The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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    • 17 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Delta Farce
    The worst thing about Delta Farce is its overall feeling of contempt--for the filmmaking process, for common decency, and, most despicably, for the audience.
  2. The Salon
    So sanctimonious and sincere in its pandering.
  3. I Know Who Killed Me
    Having broken free of the Disney machine that molded her, Lohan now seems intent on destroying her career and credibility on her own terms.
  4. Underdog
    The result is unfit for humankind.
  5. Dragon Wars: D-War
    All the thought seems to have gone into the marketing, and none into the unfathomably terrible script.
  6. Prom Night
    There's really nothing much to Prom Night: No twists, no atmosphere, no big Grand Guignol setpieces, not a single moment when it tries to do something novel with the event, the killings, the villain, or the victims. It's a little like going on a tour of the slaughterhouse, where death is meted out with mechanical regularity, but visitors are kept at a safe, PG-13 distance from all the butchering.
  7. 88 Minutes
    Actually, it's pretty much the definition of absurd.
  8. College
    God-awful.
  9. Disaster Movie
    It's too easy to say Disaster Movie deserves its title, but why put more effort into trashing it than the filmmakers did into writing it?
  10. Nobel Son
    Nobel Son sadistically resurrects the Tarantino knockoff--an unloved, foul-mouthed little bastard of a subgenre that should now go away forever.
  11. 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."
  12. Our Family Wedding
    We remain a nation divided, but hopefully we’ve at least progressed beyond the need for clumsy message movies about racial tolerance, as fortified with dick jokes.
  13. Beastly
    In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.
  14. Grown Ups
    If Grown Ups were any lazier or more slapdash, it'd be a home movie.
  15. Gulliver's Travels
    With deadening predictability, the filmmakers have reduced a definitive satire about the flaws and foibles of human nature into family-friendly sub-Disney pabulum about an affable slacker who finally musters up the courage to ask a pretty girl at work for a date.
  16. The Nutcracker
    Nutcracker In 3D doesn't just compound past errors in re-imagining the story. Thanks to a big budget, huge staging, massive overacting, and the non-wonders of post-production 3-D conversion, it adds a wide bevy of new errors.
  17. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    Apparently no one told Ricci she was acting in a comedy, not a touching drama about a young woman overcoming a formative trauma to achieve her dreams.
  18. The Chaperone
    The Chaperone is being marketed as a comedy, though no one seems to have told anyone involved.
  19. 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.
  20. I Melt with You
    A movie about self-absorbed douchebags that wallows in their douchebaggery.
  21. 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.
  22. Underworld: Awakening
    Watching the film is strangely like looking at the same three still frames of supernatural battles over and over for 90 minutes.
  23. That's My Boy
    The film is such a barren comic wasteland of scatology and misogyny that Vanilla Ice steals the film with a good-natured, self-deprecating portrayal of himself as Sandler's sleazy party buddy.
  24. 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.
  25. Dirty Girl
    In many ways, the film is history repeating itself, as the same Weinstein brothers who famously dropped $10 million on "Happy, Texas" in 1999 have overpaid again for "Happy, Texas 2."
  26. Upside Down
    Moment for moment, Upside Down is the most embarrassing, hilarious, obliviously stupid movie since M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Happening," and its constant pursuit of a striking image over any other consideration undermines it at every turn.
  27. Movie 43
    The sketches aren't united by a half-ignored framing device, so much as by an enduring fascination with bodily functions. Movie 43 is the most star-studded collection of jokes involving menstruation, flatulence, incest, bestiality, Snooki, and nutsacks ever assembled, but the stars don't elevate the material-they just descend to its level.
  28. Playing for Keeps
    The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Viewers are left to wonder if it's all actually some sort of vehicle for subliminal messaging.
  30. The Big Wedding
    It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.
  31. Parental Guidance
    Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.
  32. Seeking Justice
    To paraphrase a famous Mae West wisecrack, when Cage is good, he's very good, and when he's bad, he's better. Here, however, he's just plain lousy, and like the film he so passively carries, that's no fun at all.
  33. The Magic of Belle Isle
    For a movie that spends so much time extolling the virtues of the imagination to show so little of its own is more than ironic - it's offensive.
  34. Grown Ups 2
    Largely free of Sandler’s usual schmaltz and lame romance, it’s pure plotless, grotesque high jinks, bizarre and inept in a way that’s fascinating without ever being all that funny.
  35. The Words
    The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.
  36. The Tortured
    There's an opportunity here for screenwriter Marek Posival and director Robert Lieberman to play up the squeamishness of upper-middle-class torturers who don't fit the profile, but they're too busy tending to horror-thriller clichés.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Assassin's Bullet
    This is the third feature Portnoy has conceived and starred in, and while her initiative and ability to find funding for these films is admirable, Assassin's Bullet feels like a shameless, dismal vanity project.
  38. Last Vegas
    The high point of Last Vegas is also arguably the low point of Robert De Niro’s career.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Evidence
    There have been a lot of shoddy found-footage flicks over the past few years, but maybe none quite so shoddy as this.
  40. 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.
  41. Dealin' with Idiots
    Jeff Garlin’s second directorial feature, Dealin’ With Idiots, is a largely improvised ensemble piece about a comedian who decides that his son’s Little League team would make an interesting subject for a movie. It doesn’t.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Scenic Route
    Digital projection has made it easier than ever to get no-budget movies onto theater screens. That might sound wonderfully egalitarian, but it mostly just leads to more shoulda-gone-straight-to-DVD clunkers like Scenic Route.
  43. God's Not Dead
    Even by the rather lax standards of the Christian film industry, God’s Not Dead is a disaster.
  44. Left Behind
    This Left Behind may be worse than the last Left Behind, but it’s much less boring, thanks in part to the commitment of its star, who plays the often ludicrous material with the straightest of faces. The Cage works in mysterious ways.
  45. Septic Man
    As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.
  46. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
    Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.
  47. 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.
  48. 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.
  49. Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser
    At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.
  50. Expend4bles
    For a property that not only held unlimited potential for sequels galore, but also spin-offs (an all-female Expendables was briefly bandied about), it’s disheartening to see it face such creative bankruptcy. That’s not to say that, in the future, the right marriage of innovative directors and screenwriters can’t revive this flailing corpse and return it to its former glory. Unfortunately, recruiting those miracle workers seems more difficult than any mission any Expendable ever faced.
  51. 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.
  52. The Bye Bye Man
    On top of the general hoariness, this is also an uncommonly, at times unbelievably inept movie; from its acting to its script to most of its technical aspects, it feels barely fit for the big screen.
  53. Mother's Day
    Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.
  54. Slamma Jamma
    It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.
  55. Thinner
    Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.
  56. 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.
  57. Replicas
    Reeves is the most human presence on screen, trying and nobly failing to wrestle some emotional truth from every preposterous new plot twist. His labor is the one proof that you’re watching a real movie, and not just being plugged into the low-grade imitation of one in a poorly coded Matrix.
  58. My Favorite Martian
    With its mixture of whimsy and special-effects-driven humor, My Favorite Martian aims to blend E.T. and Men In Black, but in its sad, mercenary shamelessness, it ends up recalling Mac And Me instead.
  59. King Kong Lives
    King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.
  60. Hellraiser: Hellworld
    As far as the Hellraiser elements go, this is the laziest yet.
  61. Jingle All the Way
    If there is a bottom of the Hollywood barrel, Jingle All The Way has been gleaned from the filth upon which that bottom rests.
  62. Best Defense
    Not even a young Eddie Murphy is capable of generating hilarity out of thin air and Best Defense gives him nothing to work with. Even with Murphy inside the tank the film sorely lacks urgency and momentum.
  63. The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson
    The Murder Of Nicole Brown Simpson is directed like a Lifetime thriller, relying heavily on stark lighting and ominous music to create suspense. (Neither is effective.)
  64. 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.
  65. All My Life
    All My Life is too passionless to earn even a begrudged sniffle. It’s all paint-by-numbers, from the requisite “screaming inside a car” shot expressing a character’s frustrations to the store-bought spontaneity of a couple jumping into a fountain fully clothed.
  66. Mac and Me
    Everything about Mac And Me is shameless.
  67. 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.
  68. Purple Hearts
    Purple Hearts would be a lot more interesting if it interrogated the specific moments of weakness that attract Cassie to Luke, but that’s far too complex an idea to explore in this kiddie pool of sentimentality.
  69. Monstrous
    Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a more stillborn finished product, an exercise in tedium which checks the barest boxes of “completed movie” and possibly delivers unknown benefits for some of those executive producers, but otherwise offers nothing that might engage an audience.
  70. The Mean One
    For a film with such a promising premise, it turns out to be a plodding example of how to squander potential.
  71. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    While Snyder may do his best to invent a dark, gripping universe to engross viewers, Rebel Moon is a limp, soulless regurgitation of tropes stolen from much more formidable films.
  72. A Family Affair
    Directed by Richard LaGravenese, every moment in A Family Affair sits there as lifelessly as Gerard Butler’s character in LaGravenese’s most successful movie, P.S. I Love You. And that’s not just the fault of the expressionless romantic leads, regrettably cast opposite each other in a way that makes the whole film feel like Joey King’s vacation to the uncanny valley.
  73. AfrAId
    For all that its baffling narrative may be explained by deleted scenes, there is no excuse for how tediously non-threatening AfrAId is as a horror movie. Almost entirely bloodless and with half a handful of kills, there just isn’t enough visceral terror to make up for the disparate, thematically muddied nonsense that’s been cobbled together into the shape of a movie.
  74. Uglies
    All of Uglies feels like a rush job where its creators had the instruction manual but lost the proper parts.
  75. The Electric State
    The Electric State isn’t playful and colorful, it isn’t soberly thoughtful, it isn’t bleak yet emotional. It’s just a slog.
  76. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.
  77. O'Dessa
    Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.
  78. Oh. What. Fun.
    Beyond its desperate gestures towards better movies and its countless regifted plot points, Oh. What. Fun. does end up looking a lot like a familiar Christmas fixture: a garbage bag full of torn wrapping paper.
  79. Pretty Thing
    Even when compared to the recent underwhelming crop of erotic thrillers, topped by the enjoyably escalating silliness of Deep Water, Pretty Thing is especially chaste, abstaining from both sexual titillation and the campy fallout that results from making a series of decisions driven solely by libido.
  80. Playdate
    When people complain about the death of mainstream comedies, it’s bottomfeeding films like Playdate that are the genre’s executioner. No energy, no wit, just a tasteless and tacky sequence of events that barely manages to clear the bar for what’s still considered a movie.
  81. Return to Silent Hill
    Somewhere between a reboot and a remake, Return To Silent Hill is the worst film of the franchise so far, and a reminder that you can’t go home again—even if your home is the haunted hamlet of Silent Hill.
  82. The Players Club
    Sleazy, exploitative, cheap, and nonsensical, The Players Club is an unwatchable waste of time.
  83. 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.
  84. Winter Solstice
    The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.
  85. Bewitched
    Bewitched piles miscalculation upon miscalculation, beginning by casting the iron-willed Kidman, one of film's gutsiest and most fearless actresses, as a regressive pre-feminist dumb-blonde doormat, a sort of mildly retarded amalgam of Marilyn Monroe, Renée Zellweger, and Meg Ryan.
  86. Secuestro express
    Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz does his best Quentin Tarantino impersonation, loading the film with percussively profane dialogue, smug adolescent nihilism, rampant drug use, pop-culture references, homophobic invective, and empty stylistic excess.
  87. Underclassman
    Almost comically unambitious, Underclassman seldom tries to be funny, and never even attempts to be original.
  88. Dirty Love
    Dirty Love offers a series of desperate would-be comic moments.
  89. Cradle 2 the Grave
    Its creepy use of DMX's daughter is reprehensible, but the film is otherwise so unrelentingly sleazy that its use of the child-in-danger gambit actually qualifies as one of its subtler moves.
  90. 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.
  91. The Suburbans
    Made without the faintest spark of inspiration, The Suburbans feels like a buried, unholy relic from the era it's purportedly satirizing.
  92. My Boss's Daughter
    An abysmal screwball comedy that relies heavily on idiocy from both sides of the screen.
  93. This Thing of Ours
    A shamelessly derivative mob movie.
  94. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Guttenberg adapts James Kirkwood Jr.'s humanist black comedy -- and drains all the recognizable humanity out of it, turning it into a morose, unlikable reflection of its sad-sack lead character.
  95. Pinocchio
    An unintended gift to midnight-movie programmers and students of the bizarre, Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio could have become a "Howard The Duck" -- or "Battlefield Earth"-like synonym for cinematic miscalculation, were its title not already so familiar.
  96. 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."
  97. Kedma
    Kedma makes for a clumsy, lugubrious history lesson.
  98. 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."
    • 43 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Lost in Space
    Dream up a plot incorporating time travel, genetic mutation, cyberjargon, and saving the Earth -- all the worst and most boring elements of science fiction. Finally, type up a list of bad jokes, space-talk, and semi-tough tag lines; label it "script."
  100. 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.
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