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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    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    G
    One 'hood-rich-meets-blue-blood-rich scene is employed as comedic throwaway; it's also the film's truest. The rest: treacly orchestral swells for the brooding, oh-so-familiar impresario, Summer G, and no green light but the one mistakenly given to start production.
  2. Beside Still Waters
    Lowell hews so close to the reunion-film formula he ends up stifling anything new that may otherwise have resulted.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bones
    Bones splits the difference between horror and social commentary, with pallid returns.
  4. The Big Bounce
    The best Elmore Leonard adaptations ("Jackie Brown," "Out of Sight") play behind the beat, and although The Big Bounce isn't top-shelf Dutch, the film finds its own pace.
  5. The Time Machine
    If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.
  6. The Family Man
    It's an easier movie to tolerate than it should be if, like me, you're in love with Téa Leoni, who, as a lithe, lusty, strangely patient firecracker Superwife in a shag, rescues the movie from the tar pit of irrelevance. With some decent lines, she could be the new Myrna Loy.
  7. Wet Hot American Summer
    The film exists in a humid meta-movie ether all its own.
  8. Scumrock
    Gripping, strangely beautiful, and poignant.
  9. Swerve
    The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.
  10. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Insurgent is so vapid it seems impossible that there's enough story left for another sequel.
  11. Boss
    Boss is that rare Bollywood action film whose stars are worthy of the pedestal they're put on.
  12. The Adderall Diaries
    Franco seems the ideal interpreter of The Adderall Diaries, but he's reduced the memoirist's tough introspection to misery porn.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Home of the Brave
    As sincere as a three-legged puppy.
  14. Won't Back Down
    In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle
  15. Love the Hard Way
    If this adaptation of Chinese punk-lit writer Wang Shuo's fiction doesn't survive its Bronx trick-out, you can't really blame Brody, whose luminous autodidact seems caught between camp and coolsville.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Daredevil
    Affleck and impressively amazonian Alias star Jennifer Garner (as the ninjitsu-savvy daughter of a wealthy tycoon) are lankier than "Spider-Man's" Maguire and Dunst, which is good if you like lanky, but their relationship substitutes cliché for chemistry.
  17. Awful Nice
    It's often funny, and the writers are smart, but the film is like an arcless, extended episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
  18. Transcendence
    Transcendence, written by Jack Paglen, is just more business as usual, one of those "control technology or it will control you" sermons that nonetheless enlists the usual heap of technically advanced special effects.
  19. Midnight Eagle
    Convoluted action saga.
  20. Trade
    It's pure exploitation--the kind of movie after which you need a long, hot shower. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like "Traffic" and "Syriana"--clearly his role models--but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's "Hardcore."
  21. 24 Exposures
    Swanberg has made an inspiring career out of rejecting the aesthetic crimes of Hollywood. It's dispiriting, then, that he so doggedly indulges in its tradition of male gazing.
  22. Ironclad
    While Ironclad captures the casual cruelty and flesh-and-bone violence of the 13th century, it fails to do the same in the more intimate material set in the downtime between assaults.
  23. The Internship
    For those of you on a really tight entertainment budget, you'll be paying at least 8 cents per minute not to laugh. Your money is better spent on beans and rice.
  24. Gun Shy
    It's the casting of Liam Neeson as the nervous breakdown that turns the movie to asphalt -- it's like watching Andre the Giant play Woody Allen.
  25. The Intended
    A taut noirish thriller that unfolds in a fever of firelit ambience.
  26. Overboard
    Overboard is a manipulative mindfuck dressed up as a lightweight, heartwarming comedy.
  27. Lazer Team
    Because it's made by people who understand the importance of a clever script and want their audience to have fun, Lazer Team may just prove to be 2016's most entertaining superhero movie.
  28. Pizza
    An ugly-duckling fable populated with grotesques out of John Waters, Pizza attempts an unlikely mode: earnest camp.
  29. Piggie
    A movie refreshingly lacking in social graces, Piggie uses the transparency of video to x-ray the psyches of characters obsessed with the essence of things.
  30. Willets Point
    A jarring fusion of blue-collar lament and the-more-you-know medical drama.
  31. Motherland
    Despite its ambitious combination of murder mystery and cautionary immigration tale, Motherland doesn't quite hold together, lacking both the fuel to reach a rolling, procedural boil and the intimacy to simmer with emotion.
  32. Electoral Dysfunction
    The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mariachi Gringo
    Amid this malarkey Gustafson is smart enough to let the camera linger on musical performances that reveal mariachi to be dynamic and complex as opera.
  34. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    A compelling but ultimately unsatisfying film.
  35. Inferno
    Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.
  36. Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of
    Show 'Em What You're Made Of convincingly argues that these boy-men have something to say about the fickleness of fate — something they knew more about as young men than any of the cynics who dismissed them for dancing in unison. The hardest part will be convincing people to listen.
  37. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Green seems to be asking: In the face of beasts whose scale and life cycles we can't begin to grasp, how can we allow our fellow human beings to be so unknowable?
  38. Olvidados (Forgotten)
    In showing how some men derive primal, perverse senses of pleasure and power from their brutality, how small men make themselves feel large and invincible, the film distills the roots of terror (political, cultural, religious) to truths that are tragically evergreen.
  39. Beautiful Something
    Writer-director Joseph Graham isn't solely interested in hookups, and he uses the encounters between these men (both carnal and cerebral) to construct a compassionate romantic drama.
  40. 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.
  41. Breaking the Girls
    A decently acted, often drolly funny, tautly directed thriller that proves to be a Russian doll of motivations, coincidences, and plot-twists; it would have been more satisfying if it weren't so unnecessarily convoluted.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Holy Man
    Holy Man's traipse through the wilds of consumerism and higher purpose must have seemed like a chance for the proverbial stretch, but not even Eddie can save this ill-conceived mess of a movie.
  43. Burnt
    The movie gets duller and less focused as it wears on.
  44. Three Worlds
    An overdrawn soap opera about everyone's simultaneous fear of and longing for consequences.
  45. Let It Snow
    An inert and inept romantic comedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Two Weeks Notice
    So busy rehashing rom-com clichés that it shirks the genitive, prelude to other flaws.
  47. Psycho Beach Party
    The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.
  48. Jurassic Park III
    Drama is minimal and character nonexistent.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The 13th Warrior
    A well-marbled, albeit derivative, slab of action-movie man meat.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jackass: The Movie
    Shrewdly, the Jackass gang didn't mess with their established formula in the transition to the big screen.
  51. Bad Samaritan
    There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.
  52. Wedding Palace
    Yoo's broadly drawn characters are less ha-ha funny than endearingly over-the-top, their exaggerated mannerisms rooted in fondness as much as mockery.
  53. Celebrity
    The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.
  54. Daddy's Home
    The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.
  55. Mighty Fine
    The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.
  56. The English Teacher
    A respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh.
  57. Bicentennial Man
    Amid the complacent self-congratulation...is a bizarre reactionary bent.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Event
    Shot on crummy DV and told via flashbacks, the film largely plays out like a Reagan-era "Citizen Kane." Common sense wrecks even the film's funniest bit, and the director's nausea-inducing camera observes the hysteria in perpetual pan-and-scan.
  59. The Rage: Carrie 2
    A smart, realist drama -- I wouldn't be surprised if this one winds up on my 10-best list for '99.
  60. The Affair of the Necklace
    L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.
  61. Vampires
    A gorefest of epic proportions.
  62. The Stepford Wives
    Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anna
    Taissa Farmiga (sister of Vera) is a marvel in the title role.
  64. Viva la Libertà
    From Dave to The Dictator, politicians-replaced-by-doppelgängers has long been a favorite comedy movie device — yet never has it been employed for more torturous faux-funny business than in Viva la Libertà.
  65. American Hero
    The filmmakers blend tones like a child mixing fountain drinks into one unidentifiable flavor.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    For Southern to be funny at all, jokes must be carried too far and decorum exploded at every turn. Even if McGrath were inclined to handle the material this way, mush of it has dated, and the screenplay by Southern, McGrath, and Peter Sellers does not so much update it as displace it. [26 Feb 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  67. Austenland
    The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.
  68. Under the Electric Sky
    Under the Electric Sky manages to be amusing even while it’s annoying you.
  69. The Great Wall
    As pure spectacle, The Great Wall is absolutely dazzling. It may be a studio release, but the constant sense of invention, the go-for-broke intricacy of its battle scenes, feels very much of a piece with Chinese action fantasy flicks.
  70. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    If The Marked Ones is mildly brilliant in the first half, it stumbles witlessly into its own dumb pentagram in the second.
    • 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.
  72. Reincarnated
    The film is as lightweight as the ganja-puffing is plentiful, little more than a vanity project that allows its subject to wax philosophical on his past triumphs, tragedies, and spiritual development (aided by Louis Farrakhan) from gangland pimp to nonviolent family man.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bucket List
    Turns out The Bucket List is a meta-film, mostly about how these two legendary actors interact and what it means to be an actor in your own life.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Family
    You can be chuckling one minute then cowering and cringing the next, which tinges the humor with apprehension and taints the brutality with absurdity. That isn't to say that the combo doesn't work at all.
  75. Albatross
    By the time a disillusioned, grimly deflowered Beth leaves for school wearing her ex-friend's "I Put Out" T-shirt, tonal whiplash has eaten up the pleasures of this otherwise well-cast, evocatively shot small-town trifle.
  76. Crooked Arrows
    Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.
  77. Fred Claus
    The exceptional cast--Vaughn, Giamatti, Kathy Bates, Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz--is an embarrassment of riches for a script this thin and this beholden to family-fare protocol, with its mushy-minded moral and slick sentimentality.
  78. From Paris with Love
    He (Morel) brings in lobotomized entertainment at 90-odd minutes. During the February doldrums, this cannot be underestimated.
  79. Trapped
    Luis Mandoki's brisk hack job pushes no more buttons than Connie Chung Tonight -- though, for better or worse, it's perverse enough to stage the traumatic event as a spouse swap.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Underworld
    Speedman's such a nonentity here I worried that the theater air-conditioning would blow him off the screen.
  81. Bob, Verushka & the Pursuit of Happiness
    Patently unfunny romantic comedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Queen of the Lot
    Queen of the Lot is sort of sweet in its earnestness, sort of frustratingly delusional, and ultimately unsubstantial-but there are moments of meta-provocation that almost justify the lopsided enterprise.
  83. Cold Turkey
    As a whole, Cold Turkey is too busy and offers no fresh insight on the inner hysteria of seemingly upright WASPs. The actors work hard, but their roles are mostly one-note. It's Witt who generates the laughs and the pathos.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Amid the windy speeches, fiery explosions, exposition dumps, and product placements, there are a few treats to help the intelligent moviegoer - drawn to Dark of the Moon by peer pressure or kitsch factor or an insatiable desire for overstimulation - through the ordeal.
  85. Below Her Mouth
    Linder possesses a compelling, Kurt Cobain-like androgyny, but neither she nor Krill can do much to save the portentous screenplay.
  86. Chalet Girl
    Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chronicling a Crisis
    At once downbeat and claustrophobic, it's also often grueling to watch.
  88. The Foxy Merkins
    The Foxy Merkins would have made an idiosyncratic and amusing short film; at 80 minutes, it's a one-joke comedy that quickly overstays its welcome.
  89. Madea's Witness Protection
    An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here.
  90. Devil's Knot
    Egoyan musters some of the power he brought to The Sweet Hereafter, another lost-children tale, but little of the lyric beauty or sense of a community coming unglued.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    House in the Alley
    At its best, the film deftly plumbs the gulf between its central couple... At its worst, it paints a Victorian portrait of womanhood... It's shoddily plotted, too.
  92. Mental
    Mental skewers the easy-on and -off labels of psychiatry, but some sequences, particularly one of "bad dreams," are sophomoric. The movie's real mess-up was to move Shaz into melodrama at the movie's end.
  93. Voice from the Stone
    As evocative as the production design and cinematography are, multiple cheesy scenes with one-dimensional characters undermine Howell’s efforts to spook, let alone redefine a genre.
  94. Hollywood Buddha
    The movie, as an exercise in narcissism, is breathtaking.
  95. Along Came a Spider
    A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.
  96. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    Though it's a little slow to start and some of the humor clunks, the film features a wholesome charm, some truly dazzling effects (the Lincoln Memorial alone is worth it), and enough mild, parent-nip in-jokes to keep all but the stone-hearted happy.
  97. #Horror
    Not every gamble works: The girls' intrusive Bejeweled-like social-media game annoys at every turn, and the plot itself is murky. But #Horror mesmerizes nonetheless, filled with tension, cruelty, and can't-look-away style.
  98. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Possible resulting "fun" is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.
  99. Orphan
    Silly, overlong, and bloody as hell, Orphan is likely to turn a sweet profit, money that Leo (DiCaprio), the renowned do-gooder, should spend with shame.
  100. VooDoo
    Writer/director Tom Costabile's found-footage conceit is painfully hackneyed, although not nearly as enervating as his actual drama.
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