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. What's Cooking?
    Trades in sitcom stereotypes and crosscuts predictably from family to family as if under the misapprehension that equal time is a dramatic principle.
  2. Safe Haven
    Hough emits all the charisma of a personal assistant.
  3. Skiptracers
    The primary source of comedy is tiresome pottymouthing.
  4. Starbuck
    The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.
  5. My Brother
    Writer-director Anthony Lover takes such a kid-gloves approach to his handicapped co-star that he achieves the opposite of the intended effect: Every time Scott enters a scene, it's as if someone just told the entire cast "Whatever you do, don't say 'retard.' "
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Going Under
    Just because Rees can play a masochist doesn't mean viewers have to.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Allegro
    Unmotivated jitters and flash-zooms abound, needlessly complicating a flagrantly elaborate premise.
  8. The Better Angels
    Kruger and Clarke do their best to look steadfast with a camera swooping around them like a wounded bird, but there's no rescuing this imprecise family portrait from its own impulses toward obscurity.
  9. The Falls: Testament of Love
    Its soap-opera plot is old hat, and the largely amateurish acting of the ensemble makes it hard to connect with many of the characters.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maestro
    Would be all but unbearable without the excited testimony of the young men and women of color who'd spent their happiest nights at the Loft or the Gallery or Paradise Garage.
  11. The Moth Diaries
    There's no surer way to murder horror than to literalize it, a mistake incessantly made by The Moth Diaries.
  12. Collateral Damage
    Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.
  13. The Guys
    Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.
  14. Hangar 10
    Found-footage horror flicks laboriously source the provenance of every shot, letting us know which camera each image comes from, but they demand that we never wonder who has edited those images together — and to what purpose.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Enter the Dangerous Mind
    Despite its pretensions to social awareness — most clearly embodied in Scott Bakula's concerned-caseworker character — the film displays a luridly exploitative attitude toward mental illness.
  16. To the Arctic
    Arguably a good lesson for kids about preserving our environment, To the Arctic is definitely a threat to our equally endangered good taste.
  17. Think Like a Man Too
    Returning director Tim Story lays out the narrative wares with all the subtlety of a neon sign on the Strip, not that the screenplay from Keith Merryman and David A. Newman (who also co-wrote the first one) gives him much to work with.
  18. The Challenger
    Even the gravitas of Merkerson and Duncan can't save this flimsy construct of boxing-movie clichés. Moran casts himself as a cinematic upstart with The Challenger, but he's punching above his weight.
  19. Gold
    In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.
  20. Chelsea on the Rocks
    Chelsea rambles--and in a way that makes you want to move down the bar.
  21. Bad Words
    Bateman, as both director and star, digs his heels in too hard to make the movie's points, using lots of ho-hum close-ups and wriggly camera work along the way.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Perrier's Bounty
    Ivan Fitzgibbon’s film is so steadfastly blithe that one yearns for a flicker of pretension, some small sign that there’s a guiding principle or purpose.
  23. SuperFly
    For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Perfect Man
    The result is like a Nike commercial without a shot of the sneakers.
  25. Two Night Stand
    The problem isn't that these lustbirds suffer no delusions about their temporary affair. It's that Nichols and screenwriter Mark Hammer can't commit to the cynicism.
  26. The Loft
    The Loft's boorish leads aren't sensible enough to be worth caring about, making the film's character-driven conclusion feel like a self-defeating cop-out.
  27. Quiet Chaos
    Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.
    • 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?
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    In its attempt to diagnose a problem, it ends up serving more as a symptom of the left's current, and sadly warranted, anxieties.
  30. Aftermath
    The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Plunkett & Macleane
    The script is as full of holes as some of the highwaymen's bullet-riddled victims -- why not throw a drum-and-bass track over everything?
  32. The Words
    Hoariest of all are the exhortations to make distinctions between "fiction" and "life."
  33. 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.
  34. Jessabelle
    Greutert's savvy enough to sprinkle some white folks among his houngans and mambos, but Jessabelle still plays out as Haitian traditions ruining the life of a nice-ish white lady.
  35. Alien Outpost
    The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.
  36. The Attacks of 26/11
    Attacks doesn't establish the severity of a real-life tragedy, it only crassly devalues the loss of human life.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Chooch
    Devoid of Sopranos stereotypes, the film charms with its p.c. portrayal of Italian Americans, yet the depiction of Mexicans veers toward the offensive.
  38. Flypaper
    Slick, manic, excruciatingly hollow entry in the exhausted subgenre of misfit bank-heist comedies.
  39. Man of the Year
    Levinson loses his movie, his audience, and his purpose in a tangle of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions that sink the movie just when it begins to transcend expectations. In short, it would have been great if it had stopped, oh, 12 minutes in.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    American Chai
    As earnest as a community-college advertisement, American Chai is enough to make you put away the guitar, sell the amp, and apply to medical school.
  41. Ex-Girlfriends
    The callow behavior that characterizes Ex-Girlfriends' lead would be less maddening had writer/director/star Alexander Poe firmly decided how to portray the bedroom follies of youth.
  42. Monday at 11:01 A.M.
    Instead of beckoning viewers to follow along, Agron's script drags us toward its conspicuous landmarks.
  43. Hyena Road
    This anti-war movie is more passionate about CB radio communication than the horrors of bloodshed.
  44. Your Highness
    Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic.
  45. Tai Chi Hero
    This sequel is sluggish and rote where its predecessor was aggressively perky and desperate to please...Tai Chi Hero is more Tai Chi Business as Usual.
  46. Rounders
    An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.
  47. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Based on characters created by Rodriguez's then-seven-year-old son, Racer Max, the film doesn't belong in wide release. It belongs on a refrigerator door, alongside "100%" spelling tests, old lunch menus, and notices from the PTA.
  48. Undead
    Watching it is a smidgen like listening to the same monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for the 105th time, but for the Spierig brothers, it is clearly a demonstration of fast-cheap capabilities and a one-way ticket straight out of Queensland.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Undiscovered
    A PG-13 dramedy set in L.A. about some attractive, way-too-earnest aspiring stars has the potential to be a delectable good-bad favorite, but Undiscovered is nowhere near the guilty pleasure it could have been.
  50. A Five Star Life
    Nice to look at but tedious to endure, A Five Star Life boasts a muted classiness that doesn't mitigate its phoniness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tokyo Eyes
    Doesn't so much titillate as irritate.
  52. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    This particular rendition of a history often told is little more than propaganda.
  53. Made of Honor
    Director Paul Weiland and the three (!) screenwriters it took to boil down thousands of bad movies into 101 minutes haven't provided this one with a single original thought; it should only entertain those still getting adjusted to the idea of talkies.
  54. Beyond Borders
    It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.
  55. Emperor
    Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.
  56. Barefoot
    The gradual revelation that there's more to Daisy than meets the eye is no great surprise, but it does at least negate — too late! — some of the more troubling subtext.
  57. Dawn Patrol
    The developments keep getting more outrageous from there, with the psychologies of the characters becoming increasingly bizarre.
  58. Confidence
    Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.
  59. I Melt with You
    Stylish cinematography and an awesome punk-and-new-wave soundtrack make the early, music-video-like montages of debauchery at least trashy entertainment, but the film's second half couldn't be more contemptible.
  60. Sex and Death 101
    Stupid monikers are just one symptom of a stultifying, overwritten cleverness that substitutes quirk for character.
  61. 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.
  62. How Sweet It Is
    An extraordinarily undistinguished comedy from director Brian Herzlinger.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Dukes of Hazzard
    Dukes insults not "family values," as the original Cooter claims, just general intelligence. Yee. Haw.
  64. The Replacements
    Lame even by triumph-of-the-underdog sports-comedy standards.
  65. Supremacy
    [A] dour, dreary drama.
  66. Suspended Animation
    Alternately tense and cheesy.
  67. My Name Is Bruce
    The only things missing from this unfunny Campbell love fest are a passable script, Sam Raimi's inventiveness, and a level of sophistication beyond nose-picking and ass grabs.
  68. Gut Renovation
    What a shame it is that Friedrich, so impassioned by her subject matter, couldn’t get enough objectivity to make a film that’s more than just a complaint.
  69. American Mary
    This Canadian film seems to be trying to make some points about body dysphoria or modern fame, but the one point it's absolutely sure of is that [Katharine] Isabelle is a startlingly beautiful woman with a well-proportioned (and exploitable) body.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album."
  71. The Olivia Experiment
    There's a lot of potential in the idea of exploring asexuality in the modern world, but The Olivia Experiment loses it in a sea of clichéd characters.
  72. 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.
  73. Heartbreakers
    Heartbreakers gives redemption a bad name, but gives conniving misanthropy a worse one.
  74. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").
  75. Do Knot Disturb
    Contemporary B'wood movies are not for all tastes, and rarely do they show potential to appeal to mainstream American sensibilities, but Do Knot Disturb is so boorish and shrill that it's easy to mourn all of the great, unfinished films that could be made for just the cost of its item-number budget.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thor
    An astonishingly awkward marriage of ancient Norse mythology and 21st-century nonsense, Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh, works too hard at simply functioning to assert why it, or we, should bother.
  77. Proof of Life
    It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.
  78. Albert Nobbs
    Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.
  79. Love Is in the Air
    Wrapped in slick direction (including plenty of split-screen), this goes down easy, but it's wholly unbelievable. Worse, it's instantly forgettable.
  80. Can We Take a Joke?
    Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.
  81. Grassroots
    By ultimately softening its stance toward McIver, Grassroots disingenuously has it both ways, reducing politics first to a David-versus-Goliath adventure, and then to an everyone-is-cool bowl of mush.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Factory Girl
    Poor little girl, chewed up in the Factory machinery. It was inevitable, perhaps, that a biopic of the Pop princess would stick to pop psychology, but did it have to feel as flat as a silkscreen? With its hackneyed party scenes and jet-set montages, Factory Girl fails even at frivolity.
  83. Life as a House
    So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.
  84. Forsaken
    Amid Kiefer's narrow-eyed glowering, Donald's exhausted-sage routine, and Moore's approximation of rural homeliness, only Wincott seems to fit in, exuding a poised, laconic cold-bloodedness that stands in stark contrast to the film's inert phoniness.
  85. Solomon & Gaenor
    Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.
  86. Radio Free Albemuth
    In an alternate universe, this might be a cult hit; as it is, Albemuth will only be fun for diehards.
  87. Poseidon
    An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.
  88. The Beauty Inside
    Worse than the latent silliness of such a premise is how little the filmmakers ultimately do with the world of narrative possibilities it presents; in attempting to show the universality of love, The Beauty Inside succeeds in showing the opposite.
  89. The Mexican
    Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Untraceable
    Directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by a trio (a trio!) of whomevers, Untraceable hasn't the brains of a class-act psychothriller like "The Silence of the Lambs" (though it does reprise that film's titillating homophobia); worse yet, it lacks the balls to juice up the trashy verve of the "Saw" series.
  91. Project Almanac
    Project Almanac could have been fun, but its creators don't seem to know what fun looks like.
  92. In My Country
    Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day."
  93. Magic in the Moonlight
    The story feels shapeless, un-tailored, defiantly off the rack.
  94. They Remain
    They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.
  95. Thunderbirds
    As the dapper Lady Penelope, Sophia Myles tries to infuse the enterprise with some "Charlie's Angels" verve, but she's only one life vest, and the movie is a downed plane.
  96. The Company You Keep
    Far from engaged, the film practically surrenders in an arthritic faint.
  97. The Road Within
    This is, of course, a movie about affliction, and it ultimately succumbs to the bland, sentimental uplift we've come to expect from such outings.
  98. 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.
  99. Catch Hell
    Catch Hell suffers from both a drowsy start and a dragging ending.
  100. Cost of a Soul
    Kirkpatrick's color-deficient visual scheme is sturdy, but it can't compensate for a mechanical, unsubtle script.
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