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. Last Orders
    The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.
  2. I Spit on Your Grave 2
    The film ultimately plays less as female empowerment than it does a narrative in which the comeuppance doled out is likely to be received as a digestif for those in the audience who got off on the gendered violence in the first place.
  3. Calloused Hands
    Too bad that Josh's story, ostensibly the core of the film, is overshadowed by Calloused Hands' retro racial views.
  4. Certainty
    Clemens's and Lipinski's equally stiff performances are also disappointing as they staunch the humor inherent in O'Malley's dialogue.
  5. Zoolander 2
    Wiig's cheering presence in an otherwise depleting project/cross-promoted product highlights the fact that Zoolander 2 is a referendum on dying industries: not just the portfolio of Condé Nast titles that Wintour oversees as artistic director, but also the Frat Pack.
  6. The Pink Panther 2
    It's Garcia, Molina, and Tomlin who give you momentary hope that the film might settle into a witty, irreverent romp. Unfortunately, their efforts are ultimately defeated.
  7. Swing
    Repeatedly assuring us that its titular subject is really "a metaphor for life," Swing attempts unsuccessfully to liven up a tired scenario with a touch of Twilight Zone fantasy.
  8. Tomorrow You're Gone
    What starts out as a moderately interesting thriller in the vein of Blue Velvet and Angel Heart ends up less than the sum of its portentous parts.
  9. Dear Frankie
    Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.
  10. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    The only faint upside to this excruciating dud is that, in its movie clips of Charlie Chaplin - who the mesmerized birds view as a kindred waddling spirit - the film might hopefully function for some kids as a gateway to superior comedy cinema.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Snow Day
    A family film that's about as fluffy as fresh powder.
  12. Funny Bunny
    Funny Bunny may be effectively alienating, but never in a commendable way.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Macbeth
    The rush into gunfights and car chases pushes the text in all the wrong directions. As written, the 400-year-old words are still fresher than anything ripped from “Miami Vice.”
    • 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.
  15. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Master of the Game
    Director Stolhand gets a high-quality look on a minimal budget, but the script and acting are so amateurish.
  17. Lord Byron
    Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.
  18. Detachment
    Movies about teachers are flypaper for overblown armchair crusaderism, and this overbearingly cynical attempt gets my vote for worst offender yet.
  19. The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
    If Markell's instincts for script exhumation are questionable, she's the victim of even worse timing: Who thought releasing her film 10 days after Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's praised-to-the-high-heavens "A Streetcar Named Desire" closed was a good idea?
  20. Planet of the Apes
    It's a campy, juiced-up ker-splat, busy with clumsy pyrotechnics and never nearing the vicinity of satire.
  21. Eight Legged Freaks
    Amid numerous identical skirmishes with leapfrogging arachnids, trace elements of black comedy and intentional camp are discernible but utterly extraneous.
  22. 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.
  23. Some Kind of Hate
    Like so much teen-targeting modern horror, it opts for dull angsty brooding over the very sort of grim-and-gruesome sleaziness that might have made its premise interesting.
  24. Cassadaga
    Like the Saw franchise, Cassadaga, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, attempts to leverage the horror genre in the service of inducing epiphanies, but keeps tripping over its confused tangle of genres.
  25. Final
    A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    London
    Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well.
  27. The Frozen Ground
    The climactic interrogation wraps up neatly and just in time, much more like a story "based on actual events" than the events themselves.
  28. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    Doesn't just look and sound like a car commercial. It is a car commercial.
  29. Stand Up Guys
    But by the end, the feeling the movie inspires isn't suspense but relief: Thank God that the producers behind "Grumpy Old Men" and "The Sunshine Boys" didn't yet have Viagra to joke about.
  30. Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    Intentions and effect are at odds throughout Jorge Hinojosa's one-note documentary.
  31. The Martial Arts Kid
    The film is rife with homages to the "bullied kid learns martial arts" classic, The Karate Kid, but never quite finds its own footing in the ring. The editing is choppy and the dialogue sophomoric, however hard the actors try to deliver it dramatically.
  32. Naqoyqatsi
    Despite some rocking bombast by Philip Glass and reliably wicked cello saws from Yo-Yo Ma, the whole thing plays like a tired Tyco ad.
  33. A Dog's Purpose
    Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.
  34. A Cat in Paris
    Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.
  35. Domino
    The script, allegedly by "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, throws together tangentially related plots like cats in a sack.
  36. Let It Snow
    An inert and inept romantic comedy.
  37. A Dark Truth
    The film's heart is in exactly the right place, but there's not a brain in its pretty little head.
  38. Fast & Furious
    Fast & Furious reconfirms that car-chase movies--good, bad, or mediocre--all assume the future employment of the quaint old fast-forward button.
  39. Tracers
    Tracers is a tedious, clichéd slog from start to finish, and only briefly enlivened by two prolonged chases in which handheld cameras maintain intense proximity to their subjects.
  40. I Am Michael
    Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.
  41. 21
    A movie that wastes a lot of time and money and really, REALLY shoulda stayed in Vegas.
  42. Baghead
    It's an indie about indies--meta, right?
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Smug, sanitized fantasy.
  44. Stratton
    The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.
  45. Speciesism: The Movie
    Ultimately, Devries seems to want to impress viewers with his anger.
  46. She's One of Us
    Quickly nose-dives into the ridiculous.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Rumor of Angels
    The pat reconciliations among family members start to pile up like so much driftwood along the beach.
  48. Beyond the Clouds
    It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.
  49. Basic Instinct 2
    Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist).
  50. Trolls
    Trolls is a pretty standard piece of subpar DreamWorks product: loud and shiny, more than a tad frantic despite a generic set of characters.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I'm Reed Fish
    Short of pulling a Zach Braff, there's one sure way to get known as a screenwriter: Put your actual name in the title of the script.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Condon delivers the most authoritatively directed Twilight film so far, which only brings into sharp relief how tonally incoherent its story is.
  53. Mammoth
    Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.
  54. The Honeymooners
    John Schultz's wan, unfunny The Honeymooners is unlikely to tickle devotees of Jackie Gleason's archetypal yuk-fest.
  55. The Lost City
    Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.
  56. Convergence
    Convergence ends up squandering too much of its setup time and rushing to a largely unsatisfying conclusion instead of actually coming together in a meaningful way.
  57. A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps
    Great achievements don't guarantee great documentary - or, as A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps proves, they don't even secure a mediocre one.
  58. Wolf Creek 2
    Wolf Creek 2 merely offers more of the same casual brutality. The only shocking (and depressing) part is how inured to it moviegoers have become.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    ABCD
    Less effective in dramatizing the choices facing second-generation Indian Americans than as a showcase for Sheetal Sheth's terrific hair.
  60. Azumi
    If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.
  61. Cas & Dylan
    Leading man Richard Dreyfuss is so irrepressibly charming that he almost saves Jason Priestley's dismal buddy comedy Cas & Dylan from its awkward humor and trite sentimentality.
  62. Premature
    Premature, you will be exhausted to hear, is a teen sex comedy with the plot of Groundhog Day, its supernatural comedy hearkening more to Scott Baio's Zapped! than to Porky's.
  63. Air
    Walking Dead isn't the model, here — it's Lost, specifically the business involving that buried bunker with the outdated tech and the mystery button that must be mashed every time a Rolodex-style flip-clock counts down to zero. All of that has been copy-pasted into Air, which, sadly, doesn't even improve on Lost's resolutions.
  64. Flirt
    Hal Hartley fans, Flirt may be too slight and schematic. [13 Aug 1996]
    • Village Voice
  65. The Hurricane Heist
    The Hurricane Heist delivers what it promises on some basic level; it’s got plenty of hurricane, and it’s got plenty of heist. But those looking for Sharknado-style idiocy will probably be disappointed, as will those looking for anything that makes sense. That might be the film’s fundamental problem.
  66. Bushwick
    Bushwick is a hollow, ultimately unsatisfying exercise in organized chaos.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Stylish, low-budget indies thrive on redeeming the clichés of everyday life. But that takes smart writing and sharp humor, of which Laura Smiles has none.
  68. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    Bizarre and hysterical.
  69. First Winter
    Even when things start to go awry for our group (thanks to jealousy, illness, a dwindling food stock) Dickinson's anti-dramatic methodology proves ill-suited to the task of generating narrative interest.
  70. My Uncle Rafael
    An insufferable import indebted to "Mrs. Doubtfire" in which a man in prosthetics helps a family cope with, and overcome, divorce.
  71. Open Windows
    The new thriller from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is visually dazzling, but the story starts off silly and ends up a confusing, maddening mess.
  72. The Trip
    Steals every trick in the gaysploitation book down to the Alexis Arquette glorified cameo, but the end result -- compulsively horrible and full of unintentional poignant hilarity -- is its own mutant creature.
  73. Rain
    The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bad Teacher
    In a role hardly larger than a cameo despite the fact that he's ostensibly the male romantic lead, Segel never tries to hide that he's only here to pay his mortgage - which makes him the most likeable presence on-screen
  75. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.
  76. 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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Obtuse and creepy.
  78. Standing by Yourself
    A crystalline curio of dumbshit nihilism shot through with fleeting pathos, Koury's home movie often evokes "The Decline of Western Civilization Part III."
  79. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.
  80. An American Rhapsody
    Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.
  81. Over the GW
    Gaglia's torture re-creations become rote quickly, and his cross-processed, color-tinted, randomly inserted, over-zoomed Film School 101 indulgences need their meds adjusted.
  82. 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Buried
    Rodrigo Cortes keeps the action bound to the box, limiting his lighting to naturalistic approximations, so that much of Reynolds's performance consists of him grunting and heaving in the dark.
  84. Psycho Beach Party
    The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.
  85. After Words
    Feldman, having established all his stereotypes, refuses to push them beyond the motions you know they have to go through from the first scene of lonely Jane crying into her cat's fur.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Turistas
    Turistas eventually bogs down in an underlit mess.
  87. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The film absolutely delivers on the scenery-chewing front. And yet the movie is still hollow and joyless.
  88. 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    A Love Song for Bobby Long
    At least Macht emerges relatively unscathed from the mess, content to brood and mutter self-loathing observations while Johansson and (most painfully) Travolta spoon their Southern accents out of a jar and spread it all over the humid scenery.
  90. Bandits
    A confusingly edited music-video hodgepodge.
  91. What Alice Found
    Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.
  92. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    Much has changed in the two decades since the release of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, but, as The Angriest Man in Brooklyn flatly reminds us, the grievances of America's petulant middle-class men apparently have not.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    X-Men: First Class
    A cameo from an old-school X-Man only serves to remind how stylish and witty the first installment was a decade ago. Lacking a single memorable joke or striking image, First Class is as perfunctory and passionless as would-be franchise resurrections get.
  94. Sidewalks of New York
    Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.
  95. Me You Them
    Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Battle of Britain
    It is depressing to see $20 million poured down the drain in praise of a stiff upper lip which keeps mankind on the rack from Lagos to Mai Ly. [18 Dec 1969, p.63]
    • Village Voice
  97. Flock of Dudes
    Lifeless bromantic comedy Flock of Dudes has all the celebrity cameos and latent sexism of Judd Apatow's adult coming-of-age stories but none of the lowbrow wit and sensitivity.
  98. Stigmata
    Despite exposition delivered so redundantly and witlessly you think you're in a Kaplan class, Stigmata manages to be incoherent.
  99. The United States of Leland
    The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.
  100. Kedma
    Mesmerizingly bad filmmaking.
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