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 November Man
    As far as escapist fluff laced with totally unnecessary real-world horror goes, The November Man isn't wretched.
  2. Goats
    Incapable of energizing Mark Poirier's leaden script (based on his own novel), Christopher Neil directs with a mechanical blandness made more tedious still by a score of gentle guitar strumming so aggravatingly benign it might inspire you to partake in one of Wendy's climactic, cathartic primal screams.
  3. Lay the Favorite
    Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.
  4. The Rite
    Michael's motivations remain arbitrary and inscrutable, right down to his entry into the seminary. This is brought up by a number of characters, who interpret his implausible career decision as A Sign. It is-of bad writing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Suffers from a serious case of sophomore slump.
  6. Laws of Attraction
    Our counselors' lawyer-ese is illegally bland, and their committee-penned banter meticulously Botoxed.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Other Side of Heaven
    Strangely coy about its denominational allegiance.
  8. Raising Helen
    John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.
  9. Paparazzi
    Cookie-cutter "Cape Fear" knockoff.
  10. Clouds
    Has nice, pearly, black-and-white cinematography, but it also has the shocking temerity to run over 100 minutes. Sweet air is required.
  11. Seeking Justice
    Seeking Justice is the kind of effective middle-range pulp thriller that has lately become an endangered species.
  12. Bad Santa 2
    God bless Kathy Bates, because she scalds with the darkest, mindfuckiest burns as the ultimate Mommy Dearest. And this script is in dire need of her.
  13. The Collection
    The Collection doesn't have much to recommend it beyond a first-reel bloodbath rivaling "Blade" and "Death Ship."
  14. BearCity
    Only an old pro like John Waters could pull off an awkward bathtub threesome that ends in a golden shower and a head injury.
  15. Unlucky Plaza
    Kwek's refreshing focus on his terrorized protagonists' pre-abduction lives keeps Unlucky Plaza afloat once it invests in generic ticking-clock thrills.
  16. Amateur Night
    Besides the narrative reversal, Montgomery is the only interesting part of the film — smart, obstinate, and ambitious. The gross-out scenes and raunchy banter between the film's sex workers are funny, but its world is pretty small and unsurprising.
  17. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Matlin's haphephobic character dry-swallows anti-anxiety pills only in instances of extreme duress, but the actress herself looks pained throughout the movie, wincing reflexively at inappropriate moments.
  18. The Ward
    Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege. This is Carpenter's first all-female ensemble, and the inmates are uniformly well-played.
  19. Pali Road
    Chen's full-bodied commitment to her role adds something new to this familiar scenario, which also benefits from its idyllic island setting; psychodrama and Hawaii pair surprisingly well.
  20. Death Rides a Horse
    Petroni’s direction is crude but effective.
  21. Think Like a Man Too
    Returning director Tim Story lays out the narrative wares with all the subtlety of a neon sign on the Strip, not that the screenplay from Keith Merryman and David A. Newman (who also co-wrote the first one) gives him much to work with.
  22. August Rush
    Acclimate yourself to the frenzied vibe, and you'll feel the movie grow into itself as an urban fairy tale whose rapturous finale stakes a wishful claim on the redemptive power of love and art.
  23. Meeting Spencer
    Though it's a big thrill that the world's finest character actor has his very own lead role, one wishes there were more meat on the elegant bones of Meeting Spencer to justify his cheerfully offhand wit.
  24. A Case of You
    A Case of You is a disappointing romantic comedy that aspires to social relevance until the third act, when it settles for pat Freudian revelations.
  25. One Fall
    The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.
  26. Free Birds
    Like so many modern animated features, Free Birds packs too much in; the picture feels cramped and cluttered, and, despite its occasionally manic action, it moves as slowly as a fattened bird waddling toward its doom.
  27. Girl Most Likely
    Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan.
  28. On the Run
    A bad one-night stand endured with a jailbroke cad and his put-upon travel-agent pal that hinges somewhat on the characters' impression that Frank Sinatra is still among us.
  29. The Moth Diaries
    There's no surer way to murder horror than to literalize it, a mistake incessantly made by The Moth Diaries.
  30. The Devil's Violinist
    Bernard Rose's elegantly staged but tonally flat biopic embraces the myth, even underscoring Paganini's rising fame, scandalous hedonism, and womanizing as an anachronistic form of rock-star fantasy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    2 Fast 2 Furious
    The script, and the actors' breezy performances, work inasmuch as they get us to the chase on time.
  32. I Don't Know How She Does It
    She is also played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a performer so aggressively determined to make us like her that no work-life conflicts in the film ever gain any traction; we're too distracted by the actress's manic tics (the head tilts, the popping of the wounded-deer eyes) to notice any real adversity.
  33. 2 Jacks
    False gravity weighs down 2 Jacks, a father-son drama less interested in exploring familial relations than in tut-tutting the millennials.
  34. Max Rose
    Occasionally, Noah, who wrote and directed, hits onto something that feels like life.
  35. Youth in Oregon
    Oregon is more than a bittersweet look at a man deciding to end his life before he’s too invalid to have a say in the matter: It’s a study of how plain ol’ stubbornness can keep a family forever brimming with dysfunction.
  36. And So It Goes
    The result is a lumbering attempt at sweet-and-saucy romance, all affected emotion and strained bad-boy humor.
  37. V/H/S: Viral
    Each propulsive segment features a handful of disturbing sequences... But such pleasures barely compensate for the vapidity of V/H/S: Viral's sketches.
  38. The Medallion
    This outing, Jackie doesn't bring much humor or personality to his role, which is essentially the same one he played in the Rush Hour movies.
  39. Rugrats Go Wild
    As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.
  40. Death to Smoochy
    Death to Smoochy is often very funny, but what's even more remarkable is the integrity of DeVito's misanthropic vision.
  41. Don't Say a Word
    Fleder's forgettable thriller has a convincing edge, and Douglas remains unchallenged as Hollywood's most tremulous and disquieting dad-under-pressure.
  42. The Pink Panther
    The lack of energy suggests the film might as well have been constructed from outtakes.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    Shrill family comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    I'm sure the pot-laced antics of these trashy dudes are, like, totally hilarious on Canadian TV, but they don't translate well to America or the big screen.
  45. Brake
    Dorff's mannered Bruce Willis affect seems as insincere as the script, which helplessly loses credibility as info accrues and the narrative unpeels.
  46. Almost in Love
    Almost in Love has audacity and theatrical immediacy working for it. There's also some really impressive sound design. And that's it, pretty much.
  47. Trafficked
    The makers of Trafficked walk a fine line, embedding their advocacy in an action film and conveying the horror of sexual slavery without edging into exploitation.
  48. Third Person
    When the head-scratching impossibilities are more irritating than intriguing, does the last-second explanation outweigh the two hours we've spent rolling our eyes?
  49. Men, Women & Children
    In 2014, Men, Women & Children feels like a sermon. It's obvious and mundane, "Chopsticks" pounded on the piano.
  50. Crossing Over
    And so it goes, with Kramer--who doesn't really seem to like people very much--failing to muster even the superficial empathy the makers of the similarly programmatic "The Visitor" and "Rendition" showed toward their own cardboard-cutout imperiled illegals.
  51. Ben-Hur
    In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.
  52. God's Army
    Tries to show the oh-so-human side of Gospel-hawking, His Word, the Path, and so on.
  53. Double Parked
    Child abuse, domestic violence, and the struggles of single mothers deserve better treatment than this.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Changeling
    Stern's direction is reticent where it should be nervy, and the chemistry-free cast of mostly New York stage actors appears to have been chosen for its discomfort with dialogue such as "Come hither!" and "Get thee from me!" Ye have been warned.
  55. Billy & Buddy
    Despite a few manic comic episodes, writer-directors Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier never again capture the sense of joyous connection that can exist between child and pet.
  56. Grand Départ
    The director, Nicolas Mercier, has failed to grasp how repellent his own protagonist seems to us. By the end, he's tipped his hand, and what seemed an incisive portrait is revealed as oddly skewed.
  57. The Park Bench
    The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    The tiredness of its conceit aside, the film manages to ingratiate thanks to a script that pleasantly ping-pongs from one digressive dialogue to another and a persuasive performance by Hall.
  59. Blade: Trinity
    Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kids in America
    Nicole Richie loyalists are sure to be confounded (along with the rest of us) by Kids in America, the weirdly anti-Bush high school "satire" that is also Richie's big-screen debut.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am
    Embellished with a lot of CG, supporting clips, and lovely stock footage, I Am's basic tenets are hardly ridiculous: What's so funny about empathy, compassion, and love? Shadyac, looking like the lost triplet of Kenny G. and Al Yankovic, cheerfully indicts his own overconsumption first.
  62. Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare
    It's tough to be sure of anything in this murky experimental feature, which sadly fails to live up to its title.
  63. Extraterrestrial
    All My Children's Brittany Allen proves herself a big-screen presence as the lead earthling; her commitment to each scene's emotional truth is all the more impressive considering that the schoolboyish Vicious Brothers introduce her character ass-first.
  64. Cell
    King's decision to co-write the script and turn it into a CliffsNotes version of The Stand only makes things worse.
  65. The Abandoned
    Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.
  66. The Specials
    Wittily conceived but clumsy as a newborn calf.
  67. Random Hearts
    Everyone in the film is a walking cliché.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Looking for an Echo
    The stream of sentimentality is endless and often sickly, and the warm afterglow is decidedly manufactured.
  69. Little Nicky
    Certainly Sandler's most ambitious work. It's not just a bid for respectability but a genuine allegory.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Final Destination 2
    This risible thriller is merely a sadistic series of misread premonitions and vile murders.
  71. Mr. Jones
    Mr. Jones is the stuff of both conspiracy theories and collegiate discourse, and Mueller's elliptical exploration and creation of that mythology sets the bar a bit too high for his much-less-interesting protagonists to fully clear.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gothika
    Quickly abandoning the psychological for the supernatural, the movie collapses its premise into one painfully derivative pitch.
  73. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Based on characters created by Rodriguez's then-seven-year-old son, Racer Max, the film doesn't belong in wide release. It belongs on a refrigerator door, alongside "100%" spelling tests, old lunch menus, and notices from the PTA.
  74. Adore
    The disparity between the inherently trashy appeal of the story and the self-serious way it's presented cripples much of the potential for enjoyment. The setup screams pulp, but the film doles out stately drama.
  75. Electric Slide
    Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.
  76. The Air I Breathe
    The destiny-versus- responsibility hand-wringing is Philosophy 101, the camera angles straight out of film school, and the pacing strictly music-video. Plus, the ta-da! twist ending is foreshadowed roughly 20 minutes into the action, for those still interested.
  77. The Words
    Hoariest of all are the exhortations to make distinctions between "fiction" and "life."
  78. Made of Honor
    Director Paul Weiland and the three (!) screenwriters it took to boil down thousands of bad movies into 101 minutes haven't provided this one with a single original thought; it should only entertain those still getting adjusted to the idea of talkies.
  79. If I Didn't Care
    With their unrelenting, nostalgic clutch on old-school noir rules (a girl and a gun, plans goes awry, an easily spotted macguffin), the Cummings boys paint themselves into the proverbial corner with a cop-out ex machina ending--at which point there is no longer a need for the title's "If."
  80. Reindeer Games
    Punishing, visceral violence is the key element.
  81. Sweet Talk
    The mustiness of many of the script's ideas hardly detracts from what feels like a radical premise, at least in film — that a woman can get off with a stranger and leave it at that. Erica Jong would be proud.
  82. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    This reboot smartly doesn't try to escalate the material to bigger and better status, keeping things small and scrappy and relying on the fighters to be the best special effects.
  83. Paper Man
    An artist-in-crisis piece run through a drab but quirk-conscious indie processor, Paper Man is everything a film like "Lost in Translation" fought not to be.
  84. Dirty
    Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins Jr. (excellent as Perry Smith in "Capote") habitually rise above their clichéd roles.
  85. Hotel Noir
    Gutierrez bathes in moodiness while remaining unconcerned with anything so pedestrian as dramatic cohesion.
  86. Trespass
    A home-invasion movie as instantly forgettable as its title, Trespass is not without disturbing images: namely, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman as spouses.
  87. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.
  88. The Culture High
    It’s strongly anti-prohibition, and the film’s structure favors that bias.
  89. Marfa Girl
    The film is as shallow as its characters' oversexed conversations.
  90. Devil's Gate
    What’s most disappointing is that Staub proves himself to be a formidable director of action and visual effects. Please, someone just give him a better story.
  91. The Black Tulip
    There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.
  92. Forever Strong
    Though director Ryan Little puts together a clean, professional package, at bottom this is a nearly-two-hour scrum of therapeutic direct encounters.
  93. A Hole in One
    First-time writer-director Richard Ledes's mystical tone and pervasive swipes from David Lynch tend to suffocate his satire, and stunt casting doesn't help.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    Aside from Laspalès's enlivening physical humor, Poiré's forced, formulaic comedy of errors has little to offer.
  95. Winnie Mandela
    A story that probably could have been told better as a miniseries, the film's main strength is its performances.
  96. Annapolis
    Often laughably overwrought rehash of "An Officer and a Gentleman," ekes out enough of a subtext on competition to qualify as a non-fiasco.
  97. P2
    If it weren't for two excessively violent deaths, P2 could be termed a refreshingly old-fashioned thriller, one dependent on hairbreadth escapes and the pluck of its heroine.
  98. Autómata
    Automata has moments of tremendous visual and storytelling elegance which are punctuated with ham-fisted characterization and thunderingly terrible acting.
  99. Baywatch
    Like the show, it’s about an insanely attractive lifeguard crew whose members really throw themselves into their work. But the product teeters between absurdity and earnestness.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Another Gay Movie
    Boasting a "Scary Movie" rate of scatalogical jokes-per-minute, it fails to match that franchise's low yield of guffaws.
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