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. Vikingdom
    Vikingdom trembles with great dumb joy even before we meet the apparently handcrafted hell-dragon that looks like a set of windup chattering teeth combined with a homecoming float.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Provoked: A True Story
    Short-changing issues of race and wearing its heart way out on its sleeve, it's the film's amateur exposition that's most dumbfounding -- poised to provoke more sarcasm than righteous indignation.
  3. Adventures of Power
    The film--despite some successful goofs and a defiantly dorky Phil Collins tribute--can't quite win for trying.
  4. Man of the Year
    Levinson loses his movie, his audience, and his purpose in a tangle of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions that sink the movie just when it begins to transcend expectations. In short, it would have been great if it had stopped, oh, 12 minutes in.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Silk
    Silk isn’t just bad. It’s utterly mad. It stutters and hiccups from scene to scene, from country to country, but never once does it make narrative or emotional sense.
  6. Growing Up and Other Lies
    The seriocomic Growing Up and Other Lies, written and directed by Jacobs and Darren Grodsky (Humboldt County), offers strained male bonding from a quartet sorely out of tune.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Back Down
    A modest surprise: better acted than needed, better made than expected.
  8. Just Like a Woman
    A multicultural mini–Thelma and Louise but far duller than that description implies, Just Like a Woman peddles feminist empowerment with one-note didacticism.
  9. Synchronicity
    An admirably complex tale of time travel, corporate espionage, and high emotions you'll just have to take everyone's word on, Jacob Gentry's science fiction puzzler Synchronicity is so ambitious — and so canny, on occasion — that you might be willing to forgive its indie infelicities.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Southlander: Diary of a Desperate Musician
    The script doesn't give the cast much to play aside from vague eccentricity, and movies like this one rise and fall on the vividness of their weirdos.
  11. Love at Times Square
    Anand manages to work in shamelessly exploitative September 11 footage between numbers, but aside from this sequence, Love couldn't be more giddily benign.
  12. Moonwalkers
    Nothing in Moonwalkers matches Perlman's performance, but he frequently elevates desperate-to-please gags to stoner-comedy greatness.
  13. Dot the I
    The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations.
  14. Angels Sing
    There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.
  15. The Damned
    It's all well acted and expertly crafted — quick edits that play mind and visual games with the viewer, music that heightens tension, some cool special effects — but most of the victims are people you want to slap even before their secrets are spilled.
  16. The Darkest Minds
    Yuh Nelson proves adept with her young actors, drawing out relaxed and detailed performances while carefully managing the space between them in the frame.
  17. As Above, So Below
    As Above, So Below is sometimes creepy but mostly silly, which is too bad because the film's cramped subterranean setting is inherently unnerving.
  18. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Anderson['s] lavish visual imagination is matched to a placeholder idea of character that's almost avant-garde in its generic stylization, dialogue buffed of personality by passing through 10,000 previous movies.
  19. The Gunman
    Penn’s vanity — both in the way he shows off his bod and in the way he drives home the nobility of the once-wayward Terrier — is either the most deeply annoying thing about The Gunman, or the one thing in it that actually works. I’m leaning toward the latter.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Daddy Day Care
    Lighthearted if shy of a lark.
  21. World Traveler
    The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.
  22. When Will I Be Loved
    More wacky than wack.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    Overreaching in many of its laudatory appraisals, the film is mostly GOP-boosting rhetoric in the guise of a dull History Channel special.
  24. Legendary
    Though the redemption/coming-of-age narrative is highly predictable-with Glover appearing intermittently only to dispense bromides-Clarkson, at least, remains reliable.
  25. Frank the Bastard
    Overlong and slack in suspense, the film is most noteworthy for its patchy accents and the late Ellen Albertini Dow (the "rapping granny" from The Wedding Singer).
  26. The Other Woman
    The Other Woman doesn't give these actresses much to do except look ridiculous, if not sneaky and conniving.
  27. The Numbers Station
    There are some decent shootouts, but the movie's strongest assets are the soulful performances Danish director Kasper Barfoed, making his American debut, draws from Cusack and Akerman.
  28. Runaway Bride
    Runaway Bride isn't as offensive as most studio romantic comedies—just pointless and dull.
  29. I Love Your Work
    Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity.
  30. Restless
    Relying on rote culture-clash pratfalls, Gilfillan belabors the symmetries.
  31. All the Rage
    More commendable as social protest than as filmmaking.
  32. But I'm a Cheerleader
    Not as skillful, subtle, or hilarious as "Some Like It Hot," but its anti-essentialism vis-à-vis gender roles is just as sharp and exhilarating.
  33. The Jimmy Show
    Backed by a strong supporting cast, Whaley makes Jimmy a vivid character, but he never achieves anything like the tragic grandeur of a Willy Loman. He's at once too earnest and too unappealing.
  34. Tammy
    Falcone’s film is an unsteady mix of broad comedy and indie heart, asking us first to roar at Tammy’s ignorance and outrageousness and then to be moved at this lovable misfit muddling toward love, maturity, and a better life.
  35. O Jerusalem
    Imagine watching Otto Preminger's equally silly 1960 "Exodus" now and you'll have O Jerusalem, minus Paul Newman's blue-eyed wink.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    This time around, we enter the now 19-year-old's world while he sits behind the piano, hitting a melody that's not nearly as memorable as the focused expression that we will see repeatedly throughout the movie.
  37. P.S. I Love You
    Hilary Swank, who was not put in this world to simper, does little else as a young wife whose twinkly leprechaun of an Irish husband (Gerard Butler, who's Scottish, but never mind) has died.
  38. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    The proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.
  39. Divorce Corp
    Despite the film's hyper but insubstantial presentation of its information, there likely is a story here.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds
    As before, the fun is somewhat capped by absurdly stilted acting and daytime-soap-quality DV, but the nonstop sub-Araki glibbage is plenty peppy and so is Rebekah Kochan's ding-a-ling Tiffani, a dead ringer for 90210's Tori Spelling.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Fat Albert
    The animated scenes conjure aromas of the stilted "Clifford," and the overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.
  42. The Maid's Room
    Too low-stakes for horror, too lamebrained for satire, and too incoherent to be didactic, The Maid's Room simply uses Drina and then throws her away.
  43. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    Co-directors Jeff and Michael Zimbalist stick to the playbook throughout, from typical moments of uplift to a Pelé cameo only slightly less fan-serving than Stan Lee's Marvel spots.
  44. Reign of Fire
    Peaks early with a vertiginous dogfight; thereafter, spotty CGI and a bamboozling plot conspire toward a colossal anticlimax.
  45. Woodshock
    Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.
  46. Stage Fright
    Stage Fright's lopsided tone wouldn't be so confounding if the horror elements worked or if writer-director Jerome Sable's music, co-composed with Eli Batalion, weren't so forgettable.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Planet 51
    Like "E.T." in reverse, this pleasantly mediocre CG animation tale lands an astronaut on a distant planet.
  48. Skin Trade
    Skin Trade's action is all blood and sinew, but its camerawork and choreography are nothing if not graceful.
  49. August
    August seems to be missing something essential--a prologue? Or maybe it's not what's missing that's the problem, but what's here.
  50. Underworld: Awakening
    The entire production is single-mindedly, earnestly devoted to serving up feats of BADASS, and it succeeds in this devotion to the exclusion of everything else. Allegedly in 3-D, though I didn't notice at the time.
  51. Don Verdean
    Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way.
  52. Planes
    Can a plane jump a shark when it's already in the air? To Disney, that question is moot. It's so certain that Planes will make a mint in toys, if not in theaters, that it's already slated a sequel for next summer.
  53. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Another mystery that gives up its secrets all too quickly, Till Human Voices Wake Us is named for a T.S. Eliot line -- and it proves a woefully evocative title for this snoozy supernatural pastoral.
  54. From Prada to Nada
    Under all the pretty faces and MTV Latino pop, there's something crassly disingenuous about the movie's blatant demographic pandering (hooray for immigration-panic jokes!) and half-assed condemnation of gluttony.
  55. The Lucky One
    No amount of neck nuzzling or back arching can make us believe there's real heat rising between these two. Onscreen chemistry between actors is a mysterious thing - 100 years into cinema, it remains the one story element that Hollywood can't fake.
  56. The Runner
    The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.
  57. Krystal
    What this tiresome, out-of-pocket-ass movie actually does is create a painfully kooky, mad world where the only good thing about it is that Rosario Dawson can still turn men into idiots with her presence.
  58. Dressed
    David John Swajeski, who directed, produced, and edited this documentary on the fledgling fashionista, snags his film on clichés, poor pacing, and an unwillingness or inability to push his subject beyond talk-show pop-psych babble when the topic is interior life and wounds.
  59. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    Ideal only for the junior-high classroom, Holly Mosher's dull-as-dishwater documentary fudges the line between socially progressive message-spreading and suspicious hagiography in its celebration of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Kill Hole
    Serious-minded to a fault, this debut feature from writer-director Mischa Webley is a bit of a mess, but committed work from a talented cast gives it unexpected power.
  61. Tai Chi Hero
    This sequel is sluggish and rote where its predecessor was aggressively perky and desperate to please...Tai Chi Hero is more Tai Chi Business as Usual.
  62. They're Watching
    Writer-directors Micah Wright and Jay Lender are kids'-cartoon vets and show a facility for comedy on a more human level here — as does the nimble cast, which ably handles the tonal shift from travel nightmare to actual nightmare.
  63. The Wolves of Kromer
    Largely inept and weirdly endearing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    After the Sunset
    Despite its misguided comic pretensions, this brazenly unimaginative caper movie is most effective as a feature-length infomercial for its location, which will here remain undisclosed.
