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 7.5 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. Home Room
    Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."
  2. The Hunter's Prayer
    Even though the movie tries to sneak in some subtext about children paying for the sins of their fathers, the biggest sin The Hunter’s Prayer commits is being too dumb to enjoy.
  3. The Skeleton Key
    Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller.
  4. La grande strada azzurra
    The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.
  5. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Oblique and thickly layered with rhetoric, this account does little to illuminate Mumia the man, but it sets Mumia the statue aglow.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Becket (re-release)
    Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket's rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film's innuendo might have seemed daring; today it's close to ridiculous.
  7. You're Not You
    The most interesting aspects of the film — the real pressures felt by caregivers; popular perception of the severely disabled — are obliterated by the heavy-handed script and Swank’s inspirational bromides.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    The bulk of the Atlantis scenes in situ are as involving as a chakra workshop.
  9. Overboard
    Overboard is a manipulative mindfuck dressed up as a lightweight, heartwarming comedy.
  10. Unfreedom
    Though it starts off as a cautiously optimistic conversion narrative, the pseudo-progressive, banned-in-India LGBT drama Unfreedom quickly devolves into an absurdly pessimistic provocation.
  11. Taxi
    Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin.
  12. Nola
    Screwball it isn't, but it has screwy down pat.
  13. The Raven
    It's a pathetic missed opportunity - and one occasion of actually going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
  14. I Do
    Ross's on-the-nose script offers little subtext or nuance, and the film—for all the inherent drama of the situation—has very little real-life grit.
  15. Shadow Hours
    Isaac Eaton wrote and directed; he evidences little talent in either department.
  16. Terminal
    Compounding the manic energy of the editing is dialogue that muses mostly on long-winded ideas that don’t lend themselves to any kind of visual representation.
  17. San Andreas
    San Andreas can't wait for the carnage. The problem is, it's too chicken to ask us to comprehend it. It's all big, distant, unfathomable wreckage -- all shattering skyscrapers and rippling cityscapes -- with no sense of the human cost.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    Seems this is yet another puddle of futuristic sludge for us to blame on John Cassavetes.
  19. Total Recall (2012)
    Where Paul Verhoeven's original was testosterone-stupid and, therefore, fun, Wiseman's film is just boring-stupid.
  20. Passengers
    It would be easy to call Passengers out for its troublesome sexual politics or its way-too-predictable genre contrivances, but really, that’d be giving it too much credit. The problem lies deeper, in the fact that it’s a clever set-up in search of an execution.
  21. 28 Days
    Thomas's fleet-footed approach suggests the anxious embarrassment of a director in an awful hurry to get it over with.
  22. The Ninth Gate
    Never quite becomes unwatchable.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    American Cannibal, something like the (mock-)doc equivalent of "The Producers," really, really should've been funnier.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Color Me Kubrick
    I find it hard to believe that Conway bamboozled half of London simply by announcing his name, and it's regrettable that the filmmakers premise their picture on such improbable gullibility. The real Conway was assuredly slier than his bio-pic incarnation; he ought to have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Goodbye Momo
    Though Momo is dedicated to "the missing children and the children who are coming to save the world," the most provocative question it asks is whether, with its conspicuous product placement, the film was secretly backed by Coca-Cola.
  26. The Adderall Diaries
    Franco seems the ideal interpreter of The Adderall Diaries, but he's reduced the memoirist's tough introspection to misery porn.
  27. Mr. Brooks
    Bloody disappointing.
  28. Lies We Tell
    As much as director–co-writer Mitu Misra wants to show the oppression and repression that still have a stranglehold on Muslim communities in Britain, he does what a lot of first-time filmmakers do their first time out — he overplays his hand.
  29. Beijing Love Story
    So far removed from any original signal — there are several direct references to Titanic, so it's timely, too — this nuance-free affair registers as little more than noise.
  30. Wake
    Fraught with sophomoric lost-innocence metaphors and schematic oedipal tensions.
  31. Johnny Mad Dog
    Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.
  32. Frank the Bastard
    Overlong and slack in suspense, the film is most noteworthy for its patchy accents and the late Ellen Albertini Dow (the "rapping granny" from The Wedding Singer).
  33. Summer of 8
    Summer of 8 may be as sincere as a Hughes movie, but it's as shallow as a kiddy pool.
  34. Bob Funk
    With all due respect to Leo Tolstoy, all unhappy film families in which someone ascends those "12 steps" are exactly alike.
  35. It Stains the Sands Red
    What could have been a wordless slog is inventive and even buoyant, as Molly crosses the baked Nevada landscape. And then, like a dog turd lurking in the middle of a jelly doughnut, a needless, brutal rape scene poisons the whole experience.
  36. The Air I Breathe
    The destiny-versus- responsibility hand-wringing is Philosophy 101, the camera angles straight out of film school, and the pacing strictly music-video. Plus, the ta-da! twist ending is foreshadowed roughly 20 minutes into the action, for those still interested.
  37. Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola
    Save for a couple of visually engaging dance numbers, mostly shot with hand-held digital cameras, MKBKM is dishearteningly banal.
  38. 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.
  39. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Temptation’s refusal to find nuance in its didactic worldview ensures that the film will ultimately only succeed for audiences already in agreement with it.
  40. Defying Gravity
    Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.
  41. Traveller
    The movie lacks any sense of subcultural specificity, though it has a superabundant country music score. [22 Apr 1997]
    • Village Voice
  42. Easy
    The romantic woes of one attractive, privileged, intellectually overreaching acupuncture enthusiast don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
  43. After Earth
    Jaden is fine at running, jumping, fearful trembling, and affecting steely resolution. He doesn't yet have his father's charisma; perhaps to help him out, dad opted not to bring that charisma to the set.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    20 Dates
    The movie's best observations come from its sinister, unseen producer, who sneers at Berkowitz, "You're making a cartoon piece of shit . . . that ends with you jerking off by yourself."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bachna Ae Haseeno
    Two and a half hours of this will try anyone's patience.
  46. Close Your Eyes
    Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jesus Camp
    The doc these kids would make with flea market camcorders couldn't possibly be as ugly as this absurdly hypocritical critique of the far right's role in escalating the culture war. The classier indoctrination to which Gap-shopping urban Democrats subject their kids might look damn spooky, too, but it probably wouldn't sell.
  48. Behind 'The Cove'
    The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    The result packs all the hilarity of a museum installation on The Semiotics of Silent Comedy.
  50. Delivery Man
    Let's not blame Vince Vaughn for this stale cupcake. He's halfway through his Alec Baldwin-like transition from underbaked hunk to charismatic character actor.
  51. Creative Control
    This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.
  52. Pumpkin
    In its own dimly reckless way, the film is riveting -- not unlike watching a tightrope walker with a bad case of vertigo.
  53. Chlorine
    Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.
  54. Brake
    Dorff's mannered Bruce Willis affect seems as insincere as the script, which helplessly loses credibility as info accrues and the narrative unpeels.
  55. Inception
    It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
  56. Hello Herman
    The dialogue is all surface: Emotions are laid out on the autopsy table for the audience to dissect and analyze, but rarely feel.
  57. Beauty Remains
    The film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget: It's all soft focuses, sax flourishes, and silky slo-mos.
  58. Flawless
    Flawless is the sort of movie that tends to get called "enjoyably old-fashioned," except that there's nothing enjoyable about it. The pacing is torpid, the plotting slack, and the performances utterly joyless--chiefly Moore, who walks through every scene with her face stretched into an expressionless mask, her lips pressed into a permanent pout.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Great Role
    Chuckle-worthy jabs at American cultural imperialism aside, Le Grand Rôle has little to offer except a maudlin love story that ironically feels like a Tinseltown tearjerker facsimile.
  60. Citizen Koch
    Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's scattershot agitprop doc takes the perfidy of the billionaire Koch brothers as its given, offering up montages of Tea Party screamers rather than investigative reporting or rigorous argumentation.
  61. Non-Stop
    Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Another Gay Movie
    Boasting a "Scary Movie" rate of scatalogical jokes-per-minute, it fails to match that franchise's low yield of guffaws.
  63. 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).
  64. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Face
    Furiously intent on celebrating male love, Gibson and company try to refuse the erotics of friendship and miserably, wonderously fail. [[31 Aug 1993]
    • Village Voice
  66. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.
  67. Stryker
    The dead-end social points Gonick is making are so blunt they're hardly points at all anymore, but the galleon anchor that's weighing down this well-intentioned homey is the amateur acting.
  68. Contracted
    There's no payoff to the paranoia.
  69. The Invention of Lying
    Lying brushes more big ideas than commonplace comedies, but hasn't taken those ideas through enough drafts to work out their implications or--harder still--make them killingly funny.
  70. Big Bad Love
    Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
  71. The Nines
    It's hardly a novel idea, but at least when Kaufman, David Lynch, or Michel Gondry invites us on a tour of his chaotic subconscious, it's a fascinating place to visit. Plunging into August's gray matter is more like a season in vacation hell.
  72. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    A largely mind-numbing experience.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Buried
    The movie serves up gory killings and kinky peripheral shenanigans without any satirical thrust, blunting its death-equals-profit subtext with a snickering tone better suited to an afternoon of Clue.
  74. If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
    A shoot with Fassbinder actress Irm Hermann signifies Tillmans's desire--and the desire of every high-profile German-speaking artist (hello, Fatih Akin)--to huff the fading smell of RWF's genius. Like the rest of the film, though, it does little to convince the unconverted of Tillmans's own.
  75. Three
    70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.
  76. The Accountant
    Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.
  77. Yat luk che
    Dishwater-dull period melodrama.
  78. Rushlights
    The endless hidden connections and coincidences eventually become ridiculous.
  79. Made in America
    There's no type of documentary as shallow as those covering modern music festivals, a fact reconfirmed by Made in America.
  80. Chop Suey
    Time and again words fail Weber. He's a loquacious but unilluminating host.
  81. Hit and Run
    That even the criminal class has gone sensitive and finicky eco-conscious has some potential for comedy-or drama, as in Oliver Stone's undervalued Savages-but there's no single detail that might convince a viewer that the characters played by Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper might ever have been compelled to steal for a living, and this alienates the crime picture from any social context or sense of actual danger, making it essentially a celebrity goof-off.
  82. Arsenal
    The main enticement is getting to see Cage go full bore. And he does, gesticulating wildly and assuming an unplaceable accent, but as the only combustible element in this otherwise lackadaisical film, his energy ends up bouncing around with nowhere to go.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Savage Grace
    A tawdry nighttime soap that marvels without insight at its characters' despicable behavior: It squanders a major performance by Moore.
  84. The Dog Wedding
    The film never reconciles the incongruities of its constituent parts, which hang together like toothpaste and orange juice
  85. Treading Water
    Analeine Cal y Mayor's bland, faux-quirky dramedy's most distinguishing set piece is a kitschy historic house museum dedicated to an erstwhile Mexican crooner named Guillermo Garibai.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Letter to True
    A Letter to True could provide a corrective reminder that bad taste emerges in high-class forms as often as low. The film's failures cannot be faulted to inexperience.
  87. September 11
    It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.
  88. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    Has little to offer beyond muzzy kismet and generalized amnesia, a bit of National Geographic and a lot of cocktail jazz.
  89. The Catechism Cataclysm
    Taking the notion of toilet humor literally but incapable of delivering its promised religious satire, The Catechism Cataclysm is more muddled than its tongue-twister title.
  90. For Love of the Game
    Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.
  91. Baran
    Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.
  92. Very Good Girls
    Very Good Girls is a film one wants to like but can't. It just doesn't work.
  93. Slackers
    The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.
  94. Monster Family
    Nothing matters in this movie; stuff just happens.
  95. Intern
    Smartly written, unevenly executed.
  96. Radicalized
    It's almost unbelievable how much people talk, in Slovick's two hours, without saying very much at all.
  97. Identity
    The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.
  98. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.
  99. 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?
  100. Despite the Falling Snow
    So tasteful it’s torturous, Despite the Falling Snow is a Cold War espionage thriller for those who like their period-piece action airless and derivative.
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