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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    • 13 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Love, Wedding, Marriage
    The "romantic" half of Love, Wedding, Marriage's romantic comedy doesn't work, but that isn't nearly as problematic as the film's profound unfunniness.
  2. Daddy Day Camp
    A generic time-waster powered by a lazy, cynical combination of scatological kiddie humor and maudlin sentiment.
  3. Fascination
    Nearly everything about Fascination feels overdone. At its delirious worst, it's as pungent a Parisian cheese shop, offering a cornucopia of laughable scenes.
  4. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.
  5. New Best Friend
    A lurid, unsavory mix of Reefer Madness hysteria, drive-in sleaze, and the queasy morality of '80s slasher film.
  6. Nothing But Trouble
    No matter how much care and thought went into it it's still disgusting and pointless.
  7. The Avengers
    It's almost fascinating to witness just how lousy The Avengers really is.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    Strange Wilderness has three bad comic ideas for every good joke, and it botches many of those, too, thanks to slack comic timing and a nonexistent grasp of storytelling basics. But just when the flop-sweat stench is about to become unbearable, Strange Wilderness stumbles upon an uproarious, laugh-out moment, and suddenly it's tolerable again for another few minutes.
  9. 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.
  10. The Emoji Movie
    There was probably never going to be a version of this film that would prove even remotely plausible as a movie someone felt passionately about making for artistic reasons; as far as expanding on smartphone-related IP, this is an even weaker starting point than Sony Animation’s recent The Angry Birds Movie.
  11. Slackers
    Schwartzman steals Slackers without much effort, but it's not worth the theft.
  12. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    A headache-inducing mess without direction or purpose.
  13. The Master of Disguise
    A film about as funny as a seeping wound.
  14. King's Ransom
    Devotes its first two acts to establishing the comic monstrousness of all its characters.
  15. Date Movie
    It's kind of amazing that a joke-a-second comedy like Date Movie doesn't contain a single laugh.
  16. 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.
  17. Scary Movie 5
    Scary Movie 5 aspires to timeliness, but its comic sensibility is so groaningly retro that the film features a series of tributes to The Benny Hill Show and its signature ditty, “Yakety Sax.”
  18. Nine Lives
    Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.
  19. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.
  20. Unplanned
    There’s not a single scene that speaks to characters with lives outside their streamlined narrative function; they’re performers in a parable traced over a Chick tract, filmed with a bland competence at odds with the true perversity of the material. Old-school Pure Flix: Welcome back!
  21. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    A baffling passion project whose cruelly protracted runtime is eclipsed only by the monumentally tedious way it fills it.
  22. Future World
    Its blasé attitude to the basics of movie action turn the video-game-esque quest plot into an exercise in tedium.
  23. 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.
  24. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    The most perversely unnecessary sequel in recent memory.
  25. 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.
  26. Alone in the Dark
    A fairly faithful adaptation of what a game is like, but without the pleasure of getting to play or the much-needed option of pressing the "off" button.
  27. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    It’s a movie where everything, from the sets to the cast and crew, is an unconvincing, low-cost substitute for something else.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Meet the Spartans
    Meet The Spartans gamely alternates between unfunny gay jokes and violent pratfalls for a good 80 minutes, finding time for not one, but two musical dance numbers set to "I Will Survive."
  29. Dirty Love
    Dirty Love offers a series of desperate would-be comic moments.
  30. State Property
    A singularly uncharismatic leading man, the paunchy, expressionless, frequently inarticulate Sigel makes an unintentionally comic impression as a character named, naturally, Beans.
  31. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
    The worst part of The Haunting Of Sharon Tate is how seriously it takes its ham-fisted themes of fate and the nature of reality; the movie opens with an Edgar Allen Poe quote, for f*ck’s sake.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Transylmania
    Transylmania is so inept that it even fails as an adolescent breast-delivery device.
  33. Septic Man
    As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.
  34. Baby Geniuses
    A horrible, horrible film that wears out its welcome before its opening credits.
  35. Miss March
    Robinson is hilarious, at least in the early going. Sadly, Robinson is all that stands between Miss March and complete worthlessness.
