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. 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.
  2. Spork
    Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vacation!
    The narrative doesn't arc so much as slope down at a 45-degree angle-from the high of innocent fun to the depths of absolute moral vacuity-with a break in the dead center for a visually stunning, perfectly weird acid-trip scene, something like an excerpt from "Inland Empire's" would-be nautically themed sequel.
  4. Dark Shadows
    "Wood" is still by far Depp and Burton's best collaboration, exhibiting the balance of tone between kitsch parody and zealous fantasy that's missing in Dark Shadows, less a resurrection than a clumsy desecration.
  5. Think Like a Man
    Enduring a day-long session of couples' therapy is more fun (and flies by faster) than this film.
  6. Movie 43
    It's the kind of thing you feel you should laugh at through a phlegmy, hacking cough-and it does get laughs, if inconsistently, predictable given the circumstances of production.
  7. Tuesday, After Christmas
    Unrelentingly mundane, as if made with the sole purpose of draining the topic of adultery of any prurient interest.
  8. Hello Lonesome
    The same laxity given to the performers extends, unfortunately, to the film's structuring, a lazy Susan rotation between storylines and monotonous settings.
  9. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Anderson['s] lavish visual imagination is matched to a placeholder idea of character that's almost avant-garde in its generic stylization, dialogue buffed of personality by passing through 10,000 previous movies.
  10. Elysium
    Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.
  11. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.
  12. Reversion
    Like many similarly twisty tales, Reversion's narrative logic is undermined by its characters' irrational behavior.
  13. The Lone Ranger
    The Lone Ranger has it all, but what you end up with is not much. It's an extravagantly squandered opportunity.
  14. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay.
  15. Angel of Evil
    In many ways reminiscent of "Mesrine" but suffers greatly in comparison. It hits many of the same marks -- but the scenes unfold almost elliptically, never really building or illuminating character, and never sparking narrative momentum.
  16. Jig
    Bourne's lengthy chronicle of the World Championship is severely under-contextualized, leaving us in the dark about the competition's structure and frustrating our efforts to take a rooting interest in the proceedings.
  17. The Names of Love
    The pathetic attempts at outré, taboo-busting humor as sociopolitical commentary can't disguise what this film really is: a mawkish, MOR comedy of manners that even its straw man Nicolas Sarkozy would find suitable for date night.
  18. The Mighty Macs
    Appears to have been made on a budget equivalent to the cost of a WNBA fleece hoodie. But even at that price, the first feature by Tim Chambers is profligate with sports-movie clichés.
  19. The Family Tree
    Thin as it is, Family Tree is no slog - the droll, attentive performances by Davis and Mulroney are endearing, and the extraneous guest-star bits (including Christina Hendricks as a secretary, no less) and rambling B stories aren't overly distracting.
  20. Welcome
    Heavy ironies like that drop regularly, undermining both the film's intentions and the drama.
  21. Septien
    Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flying Fish
    Pushpakumara's debut feature portrays the recent Sri Lankan civil war as a gauntlet of private humiliations, endured by largely nameless, barely individuated villagers - making this would-be multi-strand narrative more of an impenetrable tangle.
  23. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    Discredit director John Luessenhop for giving us 3-D visuals reminiscent of "Jaws 3-D": That slab of meat's coming right for us! Try as he might to honor the original - flashbulb transitions, a skeevy (yet buff) hitchhiker, metal doors, and meat hooks - there's little of its mounting dread.
  24. Thor: The Dark World
    Lacking Iron Man’s wit, the Hulk’s brains, and the Captain’s ideals, he’s in peril of going poof himself if the franchise doesn’t figure out how to capitalize on its most glorious hero.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Implausibilities mount, and by the last act Lerner appears to have lost any compunction he might have had about using his protagonist to tug the audience's heartstrings.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Less a documentary than a glowing two-hour infomercial for Sarah Palin, Presidential Candidate To-Be.
  27. 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.
  28. Turbo
    Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.
  29. Autoerotic
    Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard's latest exploration of amorous urban collisions, is only sporadically a good sex comedy, in part because the flat affect favored by its young Chicago cast of hipsters looks an awful lot like, well, seriousness.
  30. House of Boys
    And yet, for all its hanging on the details of the boys' heavily eroticized performances and its graphing of the relationships between the young performers, the film is at once too drawn out and underdeveloped.
  31. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    What follows is a film as odd as its title character. Timothy flings grown-up ideas at the viewer but rips the teeth from them rather than risk our discomfort.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Grey
    There's too much Jack London, and, as they systematically pick off the stragglers, too many CGI wolves go unpunched.
  33. 5 Days of War
    Taking the vantage point of civilians rather than combatants allows 5 Days of War to show the toll of the terror and of the relentless, exhausting pursuit of war with unexpected force. Had it rejected the genre's romantic trappings and false heroics more consistently, the movie might've been worth the ride.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    Bowen in particular stands out, impressively describing Garrick's hairpin turns from comforting his victims to instinctively throttling them, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett exhibit less facility with the big picture.
  35. Tanner Hall
    From hairstyles and clothes to autumnal-hued cinematography and a raft of clichéd incidents involving pills, suicide, sneaking out, and blackmail, everything feels dainty to the point of stale.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam Twenty
    Perhaps Pearl Jam's arc too closely resembles Crowe's own, and he can't see what's so uniquely poignant about dimmed but enduring stars.
  37. The Double
    The Double, Michael Brandt's post–Cold War spy film, is grade-B hokum, but it's not without its occasional generic thrills.
  38. Father of Invention
    The rather unappealing character of Axel is indulged with every opportunity for redemption, as Spacey is indulged with every opportunity to showboat.
  39. 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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Proper Violence
    Scrappy college-age filmmakers Chris Faulisi and Matt Robinson do a commendable job of establishing tone and tension in their debut feature, but things fall apart when words and feelings start to flow.
  41. Chasing Madoff
    Too bad Prosserman can't trust his material: Overloading the screen with aesthetic dross, the director offers up tiresome symbolic imagery of blood-soaked hands, burning money, and out-of-focus documents. Rather than amping up the intensity, these fast-cut sequences prove disastrously distracting.
  42. 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.
  43. Undefeated
    Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.
  44. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    All the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the stiffness of the bourgeoisie.
  45. Chalet Girl
    Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.
  46. A Bird of the Air
    The cast detracts, too: Fiona, a flighty loner in the book, is a grating twit in Nichols's hands, and Hurst, while likeable, is flat and too hunky. The bird's got more charisma, which in a better movie would've been the point.
  47. The Woman
    Even with a nauseous climax, The Woman never gets under the skin, and its artsy-languid pacing and incessant lite-metal commentary tunes finally seem like part of an effort to disguise what it really is: torture porn for people who'd never admit to liking torture porn.
  48. Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology
    Like Shlain's hand-written diagram in which lines twist and knot while linking various subjects, the film resembles not a coherent thesis but a tangle of semi-related ideas.
  49. Boy
    The abundant charm of first-time actor James Rolleston, playing the 11-year-old of the title in Boy, doesn't quite save the aimless, nostalgia-woozy second feature from Taika Waititi (2007's Eagle vs. Shark).
  50. 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.
  51. Cargo
    With the certainty of bad melodrama, Cargo moves gradually into superficial moral complexity, an inevitable display of heroics, and the perfunctory title card ensuring us that sex slavery is indeed a real-life problem.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pianomania
    Directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis fail to plumb their subject's frustrations or any other insightful biographical details.
  53. 5 Star Day
    Gigandet fills every close-up with flirtatious face wrinkles, embarrassed smiles, and anything else he can think of, to the point where Jake seems downright spastic; although not terribly good at acting, Gigandet seeks to compensate for this fact by doing a lot of it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Barbershop Punk
    Dovetails with the current Occupy message but still feels rather stale.
  55. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    This is intended as one of those kid's comeuppance stories, in which a new maturity is won through contact with salt-of-the-earth types and honest labor but is done with an almost total lack of charm.
  56. A Novel Romance
    Cohabitation "commandments" and talk of "chick flicks" further send the material into a cutesy tailspin, with the script's low point an egregious scene featuring Nate sneaking a peek at a silhouette of Jenny undressing behind a curtain.
  57. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    The film is flecked with moments of interest, though this decidedly minor and not particularly cinematographic affair is clearly best suited to television.
  58. Norwegian Wood
    Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.
  59. 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Flowers of War
    With The Flowers of War, Zhang mostly just proves that there's no tragedy too terrible that it can't be turned into an operatic pageant - human suffering reduced to visual showmanship.
  61. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    By turns bizarrely affectless and then prattlingly manic, much like its dual protagonists.
  62. Paranormal Activity 4
    Screenwriter Christopher Landon, along with co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, make a truly lame attempt at establishing a supernatural mythology to explain all this, but their real energies go to amping up the jarring sound cues, darting shadows, and last-shot shocker (so goofily weird this time that you'll laugh out loud) that make this franchise a perennial crowd-pleaser.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tonight You're Mine
    The authenticity baked into the production doesn't redeem the absurdly improbable premise, the attractive actors don't do anything to make the caricatures they're playing feel real, and the aggressive hipness of the film is queasily dated - it's the cinematic equivalent of the clearance corner at Urban Outfitters.
  64. Silent House
    Silent House does superficially spiff up the haunted-house movie, but it's not built to last.
  65. Girl in Progress
    Unconvincing, flawed matriarch Mendes and junior showboat Ramirez appear to be acting in entirely different movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    The bland, jittery visual "realism" can't counteract overheated performances of tin-eared dialogue, which strain for pulp but often land at soap.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Musical Chairs
    All would be forgiven if Seidelman weren't so damningly dispassionate about dance, cutting up and away from movement and devaluing the thing we'd countenance so much cheese in order to see.
  68. 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.
  69. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reuniting the Rubins
    What happens when you put a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a high-strung capitalist, and a lesbian humanitarian together in the same room? Not comedy, it turns out.
  71. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    The movie's argument only occasionally transcends its oozy nonspecificity and feel-good bleeding-heart vibe.
  72. 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."
  73. Mammuth
    Too limp and scattershot to warrant anything stronger than indifference.
  74. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made - but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.
  75. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    Ideal only for the junior-high classroom, Holly Mosher's dull-as-dishwater documentary fudges the line between socially progressive message-spreading and suspicious hagiography in its celebration of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.
  76. Private Romeo
    The hunky ensemble shares a fine chemistry, but Brown's stylistic choices lie somewhere between perverse and nonsensical.
  77. Michael
    Not everything that is human is naturally interesting, and Schleinzer approaches his subject not as an investigator, but as though covering up a crime scene and scrubbing it of anything that might provide insight or empathy or psychological traction.
  78. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    An incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results.
  79. Intruders
    With nothing tangible at stake, Intruders is just an aggregation of influences that's as blank as its bogeyman.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Killing Them Softly
    It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The FP
    Infinitely better as a beer-goggled pitch than as a feature film, The FP never gets beyond the studied novelty of its own pose.
  82. October Baby
    A slick piece of pro-life propaganda, it has relatively luxe production values, painfully earnest performances, and a drippy "inspirational" score.
  83. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.
  84. The Woods
    A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.
  85. Identity Thief
    McCarthy gets bashed about like a Stooge, and she bashes back with riotous abandon. Sadly, the rest of the movie is a shambles. So, let it be said, this one time only: Here is a comedy that really could use more inter-gender violence.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We the Party
    Van Peebles's heart is probably in the right place, but his attempt to wed his kids' generational moment to a classic coming-of-age template falters in its message-obsessed execution.
  87. Darling Companion
    The handsome pooch is also the only appealing aspect of the latest tale of privileged boomer pulse-taking from Lawrence Kasdan.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Elles
    It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Unfortunately for Schemel, director P. David Ebersole seems to think these pop-up video footnotes are a substitute for narrative development and, more or less, forgets to edit down the rest of the tediously paced rockumentary.
  90. Jack and Diane
    Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.
  91. 360
    There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty.
  92. 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.
  93. Delicacy
    Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm - not as aggressively as she did in "Amélie," but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bel Ami
    Its the ladies who are worth tracking here, from Ricci's understated sensuality to Thomas's fragile angularity. They've supplemented beauty with good old-fashioned acting chops, something their cover-boy co-star would be wise to emulate.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Losing Control
    The blue rom-com then takes a frenzied late turn into espionage territory, an attempt to gather momentum that only makes the film more tiresome.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Come on Eileen
    The film betrays an eager crowd-pleaser's impulse toward on-the-nose dialogue and resolution on command.
  97. People Like Us
    Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.
  98. God Save My Shoes
    There's no escaping the fact that Benasra's documentary does little more than perpetuate the myth of women - all women - as vapid materialists worshipping at the altar of Manolo Blahnik.
  99. The Beat Hotel
    Scaling new heights of inessentiality is The Beat Hotel, which chronicles the period, roughly 1958–63.
  100. The Hangover Part III
    With The Hangover Part III, director Todd Phillips continues to occupy an apt (and very lucrative) niche, casting rich, entitled fraternity dicks as underdog heroes beset by shrewish women, foreigners with funny accents, and even animals-often cute animals with big, dewy eyes.
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