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. Phyllis and Harold
    What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet--another in a thriving sub-genre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn--is the abyss between the husband and wife's points of view.
  2. At the Devil's Door
    In his second feature, McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?
  3. Secret Society
    There's a certain gutsy allure to the wildly improbable proceedings.
  4. The Other Side of the Bed
    If Martínez-Lázaro, as he reiterated at the Miami Film Festival earlier this year, wants to expand the U.S. Spanish-language film market, one hopes he'll aim higher than this.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anything But Love
    If this is such a cheesy, derivative movie, why did I watch it twice with such delight? Possibly because at its center it's profoundly authentic, and because the star turn by Andrew McCarthy, a moody, mercurial characterization, saves it from fairy-tale bathos.
  6. Treading Water
    Analeine Cal y Mayor's bland, faux-quirky dramedy's most distinguishing set piece is a kitschy historic house museum dedicated to an erstwhile Mexican crooner named Guillermo Garibai.
  7. Nostalgia
    Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.
  8. In Secret
    In Secret boasts vigor and thematic richness, that feeling of artists expressing something vital.
  9. 3 Dancing Slaves
    For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.
  10. A Country Called Home
    Poots, who's quietly distinguished herself in a number of supporting roles over the last few years, brings a documentary-like naturalism to the familiar plotting; you'll care about her even if you begin to lose interest in the movie as a whole.
  11. Black Rock
    The story and its violence are deeply silly, but there's something nervy and upsetting that distinguishes the film's incidental excitement.
  12. The Tenants
    Stilted and gloomy as it sounds (and sometimes is), The Tenants gets by on its nimble approximation of Malamud's robust prose, subtle turns of deadpan humor and gut-tingling menace, and remarkable performances. McDermott does credible work here, but Snoop's casting is a stroke of genius.
  13. Alien Abduction
    Credit this spirited, uncommonly effective found-footage thriller for breaking the templates promised by its genre and title.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forces of Nature
    Well-constructed, if chilly, road romance, with some great throwaway lines.
  15. Around the Bend
    Veers deep into male-weepie territory.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Autumn
    Enamored of all things French and noir, American director Ra'up McGee has written a love letter to both.
  17. Wonder Wheel
    The camerawork in Allen’s customary long takes is fluid, even arresting, but Winslet’s performance would benefit from the kind of editing these long takes don’t allow. Rather than loose, the ensemble often seems underrehearsed, and too many of Winslet’s lines have little impact.
  18. Typhoon
    A cheap-looking action movie that sabotages itself at almost every turn.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Maybe Baby
    Proves infertile in more ways than one.
  20. Miss Julie
    Figgis's frenetic and grossly self-aggrandizing adaption of Strindberg's worse-for-wear two-hander about the battle between the sexes and the classes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Choose Connor
    For all the potential of this coming-of-age/political-awakening tale, Choose Connor undoes itself with an egregiously sordid turn.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Off Jackson Avenue
    Despite this tri-part farcical thriller's plot construction, some hackneyed dialogue and actorial mugging--the finest exception being Aya Cash's airily acerbic Slavic hooker--you can't help but eagerly anticipate the finale, when Montias brings his intersecting storylines together. Apparently, amusingly improbable coincidences can satisfy.
  23. The Little Death
    Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.
  24. The Last Movie Star
    Reynolds never appears in full command of his body, and at times the performance is painful to watch, not simply because the one-time golden boy has aged but because the role demands that he act as if aging is a betrayal, as if he has nothing to offer the world without his youthful vigor.
  25. Burke and Hare
    By swinging between broad laughs and cheap pathos - Pegg's specialties as an actor, apparently - while avoiding the more fertile ground between, Landis renders his Burke and Hare sociopolitically toothless and bizarrely insensitive.
  26. Desert Wind
    Nicely rendered moments of casual intimacy between the men attest to the trip's therapeutic value, but very little of it transfers to the audience. The dull large-group scenes consist mostly of old standbys like writing problems on slips of paper and burning them.
  27. London Town
    All the ingredients for a gritty — if familiar — coming-of-age story are here. But London Town, though spirited, is consistently tension-free.
  28. The Comedians of Comedy
    Only works when the subjects are onstage. Watching the quartet doing laundry, playing arcade games, or getting haircuts evokes the banality of road life far too accurately, and at 105 minutes, the film hardly leaves us wanting more.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mercy
    At the risk that giving Scott Caan a bad review will cause him to fall in love with me, I must note the irony in a film that seeks to critique superficiality, only to fall back on the old "dead fiancées deepen dipshits" trick.
  30. The Broken Tower
    The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
    Viewers who haven’t studied their Neon Genesis DVD box sets in advance will find the plot incomprehensible—Old Testament gibberish mixed with political intrigue at the global defense agency headed by Shinji’s aloof father. But the sentiments are clear: “I guess I want Dad to praise me,” says our wavering hero. And his courtship of Asuka is downright charming.
  32. Agnes and His Brothers
    The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Flowers of War
    With The Flowers of War, Zhang mostly just proves that there's no tragedy too terrible that it can't be turned into an operatic pageant - human suffering reduced to visual showmanship.
  34. Flirt
    Hal Hartley fans, Flirt may be too slight and schematic. [13 Aug 1996]
    • Village Voice
  35. Clay Pigeons
    It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.
  36. Deliver Us from Eva
    As wrathful health inspector, possessed choir director, and general castrating angel, Union wrecks store with a slew of ass-chapping teardowns that would make Cam'ron curdle.
  37. Foreign Sister
    Offers an incisive glimpse into one woman's inner transformation -- her secret sense of loss in the midst of plenty and her sudden perception of a world of suffering lying just beyond her home.
  38. The Nanny Diaries
    Like the book, the Nanny Diaries movie never finds a dramatic center.
  39. Reservation Road
    Reservation Road itself may twist and turn into the New England night, but emotionally and dramatically, the movie that bears its name is a dead end.
  40. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    Par for the course in blowout CGI adaptations, a great deal of detail and bustle is gained at the expense of charm - for all the miracles these armies of animators can achieve, they have yet to successfully reproduce a humble artist's line.
  41. Lolita
    There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.
  42. The Oranges
    The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden: It's inoffensive, forgettable, and you don't actually have to chew anything.
  43. Seed of Chucky
    The film mostly shoots blanks; it's less than the sum of its in-jokes.
  44. We Are Your Friends
    Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, "Startups." Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice.
  45. Ashby
    It doesn't hurt to have excellent support from the likes of Emma Roberts (as Ed's love interest Eloise) and Sarah Silverman, surprisingly winning as Ed's affection-starved mother. But it's Wolff and Rourke who have to carry the load, and for the most part they do.
  46. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.
  47. Immortals
    Given something as simple as Theseus's rousing prebattle speech, maximalist Singh is helpless, but when he gets whole armies in on the act, you've got something to behold.
  48. Habermann
    A World War II melodrama with a hook - affluent Germans as sympathetic victims - Habermann does a credible job of personalizing a period of the war largely unknown outside the Czech Republic.
  49. Extinction
    Sometimes, Extinction is a zombie apocalypse story; mostly, it's a meditation on isolation, redemption, and family that could, in its basic outline, be satisfyingly told outside of its genre.
  50. Lavender
    Gass-Donnelly (The Last Exorcism Part II) blends supernatural elements into a psychological thriller for a kind of spectral therapy, but his experimentation ultimately conforms to genre conventions.
  51. Mirror Mirror
    Here, the familiar tale is retold with concessions to feminist self-determination and camp humor, bending the Grimm Brothers' tale without infringing on its basic beauty.
  52. Food of Love
    Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Festival in Cannes
    Has shades of such oleaginous insider-treading as "The Player" and "Celebrity," but the mood, like the lighting, is altogether sunnier.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Breakin' All the Rules
    The threadbare plot gets considerable padding from alternately psychotic, lecherous, and greedy Caucasians.
  55. 28 Days
    Thomas's fleet-footed approach suggests the anxious embarrassment of a director in an awful hurry to get it over with.
  56. Beyond the Sea
    By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.
  57. B-52
    That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.
  58. The Calling
    The Calling breathes new life into a moribund genre by touching oft-ignored themes and offering a bit of introspection to go along with the obligatory slashed throats and biblical portents.
  59. The Ringer
    An uncomfortable intermingling of message movie and gross-out comedy, a sporadically funny vehicle that indicts its audience for laughing.
  60. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.
  61. Ravenous
    Ravenous loses resonance as it proceeds.
  62. Hunky Dory
    Hunky Dory isn't blazing any trails, but if you're not wholly burned out by the genre and/or look back fondly on the Glam era, you'll find musicals haven't yet completely gone to the (diamond) dogs.
  63. You, Me and Dupree
    The movie goes from being another mildly depressing lump of unrealized comic potential to being an actively unpleasant experience.
  64. Unlocked
    Unlocked feels like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, which makes it a perfect fit for the 76-year-old Apted, whose wonderfully varied career includes the James Bond flick, The World Is Not Enough.
  65. Manderlay
    All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.
  66. Mind the Gap
    In the crass, endless Mind the Gap, Schaeffer dares to ape "Magnolia," telling five barely connected stories with all the grace of a juggler tossing open bottles of Drano.
  67. The Woman Chaser
    The queasiness it makes you feel is more like acid reflux than existential nausea.
  68. The Deal
    The thriller plot sputters and the romance between Slater and eco-friendly Harvard MBA Selma Blair is a nonstarter, but the movie's threadbare execution actually enhances its queasy vision of a nation in decline.
  69. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Green is sexy, funny, dangerous, and wild -- everything the film needed to be -- and whenever she's not on-screen, we feel her absence as though the sun has blinked off.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Comedy
    There's not a false note in the film, but maybe there's a difference between accuracy and truth.
  71. How Do You Know
    Not that How Do You Know doesn't have its moments of shamelessly entertaining shtick, much of it furnished by Nicholson (watch for a very funny visual gag about his proclivities for much younger women) and by Wilson as Lisa's current squeeze.
  72. King Arthur
    Everything is pre-medieval and unwashed, but with Antoine Fuqua at the steering wheel King Arthur is still a comic book, if a little more "Classics Illustrated" in tone than we'd have the right to expect.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hostel: Part II
    Eli Roth punks capitalism all the way to the bank with cheap tricks and bankrupt imagination.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Naked Fame
    There are many dreadful elements in this chronicle of aging gay male porn star Colton Ford's quest for crossover success in the music industry: sub-amateurish camera work, a maddeningly repetitive score, and a listless narrative.
  75. If I Stay
    [Cutler] approaches all these teenage hyperfeelings with respect and sensitivity. It doesn’t hurt that he has Moretz in his corner.
  76. Esther Kahn
    This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.
  77. One Night at McCool's
    Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.
  78. Dog Park
    A series of moments that don't quite add up to a movie...one bland, maundering stroll.
  79. Secret Window
    "The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity.
  80. Fast & Furious
    Fast & Furious reconfirms that car-chase movies--good, bad, or mediocre--all assume the future employment of the quaint old fast-forward button.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Musical Chairs
    All would be forgiven if Seidelman weren't so damningly dispassionate about dance, cutting up and away from movement and devaluing the thing we'd countenance so much cheese in order to see.
  82. Fifty Shades of Grey
    The film strips Fifty Shades of Grey to its essentials: a confident man, an awkward girl, and a red room rimmed with leather handcuffs. From there, Taylor-Johnson rebuilds. She constructs an erotic dramedy that takes its romance seriously even as it admits that Christian Grey's very existence is absurd.
  83. Rebel in the Rye
    This thanklessly watchable film, recut since its mixed Sundance premiere, may not warrant Holden Caulfield’s trademark judgment of phoniness — but, like any clichéd writing, deserves rejection.
  84. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    By setting the film in a deliberately distanced '70s, writer-director Justin Lin gets the benefit of looking-back-in-superiority.
  85. The Whole Truth
    This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.
  86. 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.
  87. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    Although the big comic setups in Lee's script feel a bit forced--the director continually sets up moments of rapid-fire, barb-filled interplay among his accomplished cast.
  88. 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."
  89. The Elephant King
    Equivalent to a crummy band with a monster of a drummer who convinces you to stay for the whole show anyways.
  90. The Charcoal People
    Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Simian Line
    The film tries hard to avoid cliché but doesn't get very far.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    American Chai
    As earnest as a community-college advertisement, American Chai is enough to make you put away the guitar, sell the amp, and apply to medical school.
  93. Hollywood Ending
    The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bruce Almighty
    A looking-glass cover version of "The Truman Show," the maudlin Jim Carrey vehicle Bruce Almighty lets the comedian ply his rubber-limbed shtick as well as indulge his pursuit of sappiness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conspiracy of Silence
    Due to Conspiracy's TV-movie simplicity, it's unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just something spicy to be cooked up in the potboiler.
  96. Saw
    With its toilet-bobbing and blood spurting and Elwes's fey, Vincent Price–like mugging, Saw succeeds in capturing something like Takashi Miike by way of William Castle. Happy Halloween, indeed.
  97. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    The movie rises to another level whenever its star has a chance to cut loose -- leading the ensemble in a conga line, winning a sack race in slow motion, torching the Whos' Christmas tree while screaming, "Burn baby burn."
  98. Striporama
    An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.
  99. Rhinoceros Eyes
    Live by the meta-movie rules, die by the meta-movie rules: Rhinoceros Eyes is a parable on cine-enchantment that itself fails to enchant.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Story of the Eye
    This skin-deep flick is merely art-school sophomoric, unwittingly cornball, and counterrevolutionary.
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