Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Lost in Florence
    While writer-director Evan Oppenheimer's tale of love, sport and Italian culture captures the landscape with a pleasant sheen and certainly makes Florence look like a lovely vacation destination, its narrative contains little emotional pull and too few surprises.
  2. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    While the opera nonetheless soars with its acrobatic choreography of refugee displacement, this documentary about it suffers some dramatic slackness from the inevitable drawing board tedium of performance preparation.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bella
    Manages to be utterly predictable without making any sense at all.
  4. The Legend of Hercules
    Renny Harlin's Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (albeit rather jerkily rendered ones), some grand-looking horses decked out in handsome metal headdresses, and lots of well-oiled beefcake.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People vs. George Lucas
    It's an exhausting airing of nerd grievances, the monolithic arguments leavened only slightly by counterpoints seemingly inserted for comic relief.
  6. Boesman and Lena
    Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.
  7. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Unfortunately "My Left Foot's" Jim Sheridan, that reliable purveyor of Irish struggle-porn, anchors us in tedious exposition.
  8. Crooked Arrows
    Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.
  9. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.
  10. Crazy as Hell
    Uneasy mélange of occult thriller and insane-asylum-as-social-microcosm parable.
  11. Blood Brother
    There are undoubtedly several moving moments in the film, and the kids are gorgeous and heartbreaking, but none of that is strong enough to balance Braat's galling and enabled narcissism, which pervades the film.
  12. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.
  13. All Good Things
    All Good Things patina of fictionalization has not prevented the cagey Durst Organization from threatening a lawsuit. They need not worry, though. The film succeeds only in indicting its authors.
  14. Mr. Woodcock
    Amy Poehler ekes out a smirk or two as a boozy broad publicist trying to keep her paycheck in check, but even the best gags feel like leftovers, again.
  15. Tumbledown
    Neither comedy nor melodrama (though bearing traces of both), Tumbledown ends up a modest study of two fairly unremarkable, prickly characters.
  16. Table 19
    Everything you would expect happens, but little of it is funny or affecting.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Twist
    Stahl plays just one note: anguish. You know things are bad when the most interesting character, the menacing brute Bill Sykes, is never heard or seen on-screen.
  18. Haunt
    The frustration here comes from the filmmakers' inability to present characters with dimension, so that we might come to identify with them and their fears.
  19. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    It’s so gorgeous you can sometimes forget the train wreck of a story. But only sometimes.
  20. World Traveler
    The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.
  21. Nicky's Family
    It's a shame the way the film's narrative is undermined by long stretches of soulless re-enactments, by a well-meaning but energy-sapping final tribute, and by haphazard storytelling.
  22. Capital
    A tacky corporate noir that makes you long for the leanness of Margin Call, or even the clumsy theatrics of Arbitrage.
  23. Boys Life 3
    French director David Fourier's six-minute mock-instructional free association, "Majorettes in Space," is alone almost worth the price of admission.
  24. The War Tapes
    On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.
  25. In the Land of Pomegranates
    The film is a jumble, with no sense of meaningful interaction.
  26. 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.
  27. Red Dawn
    Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Grace
    A muddled, logic-starved provocation, Grace avoids smugness by refusing to play its body horror for sh**s and giggles, but its resonance is purely atmospheric.
  29. Stander
    Kind of a bore.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Jandek on Corwood
    Chad Friedrichs's doc has too many rock-crit talking heads, too often saying the same thing based on scant information -- a clumsy portrait of the artist that inadvertently serves as a mirror of the critical faculty itself.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flying Fish
    Pushpakumara's debut feature portrays the recent Sri Lankan civil war as a gauntlet of private humiliations, endured by largely nameless, barely individuated villagers - making this would-be multi-strand narrative more of an impenetrable tangle.
  32. Swiri
    High-powered and gory.
  33. Ghosts of Mars
    Written, directed, and edited with the offhand shoddiness of a day worker thinking about his evening beer.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Premonition
    Had the film maintained a tone of kooky, Kafkaesque tragicomedy, narrowing in on Linda's wacko wrestling match with the laws of physics, we might really have had something here.
  35. West of the Jordan River
    The maddeningly unfocused Israeli documentary West of the Jordan River doesn’t reveal anything insightful about Gaza settlers’ reasons for either supporting or rejecting a two-state solution.
