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. The Last House on the Left
    This new House tries to sustain a grave, heavy sense of threat. It fails, through its villainy.
  2. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism.
  3. High Tension
    Manages--before faltering under the weight of its own pretensions--to be pretty scary.
  4. The House That Jack Built
    As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.
  5. Take Me Home Tonight
    It's not a total wash. Faris's ample talents are squandered with a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go romantic dilemma, but there's just enough of Demetri Martin doing a prick act, and Fogler excels as a Rabelaisian dynamo.
    • 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.
  7. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait
    Though visually expansive, however, the film feels emotionally intimate.
  8. Godspeed
    The tone fits the material and the performances are surprisingly measured, but Saitzyk's sappy pontifications on loss, redemption, and zealotry don't register as headily as they're meant to (every character gets at least one melodramatic speech), and the spirituality invoked feels about as sincere as the Christian who only attends Christmas mass.
  9. The Decoy Bride
    Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.
  10. Big Daddy
    Sandler is less goofy than spitefully self-absorbed, and most of the comedy feels like child abuse.
  11. Jem and the Holograms
    Chu and screenwriter Ryan Landels's take on fame is more fascinating than most of the film's drab, slow drama.
  12. Trash Fire
    Bates (Suburban Gothic) plays with horror tropes, juggling black comedy and suspense in scenes that tease a gory release but ultimately only emphasize how much members of the creative class can underestimate their backward kin.
  13. Breakfast of Champions
    Begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout.
  14. Arthur Newman
    Fun for a bit, things soon turn silly.
  15. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    The film isn't short on ideas, it's just that those ideas are dumbfoundingly pretentious and trite.
  16. Courageous
    Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.
  17. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Flawed but genuinely creepy ghost story The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is disappointing, but only because it comes close to greatness.
  18. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jailbait
    Becomes the umpteenth prison drama to focus on the lurid threat of forced submission.
  20. A Wink and a Smile
    The tension between wanting to root for these women and ultimately being faced with what you're rooting for (a pair of pinwheeling boobies) goes completely unresolved.
  21. History Lessons
    Hammer betrays a tiresome attachment to cross-cutting ladyporn with antiquated educational filmstrips, to no real end but snarky giggles.
  22. Bubble Boy
    The coke-fried gibbons behind Bubble Boy came to a trailblazing conclusion: The ideal filmic oddity is white, male, and -- a mother's deception notwithstanding -- perfectly healthy.
  23. Splinterheads
    Touching in its dorkiness.
  24. The Last New Yorker
    Considering how meticulously Wang location-scouted the project--documenting all the barely surviving (or since closed down) luncheonettes, Irish pubs, hosieries, and shoe repair joints of yesteryear--it's a shame he couldn't stick to his shutterbug roots and shoot a documentary instead.
  25. The Chameleon
    Screenwriters, take note: Unless your story is a whodunit, it's an unforgivable flaw to telegraph early and often that, sometime during the final act, we should anticipate the proverbial rug to be pulled.
  26. Echoes of War
    However you view the western in American filmmaking — as a moth-eaten relic or an eternal form to be resurrected every few years — there's something stale about Kane Senes's tepid historical drama Echoes of War, which utilizes the genre's symbols without delivering on its potential for moral or narrative satisfaction.
  27. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Larry Crowne
    With its eager-to-please congeniality, it almost works, but with a pacing that is at once comfortably assured and frustratingly slack, like holding exactly to the speed limit on a stretch of open road, Larry Crowne never quite comes to life.
  29. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    Saddled with an improbable plotline and an incoherent character, Garity demurs on the invitation to overact.
  30. John Tucker Must Die
    Whatever the target demographic was in the pre-production phase, now it's limited to sexually active 14-year-olds still retaking the sixth grade.
  31. Mad Money
    While it's all so breezy and zippy and girl-power peppy, it's Keaton who makes Mad Money worth a few bucks.
  32. War of the Buttons
    Of course, everyone in the film - aside from one or two conspicuous villains - turns out to be a resistant, making an otherwise harmlessly corny movie something slightly more bothersome: a revisionist fantasy of French heroism.
  33. The Sorcerer and the White Snake
    Visually unspectacular and emotionally stillborn, The Sorcerer and the White Snake fails as both a fantasy and a romance.
  34. Luminarias
    Chock-full of feisty-frank go-girl sextalk speculating on white guys' underplayable size.
  35. Godzilla 2000
    Offers some interesting twists for connoisseurs.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Next Friday
    A calculated teen gross-out flick that owes more to "American Pie" than its own progenitor.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    What to Expect When You're Expecting
    For all the fear, loathing, and overthinking that Murkoff's bedside text engenders, its journey ends with the hopeful beginning of a new life, whereas the movie leaves you hoping for a swift end to your own.
  38. Johnny Got His Gun
    Filmed theater is an inherently dubious genre, and Johnny Got His Gun is little more than a good performance of dated material.
  39. Arizona
    Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two Drifters
    If you can look past the film's inexplicably straight face, Two Drifters is an enjoyably daffy picture.
  41. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are.
  42. Songwriter
    Songwriter sells the “nice boy” bit well, but if you aren’t already a fan, it eventually becomes tiresome. There are occasional glimmers of a real person (wishing to topple Adele, laying down a “no Snapchat” rule at his house, etc.) but rarely is a feature film so bluntly just marketing.
  43. White Rabbit
    Unfortunately, White Rabbit's grave, problematic conclusion attempts to broaden the movie's scope in a way that ultimately feels more unwarranted and distasteful than it does organic to the material.
  44. Best Laid Plans
    A creakily mechanical B-noir.
  45. Asthma
    A fascinating character study.
  46. Machete Kills
    Kills tops the 2010 original by not giving a mierda about logic or character.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    Structurally, Gator is a bit of a mess, largely because of the civilizing and romantic influence Reynolds has brought to the randy domain of the redneck action film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TMNT
    Writer-director Kevin Munroe parties like it's 1989, grooving on the extreme-sports set pieces and vintage slang to generally cowabusted effect.
  49. False Confessions
    In Luc Bondy’s largely inert False Confessions, the tedium is broken by the [Isabelle Huppert's] outfits, and by the way she moves in them.
  50. Battleship
    And when the F-14s came out for a triumphant flyover, I looked around the room to find the moron who was applauding only to realize that it was me.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What a Girl Wants
    A culture-shock/daddy-meets-girl romantic comedy, WAGW is a sanitized adventure for the Mary Kate-and-Ashley set.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torque
    Thankfully, Torque knows what it wants to be (which is more than you can say about other recent biker-boy flicks) and flashes a jocular self-awareness about its genre affiliation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mambo italiano
    Old annoying ethnic family stereotypes meet new annoying gay-relationship stereotypes in this candidate for "Kiss Me Guido's" heretofore uncontested niche.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stella Street
    A huge problem with the whole shebang is that the impressions (all courtesy Cornwell and Sessions) are shaky at best.
  55. Home Again
    Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s cheeringly low-key debut, Home Again, offers proof that someone making movies understands what Hollywood has in Reese Witherspoon. I hope this star and this new writer-director make a habit of pairing up.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Man's Gotta Do
    The only thing more inexplicable than the loathsome score is the story's determination to impregnate all its major female characters. Fuggedaboudit.
  57. Little Ashes
    A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Struck by Lightning
    Struck by Lightning means well, but its gentle dissection of high school cliques brings nothing new to the genre, except the fact that being out isn't the problem for the hero, Carson (Colfer).
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zerophilia
    A case of provocative issues at the mercy of unskilled execution, Zerophilia is a psychological-horror comedy that pokes its toe into dangerous sexual waters but then scurries away.
  60. The Purge
    As in so many Hollywood spectacles, the message and medium are at hopeless odds... Still, the set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.
  61. The Female Brain
    Despite its strong cast (including Sofia Vergara, Cecily Strong, and James Marsden), The Female Brain has trouble making its characters more than one-dimensional.
  62. Stand Up Guys
    But by the end, the feeling the movie inspires isn't suspense but relief: Thank God that the producers behind "Grumpy Old Men" and "The Sunshine Boys" didn't yet have Viagra to joke about.
  63. At First Sight
    The film slips into a coma early on and never awakens.
    • 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.
  65. Bodyguard
    The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.
  66. Found
    Writer-director Scott Schirmer eschews the ironic approach, thankfully, and instead works to pull genuine tension from his material. He does that quite well, and any unintentional laughs (or eye rolls) are icing.
  67. Out of Season
    There are many dramatic possibilities in an interracial lesbian romance set in a provincial town, but Out of Season focuses on the women's fears of commitment, which would be fine - even refreshing - if they seemed to, well, like each other or something.
  68. Child 44
    This is a dignified piece of filmmaking, and one that uses brutality to great effect.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Never Been Thawed
    Passably offbeat.
  70. Ride Along
    Forget going soft — Ride Along proves Ice Cube's got bigger image problems than kiddie movies and Coors Light commercials.
  71. Mr. Woodcock
    Amy Poehler ekes out a smirk or two as a boozy broad publicist trying to keep her paycheck in check, but even the best gags feel like leftovers, again.
  72. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Closing out a pretty great year for children's movies—Betty Thomas's dutiful animated and live-action sequel to 2007's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" brings up the rear with capable mediocrity.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hate Crime
    When Hate Crime confounds expectations, it transcends the whodunit-of-the-week template. On the other hand, when the plot gets lost in irrational revenge fantasies, you'll wish you had stayed home watching reruns.
  74. Dragon Blade
    The picture never quite finds its tone: It's neither go-for-broke outrageous enough to be consistently funny, nor energetic enough to be viscerally entertaining. It's neither as bad as you might fear, nor as much fun as you might hope.
  75. You Won't Miss Me
    Ry Russo-Young's character study of a gal passing the worst years of her life in cool North Brooklyn, leads off with a scene that lets you know right away that you're in the good hands of a young director sensitive to the idiosyncratic details that breathe life into a movie.
    • 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 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
    For all the legitimate reasons to jeer Palin, should her rightful wariness of Broomfield's camera be one of them?
  78. Where Hope Grows
    Writer-director Chris Dowling handles that worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors.
  79. Simpatico
    A decked-out mediocrity with a high-octane cast.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thorns
    Intent on proving that five tough guys in suits walking towards the camera in slow motion really is the coolest thing ever.
  81. Two Ninas
    Manages to gracefully step out of the way of its own referential overload.
  82. Woman on Top
    Too flimsily built and baldly unfunny to bolster Cruz's charms, but Almodóvar's blessed Virgin is, as usual, winning and guilelessly seductive.
  83. Meet the Fockers
    For a Ben Stiller rom-com, there's remarkably little pain and humiliation. Which, for the most part, is not a good thing.
  84. Jesus Henry Christ
    Making their screen debuts, young Spevack and Weinstein give the film's most natural performances and provide its little bit of warmth, but it seems time to petition Collette, a truly gifted actress, to take a long hiatus from playing bitter single moms.
  85. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    All that bravura filmmaking — the elaborate camera moves and colorful images and unexpected angles — is fascinating from both technical and aesthetic standpoints, and it certainly held my attention. But don’t be surprised if you start to suspect that, for all the film’s ornamentation, it might not be leading up to something revelatory.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    Part of La Mujer's problem is its pace: Everything happens so slowly, and so meaningfully, that we see it coming for miles. Also, none of the three principals is remotely likable until the end.
  87. First Sunday
    At first, the movie is over-anxious--trying too hard to squeeze out the laughs, pump up the soundtrack, ingratiate itself with the audience--and the straining is abrasive. But once Talbert gets distracted by keeping the plot clunking along, the comedy eases into relaxed sideline banter.
  88. Autumn Blood
    The structure of Autumn Blood and its metaphors are obvious, but what makes it engaging, even haunting, are the messy flesh-and-blood characters.
  89. Olympus Has Fallen
    A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.
  90. Kick-Ass 2
    The most welcome change is the tone. Wadlow has decided he's making a straight-up comedy, and he demonstrates a knack for it.
  91. Hell Baby
    The movie is delightfully crude in places (including an instance of relay puking) and just plain silly-clever in others.
  92. Free Ride
    The film is content to merely document certain happenings and hope you find them as interesting as it does.
  93. American Jesus
    A restless, sunnily shot, one-thing-after-another travelogue of the peculiarities of American worship and belief.
  94. Cardboard Boxer
    By emphasizing the uglier aspects of his most complex character, Lee turns an otherwise down-to-earth slice-of-life drama into an unconvincing morality play.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Terminal Man
    I'm not sure I can accept these chilling extremes of "sick" and "well," but Mike Hodges renders them with some of the same grim beauty and sense of absurdity he brought to Get Carter. [17 Jun 1974, p.82]
    • Village Voice
  96. The Truth About Emanuel
    Despite the psychological extremes, writer-director Francesca Gregorini presents her characters as recognizably human balls of complexity, nudging but never forcing them toward a sad, beautiful conclusion.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stay
    In Marc Forster's humorless thriller, going insane is an exciting, luxurious affair. People suffer stylishly; depressives are angry and dirty; they make art, carry guns, and live in magnificent houses.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    It's all an excuse for some daft production numbers, however, and a chance to relive the vanished Holland of your youth. Yes Nurse? No Nurse? Maybe Nurse!
  99. Spun
    The traumatized critic must struggle to avoid capital letters in urging patrons to steer clear of the colorfully cast but unbearable Spun.
  100. Sal
    A stubbornly not-bad character study.
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