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. Waiting for Lightning
    Unfortunately, as the extensive footage of kick flips, fakies, and grinders goes from thrilling to routine, we're left waiting - and wanting - for Rosenberg to offer something more substantial than another "big air."
  2. 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.
  3. Prescription Thugs
    It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.
  4. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    The film is alarmingly dark. It isn’t especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.
  5. Rampage
    Compared to Rampage, King Kong and Godzilla have James Brown levels of soul. Peyton has just made another movie about the Rock running through rubble.
  6. The Expendables
    This is action as timeless as the reptilian brain-and if The Expendables is no classic, for about 20 minutes, it blowed up real good.
  7. S.W.A.T.
    A prototypical new-millennium summer movie, S.W.A.T. is no more than an extended trailer for itself.
  8. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    With a premise this screwy, nobody has any choice but to follow the savvy lead of Bebe Neuwirth, who, as Hudson's "Composure" editor, hams her queen-bitch-mother-hen role to glazed perfection.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Raspberry Reich
    A lovingly overblown piece of terrorist-chic trashfilm.
  10. The Kid
    The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Slow Jam King
    More fun to listen to than watch -- though this still leaves the problem of dialogue.
  12. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
    Virtually every documentary cliché from the past decade finds its way into this account of director Joe Cross's weight-loss odyssey, a retread-reversal of "Super Size Me" right down to the cheesy animation.
  13. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.
  14. She's Funny That Way
    There are some modest pleasures to be mined from Peter Bogdanovich's romantic caper She's Funny That Way, which at least strives for buoyancy.
  15. About Alex
    A lightweight Big Chill reworked for today's young professional set, which proves too clumsy and self-conscious to live up to its weighty subject matter.
  16. Uncertainty
    The result is some nice atmospherics tethered to a cripplingly half-baked existentialism.
  17. Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
    Even in the context of pop-to-statutorily-rape-virgin-eardrums, it's difficult to rate the Jonases. The tunes are no-stick.
  18. Shoot on Sight
    As if only made for ignoramuses who get nervous around brown skin, nearly everything on-screen is condescendingly telegraphed--from its plodding dialogue jammed with black-or-white morals to its lingering reaction shots, one-dimensional racists and radicals, obvious mood music, and thriller clichés.
  19. Johnny Mad Dog
    Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.
  20. Rules of Engagement
    The clichés lap like bay waves, from the salutes to the brotherly brawl to the olive-oil tear streaks semipermanently painted down Jackson's cheeks.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Scorpion King
    Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.
  22. Bootmen
    The best sequences -- auditions in a strip bar and a public bathroom -- still can't compete with that industrial musical called "Pola X."
  23. Bangkok Dangerous
    The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.
  24. Levity
    First-time director Ed Solomon, a comedy writer (MIB, both Bill and Ted movies), clots up Levity with symbols -- empty chairs, reflections, winter slush -- and achy, tastefully drawn characters.
  25. All Cheerleaders Die
    You could call it Bring It On meets The Craft and stop right there with considerable accuracy. But why would you, when All Cheerleaders Die actually delivers as much trashy, gory fun as a movie with such a title suggests?
  26. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.
  27. Off Label
    Don't discount October Country filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's tragicomically beautiful art-doc, which sensitively favors unflinching testimonials and visually impressionistic observations over journalistic activism.
  28. Rails & Ties
    Alison Eastwood's debut feature is slow, deliberate, assured, and shot with a graceful feel for place--none of which is enough to overcome the creaky themes that tie this hackneyed domestic drama together with fearsome symmetry.
  29. Exist
    Exist is prone to posturing. Demonstrating a noble if wishy-washy faith in activism's power to save the world, the film amounts to a brief, earnest howl against apathy--easily dismissible for those unsympathetic to its views and basically useless for everyone else.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music from the Big House
    It finally feels too cautious, as if digging a little deeper might compromise the prevailing tone of tentative uplift.
  31. Patagonia Rising
    Elicits the combination of rage and helplessness (and guilty wanderlust) unique to the genre with admirable thoroughness and balance.
