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. One Missed Call
    On the shortlist for least essential movie of the decade, a copy of a copy of a copy that's so worn down, it's about as fresh and vital as a fifth-generation dub of "The Star Wars Holiday Special."
  2. Captivity
    In a genre where killers love to play head games, it's a clever idea (Cohen's?) to have this one remain mute, but that leaves Cuthbert to carry much of the psychological load, and there's no substance to her character, apart from the suggestion that she's being punished for her vanity.
  3. Tales of Erotica
    Their attempts at wit seem forced, and the overall point of each installment is too minor to spend nearly 30 minutes exploring.
  4. Juwanna Mann
    Relies on the most time-tested basic moves of farce for laughs that just don't come.
  5. Holmes & Watson
    If there are any new jokes left to tell about Holmes, they’re nowhere to be found in the abysmal Holmes & Watson, which might be the worst feature-length film ever made about the “consulting detective” from Baker Street.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Speed 2: Cruise Control
    But like De Bont's awful "Twister", Speed 2: Cruise Control somehow manages to fail in every way.
  7. Unfreedom
    Raj Amit Kumar’s film, which was banned by the country’s national censor board, is an intentional act of cultural and political provocation, and goes about its task as relentlessly as possible.
  8. Dark Crimes
    Here, a few words should be said about Carrey’s performance: It may be the worst dramatic acting of his career, a charmless cartoon of self-repression.
  9. Stay Alive
    A laughable would-be fright-fest that's as strikingly inept as a Boll movie, but nowhere near as much guilty fun.
  10. Godsend
    It mostly serves as a warning to stay away from future films involving director Nick Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback.
  11. Saw 3D
    Saw has shown a ferocious unwillingness to evolve.
  12. The Love Guru
    Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness.
  13. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    Duffy's inept command of actors, not to mention his utterly juvenile morality and his comically clumsy use of religious iconography, should keep all but the diehards away.
  14. Life on the Line
    The slumming stars actually make the situation worse for everyone; Life On The Line plays like an ego trip without any accompanying fun.
  15. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.
  16. Doogal
    It'd take more than potentially lethal amounts of alcohol to make this derivative trash endurable.
  17. Furry Vengeance
    While Fraser’s presence doesn’t necessarily elevate Furry Vengeance into something better than the dumb, lowbrow timewaster it aspires to be, Fraser does make it a little easier to digest.
  18. The War on the War on Drugs
    Writer-director-producer-actor-composer-singer Soling claims to have spent a year researching the war on drugs before deciding to make a satire instead of a documentary, but he apparently threw most of his facts out the window in favor of absurdism, exaggeration, slander, and self-congratulatory humor.
  19. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    What's perhaps most surprising about European Gigolo is its reactionary streak, exemplified by knee-jerk attacks on Europe's equally knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Then again, that seems fitting. The sequel functions as the ultimate Ugly American, good for a few cheap, vulgar laughs and nothing else.
  20. Collateral Beauty
    Collateral Beauty is one of those cloying movies about learning to take the good with the bad that feels like it was made by aliens with little grasp of human life.
  21. Exposed
    If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.
  22. The Snowman
    The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.
  23. Jack and Jill
    What makes Jack And Jill worse than the average Sandler vehicle is Jill, who's been conceived as little more than a dude in drag, hold the jokes.
  24. Couples Retreat
    Features a running gag about a little boy in the midst of potty training who doesn’t always go where it’s appropriate. In a nutshell, that subplot explains everything that’s wrong about the film.
  25. Bride Hard
    Bride Hard aims for the goofy joy of a drunken bachelorette party, but is more like the morning-after hangover.
  26. My Baby's Daddy
    Reflects poorly on everyone, particularly its makers, its stars, and the studio laboring under the delusion that this stuff was worthy of release.
  27. The Sea of Trees
    As it turns out, there is something worse than Nicholas Sparks, the king of morbid romantic kitsch, and that’s a Nicholas Sparks pretender with highfalutin pretensions.
  28. Formula 51
    Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.
  29. Term Life
    Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.
  30. The Condemned
    The film keeps adding layers of superfluous nonsense to its plot until all that's left is glowering ultra-violence and a whole lot of missed opportunities.
  31. Underworld: Blood Wars
    Too rote to be trash, it has to make do with being mere junk, impatiently exposing more incoherent machinations and more condo-board-like council meetings involving the dullest vampires in moviedom.
  32. The Roommate
    A deplorable unofficial reworking of "Single White Female."
  33. Darkness Falls
    Powered by dim bulbs on both sides of the camera, Darkness Falls barrels ahead with unrelenting stupidity, forsaking many of its own rules in search of the next cheap shock.
  34. Half Past Dead
    So audaciously bad it's good, which is about as close to quality as Seagal is likely to get these days.
  35. Eight Crazy Nights
    The worst Hanukkah movie ever made, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights does for the holiday what "Santa Claus: The Movie" did for Christmas.
  36. Pay the Ghost
    The movie’s B-movie flimsiness is pervasive, and paired with an overall lack of B-movie flair, though director Uli Edel makes some game yarn-spinning attempts.
  37. The Cobbler
    Maudlin when it’s not being offensive, The Cobbler belongs to that special class of comedy that seems to get worse with every new (mis)step it takes.
  38. Yoga Hosers
    Trouble is, Yoga Hosers isn’t really a movie. It’s a quarter-to-1:00 a.m. SNL sketch, nightmarishly distended into oblivion. It’s a corny Canuck joke, told for 88 surreally unfunny minutes. It has a target demographic of one: He wears hockey jerseys and, again, loves his daughter.
  39. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.
  40. The Bounty Hunter
    Tennant and his actors have done the bare minimum to carry their lifeless movie past the finish line, and their apathy reads a lot like contempt.
  41. The Do-Over
    The Do-Over is a de facto R-rated movie for Sandler, with the attendant bad language and sex jokes, but most of the faux-naughty stuff seems like an afterthought. The jokes that work best fill in the sad details of Charlie’s life.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Reagan
    For a movie about a man who puts himself at the center of a world apparently on the brink of annihilation, Reagan lacks any drama at all.
  43. Father Figures
    Its scenes aren’t really long or improv-heavy enough to qualify as rambling, but they’re often slow enough to qualify as excruciating.
  44. Dark House
    Director Victor Salva tries very hard to make this seem creepy, but there’s just nothing about chatting with central heating that’s gonna prompt gooseflesh.
  45. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    Star Martin Lawrence, now the sole remaining element from the original "Big Momma's House" 11 years ago, looks pretty tired both in and out of makeup here.
  46. Supercapitalist
    With its minimal settings and focus on the abstract lingo of market transactions, "Margin Call" stands as the new model for how to do Wall Street on a budget, embedding its moral themes in language and complex characters. By comparison, $upercapitalist seems naïve about both the market and the humans who operate in it.
  47. Spark: A Space Tail
    As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.
  48. Search Party
    Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.
  49. Max Steel
    From its thinly sketched teen protagonist to its deluge of hero-will-rise clichés, Max Steel evinces all of the imagination and ambition you’d expect from a movie based on a bestselling line of action figures.
  50. Children of the Corn
    There’s no reason a movie with this premise couldn’t be better. Just not in these folks’ hands.
  51. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”
  52. Black Christmas
    Seems to go out of its way to obliterate all the elements that made the original so special.
  53. New Year's Eve
    It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.
  54. Postal
    A provocation first, an insult second, a publicity stunt third, and a film a distant fourth.
  55. Home Sweet Hell
    Katherine Heigl has exactly one funny moment in the dire black comedy Home Sweet Hell, which is still one more than anybody else has.
  56. What Goes Up
    What Goes Up has a one-of-a-kind character in Coogan, a cynic with a savior complex, who lies partly out of convenience, and partly because he knows--as Glatzer and Lawson know--that even a messy story can still inspire.
  57. Martyrs
    Unfortunately, in goosing the momentum, the creators of the film have lost the soul of what was essential to this horrific tale
  58. Passion Play
    Passion Play doesn't overreach so much as it overindulges in aimless pacing, inert acting, and a romance maudlin enough to make "Twilight" look restrained.
  59. The Legend of Hercules
    While The Legend Of Hercules offers plenty for viewers who’ve acquired a taste for the fake and incompetent (not the least of which is the dialogue, which finds characters saying each other’s names at the end of every other sentence), it’s unlikely to please anyone who wants entertainment in the conventional sense.
  60. Getaway
    For the most part, Getaway lacks tension and violence. Strobe cuts rob the stunts of any sense of motion; twisting metal, seen in half-second snippets, becomes abstracted texture. While it’s possible to appreciate this stuff on an individual level, it doesn’t quite add up to an action-movie whole.
  61. Do You Believe?
    A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.
  62. Shark Night 3D
    Shark Night 3D barely bothered to show up, let alone deliver the minimal goods.
  63. The Tax Collector
    Does The Tax Collector sound intriguingly bizarre? In actuality, it’s a tediously paced procedural about work-life balance in which suspense-free displays of hackneyed gangbanger signage are filled in with a few flashbacks that look like they were a cut from a much more exciting movie.
  64. God's Not Dead 2
    The first film pandered to a heavy persecution complex; this installment’s relatively subtler, but there are dog whistles aplenty.
  65. Christmas with the Kranks
    Hard not to pelt the screen with rotten fruit when confronted with a film like Christmas With The Kranks.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    A Love Affair of Sorts
    Infuriatingly navel-gazing and insubstantial.
  67. The Cold Light of Day
    The Cold Light Of Day is the antithesis of a labor of love; it's a cold, mercenary endeavor that, like the thematically similar Taylor Lautner vehicle "Abduction," diligently ignores the potentially intriguing issues of family and identity its plot raises.
  68. Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
    Thriller framework aside, Fantasy Island probably works best as a comedy. At least when it’s not trying to be one.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exists
    It feels strange to be so dismissive about someone who once commanded wide attention (however much as a fluke) with an indie blockbuster that effectively birthed a lucrative mainstream genre. But Sánchez, sadly, is now a pretender to his own throne.
  70. One for the Money
    During a dinner with Stephanie's colorfully ethnic family, including a squandered Debbie Reynolds, the reaction shots arrive with bludgeoning regularity, and the soundtrack's burbling organ serves as an incessant reminder not to take anything seriously. Fortunately, there's no danger of that.
  71. Cannibal Holocaust
    The director’s grim commitment to shocking his audience is fanatical to the point of being enthralling, as he dramatizes one bit of extreme, rancid cruelty after another for little reason other than to turn viewers’ stomachs. It’s far from a noble goal, but there’s no denying its effectiveness.
  72. Chopping Mall
    Looking cheap, rushed, and often apathetically thrown together, except for the lovingly shot scenes involving gratuitous nudity or sudden violence
  73. Reach Me
    There are great L.A. ensembles, like "Short Cuts" "Magnolia," or "Jackie Brown," but writer-director John Herzfeld is an expert in the bad kind, having made "2 Days In The Valley."
  74. The Car
    It is, in short, sub-par as demon-possessed-car movies go, even if watching Brolin attempt to act horrified at the sight of a classic automobile makes it almost worthwhile.
  75. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    As broad as Williams goes in these scenes, it’s not really his fault. He’s acting out a screenplay, credited to Daniel Taplitz, that’s peppered with bad writerly flourishes.
  76. Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
    Laughing at this turkey might not necessarily make you a redneck, but it sure does make you easily amused.
  77. Norm of the North
    Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.
  78. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
    There's gore aplenty here, but precious little suspense or terror.
  79. Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
    Penn, who probably didn't need this shoddy placeholder after the cult success of "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle's," acquits himself with a gentle charisma that makes the crudity go down easy. Granted, it's still s---, but with a sweeter odor than usual.
  80. 8MM
    That 8MM fails miserably as a psychological thriller is forgivable. The fact that it is nearly as creepy, sleazy, and manipulative as the pornographic films it so cluelessly and hypocritically condemns is not.
  81. Geostorm
    Butler sleepwalks through his thinly written role, and the ostensible tension between the two brothers, flaring up whenever the energy starts to sag, never feels like anything but a bald contrivance.
  82. Dirty Grandpa
    There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.
  83. Killers
    Killers isn’t an entertainment, it’s a high-speed spat.
  84. The Order
    A supernatural religious thriller so awful it should result in the retroactive forfeiture of the Oscar writer, director, and producer Brian Helgeland won for co-writing "L.A. Confidential."
  85. Silver Circle
    Like a Rand Paul rally rendered in the style of Grand Theft Auto, Silver Circle engineers the perfect marriage of sub-par animation and sloppy thinking.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    General Education
    The film owes a lot to "Napoleon Dynamite," though it could have borrowed more of the underlying sweetness of Jared Hess' film, and less of other things, like its eyebrow-raising treatment of race.
  87. Just Getting Started
    Dramatically and comically impotent.
  88. Life Itself
    A vapid exercise in narrative kitsch that spans two languages and multiple decades and love stories.
  89. Bratz
    Bratz's strong anti-clique sermonizing would be slightly more convincing if it weren't tethered to a movie romanticizing the most awesome clique ever.
  90. Wing Commander: Space Will Never Be the Same
    Either a thoroughly incomprehensible movie or a daring exercise in the cinema of disorientation, and a painful viewing experience either way.
  91. An American Carol
    Great satire never fits neatly within an ideological box. Attention, the ghosts of H.L. Mencken, Stanley Kubrick, and Jonathan Swift: David Zucker could use a visit.
  92. Accidental Love
    To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.
  93. Gunslingers
    Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.
  94. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    It raises the question of who the movie is for in the first place: Kids have seen much better animation in other films, and it's hard to imagine too many grown-ups ready to smile and nod at yet more smirking takes on famous moments from "Scarface" and "The Silence Of The Lambs."
    • 20 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Not only doesn't achieve empathy for the minor plights of its human noodle of a hero Toby Regbo, it might actually make audiences understand the urge to bully.
  96. The Informers
    Though The Informers is by no means great--nor wholly true to the vision of Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki--moments sprinkled throughout the film capture Ellis' particular mix of flip yuppie satire and lived-in paranoia better than any big-screen version of his work to date.
  97. Faith of Our Fathers
    It’s obnoxious, to say the least, to use the Vietnam War as an excuse to affirm the importance of telling all and sundry about Jesus at all times (i.e., “testifying”), under all circumstances.
  98. A Haunted House
    If the sluggishly paced, virtually laugh-free Haunted House is Wayans' conception of a passion-fueled labor of love, it's horrifying to ponder what he'd consider a mercenary cash-grab.
  99. Besotted
    Hardman never gives her material a chance to develop, because she subjects it to so much forced drama and self-conscious nudging, and when she hits a wall, she gets silly.
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