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. Into the Storm
    Too cartoonish to be cathartic, and too ghoulish to be honest fun, Into the Storm is mostly a somewhat uncomfortable sit enlivened by occasional hilariousness.
  2. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
  3. The Five-Year Engagement
    There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller's limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials.
  4. Shakespeare in Love
    It soon becomes evident just how inane a film this is.
  5. Festival of Lights
    Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.
  6. King of California
    Hard to tell what’s more annoying in this empty character study of eccentrics and the suckers who love them: the braying, blurting soundtrack or Douglas himself, who can’t find his way into a man tortured by dull demons.
  7. Two in the Wave
    Director Emmanuel Laurent extends de Baecque's essay with clips from Truffaut-Godard films (diminished in HD) and, rather than new interviews with contemporaries, footage of an attractive actress (Isild Le Besco) flipping through old photos and looking pensively at the entrance of the old Cinémathèque Française.
  8. Shelter
    Shelter is a well-intentioned film that edges into misery porn.
  9. Anything Else
    I have a friend who insists Allen should make a western, if only because the demands of genre might force the birth of new ideas. His movies do create and service an innovation-free comfort zone that makes most TV sitcoms seem adventurous.
  10. The Call
    The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Pizzas
    Writer-director Vincent Sassone makes your mouth water with his lovingly photographed images of freshly baked pizza but turns your stomach with extra-cheesy dialogue and an inconsistent narrative.
  12. The Truth About Charlie
    Gave me a craving for something nouvelle, not a half-hearted Hollywood co-optation.
  13. The City of Lost Souls
    The plot is muddy and quite beside the point. The almost meditative mood takes center stage.
  14. Saving Grace B. Jones
    The film packs in more characters, subplots, and moments of nostalgic detail than it can gracefully accommodate, and the pacing often feels rushed.
  15. Wonderland
    Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good -- the simple story of a doomed hop-hog over his head in bad shit could've hit the nerve if left to tell itself.
  16. Looking for Palladin
    Requiring cuts, some sense of direction, and dialogue that doesn't either declare or dither, the film looks like it was fun to make.
  17. O
    Had Nelson and Kaaya been less concerned with following Othello to the letter and rather had pursued this love affair into uncharted cinematic waters, O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions.
  18. We Came Home
    This is a boutique production that suffers a bad case of POV syndrome, sloppily following the blueprint of what documentaries about families and important issues are supposed be.
  19. Monster Hunt
    There are some scary moments among the slapstick, and the picture surprisingly doesn't pull its punches during its Harry and the Hendersons–style denouement, but Monster Hunt is hindered by its overlong running time and often mawkish sentimentality.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stateside
    Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.
  21. Return to Sender
    Even with the dramatic buildup, Mikati hesitates to make Return to Sender an all-out revenge fantasy, and the characters are too sketchy for an effective psychological thriller.
  22. The Pink Panther
    The lack of energy suggests the film might as well have been constructed from outtakes.
  23. Gerry
    Exercise in existential tedium that it is, Gerry isn't without devotees.
  24. 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.
  25. The Playback Singer
    Were it not for Partridge's and Mishra's performances, the generic plot -- Ray becomes inspired after bonding with Ashok, a down-on-his-luck Bollywood singer -- would be completely unmoving and unenlightening.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Killing Them Softly
    It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots.
  27. Triple 9
    The story isn't complex, but its telling is tangled, often willfully so.
  28. Leonie
    Well-shot and sometimes briefly affecting, especially when Mortimer is given a scene that lasts longer then thirty seconds, the film moves too quickly for its many incidents to have much impact, and what limited power it builds is dissipated by mortifying narration.
  29. The Square
    This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."
  30. Tanzania: A Journey Within
    This film shows what was clearly a profound set of experiences for both Ndibalema and Kenney, but it is not much more than a well-made vacation slideshow or an extended Facebook post, complete with exclamation points.
  31. Masterminds
    The film is competent in its framing and editing in a way that most comedies aren’t (compare/contrast with Neighbors 2, which is barely a movie except in the most technical sense) and avoids dead-end-obvious improv.
  32. Harrison's Flowers
    A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.
  33. Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    Schneebaum is a great subject; the film doesn't quite make the most of him.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Amid the windy speeches, fiery explosions, exposition dumps, and product placements, there are a few treats to help the intelligent moviegoer - drawn to Dark of the Moon by peer pressure or kitsch factor or an insatiable desire for overstimulation - through the ordeal.
  35. The Da Vinci Code
    Overshadowed by its own marketing hurricane and popular rage, Code struggles for significance as a movie experience and flies a weak flag as a provocation.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bread, My Sweet
    There's little meaty -- and nothing glandular -- in the slight weepie The Bread, My Sweet.
  37. Yelling to the Sky
    Little more than a résumé film for all involved, it certainly feels more Park City than Bushwick.
  38. Sleep Dealer
    Science fiction easily lends itself to allegory, but while the dystopian near-future of co-writer/director Alex Rivera's feature debut focuses, admirably, on how globalization affects the third world, his ideas are as subtle as a light saber to the face.
  39. Raising Helen
    John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.
  40. Delicacy
    Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm - not as aggressively as she did in "Amélie," but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy.
  41. The Other Woman
    The Other Woman doesn't give these actresses much to do except look ridiculous, if not sneaky and conniving.
  42. Countdown to Zero
    This is another well-intentioned but preaching-to-the-choir doc, and boring as well.
  43. Fantastic Four
    The model here isn't adventure pulp. It's dystopian Y.A., junked up with scenes of medical horror too scary for kids and too unpleasant to be enjoyed by anyone.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tamara
    Genre jolts arise in spite of stylistic failures.
  45. American Pie
    Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."
  46. 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.
  47. Alice in Wonderland
    Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    The bland, jittery visual "realism" can't counteract overheated performances of tin-eared dialogue, which strain for pulp but often land at soap.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Green Lantern
    The film never rewards the viewer for even trying to keep track of what is going on. So you give up, and instead try to grab on to the small pleasures, which momentarily distract from the fact that the narrative is nonsensical, the characters so boilerplate that their every action seem preordained from the earliest frames, even as the action on-screen is often incoherent.
  50. The War Within
    Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.
  51. Sweet Home Alabama
    The clunky yee-haw script full of tired bitch/angel oppositions and Witherspoon's school-play petulance cranks the twang to a blare.
  52. The Last House on the Left
    This new House tries to sustain a grave, heavy sense of threat. It fails, through its villainy.
  53. Turbo
    Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.
  54. Shrek
    Desperately avoiding the risk of even a half-second of boredom, the movie is wall-to-window-to-door noise, babbling, and jokes.
  55. Harvest
    This is largely a non-narrative piece, the director employing a slice-of-life-in-crisis approach that only works if the characters or the situations are sharply drawn. Neither are.
  56. Distorted
    If there’s one thing I can say for this movie, it’s that the cast is delivering, even if the story they’re in cannot.
  57. Ramona and Beezus
    Wholesome to the point of being dull.
  58. The Human Experiment
    The problem with The Human Experiment as an actual film and not just an anti-chemical treatise is that, though these people and the troubling statistics they cite are on the level, we're too rarely afforded the opportunity to reach our own conclusions based on them.
  59. 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.
  60. Simon Magus
    Though Hopkins lovingly re-creates the surfaces of shtetl life, its deep spirituality seems to elude him.
  61. Literally, Right Before Aaron
    The film ends with a riff on the final moments of The Graduate, a frustrating suggestion of a much better work.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Satellite
    Nice low-budget cinematography and authentic New York City locations aside, there's little to engage viewers over the course of 100 wandering minutes.
  63. Perfect Stranger
    Perfect Stranger derives some novelty value from its colorblind casting and from being the most ludicrously silly Hollywood f----fest since the Willis-starring "Color of Night" (minus that movie's comic self-awareness). But as a thriller, it's so by-the-numbers that it's hardly worth keeping count.
  64. Possession
    Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.
  65. The Ipcress File
    The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.
  66. Dumb and Dumber To
    The misfires, including a strange menstruation gag, far outnumber the hits. Dumb and Dumber To is mostly just a kick in the nuts, and not the good kind -- provided there is a good kind.
  67. Submission
    You know that moment about fifteen minutes before the end of most American narrative features, when the protagonist is brought to his or her low point, and it looks as if there’s no possible way things could get better? Something has probably gone wrong if viewers are cheering that.
  68. 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.
  69. Step Up: All In
    Step Up All In cuts too fast, the way an MTV hack does when forced to disguise that a starlet can't move.
  70. Any Day Now
    Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.
  71. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    Having already looted the Peckinpah and spaghetti-western archives, the director now quotes his own quotations, in service of not a sequel but a vociferous reiteration.
  72. The Little Traitor
    Terminally mild, ill-structured adaptation of Amos Oz's novel "Panther in the Basement."
  73. Dorfman in Love
    Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.
  74. Postmen in the Mountains
    The notion that every generation is fundamentally the same gets hammered home so relentlessly that it becomes suffocating, despite all the fresh air.
  75. Dog Park
    A series of moments that don't quite add up to a movie...one bland, maundering stroll.
  76. Desierto
    Sam's racist behavior may be intended to make him a menacing sign of our times, but such unbelievable mustache-twirling makes him as threatening as a C-grade Freddy Krueger knockoff.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Igby Goes Down
    Culkin broods and freaks out ably, but Igby's snotty, dysfunction-derived malaise remains off-putting, mostly because his lines aren't half as clever or empathic as Steers would believe.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lion Ark
    Finding balance between the rescue of abused circus lions and the fascinating cause and effect of a ban that led to the rescue of said lions proves too much for the creators of Lion Ark.
  79. The Merry Gentleman
    Keaton, who took over directing duties from ill-stricken screenwriter Ron Lazzeretti before shooting started, inherited a stock-still story of two lonely souls and never develops their rapport.
    • 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Saint Ralph
    The most blatant rip-off is of the "Rushmore" soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stay
    In Marc Forster's humorless thriller, going insane is an exciting, luxurious affair. People suffer stylishly; depressives are angry and dirty; they make art, carry guns, and live in magnificent houses.
  83. Æon Flux
    Gone are Chung's willfully irrational non sequitur surrealisms, vertiginous designs, dry humor, and physiological weirdness; now we have Charlize Theron trying to look icy, leaping about in resistance to a future dystopia that looks a lot like an overlandscaped European Union industrial park.
  84. Spiral
    Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.
  85. The Art of Getting By
    Crafted not to give the slightest offense, The Art of Getting By makes the great - and even the mediocre - teen movies of 30 years ago, like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Fame," and "Foxes," look even more radical in comparison, with their depiction of obnoxious, horny, property-destroying teens.
  86. 2 Jacks
    False gravity weighs down 2 Jacks, a father-son drama less interested in exploring familial relations than in tut-tutting the millennials.
  87. Out Loud
    Out Loud is too clumsily put together to give its subject the weight it needs to feel both grounded and moving.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The FP
    Infinitely better as a beer-goggled pitch than as a feature film, The FP never gets beyond the studied novelty of its own pose.
  89. The Last Shot
    Planned inanity never gets mad mad mad mad enough.
  90. Bridging the Gap
    Bridging the Gap is gorgeous and weird.
  91. One Swallow Brought Spring
    The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.
  92. Man in the Chair
    Walsh and Plummer are obviously pros, and they hustle to put across some patently ridiculous business, but, well, it's true about the polishing thing.
  93. Speech & Debate
    Director Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes) structures Speech & Debate like a musical comedy that's building up to a cathartic final number, but scene after scene just falls flat.
  94. A Kid Like Jake
    Howard, who is trans himself, approaches the film with sensitivity, but it ends up feeling like a conversation to be continued, not resolved. At least there’s some classic Claire Danes crying.
  95. Damsel
    Pattinson and Wasikowska deserve better material than the Zellners’ head-scratchingly lazy jokes.
  96. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Call it parody, pastiche, remix, whatever — for some thirty minutes of its running time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transcends its goof of a premise to become something fresh and full-blooded.
  97. The Human Stain
    Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
    • 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.
  99. Unleashed
    Director Finn Taylor’s Unleashed is an inoffensive Hallmark card of an indie comedy, as indifferently intended by the sender as it is regarded by the recipient.
  100. Dead Man's Shoes
    Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.
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