  32. Colossus
    If cinema's most narcissistic actor-filmmakers were swimming in a talent pool, with Vincent Gallo confidently backstroking in the deep end and Eric Schaeffer wading in children's pee, Hendrickson's dipping his toe near Tommy Wiseau.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Perfect Sisters
    Stanley M. Brooks's directorial debut's attempt to make sense of what happened falters by laboring to tick every item off the timeline checklist instead of focusing on who these Bathtub Girls were underneath the dysfunction.
  34. The Girl and Death
    It's time to return this old painting to the attic.
  35. Postman Pat: The Movie
    Postman Pat: The Movie is one of the best family films to come down the pike this year.
  36. Salt and Fire
    Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty and a genuine talent for communicating humanity’s scale against immense natural forces and the absolute howling vastness of time.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wild Horses
    Despite the hogtied narrative momentum, Duvall has crafted a lifelike portrait of rural Texas life.
  38. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    As a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.
  39. School for Scoundrels
    Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton) is a classy, cool brand of vile--the demented drill sergeant in a designer suit. And Heder, cast in the role of the invisible man, is fine too. The movie wouldn't work without someone as nondescript as Heder.
  40. 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.
  41. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Successfully amalgamates Henry Jaglom's Hollywood-home-movie aesthetic, ego-skewering satire, and a measured understanding of the kinship between love and risk.
  42. Kate & Leopold
    The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.
  43. A Slipping-Down Life
    While the camera unsuccessfully courts Southern gothic humor, caressing a hodgepodge of retro-fetish knickknacks, the actors' knowing glances seem to look beyond the confines not only of the town, but of the film itself.
  44. I Am I
    I Am I is a remarkably assured debut for director Towne, especially since she's onscreen the majority of the time, and her script eschews the rules of the standard Hollywood amnesia plot, instead following its own internal logic while not shying away from the darker implications of its premise.
  45. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.
  46. Joyful Noise
    Speaking of camp, the diva battle teased in the trailer for Joyful Noise between its two stars, Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, flatlines, as do most of the movie's jokes.
  47. Rush Hour 3
    Chan is still the Gene Kelly of martial arts.
  48. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    Theron proved her comedy chops in the underrated Young Adult, and here she and MacFarlane get along like two eager puppies. If MacFarlane indulges in self-flattery by keeping in all the times this babe bursts into laughter at his jokes, he's forgiven; at least we feel like the characters are actually listening to each other.
    • 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.
  50. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Neither disposable nor a long-lost masterpiece, she might not be loved by all the boys, but she's still worth a Friday night date.
  51. Bushwick
    Bushwick is a hollow, ultimately unsatisfying exercise in organized chaos.
  52. Coming Soon
    Refreshingly direct and even courageous in its confrontation of female pleasure -- specifically orgasms and masturbation, the staple of teen-boy comedies, but hitherto off-limits for girls.
  53. The Love Punch
    The Love Punch is too sunny and self-effacing to be truly toxic.
  54. Chaos Theory
    Reynolds, called to 180 from anal nebbish to feral beast, is beautifully committed, but he gets no help on the other side of the camera.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Samehada otoko to momojiri onna
    Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.
  56. The Closer You Get
    Clichéd and condescending.
  57. Blood: The Last Vampire
    This overhyped slashfest fails to rise above the extravagant pointlessness that plagues inferior anime.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Code
    While Melville's films strike a pose of ironic bloodlessness, The Code attends to a thick stew of (soap-) operatic emotion, turning each internecine skirmish into an occasion for melodramatic brooding. Melville once described his films as comedies; The Code, unfortunately, knows no such wit.
  59. Brokedown Palace
    Part cautionary tale, part moral-uplift saga, Brokedown Palace is as dull as it's absurd.
  60. The Ninth Gate
    Never quite becomes unwatchable.
  61. Love & Sex
    All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.
  62. Pearl Harbor
    The chaos is convincing, but, less ruthless than Steven Spielberg, Bay eschews D-day panic and mutilation.
  63. The Jacket
    A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."
  64. Skills Like This
    Skills thinks it's far more magically whimsical than it really is.
  65. Road to Paloma
    This film is numbingly dull.
  66. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    The movie has its moments, but the bloat and the blandness take their toll.
  67. Dough
    A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.
  68. Kimjongilia
    Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.
  69. Carbon Nation
    Director Peter Byck opted for corny graphics, a wall of statistics, a voice-of-God narrator, and a xylophonic score, but behind the infomercial presentation are solid ideas that warrant scrutiny.
  70. Sex Doll
    Sex Doll, flat though it may sometimes be, is shrewdly aware of the countless clichés surrounding sex work.
  71. Incident In a Ghostland
    The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.
  72. In My Country
    Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day."
  73. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Chaste, oddly bloodless, and nearly plotless saga.
  74. The Legend of Tarzan
    The fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.
  75. Rapture-Palooza
    Always amusing, if never screamingly funny.
  76. Stalin's Wife
    Tsukerman is not interested in disproving or discounting theories, but merely assembling them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henry Poole Is Here
    A film that could have used some of the genuine intrigue of Pellington's thrillers to help offset the increasingly doe-eyed narrative.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fidel
    The tone is doting, but not cloying.
  79. Vatel
    Vatel is dull and silly, but the holiday season doesn't offer a better sets-and-costumes workshop.
  80. Sympathy for Delicious
    Ruffalo has assembled an exceptional cast-to surround writer and star Christopher Thornton, but a script that favors incident over story and direction that crowds scenes instead of letting them breathe make for curiously rough going.
  81. 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.
  82. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    My dad took me. He was a film critic and he’d already seen it for work, but then he took me opening weekend and fell asleep while I watched it. He did that a lot. But I think he liked it. I guess he wouldn’t have gone to see it again if he didn’t. What kind of idiot does that?
  83. The Brothers Grimsby
    Mostly, The Brothers Grimsby simply wants to make you laugh. And it will. Whether you're laughing because the jokes are actually funny or because you can't quite believe that you just saw what you did...well, that's between you and your god.
  84. Peter and Vandy
    Ritter and Weixler do share an easy-at-being-uneasy chemistry, mostly because his performance is downright distinguished compared to her blandness, but DiPietro's screenplay is emotionally myopic.
  85. Hyena Road
    This anti-war movie is more passionate about CB radio communication than the horrors of bloodshed.
  86. Zombeavers
    Director Jordan Rubin and the cast know the material is ridiculous, but calibrate the tone so that the dangers still feel dangerous.
  87. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Is the world of the film ruled by its high concept, its low comedy, its demographic credibility, or its romantic screwball realism? Ultimately, Orgy's refusal to be any one thing - including good or bad - forms a kind of epochal statement.
  88. Churchill
    Cox’s delivery of Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” D-Day speech surely ranks among the best, but it’s a problem when a narrative feature’s most powerful scenes are drawn from historical text.
  89. The Belko Experiment
    Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.
  90. Hostage
    Bruce looks hot and underplays handsomely as always, but Hostage is a steaming pile of siege clichés and screaming unlikelihoods.
  91. Second Best
    An ugly, amateurish film that champions mediocrity in a meta-attempt to justify its own ineptitude.
  92. Man in the Chair
    Walsh and Plummer are obviously pros, and they hustle to put across some patently ridiculous business, but, well, it's true about the polishing thing.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Walking Tall
    The plot is so absurdly perfunctory that preview audiences snickered at its TV-drama slapdashness; the producers should have pushed the straight-camp potential much further and retitled this weak bruiser Sporting Wood.
  94. Man of the Century
    Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.
  95. Reaching for the Moon
    Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.
  96. Come Out and Play
    Even by the standards of the genre, the characters behave with astonishing stupidity, while Makinov tries repeatedly to mine suspense from slowly creeping up on his actors with the camera.
  97. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Britishly, the movie has a knack for inflating little sap bubbles as if mostly for the joy of popping them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saawariya
    See this movie if you need to get some sleep.
  99. Beijing Love Story
    So far removed from any original signal — there are several direct references to Titanic, so it's timely, too — this nuance-free affair registers as little more than noise.
  100. Delivery Man
    Let's not blame Vince Vaughn for this stale cupcake. He's halfway through his Alec Baldwin-like transition from underbaked hunk to charismatic character actor.
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