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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Her savvy for self-presentation, though admirable from a business standpoint, makes for a more boring movie. You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see.
  2. Maleficent
    With more actual grrrl power, Maleficent would be a bold redo. Instead, it's a beautiful snooze, a story that hints at the darkness underneath our fairy tales and tarnishes the idea of true love without quite daring to say what's really on its mind: that even the best of us might not live happily ever after.
  3. 21 and Over
    The movie rambles in a way that dilutes any possibility of edgy discomfort. Lucas and Moore have good control over the timing within the gags; it's the spaces between them that stretch out awkwardly. You can't hate 21 & Over, and you can't laugh at it. The most you can do is just pity it for not being as outrageous as it thinks it is.
  4. Kids of Today
    Refraining images of the mind-controlled sleepwalker Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem to submit Adrien as a Svengali-like figure to the kids, even as his "Iggy used to say . . ." pickups to fresh-faced scenesters don't seem to pay off.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unraveled
    It's a fascinating fishbowl in concept, yet Simon's storytelling is unevenly textured and oddly listless - fatal for a film about a banal document - pushing felon clock-watching to a known outcome.
  6. Noah
    Noah is here not to set the record straight, but to set it on its head. This isn't a lavish work of mad genius, it's a movie designed to be a lavish work of mad genius, and there's a difference.
  7. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Green is sexy, funny, dangerous, and wild -- everything the film needed to be -- and whenever she's not on-screen, we feel her absence as though the sun has blinked off.
  8. The Broken Tower
    The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You Hurt My Feelings
    For all of its gradual build and minimalist focus, the film misses out on something essential, something more crucial than clarity, context, and connecting tissue - all of which the film aggressively eschews. It lacks a center, a sense that within its strenuously ambiguous story is a thrumming motor.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chronicling a Crisis
    At once downbeat and claustrophobic, it's also often grueling to watch.
  11. 42
    The movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Where Do We Go Now?
    Like the hashish-laced pastries the ladies make to sedate the male population, the film feels like it has been dosed with sugar to mask its distressingly bitter taste.
  13. The Observers
    There are moments when the tedium loosens you to melt into the landscape, and you swear you can hear the moss on the rocks start talking.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nesting
    Chuldenko doesn't aspire to hard realism, but a lifestyle comedy with hard-to-buy fundamentals and a central couple you can't invest in is a dubious proposition nonetheless.
  15. The Color Wheel
    The Color Wheel is funny, but it has a dark streak that takes it into increasingly creepy territory as the siblings face down a procession of people who are even more screwed-up than they are.
  16. Crazy Eyes
    The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.
  17. Mansome
    While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance.
  18. Mighty Fine
    The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.
  19. Redlegs
    The trio's mourning feels more like immature self-absorption.
  20. Red Lights
    Much as I want to believe in Cortés, who is clearly talented and ambitious, there is just too much in Red Lights that encourages agnosticism.
  21. The Babymakers
    The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.
  22. U.N. Me
    Unfortunately, mocking jibes and cutaways to Team America and Wonder Woman (among other movies and TV shows) establish a jokey attitude that weakens the overall case.
  23. 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.
  24. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    There are dozens of better, riskier, more interesting films that go unreleased every year - why this militantly dull effort is taking their place is its only worthwhile mystery.
  25. The Pact
    A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.
  26. Cloud Atlas
    Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.
  27. Ponies
    Nick Sandow's Ponies can claim the not negligible achievement of bringing one of the more irritatingly objectionable characters in recent cinema to the screen.
  28. Little Birds
    The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate.
  29. Klown
    Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Throughout, stereotypes are trotted out so that the movie can wink that it's too smart for them.
  31. This Time
    Tantalizing snippets from their combative history and rotating membership are tossed to the sidelines; the members' personality clashes and mutual psychoanalyzing hint at a much better story left untold.
  32. 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.
  33. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.
  34. Mama
    Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest.
  35. Bachelorette
    The trajectory for all four characters is toward acknowledgment of the emptiness their indulgences can't fill. It's kind of heartening that Becky has that all worked out, pretty much, even if the film doesn't quite get there.
  36. The Oranges
    The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden: It's inoffensive, forgettable, and you don't actually have to chew anything.
  37. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.
  38. LUV
    Although Common and Rainey make a well-matched duo, their chemistry is frequently squandered by a script that boxes them into impossible roles in one clichéd scene after another.
  39. Nature Calls
    The unmitigated disaster of the camping trip just stays disastrous, the story never really finding its way from adversity to heroic redemption.
  40. Breathing
    A film of unreconciled impulses, Breathing is by turns vaguely sentimental and cooly detached in a manner that's ultimately more off-putting than it is complementary.
  41. Serving Up Richard
    Glory's inconsistent characterization defeats rather than builds tension, and the tepid soon gives way to the ridiculous.
  42. 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.
  43. The Stand Up
    For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.
  44. Divergent
    It'd be easier to root for lead Tris's (Shailene Woodley, the go-to girl for drab roles with grit) quest to escape her Abnegation roots and those ghastly gray skirts to prove herself a worthy Dauntless if director Burger felt committed to the concept.
  45. Pain & Gain
    When the story runs off the rails and crashes headfirst into a too-perfect ending, it's because Bay was led astray by the same things that got the Sun Gym Gang into this mess in the first place: superficiality, ambition, and the belief that reality just isn't good enough.
  46. Decoding Deepak
    Following the celebrity guru into Thailand for his ordainment as a Buddhist monk, the film is at its best when Gotham can't help but see through his father, who seems entirely restless without an audience and a smartphone through which to be reminded of their adoration of him.
  47. Now, Forager
    A slow-food procedural, commendably devoted yet still underdone.
  48. Special Forces
    For a while Degan's serious charisma also kind of makes Islamic extremist fundamentalism look cool and badass, which could have been hilariously subversive if director Stéphane Rybojad had pushed it further.
  49. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    In an overlong sequence shot to resemble an actual play, the acting feels so forced, the staging so wooden, that it's impossible to be fully engaged in what's actually going on. The actual story is, if not quite rote, certainly nothing new.
  50. Prisoners
    Torn between making sense and arguing that the world itself makes no sense, Prisoners is a captive of its own ambitions.
  51. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr. Banks, a fictionalized account of two weeks Travers spent on the lot in Burbank, is proof that Walt has thawed and secretly reclaimed Disney's reins.
  52. Chicks
    A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.
  53. The Black Tulip
    There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.
  54. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Too bad this section of the movie is but a temporary reprieve from the obnoxious sentimentality.
  55. California Solo
    Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.
  56. Any Day Now
    Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.
  57. 28 Hotel Rooms
    Not showing us every aspect of their lives is a fine, even novel, approach, but merely telling us about them instead feels like a fruitless middle ground.
  58. Festival of Lights
    Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.
  59. Coming Up Roses
    After a hoot of an entrance by Bernadette Peters showboating a tune from the rafters at a church wedding, Coming Up Roses takes a nosedive into despair and stays there.
  60. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Treading on a shameful piece of French history, Bosch bizarrely intercuts scenes of Hitler, Himmler, and Hess working out the logistics of the exportations, in vignettes that smack of "Inglourious Basterds" farce, but otherwise, she's got a steady grip on the tear-jerking, if that's your awards-season cocktail.
  61. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    While the opera nonetheless soars with its acrobatic choreography of refugee displacement, this documentary about it suffers some dramatic slackness from the inevitable drawing board tedium of performance preparation.
  62. What a Man
    Mostly harmless but also irksome in its bland simplicity, the film follows your average too-nice-for-his-own-good everyman who sets about proving his masculinity after being cheated on by his caricature of a girlfriend.
  63. The Normals
    When everybody finally accepts that they've been experiencing a prolonged, semi-self-inflicted meltdown, Ciancimino and director Kevin Patrick Connors's lone gag pays off. Too bad the joke is only funny in retrospect.
  64. Heleno
    You're stuck daydreaming about a far, far better movie.
  65. Happy New Year
    So trite that it's unwittingly insensitive.
  66. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    With neither the moral bite of satire nor a voluptuary surrender that really basks in shallowness, this is a vague, unsatisfying work.
  67. Yelling to the Sky
    Little more than a résumé film for all involved, it certainly feels more Park City than Bushwick.
  68. Saving Grace B. Jones
    The film packs in more characters, subplots, and moments of nostalgic detail than it can gracefully accommodate, and the pacing often feels rushed.
  69. Welcome to the Punch
    When bullets aren't flying, the movie offers yesterday's goods in shiny new packaging.
  70. Allegiance
    Without its topical pretext and overzealous patriotism, Allegiance would be just another generic action film.
  71. My Best Enemy
    Getting even is wearying in My Best Enemy, a banal World War II thriller dependent on contrived role reversals.
  72. Fairhaven
    Messina's performance has a lived-in, emotional messiness, but the film is nothing but clichés.
  73. I Am Not a Hipster
    The film's energy is frequently low, befitting that of its main character, a stalled, self-loathing, San Diego–based indie musician named Brook (Dominic Bogart), breathing contempt for anyone asking him personal questions.
  74. Let My People Go!
    Mikael Buch's debut feature is silly and sweet, but also paper thin and mostly unimaginative: a series of cartoonish vignettes during which a generically eccentric Jewish clan confronts movie-family problems (adultery, divorce, health scares, tense sibling relationships).
  75. Brief Reunion
    Beautifully filmed but written without the psychological depth or sleight of hand of the best thrillers.
  76. The Call
    The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.
  77. Knife Fight
    Throughout, Knife Fight feels like TV, like a half-season of some promising cable show stuffed into a 98-minute film that never really builds or surprises.
  78. The Fifth Estate
    The issues at play here are fascinating, but Condon and Singer never let any argument about journalism or the philosophy of free information last longer than a couple ping-ponged lines between master (Assange) and student (Domscheit-Berg).
  79. Grudge Match
    Segal's gearbox gets jammed between recession-era sports drama and brainless comedy, especially as Hart hollers pop-culture punch lines like he's the squirrel sidekick in a CGI kiddo flick.
  80. Baggage Claim
    There are a handful of laughs, but nothing to balance the onslaught of clichés.
  81. As Luck Would Have It
    Iglesia's slick and frisky direction stirs up some hearty stock-character performances, stoking and stretching out the tension, but it all still feels like black comedy by the numbers.
  82. 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.
  83. Inescapable
    Inescapable isn't a terrible movie, but absent its ripped-from-the-headlines setting it's unremarkable.
  84. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver's stumbling hagiography Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder does no wrong by its celebrated subject-- but it never illuminates him, either.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    She's All That
    Amid all the cameos (Anna Paquin, Usher, Lil' Kim), only Prinze, who has the ethereal, gentlemanly quality of a young Anthony Perkins, gets enough screen time to really make an impression.
  86. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner is so bleak that it almost convinces us to take it seriously.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    The stats relayed at the movie's end...almost have more impact than the narrative.
  88. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.
  89. A Fierce Green Fire
    There's no consistent narrative thread to carry the film from start to finish, and A Fierce Green Fire fails to open any singular intellectual or psychological point of investigation.
  90. The Sweeney
    The Sweeney—a new British police drama—feels a lot like an American-made cop movie circa 1990.
  91. Lotus Eaters
    Lotus Eaters, which McGuinness co-wrote with Brendan Grant, is maddeningly shallow—maybe that's the point—but McGuinness does have talent.
  92. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    Despite Civil War homages—hazy vistas, silhouetted cannons, and even the famous Ken Burns pan over still photos—the imaginary heroes never spring to life.
  93. Annie
    It presumes that children care a great deal about cellphone towers, political campaigns, and Twitter. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie, is raw, charismatic, alive, and unpredictable.
  94. The Kings of Summer
    The Kings of Summer plays like an extended sitcom episode, and not a very special one at that.
  95. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There are hints of greatness, one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing.
  96. Graceland
    Striking the right balance between interior and exterior can mean the difference between compelling drama and accidental melodrama. Writer-director Ron Morales just misses equilibrium in the visually arresting Filipino thriller Graceland.
  97. 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.
  98. Populaire
    Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature-length debut is visually sharp, with period design that's eye-catching without being fussy or fetishistic. Too bad there's not much going on beneath the surface.
  99. The Source Family
    With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.
  100. Everybody Has a Plan
    An identity crisis is at the heart of Everybody Has a Plan—but it's the film's. Even Viggo Mortensen's movingly enigmatic performance as identical twins can't help first-time Argentinean director Ana Piterbarg decide whether she is making an existential tone poem or a brutish thriller.
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