will probably be pretty effective on campuses.
  5. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    If today's youngsters grow up thinking of Christopher Lloyd as the old guy with the bongos from The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, at least they'll be thinking of Christopher Lloyd at all.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tarzan
    Visually rich yet numbingly formulaic.
  7. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.
  8. Scooby-Doo
    As this movie knows what it is, Scooby-Doo's a relatively painless 85 minutes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dopamine
    The premise (does modern neurochemistry debunk love?) is fresh enough, but too much would-be banter falls flat, and the story is woefully schematic.
  10. Mental
    Mental skewers the easy-on and -off labels of psychiatry, but some sequences, particularly one of "bad dreams," are sophomoric. The movie's real mess-up was to move Shaz into melodrama at the movie's end.
  11. Downfall
    Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.
  12. Mr. Jones
    Mr. Jones is the stuff of both conspiracy theories and collegiate discourse, and Mueller's elliptical exploration and creation of that mythology sets the bar a bit too high for his much-less-interesting protagonists to fully clear.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Limehouse Golem
    Director Juan Carlos Medina depicts a grim city perpetually shrouded in fog the color and consistency of pea soup. He makes the murders appropriately gory, but not over the top. Yet a storyline involving anti-Semitism threatens to upend the compelling detective tale.
  14. The Day
    Ashley Bell stands out as a Heroic Fighter With a Dark Secret. Harbor only the expectations aroused by a production of WWE Studios and don't get too attached to any hobbits.
  15. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    There’s no mystery, and the action is thoroughly disposable, but what works this time around are the interactions between Reacher and Turner, mostly thanks to the efforts of Smulders, who brings an impassioned frustration to her character.
  16. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    His lightning-fast fingers can't fail to impress even those unschooled in the classical idiom, but when not center stage, Heifetz proves a far more elusive figure, firmly out of the grasp of Rosen's film.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Intermittently engaging and moving, P.S. has gathered a bit of dust over the years. Still, it's nicely acted by the small cast.
  18. Bliss
    Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.
  19. Ladder 49
    Not as snort-worthy as "Backdraft," Ladder 49 is a serviceable testament to the firemen who would bravely risk their lives to protect the safety of others.
  20. The Raid 2
    The raw ingredients of Raid 2 are superb. But the overall effect is gluttonous and queasy.
  21. The Tiger Hunter
    Immigrant stories certainly don’t demand tragedy to be legitimate, but The Tiger Hunter, with its pastiche of fish-out-of-water comedy and pointy collared shirts, ultimately feels weightless.
  22. American Swing
    The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tea with Mussolini
    Luca's transformation from waif to budding artist may be the thrust of the film, but it's the psyche of the conflicted grandson that you wonder about.
  24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    For anyone other than hardcore gore-hounds, this flipbook of deliberately invoked global-unrest horrors, from friendly-fire killings to rape as a breeding weapon, is effectively mean and unrelenting--and pretty far from fun.
  28. Hollow Man
    Gleefully confrontational in its ludicrous, pulpy tawdriness.
  29. Mean Creek
    As obvious in many ways as its title (and its poster), Mean Creek retains a gritty working-class ambience, but it feels over-rehearsed.
  30. Match Point
    A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.
  31. Closed Circuit
    To Crowley's credit, Closed Circuit is decidedly unflashy. But maybe that's a liability: There's a fine line between restrained and drab, and Closed Circuit falls just on the wrong side of it.
  32. A Serious Man
    As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."
  33. Blumenthal
    Fisher's filmmaking, aside from a couple scenes between Ethan and his best friend (Alexander Cendese) that are nicely composed in long-take two-shots, is too consistently flat to make the material spark.
  34. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Lots of Dowse's ideas work well--the ringing tinnitus, the conversion of sound to visible waves, the trimming of treble and bass for underwatery effect, the removal of ambient noise entirely. But as the humor flags, It's All Gone Pete Tong starts to feel more like an exercise.
  35. The Last Mountain
    This environmental exposé confirms every awful suspicion ever raised about the coal industry. Trouble is, the news is so bad and so plentiful that The Last Mountain may have you looking for the nearest exit.
  36. In a Valley of Violence
    A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.
  37. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.
  38. The Sixth Sense
    Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.
  39. Saints and Sinners
    There's an enforced squareness afoot as the directors contrast the couple with Pride-float revelers, as if testifying in front of a Massachusetts court that these two are as fuddy-duddy as the wholesomest het duo.
  40. The Inheritance
    The Inheritance is most effective in its first half...But the film falters as it moves closer to home and the heart, veering off into melodramatic and quasi-surreal scenarios.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Intimate Strangers
    A bland chamber drama for those who like their French cinema tame, talky, and just a little titillating.
  42. We Have a Pope
    Until the potent concluding scene, the humor and shallow profundities of We Have a Pope pivot on the cuteness of geriatrics, especially when they're spiking a volleyball in slo-mo.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Supercross
    Not since Burt Reynolds's "Stroker Ace" has a racing movie provided so many laughs, intentional or otherwise.
  44. Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering
    Like many docs with activist undertones, Second Opinion tells a potentially interesting story in a bland way.
  45. Bangkok Dangerous
    The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.
  46. Parkland
    It's in the film's second half that Parkland goes all Tony Romo and fumbles. Instead of becoming truly engrossing, it threatens to descend into unreserved melodrama.
  47. The Other Half
    Maslany and Cullen's characters seem intended to be psychologically realistic, but they're only as complex as The Other Half's surface-deep style.
  48. Lovelace
    Lovelace, ahem, blows it. The narrative rewind gives us new facts and a whole heap of crying scenes, but no added insight into Linda's mind—she's still as empty as an inflatable toy.
  49. September Dawn
    Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Racing Stripes
    The film shares a problem with its hero: identity crisis.
  52. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.
  53. The Normals
    When everybody finally accepts that they've been experiencing a prolonged, semi-self-inflicted meltdown, Ciancimino and director Kevin Patrick Connors's lone gag pays off. Too bad the joke is only funny in retrospect.
  54. Transcendence
    Transcendence, written by Jack Paglen, is just more business as usual, one of those "control technology or it will control you" sermons that nonetheless enlists the usual heap of technically advanced special effects.
  55. The Wasted Times
    The majority of the characters murder or are murdered in short order, so finding someone to root for or a storyline to follow in this strangely empty Shanghai (even the train station looks abandoned) is difficult.
  56. Patti Cake$
    “The white Precious,” as one rival calls her, may be trying to master a musical genre known for ingenious metaphors and similes, but Patti Cake$ rarely rises above the literal.
  57. Cape of Good Hope
    Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.
  58. Prey for Rock & Roll
    Unfortunately, despite pretty-on-the-inside performances from the four kickass Clamdaddies, too many extra shake-ups end up crowding out the characters, and distract from the easy camaraderie and slice-of-life intimacy that lures us into their van to begin with.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Shark Tale
    Shark Tale's shallow plot and leagues of padding put it fully in the shadow of last year's animated underwater offering, the nifty, heartfelt "Finding Nemo."
  60. Afternoon Delight
    A film whose themes are as neatly laid out as its characters' behavior is preposterous.
  61. Girls Rock!
    While the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Elf
    Works best as a rapid-fire series of sight gags and absurd remarks.
  63. A Small Act
    Arnold just expects her audience to accept that Mburu's doing the best he can and revere him for it.
  64. The Tempest
    The film lacks a pulse. There's sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.
  65. Desert Riders
    None of the reliably irritating qualities of the social issue documentary gall quite so acutely as the tendency to venerate mere awareness.
  66. Innocence
    Something lured Paul Cox down memory lane, but he should have stayed at home.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life, Translated
    Kiefer Liu's eccentric bit of teen sigh candy is veined with enough chewy oddities to give it texture, but its sappy center isn't sustainable over 100 minutes.
  68. The Good Thief
    His movie (Jordan's) winnows the original's existentialist fable into a busy caper thriller, copping plot devices from Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11" and even straining to Wong Kar-wai its camera's way around the fleshpots of Nice. It's all pizzazz, and the pizzazz is all borrowed.
