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. The Lake House
    Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fido
    Vancouver-based writer-director Andrew Currie leads us to stop expecting actual jokes while squandering the talents of an overqualified cast
  4. The Golden Compass
    In drawing and quartering much of the novel's intent, Weitz ends up with a film that feels not just unfinished but undone.
  5. Red Hill
    It's clear that Hughes knows his Midnight Oil, but he's ignorant of the craft of economic action filmmaking. However arguably noble his film's intent to redress historical grievance, a poorly filmed shoot-out is never more than exactly that.
  6. 5 Days of War
    Taking the vantage point of civilians rather than combatants allows 5 Days of War to show the toll of the terror and of the relentless, exhausting pursuit of war with unexpected force. Had it rejected the genre's romantic trappings and false heroics more consistently, the movie might've been worth the ride.
  7. I Am Happiness on Earth
    I Am Happiness on Earth's script is mostly filler between explicit, intensely choreographed sex acts.
  8. Session 9
    The script for Session 9 is so underwritten that even such lively character actors as David Caruso, Peter Mullan, and Brendan Sexton III are left stranded.
  9. Sleuth
    Whatever pleasure can be wrung from Sleuth lies in the black comedy of Caine and Law's sinuous symbiosis.
  10. Whatever Works
    Blown opportunity.
  11. Entre nos
    The postscript reveal that Entre Nos, which follows a newly single immigrant mother as she ekes out a living on the streets of New York, is based on the filmmaker's own story is more affecting than anything that made it to the screen.
  12. Yadvi - The Dignified Princess
    The Singhs aren’t able to make Yadvi more distinctive than any other women whose fate is controlled by the hubris of men, or who’ve lost the wealth their titles once afforded them.
  13. Waiting for Forever
    Strangely unaware of its overt creepiness.
  14. Mission to Mars
    Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Implausibilities mount, and by the last act Lerner appears to have lost any compunction he might have had about using his protagonist to tug the audience's heartstrings.
  16. The Safety of Objects
    Though agile edits keep things moving, in braiding several tales into one tight suburban tangle, character development takes more shortcuts than "Short Cuts."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ira & Abby
    The overall effect is that of an aging vaudevillian making a good-hearted but embarrassing attempt to entertain us with stock characters and stock jokes and stock shtick.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials.
  19. Sister Helen
    Perhaps if Sister Helen had been released when filming was completed in 2000, its tough-loving Irish nun, who gives hell to male drug addicts in a Mott Haven "safe house," might have passed for endearing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Who Killed the Electric Car?
    The real question is why this purportedly impassioned documentary investigation of a great subject--the culture's conspiratorial dismissal of eco-friendly alternatives to the gas-guzzler -- would assume such massive viewer disinterest that it coats the pill with C-list celebrity NutraSweet, including Martin Sheen voiceovers -- that would sound unforgivably hackneyed even on basic cable.
  21. Norwegian Wood
    Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.
  22. La mission
    As subtle as a face-punch, La Mission nobly continues a necessary conversation about homophobia, but paves the way to hell with its own good intentions.
  23. A Love Divided
    Brady and Cunningham share a volatile, symbiotic chemistry, sketching in elegant shorthand the rhythms of a lusty, combative marriage.
  24. Annapolis
    Often laughably overwrought rehash of "An Officer and a Gentleman," ekes out enough of a subtext on competition to qualify as a non-fiasco.
  25. Goodnight Brooklyn - The Story of Death by Audio
    The footage relies more on idealistic testimonies than a cinematic experience showcasing DBA's vitality.
  26. Forever My Girl
    Wolf establishes only a half-formed idea of the decisions, fights, and silences that have shaped these characters’ lives, so the cast often seems to be shouting into a vacuum.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Southlander: Diary of a Desperate Musician
    The script doesn't give the cast much to play aside from vague eccentricity, and movies like this one rise and fall on the vividness of their weirdos.
  28. I Saw the Light
    I Saw the Light ignores Williams's composing, denies us his voice, and is too spooked by sentimentality to show us just what his music touches off in people.
  29. A United Kingdom
    Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.
  30. What Dreams May Come
    A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.
  31. De-Lovely
    Openly gay and overwhelmingly glum.
