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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    • 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.
  2. Hit and Runway
    A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.
  3. Open Water
    Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.
  4. Girl Play
    Greenspan and Harmon's paltry song of themselves concludes with five minutes of outtakes, capping the self-love.
  5. Happy Endings
    Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Burlesque
    What you remember when it's over is the impact of Aguilera's voice, but not what she's singing; montages of body parts, but not the choreography; and Aguilera's face, music-video-trained to hold a close-up so emotionally exaggerated, you might even call it a burlesque.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Tuxedo
    The only possible surprise in The Tuxedo would be an extended demonstration of what was once Chan's trademark, the daffily choreographed kineticism forbidden of late by either his own age or the scruples of story editors.
  8. Big Eden
    Stupefyingly benign.
  9. Shwaas
    Takes a potential hot-button premise--the callous indifference of the Indian medical bureaucracy toward the lower classes--and dramatizes it in the most shameless way possible.
  10. Brokedown Palace
    Part cautionary tale, part moral-uplift saga, Brokedown Palace is as dull as it's absurd.
  11. How High
    Too lazy to be a comedy, too conventional to be a head movie.
  12. Don't Hang Up
    Basically, Don't Hang Up is a hire-me sign masquerading as a slasher film.
  13. Money Monster
    As generic and impersonal as a new credit card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality.
  14. 10 on Ten
    10 on Ten is less illuminating than pedantic, as well as tediously self-absorbed.
  15. Saugatuck Cures
    No one in the movie rises above the level of a stock character, so over-the-top in their familiar jokes as to barely even register as satire.
  16. No Stone Unturned
    Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.
  17. Audition
    After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rings
    No matter how hard anyone tries to save her, this soggy nightmare just keeps on creeping out of the TV like it’s her job. It’d be even better if everyone just let her be evil.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Babysitters
    Ultimately, the film's view of female self-loathing and girl-on-girl exploitation is woefully reductive and painful.
  20. The Brainwashing of My Dad
    The film so diligently eschews any tempered analysis that it eventually comes across as akin to the very thing it's decrying.
    • 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.
  22. Lost in the Sun
    While his images have been composed with care, Nelson's screenplay is a far less impressive invention.
  23. 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.
  24. Hangman
    Even with all its grisly, gory absurdity, Hangman actually tries to be a sincere salute to all the badge-wearing men and women who risk their lives on the regular to catch bad guys. But you may not take a single frame of this movie seriously.
  25. Lucky
    Graynor is a muddle of kooky indie girlfriend and materialistic fortune hunter; Hanks has neither threat nor pathos at his command.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Poster Boy
    Rather than creating believable characters engaged in nuanced conflict, Boy proffers a pair of obvious symbols and hopes that they'll make a statement about the personal and the political.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cupid's Mistake
    Made with $980 and about as many brain cells, Cupid's Mistake is more cute than clever.
  28. 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.
  29. The Spirit
    The fanboys will find room in their heart to forgive the desecration. Everyone else won't care at all.
  30. Valley of Love
    Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Naked Fame
    There are many dreadful elements in this chronicle of aging gay male porn star Colton Ford's quest for crossover success in the music industry: sub-amateurish camera work, a maddeningly repetitive score, and a listless narrative.
  32. The Pacifier
    Disney misfire.
  33. Don't Kill It
    Those who favor gore above all else will be at home amid the blood and guts, but others should heed the obvious warning invited by the title: don't watch it.
  34. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
    Vaxxed is, in the words of Sheriff Bart, the last act of a desperate man. It’s Andrew Wakefield’s Hail Mary, thrown — I hope — as his time in the public arena finally runs out.
  35. Crazy and Thief
    The film's engagement rests on the viewer's interest in observing—and while the kids are wildly charming at first, like a tired babysitter, one may find their antics growing repetitive and trying. Clocking in at just 51 minutes, Crazy and Thief nevertheless could have been a great deal shorter.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    It's Easier for a Camel...
    Long-winded, jokingly self-deprecating, and clichéd.
  37. In Search of God
    Purportedly about a quest for spiritual enlightenment and the question of what binds global religions, In Search of God is instead defined by simplistic philosophizing and rampant narcissism.
  38. 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
  39. Cellmates
    The film, directed by Jesse Baget, aims to be a satiric look at racism but at every turn flaunts the laws of logic and believability.
  40. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Think I Love My Wife
    Rock capably directs a screenplay graced with one or two chuckles ("You stare at a soccer mom too long and they'll post your name on the Internet") and soured by a whole lot of misogyny.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    House of 1000 Corpses
    Straining to put his own stamp on this stale-from-the-crypt material, Zombie falls back on the twitchy visual grammar of his videos, splicing in dream sequences and grainy porno-snippets apparently purchased at Bob Crane's estate sale. The violence eventually becomes more inhuman than human.
  43. Dead on Arrival
    Writer-director Stephen C. Sepher’s thriller is so convoluted that it’s hard to care about its trail of dead bodies.
  44. Happy Times
    Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Break-Up
    Faced with a long and miserable road on which they make each other sorry or crazy, both Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) dig in hard on the least appealing parts of their stock characters.
  46. America's Sweethearts
    A lackluster screwball comedy.
  47. Default
    It sacrifices its voice to the premeditated non-style of a first-person pseudo-documentary, a form that often has the paradoxical effect of making everything it shows us seem more fake than usual.
  48. Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings
    The comedy preaches tolerance... But using hate crimes—even cartoonified ones—as a source of humor is troubling, and the mincing stereotypes on display bring to mind a little kid pointing and shouting, "Homo! Homo!"
  49. Charlie Countryman
    LaBeouf and Wood don't clang, but they don't quite click, either. That's not enough for the film to persuade us of its message, that love is worth any sacrifice.
  50. An Invisible Sign
    Jessica Alba gets plain-Jane crazy for An Invisible Sign, a syrupy "A Beautiful Mind" redux in which the starlet sports big brown bangs and Pippi Longstocking pigtails.
  51. Riddick
    The only reason to root for Riddick is that his name is on the ticket stub. But he's so dull and the hunters so weird that we're literally cheering for the movie to kill off its personality, one throat slash at a time.
  52. The Funhouse Massacre
    Amateurish direction and generic characterization make a light premise — serial killers slaughter a rural carnival's haunted-house patrons while pretending to be carnies — feel like a slog.
  53. Against the Ropes
    As a gloves-off Erin Brockovich, Ryan never makes it into the ring.
  54. Temps
    The film's tone is all over the map, with weird bursts of casual racism toward its ethnic supporting cast and unnecessarily explicit sex scenes that approach a The Room level of ickiness.
  55. Furry Vengeance
    Furry Vengeance isn’t really a movie at all; it's a message provided by the good people at Participant Media.
  56. Slugterra: Return of the Elementals
    There's little in Slugterra: Return of the Elementals to interest nonfans of the show, and the sheer laziness would be more forgivable if not for the equally lazy use of broad ethnic stereotypes. But at least it's over in an hour.
  57. The Unbelievers
    A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.
  58. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    It's hard to tell whether Spielberg and Lucas are trying too hard or trying at all--the thing's such a mess, such an unmitigated disaster, that damned is the scholar stuck with the unfortunate task of deciphering this cynical, clinical gibberish in decades to come.
  59. The Preppie Connection
    Toby's eventual comeuppance feels as preordained and empty as the preppie/townie dichotomy regurgitated here from so many outdated teen-media artifacts.
  60. She Hate Me
    Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.
  61. Uncle Nino
    The elderly, violin-toting hero's successful attempt to infiltrate his miscreant nephew's mall-punk garage band is too creepy to fulfill the hipness quotient.
  62. Cell
    King's decision to co-write the script and turn it into a CliffsNotes version of The Stand only makes things worse.
  63. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    This TMNT is bigger and emptier, a wasteland of pixels.
  64. Felony
    The three lead actors are limited by their characters' kiddy-pool-shallow behavior.
  65. Hamlet
    An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thr3e
    Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma.
  67. Shanghai
    Cusack's low-simmering performance keeps the drama at a tediously low boil.
  68. Night at the Golden Eagle
    Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.
  69. xXx
    Diesel himself has the personality of a golem and a knack for dialogue delivery that suggests recent oral surgery.
  70. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Often succumbs to the craven hysteria perhaps inherent in its hoary premise.
  71. The Favor
    As an unconscious parody of everything that's wrong with Indiewood, Eva Aridjis's The Favor is brilliant. Otherwise, it's an unwatchable nightmare that brought back bad memories of NYU screenwriting classes.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mariachi Gringo
    Amid this malarkey Gustafson is smart enough to let the camera linger on musical performances that reveal mariachi to be dynamic and complex as opera.
  73. Bounce
    It's been smoothed over plenty, but this is one creaky, rigged contraption.
  74. 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.
  75. When Animals Dream
    Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.
  76. Cleopatra
    It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]
    • Village Voice
  77. Hollywood Homicide
    Hollywood Homicide knows it's a dog, and it ain't too proud to beg.
  78. Other People's Children
    Nothing ever feels like it's at stake — the drama here is whisper-thin.
  79. Anita B.
    Just as it seems on the verge of yielding a nuanced view of the Holocaust’s emotional and psychological fallout, Anita B. recedes into platitudes and cliché.
  80. Hellions
    Hellions is unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Puccini for Beginners
    Maggenti suffocates her story with dated references to every buzzword from Laura Mulvey's feminist catalog except for "the male gaze." In short, a nightmare worse than "Trust the Man."
  82. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Although there's no evidence of sexual chemistry on the screen, the stars share a certain physical defensiveness that occasionally makes them seem simpatico; most of the time, however, they just look bored to death.
  83. Dream House
    Dream House also manages to commit a cardinal thriller sin: casting well-known actors in ostensibly inconsequential roles, which in this case reveals the real culprit before the mystery proper has even begun.
  84. The Haunting in Connecticut
    In the realm of domestic horror, The Haunting in Connecticut is about as scary as a shower that suddenly changes temperature when someone flushes the toilet.
  85. Grand Slammed
    If characters are going to ignite into blazes of unchecked emotion every five minutes or so, you've got to make sure your actors have the chops. These, unfortunately, aren't sharp enough to bite.
  86. SlingShot
    The story demands journalism rather than hagiography.
  87. The Happytime Murders
    Some viewers, perhaps, might be shocked at the association of Mr. Rainbow Connection with scenes set in porno shops, strip clubs, and drug dens. What jolted me, though, was seeing the Henson name all over a project that’s so often bland and listless, so tame in its designs, so limited in its imagination, so joyless in its execution.
  88. Some Fish Can Fly
    Some dogs can bark.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dischord
    Writer-director Mark Wilkinson gracefully elides backstories while arranging his converging narratives into a neat fugue, but the overall preciousness of his conception is suffocating.
  90. Down the Shore
    The saddest part of this movie that oh-so-wants you to know it is sad is that Jennings sets up a pretty interesting dynamic, then bails on telling a story.
  91. Ghost Team
    The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.
  92. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler
    The high-concept scenario soon proves preposterous, the acting is robotically italicized, and truth-in-advertising hounds take note: There's very little hustling on view, though McCrudden does arrange for his lead gym rat to be shirtless as often as possible.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Old School
    A flatland of lowest-common-denominated retro-collegiate wackiness.
  94. Little Fockers
    Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    About the only thing to praise in Daughters is the way Seyrig looks: she is stunning in soft focus, chiffon, and egret. The dialogue and plot demands are unsurmountable burdens even for an actress as accomplished as she is. [01 Jul 1971, p.51]
    • Village Voice
  96. Breakfast of Champions
    Begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Backyard
    Though filled with violent smackdowns, slackjawed interviews, and bizarre characters, Hough's doc never rises above the level of first-year student project, hobbled by scattershot editing, badly written intertitles, and useless directorial voice-over.
  98. Underworld: Blood Wars
    Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.
  99. The Road
    Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.
  100. The Cookout
    Eventually, the pointlessness of The Cookout exudes a modicum of charm, but the simple-minded mess still lacks the wit and moral weight of an episode of "Family Matters."
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