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. Haunt
    The frustration here comes from the filmmakers' inability to present characters with dimension, so that we might come to identify with them and their fears.
  2. I Dreamed of Africa
    Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.
  3. Soul Plane
    Coming off a memorable supporting turn in Starsky & Hutch, Snoop Dogg is sadly underutilized as the stoner pilot.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sleepover
    Nussbaum's attempt to capture the 'tween zeitgeist fails: The Spice Girls–infused soundtrack is dated, and the feel-good progressiveness forced.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Smug, sanitized fantasy.
  6. New York Minute
    The whole project reeks of vanity, but it doesn't take a Columbia degree to see that any movie where the Michelle Tanners trudge via sewer from CPS to 125th is an instant camp classic.
  7. Jenny's Wedding
    Lazy, schmaltzy, and on-the-nose from its Hallmark-friendly production design to its rancid pop-music cues and naive dialogue.
  8. Cat Run
    Janet McTeer, at least, delights as MI6's cruelly capable answer to Mary Poppins. She's a whiz at testicular vivisection, yet she still cannot save this film.
  9. The Longest Ride
    A good romance can make us endure an implausible plot as long as the leads have heat. Luke and Sophia's connection feels true. Who cares about the mechanics? By the time The Longest Ride runs right off a cliff, we're already strapped in to the passenger seat. Give in and enjoy the plunge.
  10. Red Roses and Petrol
    Tamar Simon Hoffs's bland-as-boiled-cabbage adaptation of Joseph O'Connor's play finally hobbles into theaters.
  11. Can't Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police
    A staid rock 'n' roll museum piece.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Leap Year
    Leap Year belongs to the Prada backlash subgenre of women's pictures--epitomized by "The Proposal"--in which smart, stylish women must be muddied, abased, ridiculed, and degraded in order to get their man.
  13. The Punisher
    With topical revenge fantasies already available (Dogville, the Kill Bills) and with Roy Scheider on hand as a gun-loving paterfamilias, The Punisher mismanages its greatest asset: an unusual embarrassment of camp riches.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garmento
    The story has too many characters, about whom we know too little.
  15. 7 Year Zig Zag
    Green, saucer-eyed, cokey, frying in flop sweat, gives the viewer the shrill thrill of being in someone else's nightmare. But the songs? Swung, man, swung.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Loners
    Contains exactly three decent jokes, all stuffed in the last 15 minutes.
  17. Chlorine
    Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World Order
    Neither a call to alarm nor a laugh-at-the-loonies yukfest, the doc charts a temperate middle course through its subjects' heated rhetoric.
  19. Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity
    This film struggles to do justice to his many accomplishments, shortchanging his artistry.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Wedding Date
    Clare Kilner's cast frolics in the countryside in an appropriately British-romantic-comedy fashion, and at times the characters trade silly snaps, but Dana Fox's screenplay is structurally shaky.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Less a documentary than a glowing two-hour infomercial for Sarah Palin, Presidential Candidate To-Be.
  22. The Ex
    The movie is Bateman's to steal, however, which he does early and often.
  23. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    Every Thing Will Be Fine is torturously slow and hopelessly mannered.
  24. October Baby
    A slick piece of pro-life propaganda, it has relatively luxe production values, painfully earnest performances, and a drippy "inspirational" score.
  25. Kill by Inches
    A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.
  26. The Sweetest Thing
    One of the cruddiest-looking movies ever made.
  27. It's All About Love
    It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.
  28. September Tapes
    The film outs itself as a shallow indie "Rambo."
  29. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    There isn't enough visual beauty to forgive the screenplay's ugliness, but Bay does brave a daring new standard in product placement.
  30. Legion
    This wan rebooting of the Christ tale has decent acting, serviceable if familiar visual effects, a few jump-in-your-seat moments, and the always crowd-pleasing gimmick of a senior citizen cussing up a storm. But the down time between action scenes is deadly dull and the film's hoary cinematic shorthand (i.e., a young Black man enters the film to the sound of hip-hop and fights with his baby mama) is more terrifying than anything else served up.
  31. The Girl in the Photographs
    [A] grim, film-school-sloppy horror-thriller.
  32. Ride Along 2
    Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Backseat
    Bruce Van Dusen's 2005 comedy plots a meandering course due north without locating a word of truth.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Chapter 27
    A retarded sense of meta is achieved whenever Leto's Chapman goes on about the phony theatrics of film actors, but it's Lindsay Lohan, as über–Lennon fan Jude, who breaks your heart, looking convincingly horrified that she has three undeserved Razzies while Leto has none.
  35. Land of the Blind
    It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down to Earth
    There is a lot of electricity running in these cables, and directors Chris and Paul Weitz, responsible for "American Pie," know how to tap enough of it that almost every minute of Down to Earth is entertaining. But not quite surprising.
  37. Play It to the Bone
    The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.
  38. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Joyless, offensively stupid end-of-high-school farce.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    For anyone other than hardcore gore-hounds, this flipbook of deliberately invoked global-unrest horrors, from friendly-fire killings to rape as a breeding weapon, is effectively mean and unrelenting--and pretty far from fun.
  40. Paranoia
    This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.
  41. Impolex
    Can only be appreciated if you don't let guileless amateurishness, or chronic mumbling, ruin your evening.
  42. The Brooklyn Banker
    Unfortunately, this low-budget production comes up short in many places: limited performances, barely developed characters, a muddled script. The movie also has a sluggish, lumbering pace, effectively offsetting the paranoid, anxious vibe of Garity's performance.
  43. My Big Fat Independent Movie
    Feels motivated by envy more than anything else-it's a sour, petty act of mockery that values its own ineptitude over genuine cleverness, travestying Quentin Tarantino and others simply for dreaming up gimmicks that worked.
  44. Snipes
    A cockeyed shot all the way.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer
    If only there were drugs strong enough to make it all bearable: This never ending Learning Annex K-hole provides damning proof that independent film distribution has grown far too accessible.
  46. Masked and Anonymous
    Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.
  47. Tattoo Bar
    This tale of a sprung tough looking to go straight is so familiar it's faceless.
  48. Least Among Saints
    There's nothing but skin-deep warmth to Least Among Saints, a film in which any authority figure who can't magically sober up and play surrogate daddy for a spell is treated as either a meddler or a well-meaning, do-nothing skeptic.
  49. The Rambler
    The narrative is haphazard, and by the middle of the film, it's apparent that Reeder isn't even trying to make sense. Unconventional storytelling can be entertaining, too, but The Rambler just seems weird for its own sake and in love with cheap shock value.
  50. Immigrant
    Immigrant is reportedly based on writer-director Barry Shurchin's own family history, but the story he's chosen to tell is so melodramatic and relentlessly grim that any passion he feels for the material isn't reflected onscreen.
  51. Warcraft
    In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.
  52. Footprints
    Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.
  53. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.
  54. The Scribbler
    Unfortunately, no amount of softcore titillation can compensate for all the cheap special effects and faux-profundity dispensed by this superhero-self-help dud.
  55. My Name Is Hmmm...
    A hodgepodge of artistic gestures grafted onto a traditional narrative, neither fully linear nor experimental.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rising Place
    Broadway dreamgirl Jennifer Holliday's musical interludes occasionally relieve this mélange of recycled social morality lessons.
    • 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.
  58. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    It's hard to despise a movie with the balls to posit that its Blair-look-alike PM has been brainwashed by a corrupt CIA operative, but Banks 2 is really pretty hateful.
  59. 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.
  60. Careful What You Wish For
    Allen attempts to build a sense of mounting anxiety via the increasing suspicions of a tenacious insurance investigator, unexpected testimony from eyewitnesses, and Lena's squirrelly behavior, but pop star Jonas is incapable of making simple facial expressions, let alone evincing existential dread.
  61. Cassadaga
    Like the Saw franchise, Cassadaga, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, attempts to leverage the horror genre in the service of inducing epiphanies, but keeps tripping over its confused tangle of genres.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beyond Honor
    This mélange of softcore porn, overheated melodrama, and harrumphing moralizing transcends taste--its lurid insanity goes beyond good and bad, right and wrong.
  63. Cas & Dylan
    Leading man Richard Dreyfuss is so irrepressibly charming that he almost saves Jason Priestley's dismal buddy comedy Cas & Dylan from its awkward humor and trite sentimentality.
  64. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    If today's youngsters grow up thinking of Christopher Lloyd as the old guy with the bongos from The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, at least they'll be thinking of Christopher Lloyd at all.
  65. Girl on a Bicycle
    Girl on a Bicycle is like Micki + Maude minus the outrage, complexity, or crack timing.
  66. States of Control
    Takes its heroine, Lisa (Van Dyck), to the neurotic brink.
  67. Swordfish
    The story -- is just what fills in the gaps between slow-motion fireballs, Matrix-style frozen mayhem, and Halle Berry's notoriously undraped breasts.
  68. Dangerous Men
    To Rad, Dangerous Men was a life's work, and to sit through it feels like honoring the dreamers of the world who at least get shit done. Is it terrible? Of course. Is there belly-dancing? Duh.
  69. Das wilde Leben
    Stoned on the story's '60s-sex-bomb potential, Bornhak piles on the sex and forgets the bomb; the result is unaffecting filmmaking, as slack-jawed and superficial as its subject.
  70. As Luck Would Have It
    Iglesia's slick and frisky direction stirs up some hearty stock-character performances, stoking and stretching out the tension, but it all still feels like black comedy by the numbers.
  71. Price of Glory
    Contrived and contrived sloppily, this self-adoring soap even manages to make its all-Hispanic cast seem unconvincing -- except for Seda.
  72. Alex & Emma
    This isn't one for the time capsule--just bury it.
  73. Plastic
    For a film with shootouts, heists, and high-speed chases, Julian Gilbey's Plastic is a strangely lifeless affair.
  74. The Good Neighbor
    A film that — from its basic set-up to its dearth of tension — plays like the tedious inverse of Don't Breathe.
  75. The Unbelievers
    A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.
  76. Iceman
    The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.
  77. 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.
  78. The Forger
    The film works marginally well as the story of a broken family trying to heal itself, but the third act is a whole different movie.
  79. The Secret Lives of Dorks
    The Secret Lives of Dorks, starring Jim Belushi, is, well, the Jim Belushi of high-school romantic comedies: indifferent, kind of exhausted.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Perfect Holiday
    The actors distinguish themselves mainly by their ability to make the material, directed and co-written by Lance Rivera, seem even more painfully awkward and unfunny than it already is--which is very.
  81. Brightest Star
    It's either much smarter and more profound than it's letting on, or it doesn't add up to anything at all. Or maybe both — it's all relative.
  82. Someone Like You...
    The movie is trite like the ocean is big.
  83. The Middle of the World
    Director Vicente Amorim's dramatic instincts evoke after-school specials (most of the drama entails the clan's brooding teenager chomping at the parental bit), and his visual ideas are restricted to aping "City of God's" fish-eye ambience and hectic editing.
  84. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Often succumbs to the craven hysteria perhaps inherent in its hoary premise.
  85. The Transporter Refueled
    it's overstuffed, undercooked, and needlessly complicated.
  86. The Viral Factor
    It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive - but it helps keep it from being boring.
  87. Night at the Golden Eagle
    Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.
  88. A Hole in My Heart
    An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.
  89. Ghoul
    Ghoul rewards attention for much of its running time with subtle scares and growing unease, before squandering it in a shaky chase through twisted corridors that goes nowhere unexpected.
  90. Lucky Stiff
    Lucky Stiff shoots for "zany" and lands at "attention deficit disorder," but the songs aren't bad.
  91. Saint John of Las Vegas
    Mostly, Saint John traps good comic performers--including Malco and Peter Dinklage as John's boss--in airless editing and an unproductive, unresolved, sludgy tone.
    • 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.
  93. Farmland
    There's no drama illustrating the thanklessness of their jobs, and potential wisdom about fiscal instability, animal welfare, or GMOs waft by without much argument.
  94. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    Cut out thirty minutes, and this might have been a lean, mean Eighties-thriller throwback blessed with a killer lead performance.
  95. Black Knight
    Suited only for unwitting under-twelvers (though even they may not outlast the midpoint evaporation of Lawrence's shtick).
  96. Showtime
    Should come with a disclaimer.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Men Cry Bullets
    This amateurish no-budget effort has earnest charm, and a sensitivity to the tragic dimension of amour fou that saves it from lapsing into shtick.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Games People Play: New York
    Think Fear Factor: Soft Porn anchored by a third-act twist that results in confused meta-mayhem.
  99. Repo Men
    The movie shares this premise with 2008's "Repo!: The Genetic Opera." It would be worth researching who ripped off whom if both weren't ghastly.
  100. Boogeyman
    It's difficult to remember a recent movie with less regard for spatial or temporal coherence. With the bar set so low, one wouldn't think the ending could possibly come as a letdown. Believe me, it does.
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