The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
For 10,412 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Badlands
Lowest review score: 0 A Life Less Ordinary
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Dreamgirls
    It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.
  2. The Farewell Party
    The Farewell Party leaves no doubt as to where it stands on the right to die with dignity when facing terminal illness, but it’s so clumsily made that it serves only to exasperate.
  3. Get On Up
    Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.
  4. Pauline and Paulette
    Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.
  5. Babí léto
    A mud bath of sentiment, strained speechifying, and gloppy music.
  6. Anita
    The problems with Anita start with director Freida Lee Mock’s attempt to fit this story into the template of a generic empowerment narrative.
  7. Son of the Bride
    The best that can be said of Son Of The Bride is that it's attractively photographed. But, then, so was the Hindenburg explosion, and this packs far less excitement into its two shapeless hours.
  8. Life and Debt
    Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.
  9. Reality Bites
    Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie's portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow...No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct.
  10. The Wrecking Crew
    The Wrecking Crew casts about between genres like driftwood caught by the tide; for two hours, the script cycles between family trauma drama, goofy Hawaiian noir, meathead romp, and wham-bang slugfest. The indecision at least showcases some consistency, though, in that each approach is equally dissatisfying.
  11. Ray Donovan: The Movie
    This is perfunctory storytelling, a rather artless and dull 100 minutes that does nothing but check off a few predictable narrative boxes.
  12. Ever After
    It's... directed by Andy Tennant ("It Takes Two") with all the flair of an episode of "7th Heaven", making it that much more worth avoiding.
  13. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    This silly, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, but the irony of its banality is more recoiling than provocative.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    With the development of most characters truncated in order to concentrate on Sobieski (who looks eerily like a young Helen Hunt), the film proves pretty dissatisfying.
  15. Notorious C.H.O.
    Despite her healthy fan base, Notorious C.H.O. looks like the dead-end to a limited repertoire.
  16. Godspell
    Maybe the broad gestures, colorful costumes, and exaggerated acting worked in the theater. As a movie, it's actively, fascinatingly terrible, with a vision of Christ more likely to instill in viewers a fear of traveling bands of loony street performers than a desire to embrace the Holy Spirit.
  17. One Last Kiss
    Through it all, Muccino piles on one shrill confrontation after another. At times, he seems headed for the melodramatic turf owned and operated by Pedro Almodóvar, but where the young Almodóvar would have deployed a prankish wit and the older Almodóvar scraped toward the humanity beneath.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Magazine Dreams
    Bynum scaffolds the film with a narrative about failure, not one about the challenges of navigating life on the spectrum. Killian’s cognitive differences are there to be exacerbated by the many problems the script piles on his shoulders, as if Bynum has a torture fetish and means to exercises it on his lead.
  19. Cavite
    The only rational explanation for how an abysmal no-budget film like Cavite could get released theatrically is that its makers, co-writer/directors Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana, have come up with a from-the-headlines hook too big to deny.
  20. He Got Game
    There's not a relationship in He Got Game that feels right, especially the one between Washington and Allen, and if that doesn't work, neither does the film.
  21. Rental Family
    Fraser walks through this aggressively sappy drama with the aura of simple goodness that has served him well. But such concentrated radiance starts to feel like a denial of the painful reality Rental Family ignores. The movie wants to give you a hug, but you may be tempted to slap it across the face.
  22. The U.S. vs. John Lennon
    There's precious little of Lennon's legendary crankiness on display in The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, a fawning hagiography that diligently shaves away the ex-Beatle's rough edges and knotty idiosyncrasies.
  23. Drumline
    Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.
  24. The Grace Lee Project
    She acts amazed by her own work, in hopes that we'll be too. To help the matter along, Lee underscores the action with a Mickey Mouse score, cutesy animation, and a relentlessly chipper tone. Her technique is pretty much everything that's wrong with documentary filmmaking today.
  25. The 11th Hour
    The 11th Hour is slick and passionate, but neither persuasive nor helpful; it's a headache of a film directed like an Errol Morris project, but with half the substance. It's clearly preaching to the choir, but even they may find it off-key.
  26. I Capture the Castle
    Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.
  27. New Order
    If nothing else, New Order demonstrates that the line that separates festival-lauded arthouse films from crass exploitation fare can be very thin indeed.
  28. Antwone Fisher
    Directed without a shred of imagination by Denzel Washington -- Antwone Fisher masks a behind-the-scenes story that's far more inspiring than the phony uplift that makes it onto the screen.
  29. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Myers returns as his menagerie of repulsive characters, but this time, his frantic mugging feels more like an insipid parlor trick than ever.
  30. Deconstructing Harry
    Deconstructing Harry is a mess: a shambling, narcissistic, sexist romp that is, worst of all, almost entirely devoid of laughs.
  31. Visitors
    What’s hypnotic for five minutes at the Whitney Museum does not necessarily carry over to an 80-minute movie, and Visitors might conceivably run half that length without the slow motion. Reggio’s film premiered in Toronto with live musical accompaniment, a gimmick that probably enhanced the experiential aspect of what’s otherwise a glorified installation piece.
  32. The Help
    The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Anastasia
    You can set your watch to the musical cues, and the songs themselves are forgettable at best, insipid at worst.
  34. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    When it comes to time-wasting memory games, crossword puzzles are more fun than this movie.
  35. The Machinist
    Unrelentingly dreary, and seemingly destined to be remembered, if at all, as that movie Christian Bale lost a full third of his body weight for. It doesn't deserve any better.
  36. Radiant City
    The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off. If anything, the movie's observations about the corrupting social influence of cluttered mall spaces get undercut by the fact that Burns and Brown feel the need to INVENT characters to prove their truth.
  37. That Christmas
    Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.
  38. Breathe In
    The result puts a handful of good actors on autopilot, maneuvering around Intro To Screenwriting character beats, occasionally accompanied by sappy piano music.
  39. Massoud, the Afghan
    A series of non-answers isn't enough to build a documentary on, especially when they're strung together by insufferably self-congratulatory voiceover narration (de Ponfilly plays up his agony over whether documentary filmmaking helps or hurts its subjects) and corny stylistic effects.
  40. Dredd
    Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.
  41. What Would Jesus Buy?
    It's neither conceptually bold nor slyly satirical when Billy dresses up as a Southern evangelical and sings made-up hymns about "the shopacalypse."
  42. We Live in Time
    We Live In Time’s worst sin is making its thin characters so damn boring. They’re so likable and sweet, even their flaws are forgivable.
  43. Winter Solstice
    The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.
  44. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Some good Bob Dylan songs are called in to underline the big moments, but end up eclipsing them instead. There's more drama and insight in a snippet of "One More Cup Of Coffee" than the entirety of Jack & Rose.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fight or Flight
    Hartnett is the one element that makes the whole thing bearable. Yet he still isn’t enough to make it enjoyable, at least in any sustained way.
  46. Dawn of the Dead
    Swarming with zombies on both sides of the camera, the film is unrelentingly relentless, leaving no room for original director George Romero's wry satire on consumerism or his slow-paced, creeping undead.
  47. My Sister Maria
    Deeply personal and deeply silly.
  48. The Accountant 2
    The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.
  49. You've Got Mail
    Takes almost two self-infatuated, smarmy, condescending, cringe-inducingly sentimental hours to reach its pre-ordained conclusion.
  50. Beloved
    Beloved has an almost gut-wrenching quality to it. But the same can't be said for the movie overall--it's a noble, ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless.
  51. Snakes on a Plane
    Not since Pet Rocks riveted the nation have so many gotten so excited over so little.
  52. First Snow
    Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.
  53. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington’s fifth feature — his best-known previous film was 2009’s equally gormless "Harmony And Me" — will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.
  54. Shrek the Third
    Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.
  55. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.
  56. The Last Kiss
    Unfortunately, nothing about Tony Goldwyn's vapid, navel-gazing, claustrophobic adaptation of a 2001 Italian film rings remotely true.
  57. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.
  58. Religulous
    Maher's too smart to make a movie this dumb.
  59. Filth
    Like all of the very worst dark comedies, Jon S. Baird’s insipid and self-satisfied Filth isn’t content to merely tap into viewers’ most odious desires. It also insist that it’s revealing them.
  60. Troy
    Troy does look good--so good, in fact, that it takes a while to reveal itself as a thundering dud with much action but little personality, human drama, or brains.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    2 Days in the Valley
    A stupid movie that expects us to suspend our disbelief until it seems smart. Skip it and see some other movie that features two hired killers having a conversation in a car.
  62. Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Historically, of course, making no earthly sense hasn’t been a major impediment in Jodorowsky’s work. In this instance, he commits a sin graver than charlatanism by just being boring.
  63. Max
    Quirky, unsatisfying portrait.
  64. America's Heart and Soul
    Represents apple-pie mythmaking at its most insidiously thoughtless.
  65. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.
  66. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Tony Scott’s bracingly awful remake/desecration of the classic ‘70s thriller.
  67. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Inept.
  68. Money Monster
    Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.
  69. The Four Seasons
    Astonishingly boring.
  70. Bride & Prejudice
    Chadha doesn't seem at home with either Austen or Bollywood, and her ambitions far exceed her competence in the song-and-dance numbers, which are a clutter of stiff choreography and silly original lyrics.
  71. The Prom
    On stage, the contrivances might seem less glaring (although the songs truly are terrible). As a movie, The Prom is all-star, feel-good, zazzy nonsense. Long after Murphy’s film drops its cutesy cynicism, it still manages to accidentally produce a damning indictment of Broadway phoniness.
  72. The Lion King
    Ultimately, only Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, as slacker sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa, make much of an impression; their funny, possibly ad-libbed banter feels both fresh and true to the spirit of the characters—the perfect remake recipe. Just don’t look too hard at their character designs. They’re realistic, hideously.
  73. Evelyn
    From the maudlin musical cues to a senseless romantic subplot that's only barely tacked on, every aspect of Evelyn stabs blindly and insistently at emotional buttons -- Beresford has made the feel-manipulated movie of the year.
  74. Romance & Cigarettes
    Sometimes the actors lip-sync, but more often, they're singing along with the original vocal tracks, trying to out-belt Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, like a cadre of enthusiastic shower singers joining in with the radio. The resulting cacophony is generally harsh and sloppy, and the film follows suit.
  75. Anesthesia
    Still, it’s dispiriting to see him (Nelson) produce something as turgid and heavy-handed as Anesthesia, which employs a dozen or so cardboard characters as mouthpieces for singularly unilluminating thoughts about the ways in which people struggle to bury their unhappiness.
  76. The Bank
    LaPaglia brings the hero into a world of greed and compromised values, but his fork-tongued monologues aren't remotely seductive, which makes the ending a foregone conclusion.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Clearly aiming for “cult classic,” Wyrmwood is too basic to be anything more than a forgettable bro-pocalypse.
  78. Imagine That
    Though he commits to a lot of embarrassing silliness, Murphy projects so little genuine warmth that his transformation barely registers.
  79. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    The Conjuring: Last Rites solidifies The Conjuring franchise as the Fast & Furious of horror movies: A conservative, Christian, family-oriented, spin-off and sequel-laden series of adventures that lose the plot and reinvest in the audience’s affection for its familiar beats and cornball leads.
  80. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    Crude, grating.
  81. Kung Fu Panda 4
    Instead of finding the perfect balance of humor as the other films did, jokes outweigh and occasionally undercut the few resounding sentiments on personal evolution.
  82. Melinda and Melinda
    A second-rate comedy and a third-rate drama, Melinda And Melinda gives viewers two unsatisfying movies in one. The only genuine tragedy here involves a once-brilliant comedy writer plunging further into a seemingly permanent artistic freefall.
  83. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Mean-spirited and stagy where "Psycho Beach Party" was cinematic and charming, Die, Mommie, Die recycles gags from Busch's screenwriting debut--from transparently phony rear projection to a character's crippling constipation--and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty hard.
  84. The Château
    Never recovering the energy of its early scenes, the heavily improvised Château becomes shapeless and dull.
  85. Let's Get Frank
    Everly tries to patch together a profile out of borrowed news clips and shoddy videography. In the process, Frank's charisma and force never emerge.
  86. Paper Heart
    This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.
  87. Knox Goes Away
    Unfortunately, with limp, elongated scenes rendering them unexciting, the whole plot unfolds like a long afterthought the filmmakers had after the audience lost all interest.
  88. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.
  89. Good Dick
    Mainly, Good Dick just proves that TV actors like Ritter make good indie-film hires, because they'll go along with whatever ridiculous nonsense a novice filmmaker concocts.
  90. The Fighting Temptations
    The energetic musical sequences help make it feel warmer and more ingratiating than it otherwise would, which is fortunate, since this rickety vehicle needs all the help it can get.
  91. The Hunting of the President
    What a shame that The Hunting Of The President feels like part of the problem.
  92. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper feels stale and rather one-note.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    George of the Jungle
    This appalling desecration of Jay Ward's 1960s cartoon series suffers from countless movie-ruining flaws.
  94. The Blind Side
    Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.
  95. The Forever Purge
    In The Forever Purge, we’re told a story that a battered nation has heard a lot—a sermon of immigration and class warfare that’s too heavy-handed to say anything its prospective audience hasn’t been told on countless social media feeds over the last few years.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    That's What I Am
    It's a dogged family entertainment determined to teach lessons about tolerance and how it should be extended to everyone, even redheads, gay people, and kids with cooties.
  97. Lilo & Stitch
    If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.
  98. Sharp Stick
    Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    Mr. Popper's Penguins reins in its rubber-faced star, leaving most of the rote physical comedy (and overabundance of fart jokes) to his nonhuman counterparts, comprised of a combination of CGI and real penguins.
  100. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    The film is even less than the sum of its genre trappings.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »