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. Barely Lethal
    Barely Lethal's combination of bawdy humor and earnest affection for its high-school-aged protagonists is surprisingly well-balanced.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Plunkett & Macleane
    The script is as full of holes as some of the highwaymen's bullet-riddled victims -- why not throw a drum-and-bass track over everything?
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    It Runs in the Family
    Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.
  4. The Center of the World
    Hysterical but inorganic, lacking blood, sweat, or tears.
  5. Kikujirô no natsu
    An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.
  6. Manhattan Night
    Brody does his sturdiest work in years as the morally compromised Porter, and Strahovski makes for a fittingly seductive temptress with ambiguous motives. Manhattan Night's pedestrian style and affected atmosphere, however, make it a routine descent into the black heart of a city and its shady inhabitants.
  7. Sexual Dependency
    As theory, Sexual Dependency is no worse than a tinny artist's statement, but as moviemaking, it's brutally embarrassing, inexcusable.
  8. Five Time Champion
    Rule of thumb: If a movie about how life is messy features someone lecturing about how messy life is, that movie is not nearly messy enough to do justice to life.
  9. Cut Bank
    Without his usual tics, Malkovich is a wonder, quietly transforming an unassuming town fixture into Cut Bank's conscience. But the revelatory performance is Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Derby Milton.
  10. Funny Games (2008)
    Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.
  11. 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.
  12. Northern Borders
    It's easy to get lost in the natural beauty of Vermont, and Mosher (who worked on the film with several students as part of a Marlboro College program) clearly takes joy in doing so. The liveliest counterpart to that striking landscape isn't Dern, but rather Jessica Hecht as his wayward daughter, who hits all the grace notes the rest of the film tends to miss.
  13. Uncle Nino
    The elderly, violin-toting hero's successful attempt to infiltrate his miscreant nephew's mall-punk garage band is too creepy to fulfill the hipness quotient.
  14. Gaudi Afternoon
    The trumped-up alley-to-plaza intrigue could use more smoke and less mirrors.
  15. Love, Rosie
    The message is more pedestrian than passionate: Life is long, and full of instant messages.
  16. Head of State
    Shows Rock suffering from premature Robin Williams syndrome. He's yet to express the full ferocity of his comic talent on the screen and he's already doing penance by going for the warm and fuzzy.
  17. Into the Storm
    Too cartoonish to be cathartic, and too ghoulish to be honest fun, Into the Storm is mostly a somewhat uncomfortable sit enlivened by occasional hilariousness.
  18. The Raven
    It's a pathetic missed opportunity - and one occasion of actually going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
  19. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    There's a temptation to "give" this to Van Peebles, but any scene in which actors get to interact is deathly awkward, and 100 minutes should never feel this long.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Battle of Britain
    It is depressing to see $20 million poured down the drain in praise of a stiff upper lip which keeps mankind on the rack from Lagos to Mai Ly. [18 Dec 1969, p.63]
    • Village Voice
  21. Girl 6
    Girl 6, the goofy phone-sex comedy that he directed from Suzan-Lori Parks's script, may be incoherent, but it's never boring. Juggling a dozen or more subplots and letting them drop wherever they fall, the movie gives the impression of having been invented as Lee went along. [26 Mar 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 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.
  23. We're the Millers
    This film's eagerness to please functions as a slow poison, draining The Millers of its vitality by rendering its characterization uneven, its potential undeveloped, and its plot predictable and stupid.
  24. Damn!
    The director ultimately treads too fine a line between exposé and cash-in, in part because he belabors his thesis. Sure, McMillan is at least half charlatan, but 20 minutes into Damn! it's clear that he's also a sad, possibly disturbed man who needs a compassionate caseworker more than the attention of a fickle public or ambitious documentarian.
  25. The Human Experiment
    The problem with The Human Experiment as an actual film and not just an anti-chemical treatise is that, though these people and the troubling statistics they cite are on the level, we're too rarely afforded the opportunity to reach our own conclusions based on them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Hangover Part II
    It's hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II.
  27. Hot Summer Nights
    Elijah Bynum’s messy debut film is only bearable thanks to Chalamet’s charisma.
  28. Along Came Polly
    Largely innocuous and forgettable, Polly lacks "Mary's" romantic pathos and psychosexual anxiety and is a few squirmy set pieces shy of "Meet the Parents."
  29. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    The film is funny, weepy, and hairy all the way to the barrel-chested-and utterly predictable-end.
  30. Hey Bartender
    Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It's fun, easygoing, and it lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning.
    • 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.
  32. The Caveman's Valentine
    Valentine isn't exploitative or trendy in the manner of so many indie films. Rather, it seems like the kind of art film that might have been dreamed up by a feverish high schooler.
  33. Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire
    In this visually malnourished film, quirks substitute for character.
