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. Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It All
    John Griesser’s film about Srila Prabhupada, founder of the Krishna movement, is not so much a documentary as it is a hagiography.
  2. Pompeii
    Anderson distinguishes himself as the rare action director who shows us real bodies in real space in real reaction to each other, who prizes legibility over quick-cut dazzlement, who stages his fights with comic-book zeal rather than puffed-up graphic-novel miserableness.
  3. Stoned
    The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.
  4. Lucky
    Graynor is a muddle of kooky indie girlfriend and materialistic fortune hunter; Hanks has neither threat nor pathos at his command.
  5. One to Another
    Only the French seem to get away with passing off sensational sex romps as high art, but One to Another is pretty much just trashy–its murder-mystery conceit a sideshow to the film's primary offering: nubile nudity.
  6. The Nature of Existence
    There's something a tad disingenuous about the director's quest for meaning, as if the whole arc of the project has been contrived to adhere to a scripted template rather than to document a genuine search.
  7. When the Game Stands Tall
    The movie is more effective as sports fantasy than as theology.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    Give 'em a handicap for making a 20-minute man go 90--still, it's not enough.
  9. Sahara
    Sahara is many things, but it is not a movie. It is the skull-splitting cacophony of 21 producers and four screenwriters (that we know about, anyway) standing in the same room shouting into their cell phones.
  10. The Limits of Control
    Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.
  11. Nowhere Man
    Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Day Zero
    With ludicrous gravity and a narrow-minded view of courage and conviction, the film's what-if scenario is presented as a reality check to every ostensibly unimaginative male who's come of age in the draftless years since Vietnam.
  13. Money Buys Happiness
    At best, plays like an attenuated "Seinfeld" episode.
  14. The Hebrew Hammer
    The result is explicit, if less than hilarious. The Hebrew Hammer lacks the edge of Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," although as anti-seasonal fare, it would make a suitably unbearable double bill with Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa."
  15. What Planet Are You From?
    There's a certain satisfaction in recognizing that Harold -- even when he inevitably starts to feel, just like a human -- remains something of an a--hole.
  16. Little Birds
    The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate.
  17. The Day
    Ashley Bell stands out as a Heroic Fighter With a Dark Secret. Harbor only the expectations aroused by a production of WWE Studios and don't get too attached to any hobbits.
  18. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Oblique and thickly layered with rhetoric, this account does little to illuminate Mumia the man, but it sets Mumia the statue aglow.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death of a Dynasty
    Dynasty is less interesting as a film than as a winking gloss on hip-hop's assembly line of beats, beefs, and B-list lyricists. That said, Capone does a killer dancin' Dash, James Toback's Lyor Cohen is a riot, and multi-credited comedian Kevin Hart should have his own Chappelleian series.
  20. Passengers
    It would be easy to call Passengers out for its troublesome sexual politics or its way-too-predictable genre contrivances, but really, that’d be giving it too much credit. The problem lies deeper, in the fact that it’s a clever set-up in search of an execution.
  21. The Salton Sea
    Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.
  22. Grassroots
    By ultimately softening its stance toward McIver, Grassroots disingenuously has it both ways, reducing politics first to a David-versus-Goliath adventure, and then to an everyone-is-cool bowl of mush.
  23. The Secret Agent
    The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]
    • Village Voice
  24. 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.
  25. Running Scared
    Writer-director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler) is about as skilled at storytelling as Walker is at acting, which is to say not very.
  26. Renaldo and Clara
    Renaldo & Clara is almost petulant in its demand to be taken seriously as film, and as such a good deal of it is dreadful. [30 Jan 1978, p.26]
    • Village Voice
  27. Sabotage
    This is the disreputable, even disgusting diversion the Expendables pictures should've been.
  28. Dust
    Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square's reflection in a windshield. But in reaching for a cubist style of storytelling, he sacrifices character and motivation.
  29. R2PC: Road to Park City
    An Indiewood spoof that's more winning than anyone who wasn't a close friend of the director could possibly expect, R2PC satirizes not only wannabe auteurs but also that overworked genre, the faux documentary, while functioning as a credible study guide for Filmmaking 101.
  30. Before I Go to Sleep
    If the story is a smidge predictable, at least the movie is pleasingly old-fashioned and grown-up, with a ’90s paranoid-thriller vibe.
  31. 13 Cameras
    Mild schadenfreude aside, however, the film inspires almost no feeling at all — even the Friday the 13th movies bother giving the bad guy a backstory.
  32. Four Christmases
    The movie doesn't offer a single surprise within its scant 82 minutes, which feel like at least twice that.
  33. Super Troopers 2
    The sequel is so profound a buzzkill they could sell it at GNC as a detox kit. No high can survive it. It slays fun dead, grinds cannabinoids to dust, and maybe even wipes the mind of the warmth you might hold for the original Super Troopers.
  34. Raze
    The stark prison Sabrina and a half dozen final contestants inhabit make the torture chambers of Hostel look inviting, but to their credit (perhaps), screenwriter Robert Beaucage and director Josh Waller never sugarcoat their grim tale.
  35. The Hollow Point
    Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.
  36. The Forgiven
    Unfortunately, this movie has so many damn things percolating all through it that it ultimately seems unfocused and painfully earnest.
  37. A Girl and a Gun
    Since the conversation is unfocused and there's no real thesis, we get a girl and a gun but not really a movie.
  38. Staten Island Summer
    The best that can be said about teen sex comedy Staten Island Summer is that it goes down easy.
  39. Mojave
    Is Mojave's twisty purposelessness showing how producers ruin the work of screenwriters, or is it evidence that screenwriters often need another set of eyes?
  40. White Chicks
    Harmless slapstick fun.
  41. The Most Hated Woman in America
    The Most Hated Woman in America suffers from tonal whiplash.
  42. Chappie
    There's something fearlessly uncool about the film, which suffers mostly from being made 30 years too late.
  43. Hop
    Despite its scattered frenzy, Hop-thanks to its fondness for smushing together seemingly incongruous elements and Marsden's goofy, bug-eyed mugging-is just demented enough to deliver a fleeting sugar rush.
  44. Romeo & Juliet
    It’s all rote, dashed through, and somewhat detestable.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wild Target
    The whole time I was watching Wild Target, I was trying to figure out just how to explain its weirdly old-fashioned comedic tone. I could talk about its absurd plot...
  46. Darling Companion
    The handsome pooch is also the only appealing aspect of the latest tale of privileged boomer pulse-taking from Lawrence Kasdan.
  47. House of Wax
    Only a nominal remake...Nevertheless, for gore aficionados (and probably no one else) the murders are worth the wait.
  48. Our Day Will Come
    The exhausting and unrelatable Our Day Will Come escalates to a violent rampage as essentially unpleasant and nonsensical as its characters.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Meat
    American Meat won't fully counter the negative sentiment that the meat industry has, but it's not entirely propaganda, either.
  50. The Hunted
    Essentially a reheating of 1982's "First Blood" -- a psychologically wounded warrior-vet pits himself against civilized America -- but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller.
  51. Kaena: The Prophecy
    No "Triplets of Belleville," this French animated feature was hatched as an idea for a video game, and it shows.
  52. Some Body
    The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.
  53. Khumba
    Resoundingly terrible.
  54. America the Beautiful
    The scattershot America the Beautiful recapitulates vintage "Beauty Myth" trumpery.
  55. 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.
  56. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.
  57. The Invisible Circus
    A more intuitive writer-director could have extracted a credible study of time-warped bereavement from Jennifer Egan's extensively praised novel, but Adam Brooks's turgid adaptation merely emphasizes the book's stiff contrivances and wobbly characterizations.
  58. Gangster Squad
    The proximity of horrible headlines scarcely matters - released on any day of any calendar year, Gangster Squad would be a crime against cinematic sensibility.
  59. Better Living Through Chemistry
    Never feels as triumphant or as affecting as it should, but the script boasts some amusing meanness of spirit.
  60. Psychopathia Sexualis
    Drearily pretentious, Sexualis has even less softcore appeal than an American Apparel ad.
  61. Vantage Point
    Produced by Paul Greengrass, and conceived as something of a companion film to his own "Bloody Sunday," there wasn't a moment in "Omagh" that rang false. There's not a single one in Vantage Point that rings true.
  62. Evolution
    Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.
  63. Orange Winter
    Andrei Zagdansky's tedious time capsule of the event makes peculiar assumptions about audience familiarity with Ukrainian politics beyond what trickled into the headlines, blowing past potentially fascinating footnotes and story threads for 72 minutes of pure B-roll.
  64. 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.
  65. The Perfect Family
    Renton's competing tones and intentions result in a film at odds with itself and its lead performance.
  66. 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Standing Up
    The execution lacks the whimsical charm and nuance of similarly plotted Moonrise Kingdom as well as the power and clarity of 2011 documentary Bully.
  68. The Last Day of August
    The film's delivery system sets itself up for failure.
  69. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    This sequel comes off as both sillier and crueler than the original, mixing sight gags and labored puns with a vicious assault on a sex-ed teacher, and, well, "duck rape."
  70. The Frontier
    Co-writer/director Matt Rabinowitz doesn’t artfully withhold information so much as lay it all on the table a bit earlier than he might have.
  71. Dark Was the Night
    The narrative strikes a mostly sensible (if overly earnest) ratio of inner-turmoil human theater to B-movie monster hunt, before ultimately tilting toward the classic drive-in with climactic siege action and old-school effects.
  72. Reversion
    Though mildly engaging, this Reversion doesn't delve deep enough to distinguish itself.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crazy About Tiffany's
    Were Miele to parse out Tiffany's early-Aughts identity crisis or why it is that the brand has only ever had one female design director, maybe then his documentary would be something to get crazy about.
  74. Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame
    [Tony Girardin] ultimately focuses on Marinoni as a cranky workaholic driven to break a racing world record, but still paints a frustratingly vague portrait of the craftsman, husband and athlete.
  75. Hover
    Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.
  76. Table 19
    Everything you would expect happens, but little of it is funny or affecting.
  77. Act of Valor
    The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.
  78. The Boss
    The Boss is a better film than Tammy, but it still flounders, almost capsizing in its sloppy final third.
  79. Horrible Bosses 2
    The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn't terrible at all. It's looser, breezier, more confident than its predecessor.
  80. Video Games: The Movie
    More problematic than its lack of a compellingly laid-out time line is the film's habit of hopping between points of interest, so that every one of its chosen topics...is treated with a few catchy sound bites.
  81. The Good Heart
    A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.
  82. Here Comes the Boom
    Boom was produced under the auspices of pal Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, which has a tendency toward broad-comic morality tales and multiplex populism that often shades into remedial-level pandering.
  83. In the Blood
    Carano’s badass-beauty charm notwithstanding, it’s a grim, formulaic saga in desperate need of some genuine B-movie fury and flair.
  84. Derailed
    Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.
  85. Piñero
    At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.
  86. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.
  87. Suicide Squad
    David Ayer's film may not always work, but when it does, it's a perverse delight.
  88. Appleseed
    Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore.
  89. Blumenthal
    Fisher's filmmaking, aside from a couple scenes between Ethan and his best friend (Alexander Cendese) that are nicely composed in long-take two-shots, is too consistently flat to make the material spark.
  90. Ceremony
    Ceremony is a callow movie: Winkler exhibits no comprehension of the class anxieties he addresses, and extends precocity into adulthood. That callowness is Ceremony's subject scarcely makes it funnier.
  91. Fireworks
    Where Your Name’s star-crossed protagonists were fully formed characters who held equal weight in the narrative, Fireworks is very much told from the male point of view, and Nazuna seldom rises above “free-spirited object of desire.”
  92. Amy
    Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Phantom of the Opera
    This Phantom's an overblown mess of ostentatious razzmatazz. Sure, all the ingredients of camp are there (oh, the hubris!), but this isn't a so-bad-it's-good classic. It's worse.
  94. Beneath
    Beneath may be an earnest goof, but any intended irony is so spiked with rainy-day-matinee movie love that the result is an oddly guileless horror exercise, unscary but rather adorable.
  95. Monkeybone
    A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.
  96. 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.
  97. Last Weekend
    Last Weekend is too enamored of this nouveau riche household to be satirical, instead offering unexpected moments of genuine warmth as a calling card for goodness.
  98. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In every swelling musical cue, Billion Dollar Movie displays open contempt for friendship, family, love, sex, heroism, and everything lofty and beautiful that multiplex movies have reduced to cant.
  99. 3 Days to Kill
    Of course, the movie doesn't work. But Costner does. No matter now nonsensical and uneven 3 Days to Kill gets, he's miraculously consistent.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other End of the Line
    At a time when our global standing is sinking like a stone, it's comforting to know that, at least on the big screen, we can still land the babes no matter how obnoxious we are.
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