  32. The Boy
    Craig William Macneill's The Boy tries so hard to be ominous that it nearly strains itself in the process.
  33. Her
    Instead of just being desperately heartfelt, Her keeps reminding us — through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's somber-droll camera work, through Phoenix's artfully slumped shoulders — how desperately heartfelt it is.
  34. Dancing on a Dry Salt Lake
    The cast (which includes familiar character actors like Nicolas Coster and David Leisure) is wildly uneven, talent-wise, and there's a stiltedness to the film's earnestness, but its sincerity is palpable.
  35. Shrink
    Pate's eye isn't bad, but Thomas Moffett's screenplay is self-serious piffle.
  36. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    Suffice it to say that if you've always wondered how a fish out of water and a band of resourceful yokels would behave in the Quebec hinterlands, this is your movie.
  37. Storm
    The writing by director Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem) and Bernd Lange is more stilted and righteous than even the U.N. environs, with its humanity-embracing procedural-speak, calls for.
    • 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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Never Been Thawed
    Passably offbeat.
  40. 360
    There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty.
  41. The Recruit
    Cliché-density aside, Roger Donaldson's perfectly rote movie is childishly naive about the reality of the CIA as it stands in the official record and in the public mindset.
  42. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Testosterone
    We're teased with the prospect of a deeper context.
  44. The Gallows
    The Gallows is only good enough to make you wish its creators did something novel with its formulaic style, plot, and characterizations.
  45. Miral
    Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential. As creaky nonsense goes, though, this is chock-full of corny goodness down to its hilarious sense-shredding "twist," which the movie reveals like a magician proudly unveiling a dead rabbit.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Much of Monster is just a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how "important" Metallica are and, worse, how much "integrity" they have.
  48. Land of Plenty
    Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Al Franken: God Spoke
    Unfocused but brisk.
  50. Life of Pi
    Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.
  51. Bonneville
    This rarity in cinema--a graying cast in a female-bonding adventure--couldn't be more dull-humored or predictably maudlin without just calling itself "The Bucket List 2."
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    On the Line
    Less a romance than a feature-length plug for 'N Sync and its personalities -- and so, like all ads, not meant for "conscious consumption." Which opens the blissful avenue of sleep.
  53. Copperhead
    Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.
  54. Happy New Year
    So trite that it's unwittingly insensitive.
  55. Vivere
    I like writer-director Angela Maccarone's ambition, but her technical ingenuity exceeds her grasp of potentially complex emotions, which get stuck in a groove of mawkish self-pity.
  56. Wildling
    The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.
  57. Septien
    Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still.
  58. Life, Above All
    Life, Above All suggests that ignorance and stigmatization are a problem only in the village, not in the highest office of government.
  59. Earth to Echo
    Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that's at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children.
  60. Vacationland
    Todd Verow's overstuffed Vacationland promises more than it delivers in just about every sense.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Pit
    In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower.
  62. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    In an overlong sequence shot to resemble an actual play, the acting feels so forced, the staging so wooden, that it's impossible to be fully engaged in what's actually going on. The actual story is, if not quite rote, certainly nothing new.
  63. Jack and Diane
    Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.
  64. 12-12-12
    Despite some pleasant backstage-footage filler, however, 12-12-12 ultimately so truncates its artists' performances (each is given one song, and those are heavily edited) that the effect is like watching the original TV broadcast in fast-forward.
  65. Violeta Went to Heaven
    By inexpertly filtering her art through her travails, Wood and Altunaga reimagine Parra's suicide as an explicable conclusion to her turbulent life.
  66. The Film Critic
    Criticism mutated long ago, after the internet's floodgates opened, and that outmoded disconnect between The Film Critic and today's film critics underscores how the persistent references to cinema and film writing are self-awarely mimicking clichés but not subverting them.
  67. There Be Dragons
    Its appeal for the rest of us is buoyed by cinematographer Gabriel Beristain's attentiveness to the ravishing Argentinian locations, but the geriatric pacing, flat-footed Old Hollywood pastiche, and Joffé's inexplicable penchant for tear-jerking Catholic mysticism make Dragons more punishing than a hundred Hail Marys.
  68. Dealin' with Idiots
    Years of HBO seasoning has given Garlin and his cast a sure touch and great timing...but the whole project is mean-hearted and lazy, and it dawdles in repetition and dead air as if it's got a 14-show TV season to spin out.
  69. Welcome to the Punch
    When bullets aren't flying, the movie offers yesterday's goods in shiny new packaging.
  70. Daydream Nation
    Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.
  71. Lawless Heart
    Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.
  72. Bitter Harvest
    A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Scorpio exists merely as a succession of stylistic flourishes without feeling, representative of the emptiest, most uninteresting kind of cinema. [24 May 1973, p.83]
    • Village Voice
  74. Envy
    Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.
  75. Kodachrome
    Netflix’s Kodachrome is good fall-asleep-with-the-TV-on fare, and I mean you should snooze out immediately unless you want to be subjected to a criminally mediocre family drama.
  76. All the King's Men
    Penn goes for larger-than-life, wrapping his pinched frown around an unintelligible Louisiana drawl and swinging his arms like an autistic evangelist... Law is no asset--looking rather sadly like John Ireland (the actor who played the 1949 Jack Burden), he has little control over his accent and zero energy.
  77. The Reagan Show
    Rather than reveal a showman, The Reagan Show in the end imitates one.
  78. God's Pocket
    The story... could have worked well as a pitch-black comedy, but first-time director John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) takes the material so seriously that the mood never changes much after leaving the funeral home.
  79. Asphalt Zahov
    Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.
  80. Severance
    When Smith's Grand Guignol tableaux are strung together, they lack any forward momentum. Some take inspired comic flight. The rest crash to the ground and, like so much else in Severance, go splat.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    House in the Alley
    At its best, the film deftly plumbs the gulf between its central couple... At its worst, it paints a Victorian portrait of womanhood... It's shoddily plotted, too.
  82. Mama Africa
    These after-school specials are distinctly depoliticized and seem tailored for Western audiences, so the African settings feel oddly superfluous.
  83. Stage Beauty
    Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.
  84. Reel Injun
    Combining a road trip from his native Arctic reservation to Los Angeles with an archival cinematic survey, Diamond's treatment of each is perfunctory to the point of inutility.
  85. Bride of the Wind
    A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?
  86. The Chorus
    The cinematic equivalent of filtered water, The Chorus is all smooth, nutrient-free clichés. This shamelessly globalized French Oscar submission even opens with a shot of an American flag--perhaps an unconscious declaration of defeat for importable Gallic cinema.
  87. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Snags the viewer's attention by lacing its martial-arts high jinks with a compelling weirdness.
  88. 7 Chinese Brothers
    A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.
  89. Ask the Dust
    Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.
  90. Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity
    This film struggles to do justice to his many accomplishments, shortchanging his artistry.
  91. Enough
    Campbell is the movie's primary power source. His steely gaze and overbearing quietude are forever tainted; "Once and Again" doesn't stand a chance in Lifetime reruns.
  92. The Danish Girl
    If The Danish Girl dared to critique its main characters, it'd be brave. If it had celebrated a modern marriage that worked for 26 years — much longer and stranger than the film lets on — it'd be truly pioneering. Real life is full of kinks, mistakes, and selfish behavior. Biopics, however, are made of formulaic virtue.
  93. Heleno
    You're stuck daydreaming about a far, far better movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Porn Theater
    In its own quiet if overly studied way, Porn Theatre mourns a time when, for better or worse, we could all get off together.
  95. Along Came a Spider
    A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Abandon
    Hardly a nuanced portrait of a young woman's breakdown, the film nevertheless works up a few scares, particularly a tense call-number hunt in the library stacks.
  97. The Anniversary Party
    The film's greatest failure, however, is the absence of any convincing emotional or sexual relationship between Sally (Leigh) and Joe (Cumming).
  98. The Forger
    The film works marginally well as the story of a broken family trying to heal itself, but the third act is a whole different movie.
  99. The Other Side of the Street
    Co-writer and first-time director Marcos Bernstein (who also co-scripted the Montenegro-starring Central Station) drowns the film in anesthetizing atmospherics and hot Brazilian bodies, blunting the energy of his septuagenarian star's performance.
  100. Fathers and Daughters
    While Fathers and Daughters has a strong cast (including a brief appearance by Jane Fonda), it largely saddles them with one-dimensional roles and too-obvious emotional cues.
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