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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    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.
  2. Gods and Generals
    Shot with the TV-movie blahs, the film itself is nothing more than an elaborate reenactment, perfectly mating box-of-rocks acting (bring rotten fruit for Mia Dillon's Southern matriarch) and repetitious dialogue so scripturally florid Maxwell might qualify for a Comedy Screenplay Golden Globe next January.
  3. Kill Me Three Times
    The flick, written by debut screenwriter James McFarland, is twisty, clever, and totally Nineties.
  4. Oh My God
    The drubbing score leaves one nearly insensate to the fact that Rodgers has nothing original or even interesting to say about his subject, flattening fine points of scripture to recommend interfaith group hugs.
  5. Affluenza
    The film is dragged down by its awkwardly paradoxical story, which tries too hard to care too little.
  6. Freedom
    Using a slavery narrative to advance an unrelated agenda is pretty tasteless, bordering on offensive.
  7. Little Boy
    Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.
  8. The Boy Next Door
    The movie's not built for belief. It's built for dumb, shivery, sexed-up pleasure, and it delivers, albeit somewhat modestly.
  9. Cover
    This is a weirdly schizophrenic movie, one that's light on the murder mystery and heavy on the sermonizing.
  10. The Art of War
    Far more preposterous in its details than the average blam-quip-kerplow, The Art of War isn't helped by the performances.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Queen of the Damned
    Aaliyah fans, as well as fans of charisma, sex, and violence, will be sorely disappointed.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting...
    A day in the life at chain restaurant Shenanigan's, Waiting . . . makes a predictable pit stop to elaborately mess with a creep patron's food but otherwise exceeds expectations by handling the real, soul-sucking fears of the double shift.
    • 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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Milkshake
    The fact that Jolie isn't very likable would be less of a problem if this film were actually funny, but his selfish disregard for those around him only ends up making us feel bad for the people who care about him.
  15. Narcopolis
    There's simply too much going on to establish characters.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    White Noise
    White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses.
  17. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The gooseberry Harlin came up with will win no proselytizers, but it does have a pleasant matinee modesty, a cool sepia-period look, and an interesting flashback relationship with Nazis.
  18. Basmati Blues
    Watching it is something like watching a play’s first full dress rehearsal or a gangly baby deer’s initial efforts to stand, where it’s the effort that’s more engaging than the achievement itself.
  19. Night Train to Lisbon
    Gentle has its charms, and August's vision of the world, archaic though it may willingly be, is appealingly urbane .
  20. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    Coelho's writing may be "more [widely] translated than [Shakespeare's]," as the coda claims, but Paulo Coelho's Best Story never successfully pins down its subject's genius.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
    Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror gives muckraking journalism a bad name. Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy's DV assemblage of talking heads and footage shot in Iraq after the cessation of primary hostilities is low-rent Michael Moore, a poorly argued piece of agitprop.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    John Q
    Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.
  23. Blue Iguana
    From the characters to the purposely perplexing plot, it’s all hollow and artificial to the point of being downright grating. Blue Iguana is another exercise in sarcastic, self-referential, postmodern pulp whose time has so come and gone.
  24. Grown Ups
    While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.
  25. The Unborn
    For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works, in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces.
  26. Stonewall
    Stonewall aspires to be a sweeping tale of social change and hardscrabble street life, but at every moment it feels like a musical whose numbers have been cut.
  27. Always Woodstock
    The rom-com elements don't always work, and the conclusion is a bit pat, but Always Woodstock is never less than charming and funny along the way.
  28. Mad Women
    The biggest problem in Lipsky's scattershot narrative is situational ethics.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Adobo
    Adobo doesn't exoticize the culture so much as leaven it with a sense of ordinariness.
  30. Grind
    A logo-laden celebration of the joys of sponsorship wrapped inside an innocuous teen-pic package.
  31. The Butterfly Effect
    You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.
  32. Fear of Fiction
    Ahearn's maddening game of connect-the-dots is content to collapse inward with honking, preening abandon.
  33. The Smurfs
    Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.
  34. Finding Bliss
    It is particularly painful to watch Sobieski--whose unnervingly symmetrical, Botticelli face and supernatural poise can't help but hold the screen--put through the paces of Davis's almost unbearably labored script.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Right Kind of Wrong
    Jeremiah Chechick's The Right Kind of Wrong has more wrong than right and plays like an ode to testicle jokes.
  36. Daltry Calhoun
    Daltry Calhoun (Johnny Knoxville) urges you to "get high on grass--the legal kind." But to find anything funny in director Katrina Holden Bronson's debut, you're going to want the illegal kind.
  37. I, Frankenstein
    It doesn't come close to working, but it's sweet that they tried.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Knockaround Guys
    The only drama is in waiting to hear how John Malkovich's reedy consigliere will pronounce his next line.
  39. Never Again
    A comedic semi-rehash of "An Unmarried Woman" (1978) with older leads, Never Again sports a good-hearted story but doesn't know how to tell it.
  40. Endless Love
    This film is a sunny, overlong pastiche of tropes, the kind that suggest love involves nothing more than holding hands and jumping off a dock into a lake, or having slow, teary-eyed sex in front of a fireplace, inexplicably blazing in mid-June.
  41. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Vincent Guastini's makeup effects are the star here, a refreshing change from the inky CGI morphing of too much modern horror.
  42. Nature Calls
    The unmitigated disaster of the camping trip just stays disastrous, the story never really finding its way from adversity to heroic redemption.
  43. Vacationland
    Todd Verow's overstuffed Vacationland promises more than it delivers in just about every sense.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Tuxedo
    The only possible surprise in The Tuxedo would be an extended demonstration of what was once Chan's trademark, the daffily choreographed kineticism forbidden of late by either his own age or the scruples of story editors.
  45. Where the Heart Is
    Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.
  46. The Replacements
    Lame even by triumph-of-the-underdog sports-comedy standards.
  47. Dude, Where's My Car?
    My friend even supplied a blurbable quote: "The best dumbass-buddy comedy I've seen since "Wayne's World!"
  48. The Gallows
    The Gallows is only good enough to make you wish its creators did something novel with its formulaic style, plot, and characterizations.
  49. Zookeeper
    A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.
  50. She Hate Me
    Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Be Cops
    Though it charms, it's difficult to ignore how many times we've seen this story played out before.
  52. Surviving Eden
    This witless satire dares to take on the culture of--get ready for this--reality TV! Arriving a stupefying five years out of date, Surviving Eden is a not particularly rigorous attempt at mockumentary.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Eban and Charley
    Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.
  54. Speed-Dating
    Likable enough to wear you down with its eager-to-please capering.
  55. Cost of a Soul
    Kirkpatrick's color-deficient visual scheme is sturdy, but it can't compensate for a mechanical, unsubtle script.
  56. Pilgrim Song
    So little occurs, and so little seems to be at stake, that the action takes on the quality of a tossed-off, not-especially-melodic country-music ditty.
  57. One Candle, Two Candles...
    The overall comic premise is both clumsy and truly icky, because how exactly do you make progressive good on a "parody of violence against women" logline?
  58. The Odd Way Home
    Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Amati Girls
    An earnest ensemble weeper I'd at least feel comfortable seeing with my grandmother.
  60. Noel
    Most of the redemptive notes ring false, as does the mythical Manhattan, where the snow is just too clean and everybody lives around the corner.
  61. Without a Paddle
    Burt Reynolds turns up as scruffy mountain man, sparking unfulfilled expectations of some primo Deliverance jokes.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Premonition
    Had the film maintained a tone of kooky, Kafkaesque tragicomedy, narrowing in on Linda's wacko wrestling match with the laws of physics, we might really have had something here.
  63. Domestic Disturbance
    As the basest form of genre hootenanny, it wimps out: There's no twist, no showboat acting, not even an outrageous crisis of paternal violence.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Johnson Family Vacation
    The movie contains exactly two chuckle-worthy moments.
  65. The Hot Chick
    The cast, save the charisma-free Schneider, is uniformly hilarious, and deserves classier high jinks than this Juwanna Tootsie roll.
  66. The Condemned
    Writer-director Roberto Busó-Garcia's Spanish-language movie is so tame and so completely boring that to advertise it as a horror film is to insult the genre.
  67. 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.
  68. 13
    Lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset.
  69. Louder Than Words
    Louder Than Words obviously means well, but its brand of cheap uplift is the kind of cheese that actually breeds cynicism.
  70. Backstage
    High-concept cinema this ain't.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Astoria
    It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.
  72. 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.
  73. Don't Go in the Woods
    The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.
  74. 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.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    New in Town
    The movie wrong-foots Zellweger from the start. She's not enough the ice queen, like Sigourney Weaver in "Working Girl," for us to accept her transition into adorable Melanie Griffith.
  76. Nurse 3D
    If the onscreen serial killer isn't having fun, how can we?
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Timeline
    Crudely written, haphazardly acted, and improbably fun.
  78. Trade of Innocents
    Not for the first time in films, noble intent is at odds with aesthetics.
  79. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.
  80. Eye of the Beholder
    High-buffed, low-rack pulp.
  81. Civil Brand
    Without a scorcher like Pam Grier, the sub-NYPD Blue dialogue and acting dilute what could have been a shrieking wake-up call about for-profit prisons.
  82. The 24th Day
    No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).
    • 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.
  84. 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.
  85. Answers to Nothing
    The most embarrassing project on co-star Barbara Hershey's resume.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ethan Mao
    An exhausting exercise in genre mixing.
  87. Patch Town
    These grating characters frequently burst into songs that are not only ill-fitting, but also — as with every other aspect of this indie — awful.
  88. 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.
  89. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Like a hot tub itself, it looks inviting, but all too soon you've had enough.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    AVP: Alien vs. Predator
    With perfunctory battle sequences, cardboard characters, and uncreative scare 'ems, Paul W.S. Anderson's monster mashup isn't quite terrible enough to be so-bad-it's-awesome, but his swift (if forced) plotting and amusingly shoddy costumes mean that there could be worse ways to enjoy air-conditioning.
  91. The Girl Next Door
    Any resonance from that real-life atrocity gets smothered by a script that interlaces clichéd dialogue so tightly as to block out any glint of recognizable human behavior.
  92. Swimfan
    Nothing plot-wise is worth e-mailing home about. But director John Polson's surging pace, double-flip edits, nu-metal bash-ins, and copious jump-fucks make a sure-handed tempest in this teacup.
  93. Boys and Girls
    A cat-and-dog romantic squabbler so garbled you'd need a centrifuge to sort things out.
  94. How High
    Too lazy to be a comedy, too conventional to be a head movie.
  95. Drive Hard
    If you’re not expecting too much, Drive Hard is mindlessly entertaining, but it lacks that spark of madness that might have made it truly fun. At least Cusack is able to shed some of his usual overseriousness.
  96. The Quiet
    Thematically the movie never reaches beyond the ready-for-prime-time mentality that specializes in psychological shorthand.
  97. Scary Movie 2
    The Wayans brothers' new bottom-feeder signals its utter exhaustion -- and barely veiled contempt for the audience.
  98. Fool's Gold
    Fool's Gold is the sort of movie that makes you look more kindly upon the WGA strike. It isn't merely bad--it's so desperate that the actors can scarcely conceal their contempt for the material.
  99. Unmasked Judeophobia
    Greenfield works against her own interests with absurdly selective arguments and sloppy filmmaking.
  100. 1st Night
    The depressingly predictable script—and tendency of everyone involved to jump to ridiculous conclusions—suggests a combination of Noises Off at best, and at worst, Three's Company.
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