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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  1. Would You Rather
    Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in "Re-Animator."
  2. Saw V
    Devotes so much time and energy to flashbacks and recycling footage from its predecessors that it threatens to implode.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    Surely there's a more nuanced argument to be made in favor of ID than pinning the old "bad as Hitler" canard on pro-evolution scientists?
  4. Son of the Mask
    No doubt extensive market research shows that there's an audience out there for movies like Son Of The Mask, but it's too depressing to speculate who that might be.
  5. The Last Airbender
    The Last Airbender isn't that much different from the rest of this summer's generally dire multiplex fare-from "The A-Team" to "Jonah Hex"... But it is remarkable in one respect: It's the worst of them.
  6. 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.
  7. Marci X
    The makers of “Bringing Down The House” should thank the gods of cinema for Marci X, which has relieved the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah hit of its status as the year's most misguided culture-clash comedy.
  8. Absence
    There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.
    • 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.
  10. 9/11
    It’s the film equivalent of a guy loudly demanding the attention of everyone in a subway car, then refusing to even issue a compellingly strange rant.
  11. Mortal
    Director and cowriter André Øvredal (Trollhunter, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe) gets credit here for “original story,” but every single element has been borrowed, and precious little else of note about Mortal remains.
  12. The Cat in the Hat
    The ongoing cinematic desecration of Dr. Seuss' legacy continues with The Cat In The Hat, a clattering abomination that makes it depressingly likely that an entire generation of reading-averse children will know The Cat In The Hat as that obnoxious character Mike Myers played in that horrible movie.
  13. Virus
    This suspense-free, originality-deprived mess will likely be a major contender for the title of 1999's worst film.
  14. All the Queen's Men
    Stultifying.
  15. Underclassman
    Almost comically unambitious, Underclassman seldom tries to be funny, and never even attempts to be original.
  16. Old Dogs
    Adults should steer clear. Kids should be sent to it only if they’ve been extraordinarily naughty.
  17. Tomorrow You're Gone
    A dismal erotic thriller that was originally called "Boot Tracks."
  18. Good Luck Chuck
    There's an audience out there for this kind of thing--Cook is obviously a populist, and Norbit made bushels of money--but if this is what passes for funny, what in the world of comedy DOESN'T qualify?
  19. Lost & Found
    Spade proves that he's entirely capable of making unwatchable dreck all by himself.
  20. 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.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Covenant
    Okay, so it isn't challenging. There are worse things for a horror-thriller about supernatural high-schoolers to not be. Like not scary. Or not thrilling. Or not as entertaining as an episode of "Charmed."
  22. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    Wasted comedy ringers Eugene Levy and Cheri Oteri co-star.
  23. 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.
  24. Reasonable Doubt
    A courtroom thriller that becomes sillier and more generic as it zips along. It moves fast (a rare quality for a contemporary thriller), but doesn’t end up going anywhere interesting.
  25. The Pirate Movie
    The Pirate Movie suggests what Gilbert & Sullivan's original would look and sound like if it were rewritten by a boy-crazed middle-schooler who'd rather drool over John Travolta in Grease for the 50th time than suffer through anything close to opera.
  26. Downloading Nancy
    In short, this is a movie about bruised people bruising each other, and if Downloading Nancy had more of an openly pulpy sensibility, then the repugnant premise might’ve had some lasting impact.
  27. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
    Looks like a video-game promo, has a story that plays like the fifth episode of a struggling syndicated action show, and feels like a headache waiting to happen.
  28. Halloween: Resurrection
    It seems content to plod listlessly through the motions.
  29. Species II
    Though it never really taps into the whole JFK-as-alien-sex-fiend plot as a source of satire, Species 2 is still the superior piece of trash its predecessor should have been.
  30. Surviving Christmas
    Affleck's psychotic enthusiasm aside, no one seems to be having a good time, and the ill will becomes infectious.
  31. Into the Fire
    At least Into The Fire can't be accused of misleading audiences. From its overwrought opening narration to early shots of an empty Ferris wheel, it promises to be a dour, pretentious, humorless time-waster, and it doggedly makes good on that promise.
  32. BloodRayne
    With minimal flare and maximal gore, Boll simply delivers the turgid drama and incompetently staged action sequences that have made him the unstoppable Big Boss of the gaming community.
  33. 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.
  34. Ultraviolet
    Underdeveloped antagonist Nick Chinlund sums up the entire film during one of his rants about Jovovich's latest casual, offhand slaughter: "One woman against 14 men! It's ridiculous!" Well, yeah.
  35. Gigli
    Writer-director Martin Brest lends the film a professional sheen, and his stars (who some rumors suggest may have become romantically involved) have charisma to spare, but the film has all the charge and momentum of a Paxil ad.
  36. Swept Away
    Ritchie's frivolous comedy tries to have it both ways, thinning out the material for mass consumption while still sticking to the script -- an unstable alchemy that backfires horribly.
  37. It's Pat: The Movie
    It's simultaneously intriguing and repulsive, a would-be cult curio not even the most indulgent cult could love.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Who's Your Caddy?
    The tired racial stereotypes that Caddy inserts into the old Caddyshack-style "slobs vs. snobs" formula should probably make it much more offensive than it is.
  39. Serving Sara
    Misbegotten late-summer special.
  40. The Fanatic
    Mostly, the action, while bloodier than one might expect, is as goofy and dim-witted as the dialogue.
  41. The Darkest Hour
    Not since Mark Wahlberg trembled in fear beside a menacing houseplant in "The Happening" has a film tried to provoke terror with such an unlikely object of menace.
  42. Kickin It Old Skool
    For a film that has nothing to offer but lazy '80s nostalgia, Kickin' It Old Skool doesn't even bother to get the details right.
  43. The Devil Inside
    The hilariously convoluted thriller contains all the elements for a wacky parody of exorcism movies, except a sense of humor about itself: The Devil Inside never acknowledges its innate ridiculousness, so the laughs are unintentional.
  44. 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
    Zany antics of the most painful sort.
  45. Death Wish 3
    Everything abhorrent about Death Wish—its inner-city stereotyping and casual racism; its embrace of lawlessness and righteous bloodletting; Paul’s rancid transformation from naïve, bleeding-heart liberal into gun-toting angel of vengeance—gets blown up to such a grotesque degree that no sane person could mistake its world for the real one. It’s like a paranoid right-wing small-towner’s vision of what the big city is like: a gang-infested war zone, lorded over by the cast of Breakin’.
  46. 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.
  47. Boat Trip
    Has an agreeable air of anything-goes vulgarity, which is so transcendentally idiotic that it's impossible to tell whether the film is a brilliant, deadpan parody of raunchy lowbrow farces from the '70s and '80s, or one of the stupidest, most regressive films ever made. Or, more likely, it's a little of both.
  48. The Ridiculous 6
    While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.
  49. 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.
  50. Vampires Suck
    The boys similarly deserve very minor props for choosing a satirical target that lends itself to satire: the glum, self-important Twilight novels and movies. Sadly, that's where the filmmakers' mild accomplishments end and the groaningly predictable hackwork begins.
  51. The Apparition
    It's a potentially creepy setting that would give an innovative director a chance to do a lot with a little. Unfortunately, Lincoln isn't one of those.
  52. 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.
  53. I Hate Valentine's Day
    An unspeakable nadir in the career of its writer-director-star.
  54. Vice
    Bad doesn’t have to mean boring. Case in point: Vice, a bargain-bin high-concept sci-fi thriller full of Joel Schumacher-esque canted Steadicam moves, leaden expository dialogue, and cheap fluorescents-glued-to-the-wall sets.
  55. Samson
    A bargain-bin biblical epic that delivers the requisite mass-murder-by-ass-jaw as a cheapjack approximation of Zack Snyder-esque pomp, but is for the most part clinically dull.
  56. 88 Minutes
    Actually, it's pretty much the definition of absurd.
  57. See No Evil
    A punishingly awful slasher film with monosyllabic banter dreadful enough to make viewers yearn for the sophisticated repartee of earlier Dark efforts like "White Bunbusters."
  58. Best Night Ever
    Likely to be appreciated only by homeless viewers who need a quiet place to nap during the cold months of winter, the movie has more awkward dead space than jokes.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Material Girls
    The most shocking moment comes during the closing credits, when it's revealed that not one, not two, but three screenwriters were responsible for a plot that someone seems to have hastily slapped together after taking a walk around a Sephora outlet while listening to "Beat Of My Heart" on loop.
  60. Extreme Ops
    Extreme Ops seems to have only the slightest grasp of its own absurdity (or its own horribleness), which makes it almost charming.
  61. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    The problems with Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li began with the casting of dead-eyed, sleepy-voiced, charisma-impaired automaton Kristin Kreuk.
  62. 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.
  63. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The first Human Centipede had audacity on its side. Human Centipede II has only excess.
  64. All About Steve
    How do you make a movie about a protagonist so profoundly irritating that even her loved ones barely tolerate her? And how do you avoid annoying audiences to the point of distraction in the process?
  65. Girls Against Boys
    LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.
  66. The Lodger
    It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.
  67. A Haunted House 2
    However rubbery and manic, though, A Haunted House 2 still can’t overcome star attraction Marlon Wayans’ severely limited comic skill set.
    • 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.
  69. Epic Movie
    It's an ersatz comedy filled with unconvincing celebrity look-alikes and tone-deaf parodies. Only the desperation and cynicism feel authentic.
  70. Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
    A sequel so wholly anodyne that it doesn’t even deserve its exclamation point.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Witless Protection
    Larry The Cable Guy is a cancerous boil on the ass of comedy, but it's still sort of shocking how little effort he puts into his movies.
  72. The Mod Squad
    Bound to wind up as one of 1999's worst films.
  73. 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.
  74. The Last Face
    But that’s nothing compared to the sustained tone-deaf fiasco that is Penn’s latest feature, The Last Face — a movie so monumentally miscalculated, right from its opening explanatory text, that the audience at Cannes, where it (inexplicably) premiered in Competition last year, started laughing at it within the first 30 seconds. All one can really do is gape in wonder and puzzlement.
  75. Half Baked
    The main problem, however, is Tamra Davis' leaden direction, which prevents Half-Baked from developing comic momentum. There are a few scattered laughs.
  76. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Stiff, episodic, and disjointed, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D replicates its source material all too faithfully.
  77. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
    To say that Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey delivers everything a slasher movie should is higher praise than it used to be. Marketing alone would have guaranteed this movie a certain percentage of curious eyeballs, but Frake-Waterfield made sure that what genre fans see is everything they expected.
  78. FeardotCom
    Made with just enough craft to keep it from being the instantly dated camp howler its title promises, but it's quickly apparent that there's no thought or originality under its grim, familiar surface.
  79. God's Not Dead
    Even by the rather lax standards of the Christian film industry, God’s Not Dead is a disaster.
  80. Deuces Wild
    A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.
  81. Jersey Guy
    Parlavecchio is kind of an asshole, and that–along with the stilted dialogue, clueless portrayals of women, and the fact that much of the plot has been lifted from Tom Perrotta's terrific novel "The Wishbones"–ranks among the film's main problems.
  82. Shanghai Surprise
    Limply, tardily trying to cash in on the success of the Indiana Jones movies.
  83. Kangaroo Jack
    Straight from the fiery, churning bowels of high-concept hell comes Kangaroo Jack, Bruckheimer's idea of kid-friendly fare, and some of the longest 90 minutes ever committed to film.
  84. The Cookout
    Gives virtually every cast member a shot at humiliation.
  85. My Boss's Daughter
    An abysmal screwball comedy that relies heavily on idiocy from both sides of the screen.
  86. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    Cultists will be happy to discover that In The Name Of The King bears all the so-bad-it's-good hallmarks of a classic Boll production.
  87. Darkness
    It's not even bad enough to be any fun.
  88. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    Impossibly dull form of niche-marketed entertainment.
  89. The Last Days of American Crime
    In its final hour, The Last Days Of American Crime finally gets down to the business of its big heist, revealing both the propulsive entertainment value the filmmakers have been inexplicably stalling and the thinness of the whole enterprise.
  90. 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?
  91. College
    God-awful.
  92. America: Imagine a World Without Her
    Graced with a hilariously definitive title, America is astonishingly facile, a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments.
  93. House of the Dead
    Much poorly choreographed gunplay, many lovingly rendered head explosions, and some half-assed exposition about centuries-old, immortality-seeking pirates follow, with nothing to recommend House Of The Dead to anyone but the most undiscriminating zombie-movie fans.
    • 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.
  95. After We Collided
    After We Collided is too invested in its central couple to know what to do with its new romantic rival. Which is a shame because Sprouse turns in one of the film’s livelier performances.
  96. Rollerball
    Only those attracted to "Waterworld" or "Last Action Hero" level big-budget disasters need bother with this one.
  97. A Little Bit of Heaven
    Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.
  98. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    Does this even count as a movie?
  99. From Justin to Kelly
    More than anything, From Justin To Kelly needs Simon Cowell, the fork-tongued Idol judge who gives the show its only sliver of tension.
  100. Cabin Fever
    Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.
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