Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Wicker Park
    Dippy romantic thriller.
  2. Paris 36
    Like Amélie's scrubbed-up "City of Lights," Paris 36 is an antiseptic arthouse trifle, so eager to soothe that it only numbs.
  3. Leonie
    Well-shot and sometimes briefly affecting, especially when Mortimer is given a scene that lasts longer then thirty seconds, the film moves too quickly for its many incidents to have much impact, and what limited power it builds is dissipated by mortifying narration.
  4. Good
    So incompetently mounted by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim (it takes a clumsy directorial hand to make Viggo Mortensen come on like Sesame Street's Mr. Noodle) as to be utterly incoherent.
  5. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    It never morphs into the amazing Christopher Guest jam it first suggests. Strike two is the fact that, not counting one superb, David Lee Roth scissor-kick in slo-mo, director Marcus Viner does little to marry Flatley's métier to the form.
  6. Remember Me
    There's an insult-to-injury quality to a plain bad movie with a "seize the day" message (Remember Me's tagline: "Live in the Moments"), which heckles you with all the other things you should or could be doing while you're marking time waiting on the credits.
  7. Catch Hell
    Catch Hell suffers from both a drowsy start and a dragging ending.
  8. Phantom
    The ensuing suspense story is a pastiche of familiar tropes—effectively paced, but without originality. And what is up with combinations of Ed Harris, water, and unbelievably hokey endings?
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fantastic Four
    The action sequences reek of drudgery rather than adventure, and with the exception of Chiklis's remarkably soulful performance beneath 60 pounds of orange Thing makeup, all of the characters are flatter than their two-dimensional counterparts.
  10. Deliver Us From Evil
    Despite the screaming gore, the movie is so rote that it can’t even rouse us for the de rigueur exorcism.
  11. Salinger
    What the movie gets hilariously, howlingly wrong is the idea that a life like Salinger's—so extraordinary, yet so willfully humdrum—could somehow be captured by the most shopworn of cinematic techniques.
  12. The Slammin' Salmon
    Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.
  13. Sleepwalking
    Theron and Woody Harrelson provide vitality against the film's heavy load, but they aren't around long enough to keep it from collapsing under its own portentous weight.
  14. Alexander
    Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.
  15. 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.
  16. Almost Human
    With acting this wooden even among those not playing zombies, though one at least attempts a rural Maine accent, the suspense lies less in who will die than in how grisly the means.
  17. Scary Movie 4
    The jokes miss more than they hit, but there are a lot of them, and when they work, it's gold.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Next to this, even "Mean Machine's" painless soft-tissue spikings and fast-fixing broken limbs are believable -- and way funnier.
  19. Mango Yellow
    A shallow Brazilian trifle.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bulletproof Monk
    Some reliably vertiginous fight sequences (rope bridge, rooftop signage) and modest flight experiments liven up the mix, but for all the leads' individual appeal, they seem to occupy slightly different films.
  21. Clockstoppers
    If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    National Treasure
    Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.
  23. Shrink
    Pate's eye isn't bad, but Thomas Moffett's screenplay is self-serious piffle.
  24. Dark Tourist
    Cudlitz gives a haunted performance as a weathered, misogynistic, homophobic, blue-collar man roiling with demons, and Griffith can break your heart as a good woman staggering under the weight of life.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Margaret Cho: Assassin
    Assassin is the listless signature on her career-long comedic suicide note.
  26. The Sisters
    A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.
  27. Aloha
    Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire.
  28. Insidious: Chapter 2
    Insidious Chapter 2 picks up where its predecessor left off-- in abject silliness.
  29. Pitch Perfect 3
    The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.
  30. Beautiful Creatures
    Dorothy and Petula leave a bloodier trail than Thelma and Louise did.
  31. Luster
    The climactic shocker is far too exacting, but Lewis nails the milieu, and has the sense to not spell out every motivation in capital letters.
  32. Pay It Forward
    An overflowing septic tank of chicken-soupy sanctimony that proceeds from casually offensive hypocrisy to wretchedly inapt religiosity.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Happy Hour
    Every alkie downward-spiral cliché from "The Lost Weekend" to "Leaving Las Vegas."
  34. Wild Card
    Overstuffed and distractible, this episodic redo feels like a couple episodes of some Showtime series stitched into a feature.
  35. From the Land of the Moon
    The film could be shorter and perhaps more logical, and as the soap opera drama builds, the timeline becomes muddled. Still, there’s something pleasantly old-fashioned about its commitment to grandiose emotion.
  36. Mine
    The co-director/co-writer team of Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro are none too subtle, and their reliance on hallucination sequences suggests a (misguided) lack of faith in Hammer to pull this off by himself.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    2009: Lost Memories
    Why not travel back in time and not make this movie?
  38. Kai po che!
    The dramatic stakes are so puny that every obstacle can be overcome with a simple work-it-out montage.
  39. Highway
    The degree to which Highway candies up Veera's slumming toward freedom feels so fundamentally out of touch with the realities of poverty that it skirts into offensiveness.
  40. Outlaws and Angels
    Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.
  41. Jupiter Ascending
    The movie's a fascinating mess, grand and gaudy, often hilarious.
  42. Homefront
    Director Gary Fleder seems to sometimes suspect Homefront could pass as comedy.
  43. Saw II
    What's worth noting is how much greater deliberation was given to the marketing than the screenplay of this cursory dud, rushed to theaters exactly a year after its amusing predecessor.
  44. The Benefactor
    Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.
  45. The Man Who Cried
    The Man Who Cried is like a Yiddish generational tearjerker told from the perspective of the lost child rather than that of the bereaved parent.
  46. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    Clearly a bottom-feeder.
  47. The Bulls' Night Out
    A likable, earnest character study with a rare sense of purpose.
  48. Trouble Every Day
    This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Man on a Ledge
    Worthington wouldn't know how to behave if the film were a comedy; and poor Banks, after a promising, "Young Adult"–style introduction, isn't allowed to goose the script or push beyond the glass ceiling of her character.
  50. Falling Overnight
    While a movie such as last year's "Like Crazy" let its early promise gradually give way to sun-kissed montages and tedious melodrama, Jackson's mini-indie not only stays the course but also gets better throughout.
  51. Wild Wild West
    So extremely stupid and incompetent, I doubt that even the most impartial critic could find much to praise.
  52. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    The problem here is that there are no big ideas.
  53. The Film Critic
    Criticism mutated long ago, after the internet's floodgates opened, and that outmoded disconnect between The Film Critic and today's film critics underscores how the persistent references to cinema and film writing are self-awarely mimicking clichés but not subverting them.
  54. Duets
    A road movie, though there's a decided lack of forward motion.
  55. The Cell
    Not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.
  56. Ash Wednesday
    Russell Fine's kinetic camerawork outperforms the plot.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    This flat-footed male weepie musters an insurance ad's worth of clichés about the importance of busting a move in middle age-and it strains so hard to do so that it's almost perversely compelling.
  58. The Beat Hotel
    Scaling new heights of inessentiality is The Beat Hotel, which chronicles the period, roughly 1958–63.
  59. Paulette
    It's all pure hokum, perfect for a Shirley MacLaine remake, but it's lovely to see Lafont carrying a film so effortlessly.
  60. Butter
    Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.
  61. Beastly
    Tin-eared, corny attempt at fairy-tale interpretation.
  62. Level Up
    Director Adam Randall keeps the action tightly paced and the dialogue to a refreshing minimum, helping to heighten Matt's growing isolation.
  63. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The X-Men franchise takes a giant leap backward and off a cliff with its fourth offering.
  64. Brick Mansions
    This is an almost scene-for-scene remake — but not a shot-for-shot remake, which likely would have been more enjoyable.
  65. The Day of the Dolphin
    The problem is not with the subject, nor even with its presumably escapist spirit. The problem is that Mike Nichols and Buck Henry fail to bring it off successfully. [27 Dec 1973, p.51]
    • Village Voice
  66. Dracula Untold
    Too much of the last hour is a muddle of unconvincing, hard-to-read nighttime action scenes.
  67. Aftermath
    The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Green Lantern
    The film never rewards the viewer for even trying to keep track of what is going on. So you give up, and instead try to grab on to the small pleasures, which momentarily distract from the fact that the narrative is nonsensical, the characters so boilerplate that their every action seem preordained from the earliest frames, even as the action on-screen is often incoherent.
  69. Confusion of Genders
    The characters exist in single dimensions (trapped in a noxiously misogynist role, even the fearless Richard stands no chance), and in an effort to keep the plates spinning, the movie quickly devolves from risqué to risible.
  70. Angel Eyes
    A tearjerking romantic confection that, thanks to a reliance on unrestrained psychobabble and melodramatic one-upmanship, is only partially digestible.
  71. Simon Birch
    That Simon Birch is not as maudlin as it might have been is largely due to the intensely thoughtful, prickly performance of 11-year-old Ian Michael Smith, who plays Simon.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Inhale
    Ripped from the headlines and sensationalized for your would-be pleasure, Inhale uses the appalling phenomenon of illegal organ trafficking as the basis for an almost-as-appalling hyperventilated thriller.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Change-Up
    The film's final dialogue exchange reveals The Change-Up to be one long setup to a bromantic joke that, in a roundabout way, maybe comes closer than any previous film to fulfilling that woebegone subgenre's implicit homoerotic endgame.
  74. 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.
  75. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Before it descends into Percy Jackson and the Things That Happen in Movies Like This, the adventure at times clicks into the inventive groove of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, which at their best are touched with the high strangeness of the ancient tales that inspire them.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four Lovers
    Cordier remains sensitive to the subtle shifts in the foursome's dynamics, but do we really need another handwringer about the perils of polyamory?
  77. Dark Places
    [Paquet-Brenner] squanders Dark Places' icky setup for a rote investigation to find the real killer, a revelation greeted not with a "What?!" but with a "Whatever."
  78. Fame
    The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Twist
    Stahl plays just one note: anguish. You know things are bad when the most interesting character, the menacing brute Bill Sykes, is never heard or seen on-screen.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    Havana Nights es mucho frío -- the only titter of excitement comes in a cameo from a strangely reptilian Patrick Swayze.
  81. Dead Man Down
    It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.
  82. Rodin
    The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.
  83. The Green Hornet
    The Green Hornet provides a half-hour's worth of mildly entertaining travesty before collapsing in a clamor of bombastic action sequences and lame wisecracks.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wedding Weekend
    This uneven romantic comedy is firmly in the Zach Braff–ian mold: It features a group of thirtysomething men who are so terrified of growing up that they behave semi-moronically for the majority of the film.
  85. Death in Love
    Someday, a wise and potent film will be made about the Holocaust's legacy on succeeding generations. Posing as a study in evil, Death in Love is claptrap that confuses bile with art.
  86. St. Trinian's
    Can be enjoyed in all its endearing awfulness, as a loony "High School Musical" with posher accents and a lot more going on upstairs.
  87. Just a Kiss
    A convoluted writing exercise gone horribly wrong.
  88. Forgiveness
    David's trauma, madness, and recovery (including a relationship with a Palestinian woman) is arranged as a puzzle of dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, and strikingly choreographed numbers that, while occasionally dazzling, remains in pieces at film's end.
  89. Believe
    Any movie is improved at least 10 percent by the presence of Scottish actor Brian Cox, even mushy sports drama Believe.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Barber
    Only Glenn, whose taciturn performance is punctuated by flashes of genuine menace, lifts The Barber to "watchable."
  91. Zipper
    Wilson is a charismatic and underused actor, perfect here as a guy with a talent for convincing others of his virtue. Headey, as Sam's wife, creates a surprisingly complex portrait of a woman shattered by her husband but hungry for higher social position.
  92. Me Him Her
    The manic sex comedy Me Him Her has an admirably buoyant energy but a murky message and shortage of laughs.
  93. First Kill
    Christensen is impressive as a man who uses his wits and keeps cool. His straight-faced dedication is quite the contrast to the blatant disgust Willis reveals in his performance (and, really, for the whole movie). This actually makes First Kill a surprisingly fascinating study of two leading actors.
  94. Need For Speed
    Scott Waugh's moronic flick has multiple personalities — it's the Sibyl of street racing, with a script that doesn't feel so much typed as button-mashed.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nights in Rodanthe
    Exhibits a certain amount of integrity in its dedication to being uncomplicated, unashamed romantic goo.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life as We Know It
    The feminine fantasies Berlanti seemingly seeks to stoke are undercut by a vibe that's weirdly misogynistic.
  97. Dirty Weekend
    While Les eventually becomes more tolerable, LaBute's cloying dialogue makes it impossible to appreciate what turns out to be a bracingly pragmatic sense of optimism.
  98. Zaytoun
    Alternating abruptly between road-trip comedy and war-through-a-child's-eyes melodrama, the film's tonal inconsistency prevents the story from gelling.
  99. Queen of the Desert
    Herzog has previously thrived on madness, so the failure here proves even more curious.
  100. Aftershock
    Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »