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. Why Stop Now
    An unbearable 90-minute trip with a trio of loud, needy egotists.
  2. Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Bert Stern: Original Madman is a sometimes uncomfortably intimate portrait of a man who seems unsure if he has a place left in the culture he helped to shape.
  3. Rupture
    Rupture is a sci-fi abduction thriller that leaves little to be thrilled about.
  4. Love's Labour's Lost
    Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.
  5. Contracted: Phase II
    The virus is spreading, but the filmmakers don't appear fully committed to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, so no sense of dread (or suspense) ever takes hold.
  6. Camera Obscura
    Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.
  7. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The film absolutely delivers on the scenery-chewing front. And yet the movie is still hollow and joyless.
  8. Paris Countdown
    The skirmishes are alternately silly and wan. The film's gloomy techno score is its most lasting attribute.
  9. Grudge Match
    Segal's gearbox gets jammed between recession-era sports drama and brainless comedy, especially as Hart hollers pop-culture punch lines like he's the squirrel sidekick in a CGI kiddo flick.
  10. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    Weide's big-screen version is sitcom-drab.
  11. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stealth
    Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.
  13. Smokers Only
    Detached performances and a murky sound mix further the sense of suspended animation.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    All the stylistic flourishes can't hide the lack of an actual plot, character development, or point. Like Gerardo, we wait, hoping something will happen, knowing nothing will.
  15. Americatown
    The vibe rarely expands beyond dozy Comedy Central skits sprinkled with ironic cliches rather than jokes, 99 percent earnest slo-mo quirk and 1 percent funky non sequitur (the characters sport brand names, like Plymouth Ray-Ban), most of it explained rather than performed.
  16. For Greater Glory
    It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition.
  17. Dorfman in Love
    Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.
  18. The Guillotines
    A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.
  19. 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.
  20. Rumor Has It...
    Maybe it's the terrible lighting, but Friend-out-of-water Aniston spends most of this flick looking like she needs Dustin Hoffman to bang on the glass and get her out of this mess.
  21. Salvation Boulevard
    Salvation Boulevard isn't groundbreaking or even consistently funny, but it is mildly inventive and the absurdities of its characters are tender and recognizably human. Best of all, we're encouraged to laugh with them rather than at them.
  22. 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.
  23. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble "a point," save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful.
  24. Two Can Play That Game
    It's the summer's most disingenuous movie -- a real achievement in a waning season that included Tim Burton's "Banana Splits" remake.
  25. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.
  26. Scooby-Doo
    As this movie knows what it is, Scooby-Doo's a relatively painless 85 minutes.
  27. Hide and Seek
    Hide and Seek follows no semblance of internal logic--the unveiling of Charlie is a ludicrous cheat, the last reel a unique paroxysm of rancid idiocy.
  28. Very Good Girls
    Very Good Girls is a film one wants to like but can't. It just doesn't work.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Film Geek
    Westby never provides a reason you should pay to spend 70 minutes with Scotty, but he offers at least a dozen compelling ones not to.
  30. Mrs. Winterbourne
    Lake was fab in John Waters's films, especially Hairspray, but Fraser is more adroit in this screwball mode. Lake by now may be too brash and over-the-top for the big screen: too much her own persona. [23 Apr 1996]
    • Village Voice
  31. Bride of the Wind
    A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?
  32. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    Doesn't just look and sound like a car commercial. It is a car commercial.
  33. Drift
    The crookedness of the narrative is compounded by the film's failure to display its characters' great pleasures (surfing and drugs) in visually expressive ways.
  34. Marguerite & Julien
    The widescreen intimacy of small moments — the flush of a rain-soaked cheek — humanizes Donzelli's grand folly and the couple who challenge the parameters of morality.
  35. The Host
    As with the Twilight series, The Host's infelicities—drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than there is story—are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities.
  36. My Mother
    Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.
  37. The Hunter's Prayer
    Even though the movie tries to sneak in some subtext about children paying for the sins of their fathers, the biggest sin The Hunter’s Prayer commits is being too dumb to enjoy.
  38. Mansome
    While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance.
  39. Post Grad
    In 2009. Vicky Jenson's live-action debut is as cartoonish as her work on "Shrek," and that's OK for the comic bits. The rest seems like a remarkably cynical cross-breed—for all demographics, but, ultimately, for none.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Van Helsing
    In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive.
  41. Iowa
    Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.
  42. Rape Me
    Wit is in short supply -- although this journey to the end of the night derives a certain amount of punkish energy from its crude editing, cruddy-looking close-ups, strident soundtrack, and overall volatility.
  43. Ghosts of Mars
    Written, directed, and edited with the offhand shoddiness of a day worker thinking about his evening beer.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Multiple Sarcasms
    A vanity production by Branch, previously a studio branding consultant, it's the kind of odious, self-validating wish fulfillment that actually makes you appreciate the more generous self-absorption of Henry Jaglom films.
  47. Certifiably Jonathan
    The big-kid-bulky Dayton-born comedian gets some welcome playtime in Jim Pasternak's patchwork tribute, but not nearly enough.
  48. Identity Thief
    McCarthy gets bashed about like a Stooge, and she bashes back with riotous abandon. Sadly, the rest of the movie is a shambles. So, let it be said, this one time only: Here is a comedy that really could use more inter-gender violence.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the House
    The movie's not so much bad as it is chillingly uninventive.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flakes
    Despite a few good one-liners, the dialogue is overwritten, and director Michael Lehmann (Heathers, The Truth About Cats & Dogs) is in thrall with the hipness he tries to chronicle.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Broken Sky
    That's the movie--desperate grasps, huffy affronts, gulping kisses, and one juicy (if silent) sex scene, early in the film, before our senses have been deadened by boredom. Without dialogue, we don't know who the characters are, so we can't care about what they do.
  52. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Nearly every scene is clunky, and the film's commentary about TV as the unifying glue of American culture is embellished through lame incidents of sex and violence that eventually validate the Chinese tourists' anti-U.S. critiques.
  53. 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.
  54. The Blue Tooth Virgin
    In case we don't get that this is pretentious bullshit, David mentions how much he likes Bergman's "Persona." Later, to hammer it home, he admits that he's been trying to be a cooler person by succumbing to peer pressure by seeing "art films" and listening "to certain bands that actually suck."
  55. Ordinary Sinner
    As technically amateurish as it is narratively ludicrous.
  56. The Big Blue
    The results are predictably lachrymose, especially with the reinstated "unhappy" ending from the original French version.
  57. Dreamcatcher
    If hopeless literalist Kasdan could have decided on a tone this could have been a gynophobe's "Independence Day."
  58. Night of Henna
    Hobbles a likable cast with dialogue flatter than Bollywood's cheesiest.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    New York
    Quite apart from the fact that none of these performers is capable of smoldering with conviction, there's no terror or sensuality in director Khan's images.
  60. Eichmann
    Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less.
  61. When Harry Tries to Marry
    A substandard romantic comedy gussied up in Indian drag.
  62. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    The movie's argument only occasionally transcends its oozy nonspecificity and feel-good bleeding-heart vibe.
  63. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    While the opera nonetheless soars with its acrobatic choreography of refugee displacement, this documentary about it suffers some dramatic slackness from the inevitable drawing board tedium of performance preparation.
  64. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The dull Adventures of the Penguin King is definitely the laziest of the waddle-coms to win theatrical release.
  65. Arise
    The mother-daughter filmmaking team's doc reads more as a feature-length infomercial for the many organizations it highlights—all of which are more than deserving of the attention—than a probing look at what it means to be at one with our planet in the 21st century.
  66. Radio Free Albemuth
    In an alternate universe, this might be a cult hit; as it is, Albemuth will only be fun for diehards.
  67. Everly
    Everly has the heaving, bloody bosoms of an exploitation flick, yet Hayek gives the character powerful dignity. She's no victim, nor an off-the-shelf "strong woman."
  68. Manny
    Throughout, the complexities of the charismatic fighter's life are only cursorily referenced so that the celebratory tone may not be marred, with Manny ultimately content to treat its subject with kid gloves.
  69. Listening
    Rather than pioneering into the frontiers of the mind, Listening slogs through the most well-traveled pits of screenwriting.
  70. Landmine Goes Click
    It's an exploitation film that never gets its audience off, even with cheap thrills — what a dud.
  71. 31
    Rob Zombie can do better than 31. For proof, just watch any other Rob Zombie movie.
  72. Spaceman
    Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.
  73. A Billion Lives
    Demonstrating an egregious contempt for science, Biebert and his subjects attack the call for research into the effects of electronic cigarettes as nothing more than shilling for tax collectors and Big Pharma.
  74. 200 Cigarettes
    Nothing much happens, and that's the point, but all this wheel spinning could have used more grease.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    20 Dates
    The movie's best observations come from its sinister, unseen producer, who sneers at Berkowitz, "You're making a cartoon piece of shit . . . that ends with you jerking off by yourself."
  76. 7 Minutes
    Unlike guilty-pleasure Guy Ritchie crime films, in which vivid characters and unlikely subplots converge in lush visual mayhem, 7 Minutes is humorless and perfunctory, its heavies and protagonists never so much as aspiring to transcend or challenge the stereotypes they represent.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    102 Dalmatians
    Cruella is once again bent on collecting enough puppy skins to fashion the frock of her dreams. And once again, yawn.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Perfect Score
    "X is to Y, as this shit is to boring."
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stateside
    Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.
  80. Loosies
    Michael Corrente's film is a mush of poses. The director's saga revels in cornball romance, imitation tough-guy attitude, and awkward flashbacks.
  81. Conversations with God
    It's an agreeable enough tale right up until God butts in and starts talking; even if you can swallow the premise, it isn't particularly cinematic to watch a guy endlessly scribbling on legal pads.
  82. The Last Exorcism Part II
    When the creators of The Last Exorcism Part II swapped pseudo-verité realism for psychological realism, they made it a lot harder to take their franchise seriously.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Even if the speechifying is cringingly trite, and even though it's evident from Colin's first frame onscreen that 21 will be Ally's lucky number, at least her roundelay through exes allows for a few scant moments of inspired lunacy, led by Faris's cartoon-perfect vocal talents.
  84. Play the Game
    This Lifetime-ready comedy is hardly provocative--let alone perceptive, funny, or fresh
  85. Family Weekend
    Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness.
  86. Lullaby
    Rarely has the terminal seemed as interminable as it does in Lullaby.
  87. Happy Tears
    Continuing both his bad filmmaking and obsession with lethal orifices, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows up "Teeth," his clumsy debut about a dismembering vagina, with a voluminous explosion of poop.
  88. Proud Mary
    It’s a sad day when the cinematographer carries the full burden of storytelling, but in this instance, it’s also at least a wonderful opportunity to marvel at Laustsen’s work.
  89. Returning Mickey Stern
    The notion of grievingly happening upon your dead beloved, young and lovely again, is simple and potent, but the film's airless amateurism, belabored ethnicism ("Oy gevalt!"), and trite dialogue kill it in the water.
  90. Loser
    The most progressive, good-hearted studio film of the summer.
  91. Friday After Next
    If "Next Friday" approximated smoking the same old shit, FAN is a manically generous Christmas vaudeville.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ghost Rider
    Johnson's a hardcore, dime-store fanboy, not a revisionist-minded fauxteur like Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer, and his giddy, goofball affection for the material sustained my goodwill until his underdeveloped grasp of form and rhythm let it slip away.
  93. Paradise
    There's something to be said for fiction that, in its form, dares to resemble life as it's lived. Our minor failings and chemical imbalances certainly shape our stories. This troubled yet promising debut gets that much right.
  94. Who Killed Nancy?
    An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
  95. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
    Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.
  96. Java Heat
    Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.
  97. Yogi Bear
    Adults will be thrilled to see Anna Faris as nature documentarian Rachel. Greeting Yogi by speaking in "brown bear," the actress never fails to be seriously goofy.
  98. Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    I Spy
    Though ample time is spent mingling Murphy's jabberjaw locutions and Wilson's curveball spaciness, the film leaves only the bitter reek of a botched chemistry experiment.
  100. Fallen Angels Paradise
    Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.
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