The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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 2.6 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Dolittle
    Dolittle is full of anachronistic pop culture references and poop and fart humor, jokes delivered in suspiciously low-impact style by the film’s animated animals.
  2. Babylon A.D.
    As long it sticks to that chase, Babylon A.D. remains a sub-passable lead-footed action film with neat scenery.
  3. Echelon Conspiracy
    Unlike, say, "Eagle Eye," Echelon Conspiracy doesn't put enough conviction behind its stupidity. It's mostly just bland.
  4. The Choice
    Again and again, Sparks takes the stuff of great four-hankie melodrama—love, death, cute dogs—and grinds it into a formulaic mush. Ask more of your paperback romances. At least ask for a different one each time.
  5. Borderlands
    ny movie with this Manic Pixie Ellen Ripley in it can’t be all bad, though Borderlands sure as shootin’ aims for it.
  6. Meet the Blacks
    It’s more like an extremely confusing and sloppily written chunk of Purge fan-fiction—a tortured use of another movie’s absurd mythology to help make muddled quasi-satirical points, while indulging the apparently fail-safe punchline of saying the word “purge” about once a minute.
  7. Rio, I Love You
    Rio offers the uncomfortable spectacle of 10 different filmmakers mostly failing to produce a sense of place that can be sustained over 10 minutes, much less multiple senses of place that can be stitched into an interesting patchwork.
  8. Madame Web
    The film is often so hurried or so preoccupied with what’s to come that it ignores what’s happening in the moment.
  9. Hell Fest
    It delivers the tedious, heavy-breathing buildup associated with the genre, but skimps on the scares and the gory, gooey good stuff.
  10. Van Wilder
    Reynolds and Reid's white-bread romance begs to be left on the cutting-room floor, but then again, so does just about every other scene in Van Wilder, which distinguishes itself only in featuring a level of ejaculate rarely found outside of hardcore porn.
  11. No Good Deed
    By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.
  12. Mac and Me
    Everything about Mac And Me is shameless.
  13. Basic Instinct 2
    Fortunately, as a showcase for Sharon Stone's physique, Basic Instinct 2 is a rousing success. In every other respect, it's a colossal failure.
  14. Patch Adams
    The film begins to resemble the dramatic equivalent of a porno movie, with emotional orgasms spewing forth at a rapid clip. By the time Patch Adams reaches its narrative climax, it has long since shot its dramatic load.
  15. Tideland
    It's no "trip through the dark to appreciate the light." It's a nightmare from start to finish.
  16. Zoom
    Zoom suffers from following three "X-Men" movies and "Sky High," but even if it preceded them, it'd still qualify as little more than a cheap, ugly, forgettable footnote to the seemingly endless superhero boom.
  17. Fish Without a Bicycle
    This vanity project belongs to an audience of one.
  18. A Night at the Roxbury
    Running a mere 83 minutes, A Night At The Roxbury still feels like an eternity spent in bad high-concept-movie hell.
  19. Blithe Spirit
    Hall has taken away the brittle wit of Coward’s source material and replaced it with little other than some fun performances in search of a better movie.
  20. The Best and the Brightest
    The farce withers away when it should be expanding.
  21. Supercross
    Since the focus is on the track, the filmmakers aren't out to reinvent the wheel, but for such a simple piece of formula storytelling, they do a remarkably poor job of dotting I's and crossing T's.
  22. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Tucker Max’s only real strengths are his outrageousness and his uncompromising self-confidence, but neither comes into play in this punch-pulling, frankly boring film.
  23. I Melt with You
    A movie about self-absorbed douchebags that wallows in their douchebaggery.
  24. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Alien Outpost
    It’s a real slog.
  26. Gloria
    An inexplicable and disastrous mismatch of sensibilities.
  27. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    Its entire third act is just expectation for a third movie that hopefully never comes. It is a bare minimum branding experiment, a dumb thing designed to be recognized with the hope that enjoyment will simply follow.
  28. Filth and Wisdom
    Madonna presents the three leads as flawed but essentially decent and redeemable, but they're bound up in a story that's meant to affirm a vague set of values. If she needs to justify the "Sex" book by charting her own contrived path from filth to heavenly wisdom, that's fine. But she should do it on her own time.
  29. No One Lives
    How bad is No One Lives, the new bottom-feeding schlock-fest from WWE Studios? Simply put: It’s bad enough to make some of the studio’s other offerings, like the Steve Austin deathmatch movie "The Condemned" and the Kane-starring slasher flick "See No Evil," look like genre gems.
  30. Taken 3
    So what, exactly, is wrong with Taken 3? A lot of things, most of which can be attributed to the fact that director Olivier Megaton—who also helmed Taken 2—couldn’t mount an action scene if his life depended on it.
  31. The Salon
    So sanctimonious and sincere in its pandering.
  32. Officer Downe
    Officer Downe isn’t overly concerned about viewers exercising many brain cells.
  33. Skyline
    It isn't clever. It isn't original. It isn't scary. At best, Skyline is a proficient, forgettable programmer that only occasionally lapses into irredeemably silliness.
  34. Rambo: Last Blood
    The sequence is Last Blood’s pièce de résistance, and perhaps the only compelling reason the movie has to exist. But it’s also pure, relentless, grimacing punishment at the end of a joyless film, choreographed like a ritual sacrifice. Rambo has always been a monster, but in his old age, he has become something even worse: no fun.
  35. Hatchet III
    A film that plays like a long, tedious inside joke for fanboys.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    September Dawn
    With its complete lack of empathy for early Mormons and simplistic rendering of historical figures, September Dawn is that rare movie that actually deserves whatever condemnation might come from religious groups.
  37. Case 39
    Zellweger has come an awful long way since Matthew McConaughey terrorized her in "Texas Chainsaw Masscare": The Next Generation, but not quite as far as she might like to imagine.
  38. The Misfits
    The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now.
  39. Playmobil: The Movie
    Playmobil: The Movie isn’t as funny as some of the direct-to-video Lego-related movies, either, and that’s very much the field it competes in, theatrical release or not. As children’s entertainment goes, this is a harmless distractor, but it’s also poorly conceived at every story turn, unable to even stick to a particular generic message to make up for its extremely basic humor.
  40. The Benchwarmers
    For the first two acts, veteran lowbrow director Dennis Dugan at least keeps The Benchwarmers' pace brisk and the wall-to-wall soundtrack upbeat and infectious. Then the big third-act twist arrives and the film drags to a finish, leaving a slug-like trail of squishy sentimentality.
  41. Georgia Rule
    Garry Marshall has too much confidence that he can match the weighty issues here with the light comedy. He can't. Or at least he can't with this cast.
  42. Hell Ride
    A witless reprise of '60s and '70s biker movies.
  43. License to Wed
    Krasinski knows how to play off Williams--his pained looks are all too appropriate in the face of Williams' desperate shtick--but it's disillusioning to see him here, because he seems too smart for this film.
  44. The Identical
    It’s the kind of curio that’s arguably more interesting to think about than to watch — a plodding melodrama that mixes royalty-free Elvis worship with preachy proselytizing.
  45. The Comebacks
    Adhering to few solid comedic principles, The Comebacks swings wildly between lame movie references and slapstick, slightly less lame funny names (such as Aseel Tare, the running back who couldn't possibly be injured) and Airplane!-style spoof, and a few mildly amusing stabs at irony.
  46. Sorority Boys
    A shockingly inane college comedy that accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of being far worse than it looks.
  47. Extraction
    Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Formidable as the cast list looks on paper, the voice acting reeks of cash grabs, and the performances are way off.
  49. Moms' Night Out
    The film never seems hectoring or preachy. Unfortunately, it never seems funny either, coming across like a sanitized remake of some raunchier laughfest.
  50. A Cinderella Story
    A Cinderella Story banks far too heavily on its audience's affection for Duff, who's dreadful in a terrible role.
  51. Arsenal
    Anything legitimately affecting about the movie bleeds out, and Cage delivering a blood-soaked monologue or simulating the sound of a burned esophagus isn’t enough on its own to turn Arsenal into the gory, borderline rococo thriller it starts aiming for around the halfway mark. It’s the rare case of a bonkers Cage performance counting as too little, too late.
  52. Killing Season
    With casting this unconvincing, no one is watching to get a lesson in the horrors of war.
  53. When in Rome
    It’s the kind of wretched embarrassment that may leave viewers trying to suspend the belief that they’re still sitting in the theater watching it.
  54. The Letters
    The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.
  55. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    Deadly dull.
  56. Stealing Harvard
    An uncomfortable-looking Lee soldiers doggedly through a thankless role, while Green, though never particularly funny, at least brings off-kilter energy to a role that provides Stealing Harvard's only spark of spontaneity.
  57. Memorial Day
    Most of the last hour of Memorial Day feels like a retread at least, and horribly exploitative at worst.
  58. R.I.P.D.
    Nothing short of wiping their memories with a real-life neuralizer is going to convince moviegoers that the supernatural buddy-cop comedy R.I.P.D. is anything more than a thinly disguised "Men In Black" ripoff.
  59. Argento's Dracula 3D
    No amount of intentional stabs at humor can offset the hilarious awfulness of Dario Argento’s Dracula.
  60. Obsessed
    Doing his best to class up the joint, "The Wire's" Idris Elba stars as the perfect man.
  61. Venom
    Gillespie showed a real knack for '80s-style retro horror with "I Know What You Did," and while a few sequences here have the familiar-but-enjoyable framing and stylization of an old EC horror comic, his material defeats him.
  62. My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
  63. Jason X
    Feels like it was written as a fairly straight horror/sci-fi movie, then script-doctored by a comedy writer intent on satirizing the original script. As a result, the film's intentional and unintentional laughs mingle so freely that it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two.
  64. Dragonfly
    Awash in cheap shocks and corny sentiment, Dragonfly aspires to be an inspirational thriller about one man's spiritual journey, but it takes little time for him to reach his destination. All that's left for him and the audience to do is solve a riddle unfit for the back of a cereal box.
  65. Rings
    Rings doesn’t end up doing much with its fresh ideas. Instead, it transforms into a kind of remake of a remake, borrowing not just the washed-out look of Verbinski’s movie—lots of blue hues and overcast skies—but also its basic plot structure, which was itself lifted from the Japanese original.
  66. Me Time
    It’s not just that more timely humor would do better; it’s that most comedy fans would probably rather be watching MacGruber again. Instead of sitting down for Me Time, do that, and hope that Hart and Wahlberg figure out a proper story next time that gives their chemistry somewhere to go.
  67. Welcome to the Jungle
    Van Damme’s performance is about the only element left unscathed by the movie’s compulsion to point out its own absurdity.
  68. Smiley
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
  69. Wrong Cops
    Wrong Cops does what underground movies used to do: It gives the viewer the sense that what they’re watching is thoroughly wrong in terms of both behavior and style. What’s missing is the transgressive kick, the sense that a real boundary has been crossed.
  70. The Ten Commandments
    It fails on every conceivable level.
  71. Revolver
    Ritchie has said that it takes several viewings to fully understand what's going on in Revolver, but once will be enough for most to agree to take his word for it.
  72. Strange Magic
    Strange Magic, an animated film from Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, borrows its sensibility from another movie from the summer of 2001: "Moulin Rouge." The new film’s composer and music director, Marius De Vries, even arranged songs for Baz Luhrmann’s phantasmagorical musical.
  73. Abduction
    Singleton once radiated ambition and vision. These days, he seems to be aiming for mediocrity at best. Even by those extraordinarily lenient standards, the inessential, perfunctory Abduction falls short
  74. Shut In
    A thriller that takes a long time to get even remotely thrilling.
  75. Enough
    In one respect at least, the film's idiocy works for Lopez: Every diva needs at least one camp classic on her résumé, and with Enough, she's scored a howler on the level of "Mommie Dearest."
  76. Rushlights
    Unabashedly pulpy, Rushlights brings to mind the noir cheapies churned out by the studios of Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early 1950s. It has a few of the better qualities of sub-B noir—above-average camerawork, a rogues gallery of bit players — and all of the flaws.
  77. Walk of Shame
    The premise should provide plenty of opportunities to skewer the way women are perceived based on appearance, with Shame as the operative word, but writer/director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) uses it mostly as a magnet for broad ethnic humor.
  78. Gods of Egypt
    A treasure trove of gilded fantasy bric-a-brac and clashing accents, Proyas’ sword-and-sandals space opera is a head above the likes of Wrath Of The Titans, but it rapidly devolves into a tedious and repetitive succession of monster chases, booby traps, and temples that start to crumble at the last minute.
  79. Apollo 18
    Unpleasant when it isn't dull, Apollo 18 never sells the lost-footage illusion, and never compensates for it with scares. Jolts, sure. Like so many lazy horror directors, López-Gallego knows how to startle, but not how to frighten.
  80. Misconduct
    If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.
  81. The New Guy
    A comedy just funny enough to make viewers wish it were far funnier.
  82. The Loft
    Besides being an early contender for the worst date movie of 2015, The Loft is a film that can’t decide what it wants. It’s a male fantasy, and a cautionary tale. It’s sleazy in concept, and timid in execution.
  83. London
    London has a distinct Off-Off-Broadway feel. There's a stagebound quality to its handful of claustrophobic locations, its endless assault of intense coke talk, and its third-rate invocation of David Mamet, David Rabe, and Neil LaBute.
  84. The Suburbans
    Made without the faintest spark of inspiration, The Suburbans feels like a buried, unholy relic from the era it's purportedly satirizing.
  85. Playing with Fire
    It’s more tedious than unwatchable, and pint-size Cena fans may be curious to see him in a movie more compatible with his Kids’ Choice Awards hosting gigs than the likes of "Blockers" or "Trainwreck." Sadly, the movie never shows similar curiosity about what its young audience, and subjects, might be thinking or feeling.
  86. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
    Superman IV lacks the wonder and awe of Superman, that giddy sense of boundless possibilities. Superman had gotten old and familiar and the message-movie trappings feel tacked-on and desperate.
  87. A Sound of Thunder
    A plodding, bloated, long-shelved adaptation/expansion of Ray Bradbury's classic short story about the dangers of time travel.
  88. Redline
    A PG-13 celebration of hot chicks, fast cars, and deplorable behavior is like diet Mountain Dew, near-beer, or an expletive-free version of Straight Outta Compton--a tame, watered-down version of the real thing.
  89. Bangkok Dangerous
    Dimly lit, emotionally empty, and devoid of thrills, Bangkok Dangerous should disappoint Cage fans looking for Wicker Man-style camp thrills just as thoroughly as action buffs looking for a passable thriller. It's never close to good, and it can't even get bad right.
  90. The Whole Ten Yards
    The least necessary sequel since "Agent Cody Banks" embarked on a London mission a few weeks ago.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sorority Row
    Sorority Row might be utterly lacking in suspense, surprises, and wit, but nobody can say it doesn’t have a hero.
  92. Piranha 3DD
    For the much-cheaper-looking sequel, Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager mostly seems to be trying to see how much he can degrade the old "Jaws" formula and still have it interpreted as parody rather than apathy.
  93. The Brave
    The Brave ultimately plays like the world’s most depressing remake of Joe Versus The Volcano, with all the joy and whimsy replaced by gloom and grime. It’s a morbid, maudlin oddity that starts off slowly and never finds its footing.
  94. Gotti
    Scorsese goes to the trouble of making his antiheroes charismatic and exciting. Gotti, by contrast, inadvertently argues that John Gotti and his namesake son are too dull to be evil. It’s DrabFellas.
  95. Breaking News in Yuba County
    None of the curious friction of its story, nor in its cast, results in any sort of frisson of excitement, dread, or even shock. The best Yuba can inspire is indignation. You get all these folks together, Tate Taylor, and the end result is this?
  96. Mr. Deeds
    The film owes as much to Caddyshack as to Capra.
  97. Bride Wars
    There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."
  98. Jawbreaker
    A nasty black comedy whose relentlessly glossy exterior recalls both Araki and John Waters without the wit or smarts of either...As a black comedy, Jawbreaker has one major flaw: It's not funny.
  99. The Pyramid
    In the end, The Pyramid seems designed not for horror, adventure, or action but to provide every possible answer to the question of its found-footage bona fides—yes, no, or maybe, depending on who’s asking. It spends most of its running time hedging uncertainly between trend and backlash, explanations and excuses.
  100. Dirty Work
    If a great movie is one with two great scenes and no bad ones, then Dirty Work is half a great movie. It contains more than its share of bad scenes, but it does have two brilliant ones.
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