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 Human Scale
    The Human Scale lacks both the punch needed to appeal to the layperson and the deep wonkiness to gain the attention of true geeks of the built environment.
  2. Mindless Behavior: All Around the World
    Throughout the film, Mindless Behavior's four interchangeable members only project youthful enthusiasm and PR-friendly love for their fans.
  3. Writer of O
    Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.
  4. Chronically Metropolitan
    Director Xavier Manrique’s film fails to drum up more than clichés about rich-people problems.
  5. The Princess and the Warrior
    Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cold Creek Manor
    CCM's dissipated endgame borrows soggily from "The Ring," resulting in something that wouldn't make it past the first script meeting for Scary Movie 4.
  7. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    The script is often ludicrous (gratuitous digs at feminism; muddled commentary on war and the military), the sets look like sets, and the acting-aside from Helsham and Plunkett-doesn't even rise to the level of student films.
  8. Jim Brown: All American
    Since Lee is a sentimentalist, the film is more worshipful than your random "E! True Hollywood Story."
  9. Warm Bodies
    The film's intentions are way too good for its own good, producing bloodless romance and more shamefully bloodless carnage.
  10. Mother's Day
    By far the highest concentration of actual humor comes during the blooper reel over the end credits; free of the script’s saccharine constraints, the performers immediately demonstrate their chops.
  11. The Perfect Family
    Renton's competing tones and intentions result in a film at odds with itself and its lead performance.
  12. Brave New Jersey
    Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.
  13. My King
    The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.
  14. End of Days
    85 percent explosions and editing idiocy (a window can't break without director Peter Hyams cutting between five different angles) and 15 percent Arnold trying to grow a third dimension. Seeing him try for "sad" is like watching a dog try to talk.
    • 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.
  16. Garfield
    No one can accuse Garfield: The Movie of infidelity to its source: It faithfully conveys the banality of Jim Davis's cartoon.
  17. Terraferma
    It's all very predictable, very Hollywood. Storytelling cliché, it would seem, knows no borders.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Saw III
    This is laughably absurd, but unlike the first "Saw," the third installment gives no indication that its humor is intentional.
  19. Lost in La Mancha
    The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.
  20. Go North
    Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.
  21. The Hunted
    Essentially a reheating of 1982's "First Blood" -- a psychologically wounded warrior-vet pits himself against civilized America -- but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller.
  22. The 24th Day
    No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).
  23. Sugar Town
    Neither as lively nor as tough as the original, and compared to the hardcore punk of "Border Radio," the score for Sugar Town sounds like Muzak.
  24. The Forgiven
    Unfortunately, this movie has so many damn things percolating all through it that it ultimately seems unfocused and painfully earnest.
  25. Backtrack
    Between the generic shadowy cinematography and a gothic score that manages to telegraph even the film's jump-scares, there's no tangible tension by which to build an effective climax.
  26. The ABCs of Death
    What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Last Man
    If The Last Man were the last movie left on earth, there would be a toss-up between presiding over the end of cinema as we know it and another night of delightful hand shadows.
  28. The 6th Day
    Offers director Roger Spottiswoode a chance to have the worst actor in Beverly Hills play scenes with himself.
  29. Dedication
    "Inland Empire's" Justin Theroux pops his directorial cherry with this obnoxious Sundance throwaway, a by-the-numbers romantic comedy that mistakenly believes it's either too quirky or too irreverent to be a by-the-numbers romantic comedy.
  30. Push
    Seems to have been made up as it was being filmed.
  31. 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.
  32. Unmasked Judeophobia
    Greenfield works against her own interests with absurdly selective arguments and sloppy filmmaking.
  33. Jackpot
    Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.
  34. The Book Thief
    The Book Thief is just too tidy to have much impact.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Backseat
    Bruce Van Dusen's 2005 comedy plots a meandering course due north without locating a word of truth.
  36. The Dukes
    How, though, to resent a work of such deliberate inconsequence?
  37. 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.
  38. Paris-Manhattan
    Shallow, witless but pretty enough French ode to Woody Allen.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Whatever her limitations, Argento the actor makes certain that Argento the director doesn't lack for "action"--and that the audience doesn't lack for pain.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garmento
    The story has too many characters, about whom we know too little.
  41. The Cruise
    The Cruise is being hailed as a harbinger of a future in which indie film will be liberated by low-cost technology. If this is where we're going, I want off the bus.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cloud of Unknowing
    Stilted lines alternate with ominous pauses and an annoying Pure Moods score tinkling around an oppressive sound design.
  43. 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.
  44. Absolution
    Absolution is an unconvincing showcase for Byron Mann, a new action star to whom Steven Seagal halfheartedly tries to pass a torch.
  45. Friended to Death
    You can sense the director, Sarah Smick, gearing up to make a point. It proves rather obvious: Real connections are meaningful and too much Facebook is bad. But isn't the real problem more insidious?
  46. Piñero
    At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tristan and Isolde
    Myles deserves better, but acquits herself as admirably as one can mired in medieval muck.
  48. Pavilion of Women
    Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Home Fries
    The just plain folks in Home Fries -- down home, slightly slow, and desperate for happiness -- would make great Jerry Springer Show guests if they weren't so damned pretty.
  50. Fighting Tommy Riley
    Outrageously sentimental and retrograde.
  51. The Cherry Orchard
    Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.
  52. The Lie
    Weixler is an alert, mobile comedienne who deserves better than this awkward pause, nervous stammer, social-anxiety comedy.
    • 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.
  54. Bodyguard
    The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.
  55. Our Day Will Come
    The exhausting and unrelatable Our Day Will Come escalates to a violent rampage as essentially unpleasant and nonsensical as its characters.
  56. The Ladykillers
    The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity.
  57. The Girl in the Photographs
    [A] grim, film-school-sloppy horror-thriller.
  58. Nurse 3D
    If the onscreen serial killer isn't having fun, how can we?
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mother of Tears
    A once-great director's near-worst work passes through its funhouse plumbing and emerges from the crapper as intentional mischief: self-sabotage explained away as mad genius.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    EuroTrip
    Eurotrip's constant anxiety that women might turn out to be men and vice versa makes this command especially fraught.
  61. Kai po che!
    The dramatic stakes are so puny that every obstacle can be overcome with a simple work-it-out montage.
  62. The Outsider
    Fairbrass proves a hulking wannabe ass-kicker without much distinctive charisma, and his leaden performance is matched by sleepy, one-note supporting turns by the slumming-it Patric and Caan.
  63. Videocracy
    Videocracy is hopelessly infected with the very prurience it means to expose--again and again, Gandini returns to images of pretty women grinding away for the camera in hopes of scoring their 15 minutes.
  64. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    The phoniness of their cross-country saga is compounded by a gaggle of cipher sidekicks.
  65. The Ring
    Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.
  66. Trade
    It's pure exploitation--the kind of movie after which you need a long, hot shower. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like "Traffic" and "Syriana"--clearly his role models--but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's "Hardcore."
  67. Nanny McPhee Returns
    McPhee's latest saga neither conjures the humanistic heart of "Babe" nor addresses father-son separation issues with the sobriety of "The Water Horse." Instead, it's merely a compendium of photocopied elements, cartoonish special effects, and easy-bake happily-ever-afters.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Thing About My Folks
    Falk isn't given anything funny to say or do, but his performance is littered with beautiful touches, tiny oases of brilliance in an entertainment desert.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Perception
    This should be funny or sad, but it's neither, in this incoherent cross between "Riding the Bus With My Sister" and a Christina Ricci vehicle.
  70. Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
  71. Last Knights
    While Kiriya can shoot a sword fight, his preferred pace is glacial. He wants to make sure the audience feels every plot point.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Three Days of Rain
    The real subversion is director Michael Meredith's insistence on not capturing interactions between human beings in a frame; with some forethought he could have filmed the actors individually and spliced.
  73. Compulsion
    The game of wills that ensues between the two women isn't terribly interesting, much less suspenseful, and in fact, it's not clear that director Egidio Coccimiglio and screenwriter Floyd Byars ever settled on whether they were making a thriller or a satire about food and celebrity.
  74. The Smurfs
    Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.
  75. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.
  76. Playing for Keeps
    Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.
  77. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    The actors still give it their all in Allegiant, but there's only so much they can do with such a clunky, verbose script. And on the rare occasion that the film actually quiets its characters down and delivers something resembling action, it's woefully inert.
  78. Captain Pantoja and the Special Services
    Sadly, most of Lombardi's movie is too doggedly mediocre to cut loose, overheated (and quite lovely) cinematography notwithstanding.
  79. Man on the Train
    Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zhou Yu de huo che
    Devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances.
  81. Black Butterfly
    Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Losers
    A busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, poorly acted by a grab bag of new faces and franchise movie refugees, and set to a hard-rock soundtrack.
  83. Any Given Sunday
    Like a visual concussion.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kamikaze Girls
    If you value plausibility in movies, skip Kamikaze Girls; this is the sort of picture where getting run over by a truck gives a character gorgeous hair instead of a broken hip.
  85. Blade II
    Appallingly violent.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Milkshake
    The fact that Jolie isn't very likable would be less of a problem if this film were actually funny, but his selfish disregard for those around him only ends up making us feel bad for the people who care about him.
  87. Plastic
    For a film with shootouts, heists, and high-speed chases, Julian Gilbey's Plastic is a strangely lifeless affair.
  88. Bad Samaritan
    There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.
  89. 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.
  90. 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.
  91. Away We Go
    The road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever, which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. Mendes, too, seems to have trouble getting on board with the underachieving set.
  92. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Easily.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    Give 'em a handicap for making a 20-minute man go 90--still, it's not enough.
  94. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    Without characters whose fates we care about, nor fully comprehend, even the most visceral shocks are just that: impressive moments with no lingering terror.
  95. Spun
    The traumatized critic must struggle to avoid capital letters in urging patrons to steer clear of the colorfully cast but unbearable Spun.
  96. Bubble Boy
    The coke-fried gibbons behind Bubble Boy came to a trailblazing conclusion: The ideal filmic oddity is white, male, and -- a mother's deception notwithstanding -- perfectly healthy.
    • 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.
  98. Chaplin of the Mountains
    Self-taught Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's mostly English-language drama...is deadened by milquetoast characters, uninspired landscape photography, and no perceptible stakes.
  99. Insidious: Chapter 3
    Tepid ghost story Insidious: Chapter 3 tries and fails to emphasize character-driven drama over cheap, jump-scare-intensive thrills.
  100. Children of Heaven
    Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.
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