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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    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Man's Gotta Do
    The only thing more inexplicable than the loathsome score is the story's determination to impregnate all its major female characters. Fuggedaboudit.
  2. Underworld: Evolution
    There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design.
  3. 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.
  4. The Anomaly
    The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.
  5. The Aviation Cocktail
    The scenery looks just fine, however; it's the performances and dialogue that wobble and creak.
  6. License to Wed
    Dreadful excuse for an unromantic comedy.
  7. Road to Paloma
    This film is numbingly dull.
  8. Jack and Jill
    It's a dull drag-show routine headed nowhere until Pacino (playing a self-important version of himself) begins stalking Jill.
  9. The Foxy Merkins
    The Foxy Merkins would have made an idiosyncratic and amusing short film; at 80 minutes, it's a one-joke comedy that quickly overstays its welcome.
  10. The Rundown
    To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.
  11. The Girl on the Train
    There's no bite to the criminality, the motives, the acting, or filmmaking to make us care.
  12. The Independent
    It lacks the coherent internal logic that distinguishes the best mockumentaries.
  13. A Little Game
    A Little Game is an OK children's movie that can only be appreciated by kids, who have not yet been callused by the awfulness of both chess metaphors and the old ladies in films who are always spouting gauzy generalities about the magic of life.
  14. Vantage Point
    Produced by Paul Greengrass, and conceived as something of a companion film to his own "Bloody Sunday," there wasn't a moment in "Omagh" that rang false. There's not a single one in Vantage Point that rings true.
  15. Dear Wendy
    Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.
  16. Underwater Dreams
    The film is dismayingly formless, every point is made too many times, and there's too little drama or revelation here.
  17. Shoot on Sight
    As if only made for ignoramuses who get nervous around brown skin, nearly everything on-screen is condescendingly telegraphed--from its plodding dialogue jammed with black-or-white morals to its lingering reaction shots, one-dimensional racists and radicals, obvious mood music, and thriller clichés.
  18. Shaolin
    This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.
  19. The Reunion
    The resultant smorgasbord is a misshapen mess, short on humor, tension, or chemistry among its bickering protagonists.
  20. Just Wright
    Another movie, not as awful as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright.
  21. Big Significant Things
    Reisberg assumes we'll believe that in "real life" (as in, when he's not deceiving anyone about his whereabouts) Craig isn't this selfish, but watching him lie, cheat on his girlfriend, and enthusiastically provide beer to teenagers says otherwise.
  22. Unacceptable Levels
    Unacceptable Levels wants to scare the biosolids out of you, and it can, but that doesn't mean it's a success.
  23. Office Christmas Party
    As dull and impersonal as a sheaf of open-enrollment insurance forms, Office Christmas Party brings together — and underutilizes — several funny performers from TV shows (Silicon Valley, Veep, SNL) that pinpoint what this dim comedy does not: the specifics of workplace environments and their particular pathologies and joys.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Two Weeks Notice
    So busy rehashing rom-com clichés that it shirks the genitive, prelude to other flaws.
  25. We Are the Giant
    Barker's tactlessness wouldn't be so bad if he weren't too high on his own patchwork rhetoric to ask his subjects what specifically motivates them.
  26. Back to Burgundy
    There doesn’t seem to be a romantic-comedy cliché missing from the bland French domestic Back to Burgundy, a wholly contrived post-adolescent coming-of-age yarn.
  27. The Guillotines
    A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.
  28. Le Chef
    Daniel Cohen's Le Chef does little more than illuminate the superficiality of the restaurant business.
  29. Stuart Little
    The story is little more than overdetermined trials and triumphs. Kids won't care, but they won't fall for it either; unsurprisingly, it doesn't stand a chance of providing them with the memories the book provided their parents.
  30. Pay the Ghost
    The script doesn't know the difference between being something scary and pointing at something scary. It's less a film than a series of imitative gestures, a bunch of horror signifiers pointing to nothing.
  31. Zaytoun
    Alternating abruptly between road-trip comedy and war-through-a-child's-eyes melodrama, the film's tonal inconsistency prevents the story from gelling.
  32. Catwoman
    Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.
  33. Damn!
    The director ultimately treads too fine a line between exposé and cash-in, in part because he belabors his thesis. Sure, McMillan is at least half charlatan, but 20 minutes into Damn! it's clear that he's also a sad, possibly disturbed man who needs a compassionate caseworker more than the attention of a fickle public or ambitious documentarian.
  34. Burke and Hare
    By swinging between broad laughs and cheap pathos - Pegg's specialties as an actor, apparently - while avoiding the more fertile ground between, Landis renders his Burke and Hare sociopolitically toothless and bizarrely insensitive.
  35. The Village
    The screwiest yarn yet from Shyamalan's metaphysical-Limburger career project, a non-horror horror film.
  36. 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.
  37. Exhibition
    A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.
  38. Little White Lies
    Of sole interest is Benoît Magimel's Vincent, who sheepishly confesses a same-sex attraction to one in the cabal; his moments on-screen provide the only break from this slog.
  39. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    There is an odd cognitive dissonance at work between the obvious ingenuity dedicated to the film's visual details -- alien anatomies, industrial machinery, technological minutiae -- and the retarded intelligence quotient evident in its content.
  40. Back in the Day
    It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas.
  42. Fever Pitch
    The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.
  43. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.
  44. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    Clearly a bottom-feeder.
  45. Vehicle 19
    Mukunda Michael Dewil's film has the makings of a taut little thriller, but the writer-director has the twin disadvantages of needing to include dialogue and to rely on the services of Paul Walker to embody his protagonist.
  46. Shadowboxer
    This monumentally ridiculous film doesn't stop at subverting stereotypes; it discombobulates narrative logic and the basic laws of human behavior. Still, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from watching the actors attempt to dig out from under the rubble that William Lipz's screenplay repeatedly dumps on their heads.
  47. Eden
    Eden wants you to know what people are really like outside your smothering bourgeois cocoon.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invisible
    When the story takes a jarring turn into horror flick territory, Invisible loses whatever rhythm it might have had. Jane and Joe's rejuvenated love can conquer many things, including mentally impaired country folk, but it just can't save this unfortunate film.
  49. Wet Hot American Summer
    The film exists in a humid meta-movie ether all its own.
  50. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    If the 3D here is better than average, SLIGHTLY, the rest of the movie brings it way, way down--not quite to the center of the earth, but at least a good six feet under.
  51. Hereafter
    Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.
  52. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    As one five-year-old critic at the press screening astutely observed during a would-be sensitive moment: "Boooorrring!"
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Third World Cop
    Cop is an energetic portrayal of mean-street ghetto life.
  54. Kill by Inches
    A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.
  55. Grave Encounters
    True terror needs at least some authenticity. That's perhaps too much to ask of a faked movie about a faked reality show that still can't scare up a fresh idea.
  56. Butter
    Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.
  57. The Time Is... Now
    Rife with hasty generalizations, tautologies, and false choices, the movie is also tricked out with plenty of visual kitsch.
  58. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.
    • 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.
  60. The Final Cut
    Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement.
  61. Kid Cannabis
    Kid Cannabis presents its material not as cautionary tale but as celebratory fantasy — which, like Nate's mom turning a blind eye to her son's illegal operation, seems to be the by-product of either inanity or excessive THC.
  62. Immigration Tango
    Less forgivable is the fact that this is a film in which characters are flung out of character solely for cheap laughs and rarely actually listen or talk to one another.
  63. S1m0ne
    Niccol has no gift for comedy. His ongoing exploration of modern celebrity results in an industry satire that's less funny than half-empty and hyper-designed.
  64. The House That Jack Built
    As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.
  65. September Tapes
    The film outs itself as a shallow indie "Rambo."
  66. Introducing the Dwights
    With its broad, toothless humor and ham-fisted fits of melodrama, this sitcom-grade embarrassment aims to dethrone "Muriel's Wedding" as the quirky Aussie feel-gooder of all time, except it hurts too much to watch.
  67. Bart Got a Room
    With 19 producers, one wonders how many rich Floridians invested in what might be the year's most unambitious comedy.
  68. The Lovers
    Bring a notebook and some tissues — the mission to protect the queen becomes a tangle of shifting alliances between local and British forces that might require visual aids, while the snail-slow realization of gloomy prophecies may well tear you up in boredom.
  69. Dark Crimes
    This is one very ugly movie at its heart, not for how Englert photographed it but for how bleak and unrelenting the violence is — even that ending can’t dig Dark Crimes out of its dark hole.
  70. Notting Hill
    It is not, the filmmakers stress, a sequel to "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (which writer Richard Curtis was also responsible for), but it fits the latter-day Hollywood definition of the term -- same movie, only worse.
  71. The Musketeer
    East/West fusion aside, The Musketeer is a stale Euro-pudding.
  72. The Bone Collector
    So formulaic and predictable that you're bored even when you're scared.
  73. The Body
    Indiana Jones has never been so missed, but instead this shaggy God story hones in on the faith dilemmas of Banderas and a sputtering Derek Jacobi, so Sunday-hammy you want to rivet him with cloves.
  74. Americons
    Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.
    • 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.
  76. The Rewrite
    Amid much talk about character, story structure, and theme, Grant delivers his usual rakish-charmer routine in a role that’s as hackneyed as the script’s portrait of women, the movie industry, and Star Wars fanatics is one-note.
  77. The Mummy
    The Mummy turns out to be a drab, nonsensical affair that squanders its potential for humor, atmosphere and sweep.
  78. Piranha 3DD
    Add to this that it takes place in the town of Merkin, and you'll get an idea of the labored spirit of dirty-old-man humor that prevails.
  79. Reign of Fire
    Peaks early with a vertiginous dogfight; thereafter, spotty CGI and a bamboozling plot conspire toward a colossal anticlimax.
  80. The High Cost of Living
    Deborah Chow's ridiculously implausible yet still predictable tale of guilt and redemption is so bipolar in tone that when it's not a more linear rip-off of Guillermo Arriaga's grim and gritty melodramas (21 Grams, Babel), it's the kind of quirky indie romance that made Braff's name.
  81. Walter
    Walter's self-conscious efforts at quirkiness...and cartoonishly drawn characters...try too hard while falling far short of their marks.
  82. Bronson
    Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."
  83. Condo Painting
    This is more than self-amused irony; this is kitsch as religion.
  84. 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.
  85. Indigo Children
    Chaney attempts a dreamlike quality by alternating between footage of the young couple together, doing mostly nothing, with admittedly gorgeous scenes of their sylvan landscape. This works to a point.
  86. The International
    Both actors (Owens and Watts) seem mildly aggrieved (and not at all convincing) at having to play characters considerably less intelligent than themselves in a movie that plays even dumber.
  87. Little Black Book
    A mondo product placement in search of a screenplay, the conscious "Working Girl" homage Little Black Book makes the mistake of banking on Brittany Murphy, a Melanie Griffith look-alike with none of Griffith's gawky charms.
  88. The Lords of Salem
    The movie is eerily photographed (by Brandon Trost), but never suspenseful or scary, and eventually, events descend into goat-sacrificing silliness.
  89. The United States of Autism
    The United States of Autism is an example of a well-meaning documentary that may do more harm than good.
  90. The Era of Vampires
    The finale is a near-abstract mess (decapitation, impalation, "Alien" birth) -- in an empathic gesture, the filmmakers end it all with a few sticks of TNT.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bratz
    In the end, the most offensive part of Bratz isn't its stereotypes or brand expansion; it's the sorry state of Jon Voight's career.
  92. Cold Comes the Night
    Most of the film's major happenings are either illogical or, much more damningly, not especially thrilling.
  93. Jamesy Boy
    Director Trevor White frames the former teen gang member's life as an uplifting coming-of-age prison drama that feels entirely disconnected from the realities of incarceration.
  94. Let's Be Evil
    Co-writer/director Martin Owen downplays his conceit's most intriguing aspects — where are these kids' parents? — and instead focuses on monotonous chase scenes.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Speaking in Strings
    A clumsy labor of love with unforgivable lapses...key footage is missing, and it fails to show why Salerno-Sonnenberg's controversial interpretations are so original and valid.
  96. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Humorless, incoherent, and ugly as sin, this Christian-friendly production is as tragic as the candle wax that resembles a glob of man jam and opens Pa Grape's eyes to the meaning of his adventure.
  98. Gentlemen Broncos
    Hess deserves credit, I suppose, for so effectively channeling his inner seven-year-old. Personally, I preferred spending two hours in the company of Spike Jonze's.
  99. 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.
  100. The Book of Henry
    The Book of Henry is just a lunkheaded tearjerker that you’ll wish was even half as smart as its allegedly gifted protagonist.
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