  36. New York Minute
    The whole project reeks of vanity, but it doesn't take a Columbia degree to see that any movie where the Michelle Tanners trudge via sewer from CPS to 125th is an instant camp classic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    Politically, psychologically, and aesthetically schizophrenic.
  38. U.N. Me
    Unfortunately, mocking jibes and cutaways to Team America and Wonder Woman (among other movies and TV shows) establish a jokey attitude that weakens the overall case.
  39. The Fifth Estate
    The issues at play here are fascinating, but Condon and Singer never let any argument about journalism or the philosophy of free information last longer than a couple ping-ponged lines between master (Assange) and student (Domscheit-Berg).
  40. Lost and Delirious
    A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."
  41. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.
  42. Valentino: The Last Emperor
    Dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait that you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
  43. Lotus Eaters
    Lotus Eaters, which McGuinness co-wrote with Brendan Grant, is maddeningly shallow—maybe that's the point—but McGuinness does have talent.
  44. A Moment of Silence
    There's a juicy story in here, but Orgnani desiccates his narrative by relying on jargon-laden interviews with political wonks and dry intellectuals, presenting a byzantine account of the events with little context. Sans narrator, timeline, or clear-cut structure, this may have been made for Bolivian political junkies alone.
  45. The Park Bench
    The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.
  46. 21 and Over
    The movie rambles in a way that dilutes any possibility of edgy discomfort. Lucas and Moore have good control over the timing within the gags; it's the spaces between them that stretch out awkwardly. You can't hate 21 & Over, and you can't laugh at it. The most you can do is just pity it for not being as outrageous as it thinks it is.
  47. Cuban Fury
    Frost can play lovable losers in his sleep, but to succeed, Cuban Fury has to make him dance. A fat man falling down gets a cheap laugh; a fat man with magic feet makes us cheer. Director James Griffiths splits the difference between ridicule and respect, and the resulting comedy is as trite and cloying as a rum and coke.
  48. Vito Bonafacci
    Factor in the consistently subpar acting and Vito Bonafaccistands as one project better suited to Sunday schools than movie theaters.
  49. Appleseed
    Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    xXx: State of the Union
    The winking title X Cubed somehow eluded the makers of this sequel, along with plot coherency, character development, or clever explosions of genre convention.
  51. Hello Lonesome
    The same laxity given to the performers extends, unfortunately, to the film's structuring, a lazy Susan rotation between storylines and monotonous settings.
  52. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    An incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results.
  53. Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango
    The musical interludes of rarely heard recordings are an impressive find, but the movie's messy approach to telling tango's hidden history seems at odds with itself.
  54. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner is so bleak that it almost convinces us to take it seriously.
  55. Georgia Rule
    There's almost no rescuing this wobbly movie from its showdowns and insights. Except, that is, when Lohan's around.
  56. Kill Your Darlings
    Kill Your Darlings is an undernourished and over-emphatic film.
  57. New Suit
    Despite frequent cuts to mambos and cha-chas, this insulated tale of rich interns swindling rich studio bosses has no “Clueless”-style SoCal breeze (or righteous “Working Girl” gotcha).
  58. Chéri
    Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs.
  59. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie), the movie suffers from the same tonal schizophrenia of that other recent goth wannabe, "Jennifer's Body": Is it meant to be scary or funny? Oops, it's neither.
  60. More Than a Game
    Good game footage, a few clear looks at the kids behind it, but mostly as processed as "Space Jam."
  61. Intruders
    With nothing tangible at stake, Intruders is just an aggregation of influences that's as blank as its bogeyman.
  62. Hank and Asha
    The film's success rests upon the interest engendered by these characters, but Hank and Asha fail to meaningfully engage us.
  63. The Fluffer
    The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.
  64. Jackie & Ryan
    The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.
  65. Affluenza
    The film is dragged down by its awkwardly paradoxical story, which tries too hard to care too little.
  66. B-52
    That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.
  67. 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.
  68. Maya Dardel
    Is Maya Dardel serious? The regal Lena Olin plays her with frank ferocity and arrogant certainty, but so much about the grandiose poet borders on parody.
  69. Chicks
    A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    Long before the third, fourth, or fifth climax in this endless, obligatory summer diversion, I slunk into my seat in a passive, inattentive stupor, fully submitting to the fact that I hadn't the slightest idea what the hell was going on.
  71. Queen of the Desert
    Herzog has previously thrived on madness, so the failure here proves even more curious.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reuniting the Rubins
    What happens when you put a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a high-strung capitalist, and a lesbian humanitarian together in the same room? Not comedy, it turns out.
  73. Sucker Punch
    His (Snyder) mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they're-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.
  74. Serving Up Richard
    Glory's inconsistent characterization defeats rather than builds tension, and the tepid soon gives way to the ridiculous.
  75. The Weight of Water
    Lovingly detailed but unaccountably clumsy, obviously ambitious, and unfortunately chintzy. It's also genuinely anachronistic.
  76. This Means War
    The cocky presumption of charm that isn't actually there is precisely the problem with action-comedy This Means War.
  77. Post Grad
    In 2009. Vicky Jenson's live-action debut is as cartoonish as her work on "Shrek," and that's OK for the comic bits. The rest seems like a remarkably cynical cross-breed—for all demographics, but, ultimately, for none.
  78. Bereavement
    Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Novo
    Limosin's elliptical narrative, meant to correlate with his protagonist's blank-slate mind, instead plays as desultory and just plain confused.
  80. Dark Places
    [Paquet-Brenner] squanders Dark Places' icky setup for a rote investigation to find the real killer, a revelation greeted not with a "What?!" but with a "Whatever."
  81. Nights and Weekends
    Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.
  82. Made-Up
    A ham-fisted satire on the American obsession with appearance, Made-Up is ultimately self-defeating and even offensive.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Touch of Pink
    Presumably writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid chose Grant because Bogie's been done, but that didn't stop him from lifting Touch of Pink's plot wholesale from "The Wedding Banquet."
  84. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    Anyone who's seen a martial-arts picture expects a certain amount of thumb-twiddling between the big numbers, but director Andrew Lau's handling of exposition is markedly poor, distended with rubbish plotlines, flashy sadism, and overwrought jingo.
  85. Mad Love
    Adroit but finally a trifle flat, Mad Love doesn't galvanize its outrage the way, say, Jane Campion might have done, but at least it possesses some.
  86. In Stereo
    In Stereo is not without its merits, but it doesn't really get going until the last ten minutes, which play like the opening of a movie that would be much more interesting than the one that preceded them.
  87. My Old Lady
    It sounds like a recipe for comedy (and Kline seems to think so too, waltzing and prat-falling through Mathias's alcoholic foibles), but Horovitz's screenplay guns instead for an emotionally and financially tangled melodrama, and ends up feeling aggravatingly inconsistent.
  88. Populaire
    Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature-length debut is visually sharp, with period design that's eye-catching without being fussy or fetishistic. Too bad there's not much going on beneath the surface.
  89. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.
  90. Sex and Lucia
    An adept mood maker, Medem strains madly for cosmic alliances, fairy-tale imagery, and fated coincidences, but he triumphs only with two hot bodies, a cluttered apartment, and a Shower Massage.
  91. Bare
    Natalia Leite, here making her feature directorial debut, does have a knack for capturing a sense of place. Both the Nevada landscapes and a supermarket where Sarah works early on have a pleasing clarity and recognizable feeling of malaise. The environment says more than the characters ever do.
  92. Hellbenders
    Aided by capable if unnecessary 3D effects, Petty displays a flair for staging violent action, but he's trapped inside a broad comic set-up that doesn't mesh with the story's innate meanness.
  93. Pain & Gain
    When the story runs off the rails and crashes headfirst into a too-perfect ending, it's because Bay was led astray by the same things that got the Sun Gym Gang into this mess in the first place: superficiality, ambition, and the belief that reality just isn't good enough.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    In deliberate, clinical fashion, Zev Asher's documentary catches up with a notorious Canadian case of art versus animal cruelty.
  95. 37
    For all its postures of humanism, the film is remarkably cold toward the victim herself, who appears only briefly.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Closing Escrow
    Closing Escrow can't even execute the bare-bones requirements of mediocre mockumentaries, as its unbelievably quirky characters' not-funny behavior is punctuated with awkward silences and L.A. clichés.
    • 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.
  98. Lemon
    A grating protagonist alone does not a bad film make, but the episodic, unsatisfying Lemon revels in purposeful nails-on-a-chalkboard unlikability.
  99. Reindeer Games
    Punishing, visceral violence is the key element.
  100. A Most Violent Year
    Grand in its aims but tepid in its conclusions, A Most Violent Year burns slow and gives off very little heat. It's not really that violent. But it sure feels like a year.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »