Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Wedding Ringer
    Hart rants, Gad fidgets, and together this pair barrels through the plot, shaping between them a surprisingly potent friendship.
  2. Escape from Planet Earth
    Escape From Planet Earth makes a compelling case for our disposable culture to finally get wiped out by malevolent aliens.
  3. Diana
    Diana is a Lifetime movie in sensible pumps, at once too silly to be taken seriously, yet so self-serious it rarely allows us to giggle.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannibal Rising
    This comically fastidious telling of the Hannibal Lecter origin story completes the extreme makeover of grindhouse fare that "The Silence of the Lambs" started 15 years ago. Meaning: Respectable audiences who wouldn't be caught dead at a (sniff!) horror movie still want severed heads; they just want the bloody meal served on Royal Dalton china.
  5. Self/less
    [Singh's] film is good with physics and lousy at philosophy.
  6. The Other Man
    It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple's quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking.
  7. Red Planet
    A pale, patchy amalgam of the year's two unfairly reviled interplanetary adventures, "Supernova" and "Mission to Mars," the lunkheaded Red Planet distinguishes itself with a touching pretense of scientific veracity.
  8. Mission to Mars
    Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.
  9. Wake
    Fraught with sophomoric lost-innocence metaphors and schematic oedipal tensions.
  10. Bewitched
    To spend even 10 minutes in the movie's universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.
  11. The Assignment
    The film is wallpapered with beatings, shootings and bloodshed, so its genuine sensitivity to trans issues is welcome and surprising.
  12. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    It’s as if somebody wrote out the basic setup, figured they would flesh out the character bits and plot twists and jokes later … and then never got around to it. It’s dispiriting and infuriating all at once.
  13. A Long Way Down
    The group's surprising anchor is Maureen, the single mother of an adult son with cerebral palsy; her fierce love and stifling isolation are contained by careful routine. Collette wears that armor, and cracks it, to devastating effect.
  14. Twice Born
    Sergio Castellitto's Twice Born irresponsibly appropriates the horrific siege of Sarajevo to serve as aesthetic backdrop for a story that exhibits no real interest in the conflict.
  15. The Forest
    Before devolving into the same series of demonic faces and jump-scares we've seen time and again, The Forest is a genuinely unnerving mood piece.
  16. Bitter Harvest
    A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Me Again
    Just your run-of-the-mill indie sex comedy until the third act, when it veers into charmingly shrill, "Mommie Dearest"–style melodrama.
  18. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    Above all, it will make you long for a day when studio movies about relationships feel like they are by and for adults who have actually been in one.
  19. Loudmouth Soup
    This micro-budget amateur-acting exercise plays like "The Anniversary Party" without the frisson of marquee performers behaving badly. We get F-listers playing at being marquee performers behaving badly.
  20. Copperhead
    Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.
  21. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    Bullock manages medium charm, but you gotta feel for King, forced to play dat-bitch-crazy butch to Bullock's untrammeled femme.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tamara
    Genre jolts arise in spite of stylistic failures.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    On the Line
    Less a romance than a feature-length plug for 'N Sync and its personalities -- and so, like all ads, not meant for "conscious consumption." Which opens the blissful avenue of sleep.
  24. My Life in Ruins
    A strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos's tour group as a uniformly ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece itself as a badly plumbed third-world hellhole run by lazy, Zorba-dancing louts.
  25. The Happening
    What a bunch of nonsense--effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
  26. Aloft
    The writer-director's ideas about our connection to the land and the many other animals roaming it may well be profound, but they're buried under layers of superfluous storytelling devices. A better title would have been Adrift.
  27. The Dark Tower
    Outside of its actors, the film is unremarkable.
  28. The Last Witch Hunter
    The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.
  29. The Color of Time
    Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?
  30. Sleepless
    Monaghan and Foxx, for all their gifts, can't transcend the material, though they do get more out of it than most others would be able to.
  31. $pent
    So committed to its by-the-numbers banality you wonder why it isn't part of the fall TV lineup.
  32. 15 Minutes
    15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.
  33. Dead or Alive: Final
    Scene-by-scene, things happen, but you'd be hard-pressed to say what or why; occasionally, a poetic moment leaps out of the soup.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Haunted Mansion
    Lamer than Tiny Tim on a damp London day.
  35. Bert and Arnie's Guide to Friendship
    Enjoyment of Jeff Kaplan's film will vary given your capacity to simultaneously laugh and wink at the hijinks of two of the least palatable characters to share screen time in recent years.
  36. Festival of Lights
    Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.
  37. Get Hard
    Get Hard is most comfortable — and funny — when Cohen gets back to skewering class warfare.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Take Care
    It's only in the closing moments when Tuccillo lets up, delivering a skip-into-the-sunset ending that seems a bit canned. Take Care's laughs feel better than its romance.
  39. Law Abiding Citizen
    If the filmmakers meant a word of it, they'd quit making films and do something more useful. "Saw" with a conscience is not what the world needs.
  40. Russian Doll
    The cheesy idiot-twin of Pawel Pawlikowski's superb "Last Resort."
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th
    This means that for one ticket price, you get three shoddy Friday the 13th movies packed into one, which might constitute entertainment value if any one of them constituted entertainment.
  42. The Late Bloomer
    Though Pollak's direction in his first narrative feature is solid, The Late Bloomer is mostly an excuse for predictable sex jokes and ample toplessness.
  43. Beyond the Reach
    Madec and Ben's showdown becomes a battle to see which type of man is best equipped for survival: the well-funded scoundrel or the honest grunt. The film is too honest itself to always give us the answer we want. It's also too dully on-the-nose to entertain.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hide Away
    The film stays afloat, if barely, thanks to Elliot Davis's uncluttered camerawork, a surprisingly unsentimental denouement, and performers who deftly undersell the script's corniest pretensions.
  45. 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.
  46. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    Cage-ophiles will find some delectable freakouts in Blaze's transformation - or near transformation - scenes. Otherwise, the committee-penned script combines yokel-friendly haw-haw irreverence (non-sequitur cutaways to the Rider pissing in a flamethrower pattern) and sweaty monologues about "controlling the Rider" (the character is basically a mean drunk's superhero).
  47. Looking for Palladin
    Requiring cuts, some sense of direction, and dialogue that doesn't either declare or dither, the film looks like it was fun to make.
  48. Mother's Day
    Mother's Day is distinguished, at least, by De Mornay's porcelain-smile lampoon of castigating matriarchy.
  49. Motherhood
    Dieckmann nails the look of a certain niche of urban neo-middle-class living, but the film's hyper-earnest tone and reliance on "day-from-hell" New York clichés overwhelm those details.
  50. Fireflies in the Garden
    Despite an A-list roster, the performances are universally one-note, a fact largely attributable to a script overflowing with blunt dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism.
  51. The Longest Week
    Lacking any significant character arc or motivation, The Longest Week is little more than a series of insipid conversations between bored aristocrats who snark at each other in monotone.
  52. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    It manages to be both ponderous and silly.
  53. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    As one five-year-old critic at the press screening astutely observed during a would-be sensitive moment: "Boooorrring!"
  54. The Ledge
    Even if The Ledge couldn't be written off as a hollow polemic, there's also the lifeless drama, laughable dialogue, chintzy sets, and poor lighting to grapple with.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doom
    As dumb as they come, the entertaining Doom might warrant a place in cinema history as the first movie in which someone rips off their own ear.
  56. The Smurfs 2
    Its tolerant messages remain buried beneath lame pop-culture references, hectic slapstick, fart jokes, and endless Smurf-puns that—Azaria's funny, over-the-top cartoon villainy aside—make one pine for the Smurfpocalypse.
  57. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    It’s so gorgeous you can sometimes forget the train wreck of a story. But only sometimes.
  58. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thr3e
    Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma.
  60. The Fourth Kind
    A couple of modestly effective shocks lie in store.
  61. Stolen
    It's uncertain whether or not Taranto and debuting helmer Anders Anderson looked at the "Law & Order: SVU" and "Cold Case" episodes that also used the crime as a plot thread; the sub-televisual incompetence of their film suggests not.
  62. Baggage Claim
    There are a handful of laughs, but nothing to balance the onslaught of clichés.
  63. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Testosterone
    We're teased with the prospect of a deeper context.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    The only rationale for the production seems to be that the pair were gay, and therein lies the main problem with this uninspired example of queer-film-festival filler.
  66. The Wait
    The pained, textured performances of Sevigny and Malone enrich their scenes, but when it ranges away from its leads, The Wait can seem like an anthology of moments rather than a narrative whole, although those moments do accumulate into a mood of chilly, gently surreal isolation.
  67. Angels in Stardust
    the film's occasional fits of comic inanity — locals ranting about aliens, conversations about two-headed dogs — are certainly embarrassing. But its attempts at melodrama are outright repugnant.
  68. The Possession of Michael King
    After a promising start, rote possession imagery eventually becomes the focus, culminating in a by-the-numbers ending.
  69. Sex Ed
    Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.
  70. Bringing Up Bobby
    The movie permanently downshifts to moralizing melodrama and retrograde Stella Dallas–like maternal sacrifice when Bobby has an accidental run-in with real estate magnate Kent (Bill Pullman).
  71. Beneath
    Beneath exhausts the appeal of its thinly sketched characters almost as soon as they're trapped together in the mine's emergency bunker, and it isn't long before Ketai, tiring of human drama, turns instead toward the supernatural.
  72. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ninja Assassin
    A triple-cross plot with Harris's superiors doesn't help the movie's clarity--neither does the clattering sound design. Shouldn't throwing stars be silent? If they're gonna sound like gunshots, why not just use guns?
  74. Devil's Due
    Devlin's script tips its hand so early on that Devil's Due lumbers toward a woefully flat, predictable ending, and the unwelcome promise of something truly demonic — sequels.
  75. Siberia
    This movie so badly wants to be a sexy thriller, but it is neither sexy nor thrilling.
  76. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    The filmmakers capture a battle for the soul of a state and country; we're all damned, no matter our choice of red or blue, unless things change sooner than later, says a movie that will divide like nothing since Michael Moore took the nation's temperature.
  77. Isn't She Great
    Aspires to be both stylish and coarse, camp and vulgar -- which is pretty much how Bette Midler plays it.
  78. Chelsea Walls
    The digital-video results play like a flatulent teenager's first discovery of jazz, cigarettes, and hooch.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Basic
    Such confusion makes the script-flipping finale something of a respite, as it gives one an excuse to forget everything that's happened.
  80. ATM
    After memorably sealing Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in "Buried," screenwriter Chris Sparling's attempts to make a two-ATM vestibule equally claustrophobic are less inspired.
  81. Jellyfish Eyes
    Jellyfish Eyes may be blessedly unpretentious, but it's also immediately unmoving and relentlessly boring.
  82. Even Money
    The problem with ensemble films, and this one in particular, is that they often flit instead of float between story arcs. With deep lags in momentum, it is this lack of cohesion that nearly cancels out what can be great about ensemble films: the performances.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential. As creaky nonsense goes, though, this is chock-full of corny goodness down to its hilarious sense-shredding "twist," which the movie reveals like a magician proudly unveiling a dead rabbit.
  84. Hellions
    Hellions is unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Momma's House 2
    Lawrence is an ingratiating performer, sarcastic and sentimental, and does inventive work with a swivel chair, a bathing suit, and steaming rocks. He's helped along by Emily Procter, who plays the overworked wife and should be freed from "CSI: Miami" as soon as possible.
  86. Refuge
    Even at its well-meaning best, Refuge is listless.
  87. Knife Fight
    Throughout, Knife Fight feels like TV, like a half-season of some promising cable show stuffed into a 98-minute film that never really builds or surprises.
  88. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentine's Day
    Shoddy enough within its primary genre, Valentine's Day becomes deadly in its attempt to be a Los Angeles Ensemble Movie.
  90. The Girl
    Agathe de la Boulaye, as The Painter, gives off an appealing air of good-natured amusement, which is appropriate given her surroundings.
  91. Just One Time
    An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Snow Day
    A family film that's about as fluffy as fresh powder.
  93. All About the Benjamins
    Glitz and speed help alleviate cavernous plot holes and rote gangsta misogyny, while the gleeful violence, pointlessly sappy lulls, and racial sparring are leavened a bit by capricious auto-critique.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq
    An interesting cross between a Frontline exposé and "World's Scariest Weapons Inspections Videos."
  95. Into My Heart
    Anemic.
  96. Otto; or, Up with Dead People
    Campy but not comical, reactionary but not very clever, LaBruce's film is best saved for those tickled by the sight of homo-zombie orgies or the hardcore penetration of an open wound.
  97. Shutterbug
    Papas leans too heavily on expected street types (a black pimp, multi-ethnic skate punks) to populate his underworld, but he compensates with expressionistic HD photography and eerie electronic doodling to sustain an impossible mood of productive unease.
  98. 21 and Over
    The movie rambles in a way that dilutes any possibility of edgy discomfort. Lucas and Moore have good control over the timing within the gags; it's the spaces between them that stretch out awkwardly. You can't hate 21 & Over, and you can't laugh at it. The most you can do is just pity it for not being as outrageous as it thinks it is.
  99. Safe Haven
    Hough emits all the charisma of a personal assistant.
  100. The Real Cancun
    There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »