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. Love Object
    Utilizes horror movie jolts to plumb male control-freakishness.
  2. Proof of Life
    It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.
  3. What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole
    The movie is a sloppy amalgamation of animated instruction, dramatic vignettes (starring actualization-starved single gal Marlee Matlin), and talking-heads interviews.
  4. Delhi-6
    It's pretty much irresistible and, in that sense, represents the enigmatic India of today as well as anything ever could.
  5. 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.
  6. Jack and Diane
    Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.
  7. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.
  8. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    An incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results.
  9. Mini's First Time
    Mini is impossible to like, especially since she delivers some of the worst narration ever spoken, and her final lines are like a big middle finger to viewers foolish enough to enjoy the film.
  10. The Greatest
    First-time writer-director Shana Feste has made an uneven but often affecting film that requires its gifted cast to push hard against the script's schematic plotting to find moments of real emotion.
  11. Hank and Asha
    The film's success rests upon the interest engendered by these characters, but Hank and Asha fail to meaningfully engage us.
  12. Colombiana
    Possibly worth seeing if you are 13, as the hot Rihanna-looking chick shows sideboob.
  13. Justice League
    The joints show, and the cuts are sometimes awkward — there was clearly a longer, more d-r-a-w-n o-u-t version of this at some point — but what’s left after the cutting is fun and engaging enough, and it’s all anchored by terrific lead performances. There were even times when (gasp) it moved me.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Condon delivers the most authoritatively directed Twilight film so far, which only brings into sharp relief how tonally incoherent its story is.
  15. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Unfortunately "My Left Foot's" Jim Sheridan, that reliable purveyor of Irish struggle-porn, anchors us in tedious exposition.
  16. Firewall
    As used cars go, the latest and possibly last Harrison Ford thriller, Firewall, is no deal: It runs rough, stalls frequently, smells like the stale sweat of four dozen older movies, and handles like a blind mule.
  17. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights in Maine may leave audiences wanting more grounding in the husband-wife/mother-daughter drama that is a constant, foggy presence, but the raw confusion and sadness associated with great loss shines through.
  18. Mr. Brooks
    Bloody disappointing.
  19. Kill Your Friends
    Steve's voiceover monologues and dealings with a detective investigating a murder are straight out of the Patrick Bateman playbook, but turning the sociopathic cynicism up to eleven tends to be ineffective unless wit and insight are included in the mix.
  20. Brave New Jersey
    Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.
  21. Whiteboyz
    Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.
  22. Maid in Manhattan
    Really, any wit at all would have helped balance the playful but crass butt-seeking money shots.
  23. Life as a House
    So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Latter Days
    Cox's tacky melodrama is indeed sub-par, but no worse than numerous gay indies.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Me If You Dare
    The movie's hyperactivity eventually yields to such revelations as Life Isn't a Game and The Biggest Dare Is Love, but the ultimate measure of its conventionality is its soundtrack.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Evergreen
    Though the acting is tentative at times, with performances not quite landing on the same page, Evergreen is a compassionate slice of Pacific Northwest misery.
  27. Happy Life
    The most spot-on scenes show passive-aggressive hipster clerks snorting at Keith's flyers for a comeback fundraiser rave and a city suffocating on its own cool.
  28. Valiant
    The main problem with this Disney release--which also wastes the voices of Ricky Gervais and Jim Broadbent--is its refusal to recognize the war as anything but an excuse for tomfoolery.
  29. American Dreamz
    The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.
  30. Come What May
    Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.
  31. The Possession
    Bornedal's fondness for punctuating abrupt cuts to black with a solitary piano-key note is so pathological that it soon turns risible.
  32. Miral
    Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.
  33. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    As the seductive and conniving Angelica, Cruz is luminous, albeit not enough to compensate for Marshall shrouding virtually every major set piece in nighttime fogginess.
  34. By the Sea
    The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.
  35. 23 Blast
    Dylan Baker's film bests larger-budgeted fare like When the Game Stands Tall thanks to ace acting, a humble spirit, and all-around sturdy craftsmanship.
  36. The Paperboy
    When not contriving to get Efron out of his clothes, The Paperboy gropes for familiar movie language of its period setting: Soul music swells up excitedly over a jumble of jerky zooms, befuddling cuts, and spatial vagueness. But sometimes hot messiness has its charms.
  37. The Last Ride
    It portrays Williams in a generally sympathetic light without whitewashing his vice-loving, belligerent ways or mythologizing them in a bid for postmortem psychoanalysis.
  38. Digging Up the Marrow
    After poking fun at both Green's lack of originality and the hackneyed nature of found-footage shockers, Digging Up the Marrow merely resorts to climactic shaky-cam footage of people running through the pitch-black woods -- thereby becoming the very dull, clichéd thing it mocks.
  39. JeruZalem
    Not much substance is buried beneath the irritating style.
  40. Click
    De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blindness
    Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.
  42. The Leisure Seeker
    For all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia, even when the story skirts toward sensationalism.
  43. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Kapur and his screenwriter have little interest here in maintaining even a dollop of historical accuracy.
  44. Pride and Glory
    How ironic that a movie filled with police officers should end up feeling like a hostage situation.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Manna from Heaven
    It's shot like a Lifetime-influenced student film, and the overall artlessness makes the spoony dialogue all the more glaring.
  46. 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.
  47. Zombie Strippers!
    Director Jay Lee (The Slaughter) delivers absolutely everything you could possibly hope for in a film called Zombie Strippers, with a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of "Return of the Living Dead" and "Showgirls" that actually beats out Mark Pirro's "Nudist Colony of the Dead" for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever.
  48. Blood Ties
    Though it takes a long while for the many moving parts to click into place, the final minutes redeem not only a few characters but also Blood Ties itself -- not enough to make up for prior transgressions, perhaps, but enough to leave a favorable last impression.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.
  50. 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.
  51. Upside Down
    Solanas comes up with arresting images; it's in telling the story that he stumbles, getting so tripped up in the allegorical details of his invented universe that his characters suffer.
  52. Taken 2
    Taken 2 rarely embodies the values of concision and focus that it extols, and any breathing room from the hurtling narrative illogic only allows the audience opportunity to notice slips in Mills's father-knows-best infallibility.
  53. Intruders
    With nothing tangible at stake, Intruders is just an aggregation of influences that's as blank as its bogeyman.
  54. Detention
    It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.
  55. Brimstone
    The filmmaker isn't as nimble as he is ambitious, though, and you'll feel all 148 minutes of Brimstone's runtime — just maybe not in the way Koolhoven wants you to.
  56. Hall Pass
    The crazy-barista melodrama-slapstick collision seems not like a nimble twist, but tone-deaf blundering-what once came naturally now seems like trying too hard, as the Farrellys face their own mid-life crisis.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    Like 2 Fast 2 Furious before it, Tokyo Drift is a subculture in search of a compelling story line, and Black's leaden performance makes you pine for the days of Paul Walker.
  58. Flower
    Flower is messy and imperfect and above all else a star-making role for Deutch, who carries this film from funny to tragic and back again.
  59. Blood Glacier
    It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.
  60. Loverboy
    Bacon the director indulges his wife, letting her play crazy and emotional in a showy performance that screams "serious actress."
  61. 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.
  62. Elizabethtown
    Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Fits of Passion
    Flawlessly acted, Strange Fits of Passion could be a female equivalent of "The Year My Voice Broke," only in contemporary gear.
  64. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Casting Tokyo as a neon wilderness thick with aged "perverts" and teenage pimps, the movie frames a critique of socially permissible pedophilia as indelible as Harada's eavesdropping mise-en-scène.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Home Fries
    The just plain folks in Home Fries -- down home, slightly slow, and desperate for happiness -- would make great Jerry Springer Show guests if they weren't so damned pretty.
  66. The Statement
    Ends up second-guessing its own high-minded strivings, not trustful enough of its audience to be sophisticated about history and ethics, and not pulpy enough to keep us awake.
  67. Vanilla Sky
    For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.
  68. Freak Weather
    Kuryla has her prole banter down, and moments like McKenzie's desperate dance on her jalopy hood when Turturro locks her out move beyond literary sting into kinetic and sympathetic gutter picaresque.
  69. Shanghai Calling
    Shanghai Calling eventually reveals itself to be just another stale tale about the virtue of morality over ambition.
  70. The Situation
    The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.
  71. Craigslist Joe
    Directed by Garner, Craigslist Joe is sweet, moving, and frustrating.
  72. Two Night Stand
    The problem isn't that these lustbirds suffer no delusions about their temporary affair. It's that Nichols and screenwriter Mark Hammer can't commit to the cynicism.
  73. 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.
  74. Surrogates
    Willis is fine, both as his blond action figure (Zack Morris hair) and actual self, in trusty bruised palooka mode. Mostow does good meat-and-potatoes genre work, coherent even when reckless.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    South of the Border
    South of the Border's subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.
  76. Fanboys
    The one genuine bright spot among the performers is Kristen Bell as Windows's would-be girlfriend, his dream combination of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Janeane Garofalo.
  77. The Burning Plain
    The writer's most successful works--"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and "Amores Perros"--were bolstered by directors who brought genuine emotion to the screen, but The Burning Plain marks Arriaga's behind-the-camera debut, and his obviousness is staggering.
  78. England Is Mine
    [A] muted, sometimes arresting drama.
  79. Hits
    Cross, who also wrote the script, is content to come across like a grumpy old man. His comedy is one-note, furious, and fun-enough.
  80. Snatched
    The noxious self-absorption of straight white women that Schumer has sent up so blisteringly on her Comedy Central show is extolled more than it is lampooned.
  81. The Hottest State
    Hawke quite capably taps into the bittersweet complexities of young, love-struck idiocy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    HellBent
    The scariest thing about Hellbent is that somebody thought making this humorless gaysploitation slasher flick would be a good idea.
  83. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    Skeleton may be 100 percent cult-in-a-can, but aficionados should feel sated. All others are advised to bring copious amounts of controlled substances.
  84. Meet the Browns
    Surprisingly half-decent--surprising because Perry’s not about to switch up his hardly revelatory but consistently bankable box-office signature:
  85. Just Looking
    Marshall Karp's script is clever and funny, though studded with anachronisms.
  86. Novocaine
    Martin seems uncomfortable and oddly waxen (the orange Al Gore makeup doesn't help), injecting Frank with neither restless anger nor wry humor.
  87. Full Frontal
    "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    El leyton
    Barely elevated telenovela.
  89. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Despite Herrington's skill at capturing the physicality of the game, Stroke is strictly for golf nuts and masochists--assuming there's a difference.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    EuroTrip
    Eurotrip's constant anxiety that women might turn out to be men and vice versa makes this command especially fraught.
  91. Lila & Eve
    The movie, directed by Charles Stone III — who gave us 2002's likable Drumline — runs hot and cold, suspenseful and well observed, well acted and often affecting, but somewhat tiresome and implausible by the end.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kicking & Screaming
    Even the intermittent laughs undermine Kicking and its winning-isn't-everything message.
  93. Hesher
    Still, Hesher finds uncommon sympathy for people at loose ends, and although Hesher himself is sentimentalized and backhandedly inspiring, he never softens into an actual role model.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madea's Family Reunion
    Perry's vaudevillian shamelessness and indifference to committee-approved taste are energizing and frequently jaw-dropping.
  95. Descent
    A well-acted trifle straining to be a hard-hitting morality play.
  96. Smokin' Aces
    Carnahan does have an oddball sense of comic timing; what his picture lacks in hilarity it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd.
  97. Rashevski's Tango
    The Rashevski Tango begins and ends with a burial, but the movie teems with cranky life, then heals all rifts with a dance that sets a seal of comically erotic approval on that undying genre, the domestic melodrama.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mean Machine
    The most off-key notes here are the sentimental ones: When David Kelly shows up, reprising the wise-trustee role he had in the horticulture-behind-bars movie "Greenfingers," it's as though some twee script gremlin sneaked in and meddled with the Guy Ritchie schematics.
  99. Defying Gravity
    Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Planet Earth: Dreams
    The acting is deliberately bad, directed to an ostensibly dreamlike flatness; and it's also just plain bad.
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