  36. The Hottie & the Nottie
    How is Paris Hilton in her first starring role to receive a national release? Pretty bad, actually. She's limited to a single, all-too-familiar expression of smug self-satisfaction, and she delivers her lines in a tone somewhere between "seductive" and "dish-soap commercial."
  37. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    Originally titled Lady Killers, this rancid, underlit B-movie aspires to little more than cheap laughs eked out of the discomfort and queasiness Owen and Friedle feel over sexually servicing assertive, kinky old women.
  38. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    The gross-out gore scenes and poop jokes are there, too, as is to be expected. The direction is bad, the acting is worse, and it’s lit to mimic the soap-opera effect on a poorly calibrated HDTV. Basically, The Human Centipede III is an unsexy "Ilsa" movie, and it’s just as impossible to sit through as that sounds.
  39. Contract to Kill
    The rare Steven Seagal movie to open in American theaters, Contract To Kill is so crude and anti-cinematic — so f***ing bad — that it becomes its own parody.
  40. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    That a film already busy with historical reenactments, interviews, and conspiracizing of the wildest sort should end with three consecutive musical numbers suggests a kind of vaudeville structure to D’Souza’s work.
  41. Death of a Nation
    D’Souza fails, as ever, to make an argument that would resonate outside the QAnon echo chamber.
  42. Trick 'r Treat
    The idea of a Halloween-centric anthology is solid, but the subject deserves stronger material than this reheated mush.
  43. No Good Deed
    The film doesn't begin to take off until its second half, when it thankfully shucks its weak supporting cast and turns into a three-way battle of wits involving Jackson, Jovovich, and Skarsgård, its wiliest and most compelling characters.
  44. Cup of My Blood
    Working under a limited budget, Catania stirs up a thick gothic atmosphere and delivers the goods with a certain amount of proficiency, but when professionalism is the best thing a film has going for it, there isn't much else to discuss.
  45. In Her Skin
    Rather than peering into the heart of darkness, North just slaps a coat of Art atop her true-crime subject, and the upshot is akin to an especially pretentious episode of "Law & Order."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Caller
    For a while, the two ominous elements play off each other promisingly, and then it all becomes ridiculous, despite an appearance from the excellent Lorna Raver, the malevolent gypsy woman from "Drag Me To Hell."
  47. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    It isn't just the fashions that date this documentary, or the subjects' shared experiences of the European turmoil of the mid-20th-century. It's also their work itself, which is like a relic of some ancient civilization.
  48. Death of a Superhero
    Fitzgibbon and McCarten have succeeded in integrating cancer into a slick teen love story, but in the process, they've robbed it of some of its necessary pain.
  49. Stretch
    Puerile, demented, and often funny.
  50. My Little Pony: Equestria Girls
    My Little Pony: Equestria Girls continues the appeal of Friendship Is Magic, as the heartening lessons of Ponyville—on friendship, leadership, morality, etc.—transcend its equine-dominated world.
  51. SX_Tape
    Viewers will readily accept monsters, but the idea that someone would keep filming while evading said monsters — well, that’s taking it too far.
  52. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
    The film is at its best when cutting between delicious stories... It doesn’t make for the strongest film, but it does work like a case of people swapping outrageous war stories over a few beers.
  53. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
    Simply put, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 doesn’t pop like a Johnnie To flick. Shooting in a digital format for the first time, and without his signature Technovision anamorphic lenses, To seems to have been thrown for a loop; his sense of space and rhythm are off, and his compositions are uncharacteristically flat and conservative.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Veronika Decides to Die
    It’s hard to pick only one representatively ridiculous moment in this campy brew.
  55. X/Y
    It’s just that the quality of Williams’ script varies wildly, from superb to dire.
  56. 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.
  57. I Am Wrath
    If the film’s casual racism—the villains are almost all some shade of not-white—feels more perfunctory than malicious, it’s because it’s just another secondhand element in the collection of bad clichés passing for a script.
  58. Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith
    These are the kind of character- and plot-driven police procedurals designed for binging, a lot like Netflix favorites "Happy Valley" and "The Fall." Although each of the first three films tells a full, discrete story, they work best cumulatively, as the ongoing adventures of one cranky, conscientious cop.
  59. League of Gods
    It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.
  60. Ace the Case
    The film is too violent and dark for kids but too juvenile and bland for grown-ups.
  61. Daguerrotype
    Daguerrotype is frustratingly easy to rationalize. It’s also about an hour too long; by the time it reaches the end credits, even the spell cast by his eerie direction and handsome widescreen compositions has worn off.
  62. Slamma Jamma
    It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.
  63. Tout Va Bien
    Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.
  64. A Question of Faith
    The plot’s mechanics in tying the families together are often clumsy and contorted, in ways that are strange without being particularly interesting.
  65. Ghost Chase
    For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.
  66. Prototype
    There’s a lot to ponder in Prototype, not least in the confounding coda that suggests a note of hope for rebirth, but the film’s powers are visceral as much as (if not more so than) they are cerebral.
  67. Vampire Clay
    It’s not a great film by any means, but it is the epitome of a “Fantastic Fest movie,” meaning enjoyed best with friends and a few drinks.
  68. Hellraiser: Inferno
    The first of several low points in the series. At this point Kirsty’s out of the picture (at least temporarily), the original rules of Cenobite engagement are discarded, and Pinhead’s ultimate fate is sealed. So what’s left? You guessed it—a Gritty! Contemporary! Reboot!
  69. Hellraiser: Deader
    Hellraiser: Deader starts off okay—But that’s just Stockholm syndrome.
  70. Hellraiser: Hellworld
    As far as the Hellraiser elements go, this is the laziest yet.
  71. Hellraiser: Revelations
    Revelations completes Hellraiser’s transformation from an original and refreshingly adult concept into teens indiscriminately screwing and dying, hollowing out the soul of the franchise while functioning as a loose remake of the original.
  72. The Great Pretender
    The Great Pretender has its share of dark punchlines, but its central concern is a sympathetic one: what we see in other people and how we would like to see ourselves.
  73. Madness in the Method
    Most of the time, Mewes’ follows in the later-period footsteps of his friend Smith, steering a what-the-hell production that’s less entertaining than the two buddies just talking.
  74. Tourist Trap
    What keeps it all from becoming high camp is the film’s eerie atmosphere and unsettling childlike quality, which sucks the viewer into a nightmarish alternate reality with such plainspoken innocence that we have no choice but to accept it at face value.
  75. 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.)
  76. Homewrecker
    Its clever comedic writing couldn’t quite overcome its sometimes subpar camerawork.
  77. Adoration
    The film flounders a bit in its second half, as it struggles to maintain the tension of its inciting incident. But Harduin’s performance as Gloria goes off her meds and descends into her own private world would be impressive for an actress of any age, let alone a 13-year-old.
  78. Nona: If They Soak Me, I'll Burn Them
    Donoso does put an effort into maintaining visual interest throughout this micro-budgeted character study, alternating between professionally shot, full-frame tableaux and intimate, grainy camcorder footage, accentuated with light touches of Brakhage-style experimental montage. However, it remains an undeniable—and inconvenient—fact that the most interesting aspects of If They Soak Me are all offscreen.
  79. Trump Card
    By this point, D’Souza is unconvincingly frothing on the soundtrack about how “the socialist left and the Democrats want to make us grovel” and “make us worms,” but the whole premise is, predictably, a radical, cynical misunderstanding of Orwell.
  80. The Calming
    The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.
  81. Midnight in Paris
    The flubbed ending is more glaring because the film is otherwise so enjoyable and relatable. It’s achingly familiar in its exploration of what seems to the seniors like a final dash toward adulthood and its accompanying freedoms.
  82. Roe v. Wade
    Loeb mostly tamped down the lunacy endemic to an obscure corner of choir-preaching moviedom, and for what? No critical mind runs the risk of mistaking this partisan broadside for innocent edutainment.
  83. Separation
    The film’s lone value may be setting up the perfect answer to that “improve a movie with one letter” challenge: Add an indefinite article to the front of its title, and you’re left with one of the great films of the new millennium—and, incidentally, a much more unnerving portrait of a marriage on the rocks.
  84. What Drives Us
    The film works better as a casual glimpse behind the curtain of big-name acts, exuding a voyeuristic appeal in the footage and anecdotes of beloved musicians opening up about their pasts. It’s breezy fun, if a little forgettable, spending 90 minutes with charismatic performers who have a knack for a good yarn.
  85. Her Socialist Smile
    Her Socialist Smile develops, in other words, a kind of ethics of the image. Gianvito is not, of course, suggesting that we should somehow give up our senses—only that, whatever the technology or medium we engage with, it is our responsibility to keep our minds from becoming what Keller called “automatic machines.”
  86. After We Fell
    Even as young adult softcore, After We Fell is limp. Though the series switched over to an R rating starting with its previous installment, the repetitive sex scenes set to moody pop songs are lacking in anything resembling genuine heat, even as new series director Castille Landon tries to spice things up by adding hot tubs, phone sex, and gym equipment into the mix.
  87. Fauna
    Fauna has some smart things to say about how the drug trade and its attendant stereotypes have changed the Mexican popular imagination. You just have to pay attention to follow the film’s many idiosyncratic twists and turns.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Super Bob Einstein Movie
    A worthy tribute to a singular comedic voice. ... It shows why Bob Einstein could make audiences laugh for almost 50 years—but it also shows why he’ll be making them laugh for a lot longer.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Beanie Mania
    Beanie Mania weaves an entertaining, fast-paced narrative that reveals the depths to which collective fanaticism, greed, and the influence of the internet, even in its earliest days, all combined to create an inflection point that led to an unprecedented and unsustainable investment bubble.
  90. The Ravine
    The Ravine spends more than an hour telegraphing that this is a story about the perplexing feelings that arise from a close friend’s dark and sudden turn. Then it swiftly brushes aside those layers in favor of a mystically clean explanation, and the result is narratively dull, emotionally ungratifying, and intellectually insulting.
  91. 9 Bullets
    It’s a dud, yet one made semi-palatable thanks to a decent performance from leading lady Lena Headey, and of all things, a soulful ballad written by Diane Warren.
  92. Press Play
    Press Play is a smart melding of high-concept and relatable romance—not the least of which is because this type of young love has a high replay value, just like the music we often associate with and attach to these formative years.
  93. Unhuman
    If you’re a fan of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, scribes of the later Saw sequels and the Feast trilogy, you know what to expect from them: gore, vomit, red filters, and maybe a half-clever plot twist. If you’re not a fan, it’s best to stay as far away as possible from Unhuman, a cheap-looking, awkwardly calibrated horror-comedy which only the team’s truest devotees could love.
  94. Code Name Banshee
    In the end, Code Name Banshee doesn’t have interesting ideas about who its characters are, or even wish to be. It’s a cliché-driven, rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets, nothing more.
  95. Love & Gelato
    Love & Gelato is basically the professional equivalent of a work-study program, the type of movie which affords young actors the opportunity to cut their teeth on uncomplicated material within the well-manicured confines of an easily prescribed genre.
  96. The Road to Galena
    It is a movie of tropes and clichés that argues, with generic earnestness and a near-total lack of surprise, that the city is a corrupting influence compared to the nurturing, sun-drenched simplicity of the country.
  97. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
    Despite briefly losing its balance, Stay On Board sticks the landing, crafting a story of self-love and determined self-actualization that many pre-transition queer folks will find aspirational.
  98. About Fate
    Despite the off-putting blandness of its poster, soundtrack, and setup, About Fate proves surprisingly charming. Old pros (especially for their relatively young ages) Mann and Roberts manage to sell some significant character flaws.
  99. Blank
    When the all-important moment of catharsis that every good scary movie requires comes around, it’s palpable. But writers, and other creative types, just might feel it a little bit extra.
  100. Dig
    The goal of a movie like Dig ought to be simple: keep ratcheting up the tension to the point that when our main character(s) finally turn the tables, it’s hugely cathartic. Unfortunately, the “ratcheting” part is where Dig fails to hit paydirt.
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