  69. The Road Home
    The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.
  70. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Too bad this section of the movie is but a temporary reprieve from the obnoxious sentimentality.
  71. 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Mexican Shivah
    Kvetches its way through an insipid vision of cross-cultural conflict.
  73. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    My dad took me. He was a film critic and he’d already seen it for work, but then he took me opening weekend and fell asleep while I watched it. He did that a lot. But I think he liked it. I guess he wouldn’t have gone to see it again if he didn’t. What kind of idiot does that?
  74. Intermission
    Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Throughout, stereotypes are trotted out so that the movie can wink that it's too smart for them.
  76. Symphony of the Soil
    Despite director Deborah Koons Garcia's mighty effort to create a stimulating and visually engaging product, Symphony plays mostly like a taped lecture.
  77. Upside Down
    Solanas comes up with arresting images; it's in telling the story that he stumbles, getting so tripped up in the allegorical details of his invented universe that his characters suffer.
  78. Women in Trouble
    Awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories.
  79. Cowboys & Angels
    Ostensibly a less colorful, feature-length "Queer Eye," the film also examines the apparent social trichotomy of modern Ireland, where you're either a fashion designer, a drug dealer, or a complete square.
  80. A Real Young Girl
    A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.
  81. After
    The final revelation of the big secret that haunts the family -- hinted at throughout the movie -- is more than a little maudlin, and the dedication feels like nothing so much as ass covering. Until then, After is a frequently absorbing miserablist family drama shot in appropriately chilly winter tones.
  82. The Culture High
    It’s strongly anti-prohibition, and the film’s structure favors that bias.
  83. Fred Claus
    The exceptional cast--Vaughn, Giamatti, Kathy Bates, Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz--is an embarrassment of riches for a script this thin and this beholden to family-fare protocol, with its mushy-minded moral and slick sentimentality.
  84. The Passion of the Christ
    X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.
  85. À cause d'un garçon
    Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.
  86. Flavors
    Unfortunately, the constant cell phone chatter and pervasive split screen do little to prop up a limp, poorly structured screenplay.
  87. Life Happens
    L!fe Happens is a blonde-brunette buddy comedy with a charmless cast (Rachel Bilson plays the third roomie, a Christian virgin) and banter as flat as Deena's favorite no-strings imperative, "Bone and bolt."
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    My eight-year-old nephew sat nearly silent throughout, so when he says he had fun, he must be talking about the treats.
  89. The Babymakers
    The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.
  90. Five Time Champion
    Rule of thumb: If a movie about how life is messy features someone lecturing about how messy life is, that movie is not nearly messy enough to do justice to life.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    Aside from Laspalès's enlivening physical humor, Poiré's forced, formulaic comedy of errors has little to offer.
  92. Marvin Seth and Stanley
    Shot in '70s naturalism, the film's cinematography only invites unfavorable comparisons to the more ambitious, psychologically searching interpersonal dramas of that era.
  93. Runaway Bride
    Runaway Bride isn't as offensive as most studio romantic comedies—just pointless and dull.
  94. Elizabeth Harvest
    Gutierrez works some twists on the familiar premise, and one standout thrill of a chase scene employs Brian De Palma’s signature split screens. But as it nears the two-hour mark, the film becomes exhausting, shedding very little light on the futuristic implications of the story.
  95. All the Rage
    More commendable as social protest than as filmmaking.
  96. The Boy from Geita
    The Boy From Geita has some fascinating subjects but absolutely no idea how to present them.
  97. The Black Tulip
    There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.
  98. The Devil and Father Amorth
    It’s stuck between earnest examination of a case and exploitative hustle — and is unlikely to please the audiences interested in either.
  99. The Doctor from India
    Sometimes a filmmaker is so taken with a subject that a documentary fizzles into hagiography, a problem of Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor From India, a film about Vasant Lad, who brought the ancient Indian healing practice of Ayurveda to the U.S. in the late 1970s.
  100. The Queen of Spain
    Sumptuous production and costume design coupled with José Luis Alcaine’s expert cinematography make it a feast for the eyes…but there’s not much more substance.
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