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 Brothers
    An epidemic of solipsism breaks out among four lifelong African American friends when one of them announces his impending nuptials. Cringe-inducing slapstick jockeys for screen time with undermotivated high-volume confrontation.
  2. Before I Disappear
    What makes this minefield of sphincter-clenching sassy bons mots even harder to stomach is the uninspired photography, which impassionedly pleads for significance through use of slow motion, bokeh-effect streetlights, and close-ups.
  3. Mad As Hell
    If Napier hadn't shown up with a camera, Uygur would likely have continued filming himself, because his "firebrand" commentary is only ostensibly about politics; it's mostly about projecting the world onto his own ego and making it Cenk Uygur–shaped.
  4. Esther Kahn
    This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.
  5. Lake City
    Added to the general torpidity and twangy tropes of this Southern family drama is the discomfort of watching a natural actor (Garity) force it.
  6. Fugly!
    It's a comedy that's so broad and cartoony that the occasional dramatic pivots seem diminished and ridiculous, like performing a soliloquy on a Chuck E. Cheese stage.
  7. Rid of Me
    Rid of Me is a bad movie, but at least it's a flailing, innocent badness.
  8. A Haunted House
    Are the movie's half-dozen genuine laughs there just to tease the audience? What can we do to keep "A Haunted House 2" from happening?
  9. Saved!
    An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.
  10. The Pawnbroker
    A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.
  11. Camera Obscura
    Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.
  12. The Reaping
    Those two age-old foes--science and blind faith--tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues being visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater.
  13. Meet Joe Black
    This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.
  14. Viva la Libertà
    From Dave to The Dictator, politicians-replaced-by-doppelgängers has long been a favorite comedy movie device — yet never has it been employed for more torturous faux-funny business than in Viva la Libertà.
  15. Get the Girl
    By the time the final half-hour rolls around, the film descends into twist-ridden, ridiculous madness. It becomes as messy and unattractive as the blood and brain matter that gets scattered throughout.
  16. I, Frankenstein
    It doesn't come close to working, but it's sweet that they tried.
  17. Thale
    Any initial, intriguing otherworldly atmosphere is negated by answers that are more pedestrian than terrifying.
  18. Welcome to Happiness
    As we plod along, attempting to figure out how the sprawling ensemble players all fit together, the mystery and symbolism of what's truly behind the door grows less profound and more irritating.
  19. Alexander
    Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.
  20. The Valley
    In her feature debut, Kariat has touched upon important themes — the immigrant experience, ageism in tech, the performance of traditional family roles, and the toll of depression — but the way she has combined them too often feels slapdash.
  21. Raise Your Voice
    The God-squad answer to Todd Graff's "Camp."
  22. Go Goa Gone
    Most jokes don't translate very well in Go Goa Gone, a Bollywood horror comedy influenced by Shaun of the Dead.
  23. The Intern
    The spongy subtext of this and every Meyers movie is "We're being serious, but we're also being FUN!" No viewer must ever be made to think too much, feel too much, or be left out. She doesn't so much tell a story as lead a team-building exercise.
  24. Narcopolis
    There's simply too much going on to establish characters.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Latter Days
    Cox's tacky melodrama is indeed sub-par, but no worse than numerous gay indies.
  26. 1911
    If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.
  27. Gigli
    Gigli berates, insults, dismisses, throttles, and bellows at Bartha's meticulously aped retard, and then turns sensitive and warm—it's hard to decide which attitude is more insulting.
  28. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.
  29. Cool It
    The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Barber
    Only Glenn, whose taciturn performance is punctuated by flashes of genuine menace, lifts The Barber to "watchable."
  31. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.
  32. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died
    That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.
  33. Angela's Ashes
    Lacks development and dramatic coherence.
  34. Hatchet II
    This time out, Green is not as self-aware, devoting a solid hour of his film's 90-minute running time to pre-mayhem character development so witless and dull that Hatchet II might as well be "Friday the 13th, Part 14."
  35. Fists of Legend
    The battles are staged with moderate intensity but a dispiriting lack of surprise that's also characteristic of the story in general.
  36. Fallen Angels Paradise
    Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.
  37. He liu
    The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.
  38. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Although Thornton and co-writer Tom Epperson are clearly trying to get to some essential truth about the ways in which machismo hinders love, their insights are scattered and pedestrian.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies.
  40. Hollow in the Land
    The stench of needlessly convoluted derivativeness lingers throughout this flick.
  41. My Piece of the Pie
    A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.
  42. 96 Souls
    That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.
  43. One Bright Shining Moment
    Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.
  44. Julien Donkey-Boy
    A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.
  45. Meet the Mormons
    Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.
  46. Welcome to Mooseport
    Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sky Blue
    Most of the action is tedious, and the less you pay attention to the dialogue, the less you'll feel your hand inadvertently twitching as if with joystick.
  48. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    As filmmaking it's drearily anonymous — proof, if we needed it, that writing a screenplay via referendum is not a great idea.
  49. Labor Day
    Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the work of a pod person. Humans, film lovers, and fans of Reitman's till-now-flawless filmography: We've gotta fight back.
  50. En kærlighedshistorie
    Another in a line of Dogme half-wits whose madness is posited as a state of tortured grace, the young wife in Kira's Reason is a woman well past the verge.
  51. A Strange Course of Events
    Its emotions prove curiously inconsistent, hinting at darkness but never committing fully.
  52. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.
  53. Girl on a Bicycle
    Girl on a Bicycle is like Micki + Maude minus the outrage, complexity, or crack timing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    Shrill family comedy.
  55. Snitch
    Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise?
  58. November Criminals
    What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Scorpion King
    Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.
  60. Rio, I Love You
    Even more than in Paris, Je T'Aime and New York, I Love You, this latest omnibus in producer Emmanuel Benbihy's "Cities of Love" franchise might leave viewers wondering whether these needed to be set in Rio de Janeiro at all.
  61. Club Life
    Ferrara, best known as "Turtle" on HBO's Entourage, plays what is essentially a muted version of that character. Abeckaser is more believable, which is unsurprising, since the movie is loosely based on his own experiences.
  62. First Descent
    Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.
  63. The Green Inferno
    Roth amplifies that exploitation flick's least interesting components (gore, cruelty) at the expense of all others.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Emile
    Odd beginning permits viewers to leave after five minutes and know what happens. Those remaining are left with the full tome, its 92-minute length hiding an experience as draining as "Heaven's Gate."
  65. Dummy
    It has Adrien Brody in his last pre-"Pianist" role, leading one to assume that the film -- which veers torpidly from antic humor to mortifying sentimentality -- would have remained shelved were it not for his Oscar coup.
  66. The Thirteenth Floor
    It'll make you cyberlaugh, it'll make you cybercry, just like cyberlife -- One thing is certain: your boredom
  67. 15 Minutes
    15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.
  68. Roger Dodger
    First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.
  69. The Tale of Despereaux
    Clumsily wedged in like a TV commercial between deafening stunts, the emotional storytelling sinks without trace, leaving you with only one flawed character to cling to.
  70. Shirin in Love
    There's very little to distinguish this from every other characterless rom-com with a demographically marketable hook.
  71. Harry + Max
    A swirl of messy boundaries and loony dialogue.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Human Error
    On a spare stage set, Dresser's clever script is allowed breadth for contemplation; here it's sodden with animated sludge. Watch it with your eyes closed.
  73. Smokers Only
    Detached performances and a murky sound mix further the sense of suspended animation.
  74. Trade of Innocents
    Not for the first time in films, noble intent is at odds with aesthetics.
  75. Jellyfish Eyes
    Jellyfish Eyes may be blessedly unpretentious, but it's also immediately unmoving and relentlessly boring.
    • 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.
  77. Dead Awake
    Under the direction of Phillip Guzman, the whole affair plods along in by-the-numbers fashion, and the characters are all types, displaying little evidence of interior lives.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fuel
    Those outside the bio-church aren't likely to drive--even on regular and currently cheap gasoline--to see Fuel at their local theater.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    From Other Worlds
    There's no beguilement to this toothless caprice by writer- director Barry Strugatz, who may intend a spoof of '50s melodramas and alien abductions but delivers instead an inert doodle.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hostel: Part II
    Eli Roth punks capitalism all the way to the bank with cheap tricks and bankrupt imagination.
  81. Orphan
    Silly, overlong, and bloody as hell, Orphan is likely to turn a sweet profit, money that Leo (DiCaprio), the renowned do-gooder, should spend with shame.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mail Order Wife
    Less a film, more a series of ragtag gags.
  83. Burning Blue
    Honorable in intent but risible in execution.
  84. Agnes Browne
    Soft-boiled blarney so sluttish with Hollywood clichés it could've been made in Burbank.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fog
    Making concessions at every turn to the youth-horror market, the film slashes the ages of its protagonists by some 15 years, and its IQ follows suit.
  86. One Night at McCool's
    Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.
  87. Ironclad: Battle for Blood
    Co-writer/director Jonathan English ups the viscera and nudity at the expense of a compelling narrative, which was hardly the original’s strong suit (if indeed it had one) anyway.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    Neel is a compelling subject, but she's more alive in one of her paintings than in all of the voluminous video footage her grandson thrusts upon us.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All Relative
    All Relative requires a strenuous suspension of disbelief. As Harry struggles through this surreality toward love, his mother-daughter love triangle yields few laughs and instead delivers disappointing moments.
  90. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Chaste, oddly bloodless, and nearly plotless saga.
  91. The Drowning
    The deeper Tom wades into this psychological morass, the more Danny's volatile behavior seems dictated by the screenwriters' convenience rather than by any plausible depiction of a tortured mind.
  92. Sirius
    Amardeep Kaleka's documentary often seems like little more than preaching-to-the-converted, New Age drivel.
  93. Manderlay
    All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.
  94. 13
    Lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset.
  95. Sex, Love & Salsa
    This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.
  96. Dead Man Down
    It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.
  97. Xingu
    The white saviors are flat, 2D manifestations of virtue... And the film's Indians? They aren't characters at all.
  98. Men of Honor
    The filmmakers at once coarsen and dilute a fascinating life into a lumpy puddle of punishing inspirational hokum.
  99. Echoes of War
    However you view the western in American filmmaking — as a moth-eaten relic or an eternal form to be resurrected every few years — there's something stale about Kane Senes's tepid historical drama Echoes of War, which utilizes the genre's symbols without delivering on its potential for moral or narrative satisfaction.
  100. The Identical
    A cardboard cutout of a movie.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »