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. K-PAX
    K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.
  2. Sex, Death and Bowling
    The movie's flair for soap-opera-style pile-on becomes emotionally draining rather than moving.
  3. Fighting
    The movie never works up a pulpy head of steam. It's like an exploitation movie that thinks it's an art movie, only there's no art to be found.
  4. Sweet and Lowdown
    It's the prettiest movie of the year, maybe of Allen's career.
  5. All in Time
    All in Time is best when it's not forcing its slight narrative toward fantasy.
  6. Undefeated
    Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    AmnesiA
    So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”
  8. How He Fell in Love
    Meyers allows takes to run long, staging naturalistic conversations on sidewalks and in apartments. The result is hit or miss: We may not know what the characters feel, but we're way up to speed on how many steps it takes them to walk to a bar.
  9. Cardboard Boxer
    By emphasizing the uglier aspects of his most complex character, Lee turns an otherwise down-to-earth slice-of-life drama into an unconvincing morality play.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly--what's the proper cinematic terminology?--batshit-crazy finale.
  11. 5 to 7
    There's no credibility to Arielle and Brian's romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn't? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif she treats like a slow child?
  12. The Kings of Summer
    The Kings of Summer plays like an extended sitcom episode, and not a very special one at that.
  13. The Human Race
    One test for movies like this is whether they bemoan the inevitable gore or revel in it; The Human Race too often falls into the latter, amplifying and focusing on the bloodshed.
  14. A Teacher
    When Diana's fixations begin to take over, Fidell seems ill-prepared to steer the film into strictly psychological territory, resulting in a project that loses its fraught sense of control at the same moment as its embattled protagonist.
  15. The Frontier
    Co-writer/director Matt Rabinowitz doesn’t artfully withhold information so much as lay it all on the table a bit earlier than he might have.
  16. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Glass is a stupefyingly dull portrait of a man who doesn't seem to be lying when he says, "I have so few secrets."
  17. The Bang Bang Club
    Silver treads around and too heavily on the moral ambiguities involved in documenting atrocities, moving between frantic, poorly explained scenes of African conflict and the equally familiar, benumbing aesthetic of boys making a macho game of war.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Wedding Date
    Clare Kilner's cast frolics in the countryside in an appropriately British-romantic-comedy fashion, and at times the characters trade silly snaps, but Dana Fox's screenplay is structurally shaky.
  19. Spork
    Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."
  20. Saving Silverman
    A sharp-dumb, jack- and goof-off affair.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ghost Rider
    Johnson's a hardcore, dime-store fanboy, not a revisionist-minded fauxteur like Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer, and his giddy, goofball affection for the material sustained my goodwill until his underdeveloped grasp of form and rhythm let it slip away.
  22. One to Another
    Only the French seem to get away with passing off sensational sex romps as high art, but One to Another is pretty much just trashy–its murder-mystery conceit a sideshow to the film's primary offering: nubile nudity.
  23. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble "a point," save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful.
  24. Black Out
    A self-aware, borderline self-reflexive action-comedy from the Netherlands, Arne Toonen's Black Out is derivative in a way that undermines its wry sense of self.
  25. Belle
    There's a great story here, but Asante — who has made one previous feature, the 2004 drama A Way of Life — can't quite harness its power.
  26. The Runner
    The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.
  27. Spare Parts
    This blatantly big-hearted product isn't half as vibrant as the original 2005 Wired article on which it's based, and myopically neglects to address Arizona's troubling anti-immigration legislation through even a splash of hindsight.
  28. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.
  29. The Rescuers
    This very serious film sometimes feels like a farce.
  30. Learning to Drive
    The filmmakers' hearts might be in the right place, but the film's doesn't kick in until well after you might already have declared it dead.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Miss Sunshine
    Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill.
  32. Prisoners
    Torn between making sense and arguing that the world itself makes no sense, Prisoners is a captive of its own ambitions.
  33. Psychotic!
    Psychotic! is best when it leavens the terror with comedy, slipping moments of ridiculousness into horror tropes.
  34. As Luck Would Have It
    Iglesia's slick and frisky direction stirs up some hearty stock-character performances, stoking and stretching out the tension, but it all still feels like black comedy by the numbers.
  35. Colonia
    Rather than a grand buildup, Colonia just gives the sense of one thing happening, and then another thing happening.
  36. Effie Gray
    You can feel the good intentions vibrating off the screen, but it's still a listless affair, one that takes forever to go almost nowhere. The picture struggles so valiantly to be a woman's empowerment fable that it leaves you wishing for just a little romance.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cool and Crazy
    If music be the food of love, Cool & Crazy could stand a few more hits from the spice rack.
