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. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change
    After speaking to several environmental experts, hiking for hours through the Amazon, and discovering just how momentous the threat of climate change is to humanity as we know it, documentarian Josh Fox made a film about himself.
  2. Darling Companion
    The handsome pooch is also the only appealing aspect of the latest tale of privileged boomer pulse-taking from Lawrence Kasdan.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uncle Kent 2
    Uncle Kent 2 is an even more rambling ball of nonsense than the original, which at least had its feet planted in reality.
  4. 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.
  5. Eichmann
    Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Leap Year
    Leap Year belongs to the Prada backlash subgenre of women's pictures--epitomized by "The Proposal"--in which smart, stylish women must be muddied, abased, ridiculed, and degraded in order to get their man.
  7. Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life
    It’s a vital and worthwhile project to unpack Di Palma’s career...but Water and Sugar misses the mark.
  8. Wild Hogs
    This shallow comedy imagines itself as an amalgam of "St. Elmo's Fire," "The Wild Bunch," and "Deliverance."
  9. Chalet Girl
    Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.
  10. 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.
  11. Dear Dictator
    Although the filmmakers name-check and appear to draw inspiration from Mean Girls, they’ve missed the mark on truly biting satire, leaving Dear Dictator toothless and silly.
  12. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver's stumbling hagiography Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder does no wrong by its celebrated subject-- but it never illuminates him, either.
  13. Growing Up and Other Lies
    The seriocomic Growing Up and Other Lies, written and directed by Jacobs and Darren Grodsky (Humboldt County), offers strained male bonding from a quartet sorely out of tune.
  14. Graceland
    Striking the right balance between interior and exterior can mean the difference between compelling drama and accidental melodrama. Writer-director Ron Morales just misses equilibrium in the visually arresting Filipino thriller Graceland.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Dancer
    The strength of the film is its portrait of a female artist at work, doing all the complex backstage and business chores her career requires.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Skeptic
    Though a few scary skeletons (and one doll) rattle in and out of the film's closet, Bardwell is a slave to television lexicon, allowing Bryan and his lawyer buddy (Tom Arnold) to brave the banter of shrill detective comedies, and framing his images with all the brio of your average "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" episode.
  17. Nina
    The filmmakers have denied us their subject's voice and then sunk their lead by adding distancing layers between the audience and her chief instrument, her face. Even the script exhibits little confidence in this Nina's ability to communicate to us what matters.
  18. 42
    The movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.
    • 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.
  20. Preggoland
    There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them.
  21. Noah
    Noah is here not to set the record straight, but to set it on its head. This isn't a lavish work of mad genius, it's a movie designed to be a lavish work of mad genius, and there's a difference.
  22. 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.
  23. Coming Up Roses
    After a hoot of an entrance by Bernadette Peters showboating a tune from the rafters at a church wedding, Coming Up Roses takes a nosedive into despair and stays there.
  24. The Broken Tower
    The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.
  25. Java Heat
    Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.
  26. Vertical Limit
    Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.
  27. April's Shower
    Tepid lesbian comedy.
  28. True Crime
    A ridiculous deus-ex-machina "wrong man" story.
  29. The Mothman Prophecies
    A diverting pulp time-waster.
  30. C.O.G.
    What was very funny in print becomes serious and occasionally dour onscreen, with fewer laughs than you would expect from a Sedaris project.
  31. Allegiance
    Without its topical pretext and overzealous patriotism, Allegiance would be just another generic action film.
  32. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Durst and Elkoff deliver a nuanced scenario of class assimilation and resentment, then flub the ending.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    The stats relayed at the movie's end...almost have more impact than the narrative.
  34. Believer
    A better doc would have used its superstar lead as a linchpin, structuring it so that he’s absorbed into the cause, gradually upstaged by those directly affected by sanctioned bigotry. Instead, director Don Argott (of the more dynamic music docs Rock School and Last Days Here) fills the running time with borderline Akerman-esque mundanity.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Less a documentary than a glowing two-hour infomercial for Sarah Palin, Presidential Candidate To-Be.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Robin Hood
    The directorial choices are, for the most part, so lazy, the blockbuster engineering so blatant, that Robin Hood often falls into self-parody. All the more reason for Sarah Palin to love it.
  37. Ghostbusters
    There is an easy camaraderie and chemistry among the central quartet, a harmony that continues when Chris Hemsworth, charmingly stupid, enters as the phantom-vanquishing squad's receptionist. Yet the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths.
  38. Undisputed
    The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.
  39. Tammy
    Falcone’s film is an unsteady mix of broad comedy and indie heart, asking us first to roar at Tammy’s ignorance and outrageousness and then to be moved at this lovable misfit muddling toward love, maturity, and a better life.
  40. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    A time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Aquamarine
    The film's true focus is the friendship between the two girls, although this tends to get lost between Elizabeth Allen's jittery direction and the screenplay's contrivances.
  42. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    There are too many vaguely defined interpersonal dynamics and marginal characters (hi, Liv Tyler and Judy Greer!) that distract needlessly from the earnest tone of an outrageous set-up.
  43. Black or White
    Occasionally, the film rouses into something thoughtful, even daring.
  44. Support Your Local Sheriff!
    Unfortunately, Support Your Local Sheriff is basically serial material that in straining to be something more ends up being something less. [08 May 1969, p.47]
    • Village Voice
  45. The Red Violin
    It sustains its purplish, epic sweep by thrusting broadly etched characters into extravagantly hokey situations, and registers mainly as a flamboyant joke.
  46. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.
  47. Junction 48
    Junction 48 mostly sticks to uplifting formula, rarely offering anything particularly fresh or interesting.
  48. Vampires
    A gorefest of epic proportions.
  49. That's Entertainment!
    After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
  50. Daybreak
    A studied, overwrought look into Personal Crisis and Redemption.
  51. From the Edge of the City
    The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.
  52. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    While it has its moments, Miguel Arteta's comedy relies too much on gender-shaming and emasculation jokes.
  53. War Horse
    Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nights in Rodanthe
    Exhibits a certain amount of integrity in its dedication to being uncomplicated, unashamed romantic goo.
  55. The Lucky Ones
    Its hopelessly schematic road-trip arc (bond-fight-reconcile-repeat) grows increasingly tedious.
  56. The Other Man
    It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple's quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking.
  57. Everybody Has a Plan
    An identity crisis is at the heart of Everybody Has a Plan—but it's the film's. Even Viggo Mortensen's movingly enigmatic performance as identical twins can't help first-time Argentinean director Ana Piterbarg decide whether she is making an existential tone poem or a brutish thriller.
  58. The Activist
    Morin's idea of wedging a political thriller into this historical moment is brilliant, but he undermines his story with broad caricatures and a phlegmatic pace.
  59. Wah Do Dem
    Methinks we're meant to actually feel sorry for this overprivileged twerp in neon sunglasses.
  60. Following
    Following is modest and engaging, but in being strenuously clever, it surrenders any dibs it might have on being relevant, or original.
  61. How I Killed My Father
    A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.
  62. Here Comes the Boom
    Boom was produced under the auspices of pal Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, which has a tendency toward broad-comic morality tales and multiplex populism that often shades into remedial-level pandering.
  63. Tiger & Bunny: The Rising
    Tiger & Bunny: The Rising indulges in homosexual stereotypes that would have been regressive in the 1980s, let alone in a spin-off of a 2011 television series, and it's a damn shame.
  64. Beautiful Darling
    Denied the opportunity to see Candy at her best, simultaneously mocking and paying homage to golden-age glamour, viewers instead get too much of Jeremiah Newton, a close friend of the actress's and guardian of her papers, personal effects, and ashes (and one of Beautiful Darling's producers).
  65. Fireworks
    Where Your Name’s star-crossed protagonists were fully formed characters who held equal weight in the narrative, Fireworks is very much told from the male point of view, and Nazuna seldom rises above “free-spirited object of desire.”
  66. Atrocious
    A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.
  67. The Quitter
    The movie is partly saved by Bonifacio and DP Timothy Nuttall's regular use of patient long shots, as well as their capable grasp of widescreen composition.
  68. Autómata
    Automata has moments of tremendous visual and storytelling elegance which are punctuated with ham-fisted characterization and thunderingly terrible acting.
  69. Telling Lies in America
    Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]
    • Village Voice
  70. Hiding Divya
    Though the leads make for a believable family unit, the performances in writer-director Rehana Mirza's thin-skinned, no-frills drama unevenly range from functional to histrionic.
  71. The Hebrew Hammer
    The result is explicit, if less than hilarious. The Hebrew Hammer lacks the edge of Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," although as anti-seasonal fare, it would make a suitably unbearable double bill with Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa."
  72. Soul Surfer
    Soul Surfer offers a ghastlier sight than your wildest "127 Hours"–meets-"Jaws" nightmare: barefaced Christian pandering that pretends it isn't.
  73. The Big Bang
    Though the setup is pure Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, specifically), the film's bleary, neon glamour and penchant for the bizarre suggests an attempted-and wayward-homage to David Lynch.
  74. 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.
  75. Chloe and Theo
    Chloe and Theo is a film that operates entirely on a vague sense of uplift.
  76. The Anderson Tapes
    I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Me Again
    Just your run-of-the-mill indie sex comedy until the third act, when it veers into charmingly shrill, "Mommie Dearest"–style melodrama.
  78. Listening
    Rather than pioneering into the frontiers of the mind, Listening slogs through the most well-traveled pits of screenwriting.
  79. Masked and Anonymous
    Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tuck Everlasting
    Bledel, consigned to corsets and croquet, looks so weepy for much of Tuck Everlasting. The reason might lie in a script that favors the starchy demands of period melodrama over her TV show's fizzy screwball banter -- or maybe it's just William Hurt's embarrassing brogue.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Land of Women
    Maudlin, formulaic affair.
  82. The Devil's Violinist
    Bernard Rose's elegantly staged but tonally flat biopic embraces the myth, even underscoring Paganini's rising fame, scandalous hedonism, and womanizing as an anachronistic form of rock-star fantasy.
  83. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
    The spectacle of two dudes mucking about in the primal forest becomes tedious.
  84. Taking Woodstock
    Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.
  85. Phillip the Fossil
    Donovan's idiosyncratic approach to character develops a compelling rhythm, but the film falters when a dramatic double climax pushes it past its low-key limits.
  86. Life in a Day
    The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life as We Know It
    The feminine fantasies Berlanti seemingly seeks to stoke are undercut by a vibe that's weirdly misogynistic.
  88. What Doesn't Kill You
    Goodman's movie tends to limp along.
  89. Frozen
    Green also can't maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary as we watch three charmlessly written characters bicker and attempt inane ideas. It's one thing to be scared with them, and quite another to feel trapped with them.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Captain America: The First Avenger
    (A) hokey, hacky, two-hour-plus exercise in franchise transition/price gouging, complete with utterly unnecessary post-converted 3-D.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tollbooth
    How is czarist Russia like modern-day Brooklyn? Touché, but let's say this time the answer's not Brighton Beach. It's not The Tollbooth either, but what with the movie's dramatization of the opposition between tradition and individualism for a Jewish family's three "marrying age" daughters, "Fiddler on the Roof" parallels will inevitably be drawn.
  92. The Moving Creatures
    A puzzling film that despite being saturated with feeling leaves only a vague impression.
  93. Land of the Blind
    It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days and Nights in the Forest
    Whatever virtues Ray's defenders may claim for him, I find it difficult to get very far beyond the sylistic mess of this film. Ray's style ranges from half-baked artsiness to total artlessness without managing to find any real art in the transitions. [12 Apr 1973, p.91]
    • Village Voice
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Secondhand Lions
    The self-consciousness is unintentionally touching, but it wet-blankets the film into a thirdhand lark.
  96. Big Fish
    An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.
  97. Illegal
    Blunt, loud, and showboaty, Illegal suffers even more when compared with another recent Liège-set film about the horrors faced by paperless immigrants: the Dardennes' "Lorna's Silence."
  98. Contracted: Phase II
    The virus is spreading, but the filmmakers don't appear fully committed to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, so no sense of dread (or suspense) ever takes hold.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jailbait
    Becomes the umpteenth prison drama to focus on the lurid threat of forced submission.
  100. Baggage Claim
    There are a handful of laughs, but nothing to balance the onslaught of clichés.
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