  34. What Dreams May Come
    A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    American Cannibal, something like the (mock-)doc equivalent of "The Producers," really, really should've been funnier.
  36. Mia and the Migoo
    Regrettably, both the condemnation of capitalist avarice and violence and the sanctification of nature and youthful innocence are dramatized only in simplistic black-and-white terms.
  37. Wolf Creek 2
    Wolf Creek 2 merely offers more of the same casual brutality. The only shocking (and depressing) part is how inured to it moviegoers have become.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unknown
    The pacing is slightly off, with the action switching between the imprisoned men and the police who are trying to find them, and what should be a mounting sense of urgency inside the warehouse (think Reservoir Dogs) falters and goes slack.
  39. 13 Sins
    [Webber's] performance is crazy good, and so emotionally charged that viewers may be forgiving of a finale overloaded with silly twists.
  40. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    The movie's not bad but it doubles down on its least-interesting and potent elements at the expense of those that actually work. In the end, the film is as forgettable as the dime-store philosophy that fuels it.
  41. This Is Where I Leave You
    The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Chandni Chowk to China
    Alas, Chandni Chowk to China, directed by Nikhil Advani, is asymmetrical in the extreme: shapeless, shameless, and slapdash.
  43. The Answer Man
    Hindman is a stand-up comedian with many Turgenev-size issues on his mind--inadequate fathers and troubled sons, overprotective mothers, the search for belief--whose weight this slight picture can hardly bear. But the laid-back charm of Daniels and Graham's bumpy courtship gives the movie a much-needed edge of idiosyncrasy.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Connie and Carla
    One suspects Vardalos's movies aren't written as much as up-chucked, the result of all-night binges on SnackWells and Oxygen network reruns.
  45. The Village
    The screwiest yarn yet from Shyamalan's metaphysical-Limburger career project, a non-horror horror film.
  46. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    Improbably, the sequel only ups the ante on its predecessor's comedy-of-embarrassment quotient.
  47. Cook County
    Rather than viewing moral chaos from the eye of a storm, director David Pomes watches his movie blow off into the storm itself.
  48. Gut Renovation
    What a shame it is that Friedrich, so impassioned by her subject matter, couldn’t get enough objectivity to make a film that’s more than just a complaint.
  49. Preservation
    Christopher Denham's Preservation is a violent yet agreeably goofy throwback to the survival-in-the-woods genre.
  50. One Last Thing...
    Angarano and Mabrey bring something special to the proceedings, and they make it work.
  51. Jobs
    Kutcher finds compassion without going for anything so cheap as an explanation for Jobs's bad behavior; it's a wily, understated performance.
  52. The Libertine
    The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Losers
    A busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, poorly acted by a grab bag of new faces and franchise movie refugees, and set to a hard-rock soundtrack.
  54. Southland Tales
    In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nina's Heavenly Delights
    "A difficult choice, between perfection and heavenly delight," crows the announcer at an Indian-cooking contest during this movie's climax. Sadly, Pratibha Parmar's Nina's Heavenly Delights offers neither.
  56. Life Happens
    L!fe Happens is a blonde-brunette buddy comedy with a charmless cast (Rachel Bilson plays the third roomie, a Christian virgin) and banter as flat as Deena's favorite no-strings imperative, "Bone and bolt."
  57. Aftermath
    The story necessitates ceaseless sadness, which can grind, but for the most part Aftermath glides just above the wreckage with its leads’ performances. Lester, however, can’t resist throwing in some easy, cheesy symbolism to slop it up.
  58. The Operator
    Can't surmount its own ineptitude.
  59. Snow Falling on Cedars
    Trying to act in this movie is like trying to stand upright in a blizzard.
  60. Sex with Strangers
    Choppy, overlong documentary.
  61. Gasoline
    Devoid of originality, Gasoline is at least a model of modesty -- a road movie that goes nowhere slowly, and ends up where it began.
  62. America's Sweethearts
    A lackluster screwball comedy.
  63. Tio Papi
    Doesn't try to be anything more than a soft-serve pull of treacly pandering.
  64. Lula, the Son of Brazil
    Forget "Son of Brazil": This syrupy origin story/biopic on the nation's beloved reformist president, whose second term ended in 2010, should be titled Mama's Boy.
  65. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Steve + Sky
    Sporadically entertaining and utterly shallow, Steve + Sky answers the age-old question of whether a star's blinding beauty can justify an otherwise bland movie.
  67. Blood
    Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.
  68. The Wendell Baker Story
    A sweet, dumb pup of a movie, not unlike its eponymous hero, The Wendell Baker Story frisks along sniffing the sidewalk.
  69. Something to Cheer About
    Betsy Blankenbaker's doc doesn't possess the kinetic charge of the tale itself; it's too reliant on talking heads and faded photos. Cheer feels amateurish for a generation raised on sports films. Shoulda been a slam-dunk too.
  70. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Tim eventually evolves out of smugness, but unfortunately, the film merely trades it for sappiness. Fischer, meanwhile, imbues Janice with a wounded soulfulness that cuts right through the clichés. The less said about a hideously wigged Topher Grace as a smarmy self-help author, the better.
  71. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    This particular rendition of a history often told is little more than propaganda.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Racing Stripes
    The film shares a problem with its hero: identity crisis.
  73. A Piece of Eden
    Mushy and musty itself, A Piece of Eden takes an eternity...this time to cheat and shortcut its way to lesser Frank Capra moments without the gritty touch of, say, a Garry Marshall.
  74. Teknolust
    A quiet tour de force for Tilda Swinton, who plays researcher Rosetta Stone and her feisty but fragile alter egos.
  75. Under Suspicion
    Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.
  76. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Most Wanted isn't aiming for social commentary, but it isn't too difficult to enjoy its good-natured humor.
  77. The Drowning
    The deeper Tom wades into this psychological morass, the more Danny's volatile behavior seems dictated by the screenwriters' convenience rather than by any plausible depiction of a tortured mind.
  78. Survival of the Dead
    The inevitable all-you-can-eat orgy of zombies pulling stringy mouthfuls away from red, wet rib cages may satisfy gorehounds, but big set pieces showing how atrophied Romero's cutting and tactical framing have become is depressing to anyone who has valued his films for more than just splatter.
  79. Backwards
    Subplots are introduced only to be resolved within minutes, characters jettisoned at a moment's notice. Those who can't do, teach; those who settle apparently end up pretty happy.
  80. Daniel and Ana
    Too bad the director blows it with a last act that tips the film's delicate balance over into lurid grotesquerie, even as his staging remains as consciously muted as ever.
  81. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anamorph
    Any resemblance between these and the real-world practice known as murder--committed for trifling old human motivations like blind anger and money--is strictly coincidental.
  83. Looking for Kitty
    It might be the most maturely conceived role in Burns's films, but the plot around it is flimsy, the visual storytelling simpleminded, and the general ideas for character one-note. At 78 minutes, the movie says howdy, rewards little, and does not test its welcome.
  84. San Andreas
    San Andreas can't wait for the carnage. The problem is, it's too chicken to ask us to comprehend it. It's all big, distant, unfathomable wreckage -- all shattering skyscrapers and rippling cityscapes -- with no sense of the human cost.
  85. Madison
    Madison peddles condescending hokum as heartland values.
  86. The Tempest
    The film lacks a pulse. There's sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.
  87. True Wolf
    Spongy with equanimity and stronger on introspection than exposition, the movie amounts to a crude assembly of sincere testimony, somehow too long at 76 minutes and maybe actually a job for Werner Herzog instead.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Omen
    If the movie didn't take itself so seriously, it could have been a great popcorn muncher. As is, it'll still work fine for those willing to forgive its trespasses.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Great Role
    Chuckle-worthy jabs at American cultural imperialism aside, Le Grand Rôle has little to offer except a maudlin love story that ironically feels like a Tinseltown tearjerker facsimile.
  90. The Mexican
    Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Jersey Girl
    Aware of its awfulness.
  92. 9 Songs
    Winterbottom never provides the empathic connective tissue we expect. Love it or not, 9 Songs amounts to a common human rite fastidiously caught in amber, giving off no heat or joy but crystallized for the future.
  93. Hot Rod
    Like so many movies from the SNL factory, there are perhaps 10 to 15 minutes of good, gag-worthy material here stretched out to interminable lengths. Or to put it another way: It's a very small dick in an oversized box.
  94. Le Chef
    Daniel Cohen's Le Chef does little more than illuminate the superficiality of the restaurant business.
  95. Equals
    We're left with an idea of passion instead of a real depiction of it. And a movie that can't stop wallowing in its own emptiness.
  96. Sorry, Haters
    It's all about the performances. Kechiche is reserved and superbly troubled, but Wright Penn, her stardom-crippling reserves of bitterness and bile rising to the surface, is a scary monster in full bloom, and her habitation of this wacky role makes the movie worth its weight in pixels.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    My eight-year-old nephew sat nearly silent throughout, so when he says he had fun, he must be talking about the treats.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X Games 3D: The Movie
    Steve Lawrence's glitzy infotainment raises the question, "How much awesomeness can an audience take?"
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light It Up
    Unexpectedly satisfying feel-good agitprop.
  100. American Pie 2
    Hardly works up a decent belly laugh before its characters are happily pairing off with whomever they desire most. The film is like skipping the orgasm and going straight for the cigarette.
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