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. Anything Else
    I have a friend who insists Allen should make a western, if only because the demands of genre might force the birth of new ideas. His movies do create and service an innovation-free comfort zone that makes most TV sitcoms seem adventurous.
  2. The Beach
    Barely a movie.
  3. Hellbenders
    Aided by capable if unnecessary 3D effects, Petty displays a flair for staging violent action, but he's trapped inside a broad comic set-up that doesn't mesh with the story's innate meanness.
  4. Chaplin of the Mountains
    Self-taught Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's mostly English-language drama...is deadened by milquetoast characters, uninspired landscape photography, and no perceptible stakes.
  5. Shelter
    Shelter is a well-intentioned film that edges into misery porn.
  6. All I See Is You
    It defeats expectations, but it’s far more arresting and captivating a romance because Forster infuses it with suspenseful urgency. I have to admire the guts of a director who portrays the dissolution of a mismatched marriage with the dread of a murder mystery.
  7. Year by the Sea
    It’s less the story of a woman taking a year off from city life and her husband than it is a pleasant revue of sketches and scenarios on that topic.
  8. Sherman's Way
    Plays like something out of an indie-film paint-by-numbers.
  9. My Best Enemy
    Getting even is wearying in My Best Enemy, a banal World War II thriller dependent on contrived role reversals.
  10. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here is at least stretching toward something, and even if its reach exceeds its grasp, Braff's earnest determination as a filmmaker and performer helps smooth out some of the awkward bumps.
  11. Total Recall (2012)
    Where Paul Verhoeven's original was testosterone-stupid and, therefore, fun, Wiseman's film is just boring-stupid.
  12. Suspended Animation
    Alternately tense and cheesy.
  13. Riding in Cars with Boys
    Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.
  14. The Last Castle
    Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.
  15. Paycheck
    Woo's film is in some ways closer to Dick's -- and his own -- pulp roots, and if he lazily quotes himself (and, inexplicably, Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly") once too often, he at least gets loose, spirited performances from his cast -- Uma's post-"Kill Bill" gravitas notwithstanding.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    From Other Worlds
    There's no beguilement to this toothless caprice by writer- director Barry Strugatz, who may intend a spoof of '50s melodramas and alien abductions but delivers instead an inert doodle.
  17. The War on Kids
    Cevin Soling's lively documentary lays out in hair-raising detail the authoritarian underpinnings of America's child-centered culture.
  18. Salt of This Sea
    Annemarie Jacir, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, directs with flair and loving attention to the wild, damaged beauty of the contested landscape. But Soraya's rebellious bursts of rage come off more like the tantrums of a spoiled princess than the legitimate anger of an emerging activist.
  19. 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.
  20. Rage
    The structuring allegory's invocation of familial bonds and immigrant burdens grows stilted: It doesn't collapse this delicate film, but it can't quite hold it up, either.
  21. 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.
  22. The ABCs of Death
    What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.
  23. The Brass Teapot
    Wearing out its welcome long before its moralizing finale, the film...does manage to mine contemporary fears about the increasing worthlessness of a college degree.
  24. The United States of Football
    [Pamphilon] won't wow you with his skill behind the camera, but you'll likely still find yourself nodding your head in frustrated agreement.
  25. Bottled Up
    The jokes are not always consistent but highly effective when they strike.
  26. Chapman
    Mostly due to the assured polish of cinematographer Sean Stiegemeier, Chapman punches above its featherweight budget, but the punch is ultimately pulled as both strands of the narrative intersect with one last reveal of unresolved melodrama that feels coldly calculated in its cause and effect.
  27. Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering
    Like many docs with activist undertones, Second Opinion tells a potentially interesting story in a bland way.
  28. #Stuck
    Acher adroitly juggles all the gimmickry, using it to comment on Holly and Guy's burgeoning relationship.
  29. One Piece Film: Gold
    Only Yesterday it ain't, and you probably already know whether One Piece Film: Gold will make you ecstatic or not.
  30. The Pulitzer at 100
    It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.
  31. Hello Again
    What Gustafson has achieved is certainly artful, and sometimes, through montage and smart camerawork, suggests correspondences between these century-crossing assignations that the stage show could not. But even at its best, this Hello Again struck me as an uncertain, even ancillary work.
  32. Dear John
    The biggest surprise here is Tatum, whose butch reticence has never been put to better use: His saddest farewell isn’t to his lady, but to a man even more uncommunicative than he is.
  33. Youth Without Youth
    For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
  34. The Lady
    Impersonally directed by cinéma du look pioneer Luc Besson, The Lady was written by first-timer Rebecca Frayn, whose script has all the elegance and nuance of Google Translate.
  35. Death by China
    The bulk of the film contains as much hysterical rhetoric as sober analysis.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Automatons
    Automatons is what happens when "Eraserhead" and "Tetsuo the Iron Man" bong themselves into oblivion and collaborate on a minimalist avant-garde sci-fi cheapie shot in a toolshed.
  37. Women in Trouble
    Awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories.
  38. 360
    There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty.
  39. Doctored
    Sheehan largely omits the voices of skeptics, resulting in a considerable - but possibly overdue - slant in favor of chiropractors.
  40. Final Destination 3
    Rote sequel that surely no one was waiting for: Like the serially thwarted Death (the only "character" to return from the first two Final Destination movies), audiences are required to endure banal exposition and junior-high-level foreshadowing before being treated to the nauseatingly detailed scenes of CGI slaughter.
  41. Bleeding Steel
    The closest comparison for this film is 2017’s joyfully schlocky Beyond Skyline, though that boasted far more original set pieces. Bleeding Steel seems content to rehash old ones, cutting and pasting Chan into familiar scenes, with the welcome exception of one battle that takes place atop the Sydney Opera House — but I’ll be damned if I could figure out why or how they got there.
  42. Home Room
    Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."
  43. Black Butterfly
    Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.
  44. Malevolence
    Laughably unscary.
  45. Violet & Daisy
    The key relationships are well drawn, if not especially revealing of anything human, and director Fletcher sometimes dares some welcome absurdity. But if you've seen movies built from the same parts as this one, you'll likely find this too familiar—but energetic, well-acted, and distinguished by artfully artless chatter.
  46. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Easily.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gardens of the Night
    Pitched at the risible level of Marco Kreuzpaintner's Trade, the film never quite recovers from writer-director Damian Harris's dithering way of shooting things.
  48. Meet Joe Black
    This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Young Unknowns
    Numbing but effective debut.
  50. BookWars
    Artless but seductive.
  51. Cleopatra's Second Husband
    An engagingly grim psychological thriller.
  52. For Love of the Game
    Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.
  53. Twentynine Palms
    The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Wedding
    The deliriously overacting Scott is game for anything, too much really, but as a one-man army against the tide of Z100-scored banality, he's the closest thing the movie has to a savior.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Master of the Game
    Director Stolhand gets a high-quality look on a minimal budget, but the script and acting are so amateurish.
  56. 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.
  57. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie), the movie suffers from the same tonal schizophrenia of that other recent goth wannabe, "Jennifer's Body": Is it meant to be scary or funny? Oops, it's neither.
  58. Passage to Mars
    Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.
  59. Bad Fever
    If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.
  60. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It's serviceable.
  61. Vincent N Roxxy
    By the end, the point-blank murders might make you queasy, but Kravitz still manages to project composure, even when her face is covered in blood. All through, she’s battered but defiant.
  62. 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.
  63. Steal Me
    Whether it's the guitar-strum soundtrack, "lyrical" cornfield shots, or arrhythmic performances, Steal Me has at least one indie-film cliché too many.
  64. Wonderland
    Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good -- the simple story of a doomed hop-hog over his head in bad shit could've hit the nerve if left to tell itself.
  65. Machine Gun Preacher
    Machine Gun Preacher is the umpteenth onscreen iteration of a white savior aiding the most desperate in Africa.
  66. Segunda piel
    Apparently reassembled from the cutting-room floor of any given daytime soap.
  67. Hey, Happy!
    Gonick's visceral impulses have drawn comparisons with John Waters, but the starry-eyed collision of gross-out gags and candy-sweet sentiment owes as much of a debt to the Farrellys as Bruce LaBruce.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Instinct
    Instinct moves along at a competent clip, but it's mostly a tease.
  69. The Forgotten
    The resolution is as surprise-free as it is improbably sunny.
  70. This Ain't No Heartland
    One might expect some insight into nationalist propaganda from This Ain't No Heartland, which opens with a Goering quotation, but Austrian director Andreas Horvath's scattershot film is more interested in advancing the thesis that Midwesterners are all dumb hicks.
  71. Eternal
    "It is a study of the psychopathologies of perversions," co-director Federico Sanchez says in the press notes for Eternal, which is certainly one way to rationalize a trashy lesbian vampire flick.
  72. The Romantics
    It is uncertain, though, how this material is served by disheveled cinematography, shooting handheld on the Hi 8 camcorder I had in high school, apparently editing on two VCRs, and flooding the mix with Forever 21 dressing-room music.
  73. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    When Reggie advises Eleanor, a former cornet prodigy, to protect her artistic "gift," Like Sunday, Like Rain finally achieves maximum phoniness.
  74. Miss Meadows
    Holmes and Dale are ideal together, turning a polite courtship and charged relationship (including a sex scene that's both giddy and profound) into a twisted, compelling expression of unconditional love.
  75. Trust the Man
    Writer-director Bart Freundlich (Moore's husband) has nothing to say and nowhere to go with this material, except to the most contrived ending this side of a "Will & Grace" episode.
  76. Apart
    To understand Apart's Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown tommyrot any better, one would need a psychic bond to first-time writer/director Aaron Rottinghaus, for his movie doesn't do much of a job explaining it.
  77. Down and Dangerous
    Forsman — whose loose inspiration was Snowblind, a 1976 memoir by his retired drug-smuggler father — brings a refreshing crispness to the foot chases and fights, and there's a fun cameo that supports the retro-'80s vibe nicely.
  78. The Players
    An extended riff on marital infidelity, this is the rare omnibus film that isn't just a mixed bag -- it very nearly succeeds at being uniformly bad.
  79. Desperate Acts of Magic
    Desperate Acts of Magic is a pleasant little film.
  80. Spread
    Spread becomes a sloggy, tepid comeuppance tale.
  81. A Dog's Purpose
    Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.
  82. Tank 432
    A last-minute flurry of action and a final plot twist aren't enough to redeem this busy but tedious thriller.
  83. The Grace Card
    By refusing to even suggest that racism is a walloping social problem rather than an individual, circumstantial one with an easy fix, it does a rotten job of preaching to the choir.
  84. Brooklyn's Finest
    Filled with every cop-movie convention since the invention of gunpowder and curse words, Brooklyn's Finest is three movies in one, all of which you've seen before.
  85. The Circle
    Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.
  86. America: Freedom to Fascism
    From the tax debate, the documentary suddenly gets scattershot, going after the Patriot Act, laws against vitamin sales, election fraud, and Hurricane Katrina response (apparently a plot to grab people's guns), building to the standard New World Order line, which discredits any valid points Russo may have.
  87. Backtrack
    Between the generic shadowy cinematography and a gothic score that manages to telegraph even the film's jump-scares, there's no tangible tension by which to build an effective climax.
  88. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    It wouldn't be fair to gripe about the hundreds of plot holes; the whole thing is hole.
  89. The Final Cut
    Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise?
  91. Dealin' with Idiots
    Years of HBO seasoning has given Garlin and his cast a sure touch and great timing...but the whole project is mean-hearted and lazy, and it dawdles in repetition and dead air as if it's got a 14-show TV season to spin out.
  92. Into the Grizzly Maze
    What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.
  93. Beach House
    The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.
  94. Donkey Punch
    A workmanlike thriller that works as an (unconscious?) auto-critique of mainstreamed Internet-age hedonism.
  95. D.E.B.S.
    Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.
  96. Office Christmas Party
    As dull and impersonal as a sheaf of open-enrollment insurance forms, Office Christmas Party brings together — and underutilizes — several funny performers from TV shows (Silicon Valley, Veep, SNL) that pinpoint what this dim comedy does not: the specifics of workplace environments and their particular pathologies and joys.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    As the parallel friendships evolve over time, both push and pull between platonic and erotic; it's to the film's credit that it never definitively suggests that love can only be one or the other.
  98. My Father Die
    From homophobic start to misogynistic finish, My Father Die is a parade of thrift-store images and scenarios as dull as they are repugnant.
  99. Whisky Galore!
    Instead of glorifying the amber liquid, Whisky Galore! is a love letter to an isolated community trapped in amber.
  100. The Lovely Bones
    In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.
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