  38. Triumph of the Wall
    Triumph of the Wall is often painfully boring and rather shapeless, not so much a crafted film as a compendium of one guy's musings. Regardless, in an era when seemingly every documentary is tied to a hot-button issue, making one about a guy building a wall is endearing.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bel Ami
    Its the ladies who are worth tracking here, from Ricci's understated sensuality to Thomas's fragile angularity. They've supplemented beauty with good old-fashioned acting chops, something their cover-boy co-star would be wise to emulate.
  40. The Town Is Quiet
    The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.
  41. Walking with the Enemy
    As with many other WWII films, it takes genuinely stirring source material -- a young Hungarian man poses as a Nazi to find his dislocated family -- and reduces it to its most shopworn components.
  42. Moonlight
    Not only is the candid (but never prurient) treatment of early-teen sexuality and drug use too hot to handle, but the narrative blend of fairy-tale wonder and nightmare logic feels sui generis.
  43. I Am Eleven
    "I wanted to make something energetic, optimistic, universal, and real," Bailey announces in voiceover as the movie begins. She's certainly accomplished that, but it's too bad she didn't also aim for vital, illuminating, or consistently compelling.
  44. Beyond Outrage
    It's somewhat surprising to find the filmmaker's sequel marked by such a lack of urgency. The action here seems dutiful, devoid of the indignation at criminal vileness that seethed below Outrage's surface.
  45. Inescapable
    Inescapable isn't a terrible movie, but absent its ripped-from-the-headlines setting it's unremarkable.
  46. The Horse Boy
    The Horse Boy may excuse itself as a "raising awareness" tract on autism, but the exotic travelogue isn't a practicable care option for most cases, and it certainly isn't worthy cinema.
  47. Jackpot
    Certainly, a lot of blood is spilled in the name of laughs. There's only one problem with its broad attempts at grotesque comedy: Jackpot simply isn't funny.
  48. Winter Passing
    The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over, though the thick grains of Terry Stacey's photography and Deschanel's understated performance add a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical.
  49. 3
    More willing suspension of disbelief - or suppression of giggles - is required.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Planet 51
    Like "E.T." in reverse, this pleasantly mediocre CG animation tale lands an astronaut on a distant planet.
  51. Grand Départ
    The director, Nicolas Mercier, has failed to grasp how repellent his own protagonist seems to us. By the end, he's tipped his hand, and what seemed an incisive portrait is revealed as oddly skewed.
  52. Hustle & Flow
    There's something wrong with Hustle. A bad aftertaste, and not just the dry grit of Memphis dust, but something meaner. A feeling that Brewer's sensibility is way off. Aside from Howard's characterization, the most indelible parts of the movie are the demeaning caricatures forced on DJay's women.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Under Hellgate Bridge
    "Sopranos" vet Dominic Chianese is squandered as a banal father confessor.
  54. Slow Learners
    While it has a few funny moments (including the uncomfortable date that begins the film), Slow Learners mostly feels like a collection of exaggerated performances of drunkenness and mean-spiritedness that leads to a very predictable end.
  55. Jack Goes Home
    There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.
  56. Footprints
    Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.
  57. Aloft
    The writer-director's ideas about our connection to the land and the many other animals roaming it may well be profound, but they're buried under layers of superfluous storytelling devices. A better title would have been Adrift.
  58. Pretty Persuasion
    A high school send-up more gleefully incorrect than "Heathers" and considerably less articulate than "Election," Pretty Persuasion is a hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular.
  59. Innocent Voices
    For more than an hour, schmaltzmeister Luis Mandoki (Message in a Bottle) directs as if on assignment for Miramax.
  60. Big Daddy
    Sandler is less goofy than spitefully self-absorbed, and most of the comedy feels like child abuse.
  61. The November Man
    As far as escapist fluff laced with totally unnecessary real-world horror goes, The November Man isn't wretched.
  62. Songcatcher
    The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Babel
    Puzzle master Arriaga may be the Will Shortz of globalized hand-wringing, but the by-now-predictable jigsawing of his scripts reeks of desperation.
  64. Waking Life
    Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.
  65. Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame
    [Tony Girardin] ultimately focuses on Marinoni as a cranky workaholic driven to break a racing world record, but still paints a frustratingly vague portrait of the craftsman, husband and athlete.
  66. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    Despite a backbeat of perky music and the sarcastic voiceover meant to lubricate the action, The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks pizzazz. The movie isn't funny enough to work as farce, but it's far too dippy to take seriously.
  67. Pornography
    Ambitiously layered and almost completely incoherent, Pornography: A Thriller is a somber thesis film buried under a host of nightmarish, Lynchian conceits.
  68. Rodin
    The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.
  69. Ponies
    Nick Sandow's Ponies can claim the not negligible achievement of bringing one of the more irritatingly objectionable characters in recent cinema to the screen.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    For Southern to be funny at all, jokes must be carried too far and decorum exploded at every turn. Even if McGrath were inclined to handle the material this way, mush of it has dated, and the screenplay by Southern, McGrath, and Peter Sellers does not so much update it as displace it. [26 Feb 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  71. American Animals
    Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.
  72. Keeping the Faith
    Its exploration of faith and love is skin deep.
  73. Michael
    Not everything that is human is naturally interesting, and Schleinzer approaches his subject not as an investigator, but as though covering up a crime scene and scrubbing it of anything that might provide insight or empathy or psychological traction.
  74. I Am Secretly an Important Man
    Sillen ennobles the havoc of his life with a measure of down-and-out romance, but no moments really puncture a viewer, and the darkness is all too easily shaken off.
  75. Me Myself I
    A feel-good, fatalist placebo.
  76. Think Like a Man
    Enduring a day-long session of couples' therapy is more fun (and flies by faster) than this film.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You Hurt My Feelings
    For all of its gradual build and minimalist focus, the film misses out on something essential, something more crucial than clarity, context, and connecting tissue - all of which the film aggressively eschews. It lacks a center, a sense that within its strenuously ambiguous story is a thrumming motor.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Ring Two
    This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" ditches that film's scariest conceit.
  79. The People I've Slept With
    (It) notably liberated itself from the fusty tradition that a sex comedy should either titillate or tickle an audience.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bubba Ho-tep
    Though unpainfully entertaining, its greatest dose of otherworldly mojo must have been spent warding off straight-to-video status.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Benji: Off the Leash!
    This unwarranted iteration of the '70s shaggy-dog tale pales in entertainment value compared to its website, which features a rant from the mutt's creator, Joe Camp.
  82. Arthur Newman
    Fun for a bit, things soon turn silly.
  83. Maggie
    While zombie drama Maggie seems intended as a showcase for Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting range, the star's performance is smothered by the film's deeply affected style.
  84. The Man on Her Mind
    The Man on Her Mind has a terminal case of the cutes.
  85. Unaccompanied Minors
    Anyone who has ever actually been stuck in a terminal with rowdy youngsters will not likely choose to pay money to revisit that experience on-screen.
  86. Decoding Deepak
    Following the celebrity guru into Thailand for his ordainment as a Buddhist monk, the film is at its best when Gotham can't help but see through his father, who seems entirely restless without an audience and a smartphone through which to be reminded of their adoration of him.
  87. Grind
    A logo-laden celebration of the joys of sponsorship wrapped inside an innocuous teen-pic package.
  88. The Fall of 1980
    Refusing to think small, Lonergan cannot help but fail big.
  89. New World
    Park's direction is sleek and assured, but lacking the dynamism that might help energize a film that—its title notwithstanding—comes off as dully old-school.
  90. Occupation
    The cast, led by Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, and Stephany Jacobsen, delivers sturdy character work, and the action is clear and well-executed, but none of it ventures beyond well-trod ground.
  91. Take Me Home Tonight
    It's not a total wash. Faris's ample talents are squandered with a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go romantic dilemma, but there's just enough of Demetri Martin doing a prick act, and Fogler excels as a Rabelaisian dynamo.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    Bowen in particular stands out, impressively describing Garrick's hairpin turns from comforting his victims to instinctively throttling them, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett exhibit less facility with the big picture.
  93. Come and Find Me
    Most like-minded films spend approximately twenty minutes on the same material covered by the entirety of Come and Find Me — a fact that leaves this mystery from writer/director Zack Whedon (brother of Joss) feeling insufferably drawn out.
  94. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The film too often relies on rote sermonizing when tackling the city's scourge of shootings, a grave topic that The Next Cut is simply too feeble to examine with any real depth or meaning.
  95. Being Charlie
    If Charlie were just unlikable, it all might be palatable and even fun. But his behavior draws more of an eye-roll than a laugh or a snarl, despite Robinson's confident, believable performance.
  96. Alumbrones
    Alumbrones's creators talk up their work's restorative value, but never go into great detail about the world beyond their canvases. Donnelly's vague, circuitous questioning is to blame.
  97. Now, Forager
    A slow-food procedural, commendably devoted yet still underdone.
  98. California Solo
    Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.
  99. Elvis & Nixon
    Outside of Shannon's performance, Elvis & Nixon is enough to make you long for the nuance of Kissin' Cousins.
  100. The Prince of Egypt
    As entertainment goes, however, this desert spectacle is no "Aladdin"-- despite the impressively strong graphics of the vast urban spaces.
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