  65. April's Shower
    Tepid lesbian comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Goodbye Momo
    Though Momo is dedicated to "the missing children and the children who are coming to save the world," the most provocative question it asks is whether, with its conspicuous product placement, the film was secretly backed by Coca-Cola.
  67. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
    Mena Suvari, as Art's vindictive ex-fuckbuddy, gives sole signs of life--Miller is so void of presence that one can forget she's in the movie from scene to scene.
  68. Phantom Halo
    Sleepy domestic-abuse/coming-of-age melodrama Phantom Halo never goes anywhere memorable because its two main characters don't consistently act like they're afraid of their big bad dad.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
    Unfabulous, unfunny, and unwatchable.
  70. Our Family Wedding
    Might've made for a progressive film if director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar) hadn't pandered to the lowest common denominator with brainless screwball laughs.
  71. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taking Lives
    If the Naqoyqatsi-lite score by Philip Glass doesn't exactly make sense of the film's sketchy identity politics, it does complement its utter ridiculousness.
  73. The Chronicles of Riddick
    Riddick is a preening outer-space costume drama staged as a backdrop for its leading man's muscles.
  74. Angels Crest
    Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.
  75. Sweetwater
    That Sweetwater is so generic doesn't prevent it from being intermittently entertaining.
  76. Jack Goes Home
    There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.
  77. Submergence
    Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.
  78. Entourage
    It may be not much more than a heavily branded romp through a Hollywood fantasyland, but it’s got a pulse. It’s easy fun. No one ever died from reading People magazine.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    City with No Mercy
    Flash Point treats its audience like dogs, making us suffer through routine, almost inscrutable plot points and inconsequential characterizations to get to these episodes, and as such reveals itself as nothing more than a dumb action picture with delusions of Johnnie To–dom.
  80. Terminator Genisys
    Genisys is all bullets and bombs, action without pause, as though if the ride stops the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.
  81. Empire
    Too bad the central bedfellowship never gels, and Franc. Reyes's script turns a dissection of ambition into "Sleeping With the Enemy"-style nonsense.
  82. The Jungle Book 2
    The new tunes sound like Buster Poindexter mainlining Sweet 'n Low, and at a critically song-starved moment, John Goodman's Baloo admits, "King Louie? He split!" Before the third defibrillation of "Bare Necessities," you and your kids might too.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bad Boys II
    Martin Lawrence's Marcus is the Costello to Smith's Abbott.
  84. The Green Inferno
    Roth amplifies that exploitation flick's least interesting components (gore, cruelty) at the expense of all others.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An American Haunting
    The movie exhausts its blast-in-the-face scares through repetition. A wasted opportunity-- especially since the events as reported scarcely need embellishing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dark Streets
    The film has its shallow pleasures, but once it becomes obvious that that's all Dark Streets has going for it, the affected performances and forced tough-guy speak stop feeling playful and start to become oppressive.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    All Eyez on Me
    Simply put, Shipp Jr. fails to capture Pac’s multiplicity, much less portray the depth of his talent.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    There's too much going on in Burning Annie but one thing goes remarkably right: Ordynans's exceptionally canny script nails how thoroughly pop culture has colonized our sentiments.
  89. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.
  90. Just Visiting
    Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Radio
    Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.
  92. Never Die Alone
    There's something refreshing about a pulp drama that turns on the notion that redemption is a sucker's fantasy. That knowledge may not have saved Goines, but it informs Dickerson's adaptation and results in stellar neo-noir.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ouch
    If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.
  94. Brief Reunion
    Beautifully filmed but written without the psychological depth or sleight of hand of the best thrillers.
  95. The Vatican Tapes
    At no point does this film strive to be more than a second-rate version of what it is: a halfhearted attempt to make some scratch while pretending the devil exists. Some trick.
  96. Ouija
    First-time director Stiles White's effective use of long takes and director of photography David Emmerichs's wide-angle digital cinematography make an otherwise generic teen ghost story unexpectedly atmospheric.
  97. No Escape
    No Escape, while cruel, is often uncommonly suspenseful. And by pitting its white leads against the citizen hordes of Southeast Asia, No Escape is also uncommonly honest about the fears and assumptions that fuel adventure fiction — here, the Other is not abstracted away to orcs or aliens.
  98. Gigantic
    I don't remember ever wanting to just haul out and punch a movie before Gigantic.
  99. The Last Time
    Beyond his technical clumsiness, Caleo seems convinced that real men exert power by being A-type jerks and all women are sluts. If nothing else, this film serves as a troubling psychological profile of a filmmaker who feels scornfully cynical toward nothing in particular.
  100. Confessions of a Shopaholic
    Plays like both a supremely outmoded chick-lit adaptation and an outrageously obscene gesture as the economy continues to swallow up livelihoods, homes, and hope.
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