The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. The Lunchbox
    The Lunchbox ultimately registers as a too-hesitant portrayal of hesitancy, and its pleasures are largely incidental.
  2. Odd Thomas
    Odd Thomas is at its best when it’s presenting — rather than commenting upon or explaining — juxtapositions of the wholesome and the supernatural.
  3. Non-Stop
    Part locked-room mystery, part political allegory, Non-Stop is one of the most purely enjoyable entries in the ongoing cycle of Liam Neeson action-thrillers.
  4. Ernest & Célestine
    Once upon a time, a movie like this would have seemed a minor pleasure, enjoyable, but unremarkable. Today, it looks more like a treasure.
  5. 3 Days to Kill
    Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.
  6. Pompeii
    Fortunately, Pompeii’s second half is tailor-made for Anderson’s established skill set, unfolding over a matter of hours, with many scenes set in and under a gladiatorial amphitheatre that recalls the arenas, subterranean tunnels, and cavernous vessels of Anderson’s best movies.
  7. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Director Chiemi Karasawa is on her best footing when she deals with Stritch not as a Broadway icon and occasional film and TV star, but rather as a woman approaching 90 and holding on thanks to lack of filtering and an indomitable will to perform.
  8. In Secret
    If it weren’t for the costumes, the basic plot could be mistaken for a 19th-century version of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" or "Double Indemnity."
  9. Omar
    Knotty and tense for most of its running time, Omar becomes muddled in its closing minutes, conflating personal and political treachery.
  10. Child's Pose
    Sporting a blonde dye job and a haughty, impervious manner, Gheorghiu makes Cornelia a consistently compelling figure, at once monstrous and pathetic.
  11. Jimmy P.
    Casting two great actors as doctor and patient helps a little.
  12. Winter's Tale
    Though viewers may have trouble watching any of this with a straight face, the movie’s goofy corniness becomes marginally endearing, in a hobbling-puppy sort of way.
  13. Date and Switch
    In effect, it feels a lot like the characters at its center — not terrible, just incomplete. A comic take on this premise and these themes feels like a necessity in 2014. Unfortunately, Date And Switch isn’t the movie this day and age needs.
  14. Endless Love
    The film also contains fleeting moments of authenticity. Most of these come courtesy of Robert Patrick, who plays David’s father, and Greenwood. Together, these two veteran actors turn could-be-thankless “good dad/bad dad” roles into credible depictions of wounded masculinity. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t about them.
  15. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    True to its franchise roots, the film is atmospheric, well acted, and frustratingly intent on draining every last drop of pleasure from the genre-movie conventions it cannibalizes.
  16. About Last Night
    Despite a few deviations, About Last Night is basically the same sanitized rom-com, bearing the slightest hint of resemblance to its source material. In other words, most of the perversity of Perversity has again been excised — the Chicago too.
  17. The New Black
    The film largely lacks the urgency its subject demands. It’s an extended news segment in the form of a feature film.
  18. RoboCop
    This RoboCop earns its stripes, mostly for the seriousness with which it treats its Frankenstein story.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Vampire Academy
    Vampire Academy is toothless in both substance and style.
  20. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    The film’s whimsical specificity, random though it frequently seems, is the main thing it has going for it.
  21. A Field in England
    It’s the period itself that’s front and center here — not in the usual sense of historical accuracy, but as a sort of theater of the bizarre that allows Wheatley and his wife, screenwriter Amy Jump, to indulge in dementia.
  22. 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The LEGO Movie
    Effervescent in style, conveying a substantive message without ever devolving into saccharine preachiness.
  24. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men feels not just self-conscious but also a bit self-congratulatory, its creator squashing the spirit of adventure with too many grandiose lines about the Importance Of Art.
  25. The Last of the Unjust
    The Last Of The Unjust is demanding but fascinating, both as history and as an intellectual volley on the lure of power, the ambiguities of perspective, and the difficulty of claiming moral high ground in a context where matters of life and death are so precarious.
  26. 12 O'Clock Boys
    At just 75 minutes, the movie doesn’t wear out its welcome, though its shapelessness can be frustrating; it ends abruptly, on a moment that could be interpreted as a triumph or as a profound loss, and it doesn’t seem to care much what one concludes.
  27. At Middleton
    Unremarkable, though hardly unpleasant, the middlebrow middle-age romance At Middleton often plays like a forgotten trifle from the Golden Age of Hollywood studio filmmaking, distinguished more by its competence and affable performances than by any formal or thematic potency.
  28. 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.
  29. Labor Day
    Improbably, this saccharine melodrama comes courtesy of Jason Reitman, the Hollywood scion director who made "Juno" and "Up In The Air." Clearly, he’s chasing a change of pace, a hard right turn away from the sardonic redemption stories that have previously sported his byline and into the unfamiliar realm of Sirksian soap.
  30. Jobriath A.D.
    Jobriath A.D. is a tragic and occasionally fascinating look at pop stardom in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but its subject seems just barely compelling enough to sustain it.
  31. Brightest Star
    So terminally bland is Brightest Star’s protagonist (played by Chris Lowell) that screenwriters Maggie Kiley (who also directed) and Matthew Mullen couldn’t be tasked to provide him with a name — the closing credits refer to him simply as The Boy.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    That Awkward Moment
    That Awkward Moment desperately wants to speak to a new generation of romantic-comedy devotees without proving it has the authority to do so. It’s not as laboriously dumb as the overloaded ensemble rom-coms of Garry Marshall ("Valentine’s Day," "New Year’s Eve") or the similarly star-studded "He’s Just Not That Into You."
  33. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.
  34. Gimme Shelter
    There’s nothing wrong with social-cause filmmaking, and the movie’s chief problem is less its political talking points than the corny way it tries to impart them.
  35. I, Frankenstein
    If the film is made with the understanding that campiness needs to be straight-faced to be funny, then are its “unintentional” laughs really that unintentional?
  36. Stranger by the Lake
    As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.
  37. Gloria
    Movies about middle-aged women are so rare that it’s tempting to praise them on that basis alone. Thankfully, the Chilean drama Gloria, which won Paulina García the Best Actress prize at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, doesn’t require much critical mitigation.
  38. Run & Jump
    Forte’s strength in playing awkward characters works to his advantage.
  39. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer finds Hyams senior and his screenwriters, Eric and James Bromberg, channeling Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series "Twin Peaks," mixing bizarro characterizations and woodland intrigue with wholesome national imagery.
  40. 24 Exposures
    Like countless Swanberg films (the prolific director has completed 17 features in less than a decade), 24 Exposures is populated by characters who are defined not by their actions, but by their unwillingness to act. The difference here is the presence of an exterior force—the murders—that makes Swanberg’s naturalistic style seem affected.
  41. Visitors
    What’s hypnotic for five minutes at the Whitney Museum does not necessarily carry over to an 80-minute movie, and Visitors might conceivably run half that length without the slow motion. Reggio’s film premiered in Toronto with live musical accompaniment, a gimmick that probably enhanced the experiential aspect of what’s otherwise a glorified installation piece.
  42. Devil's Due
    While it’s generally above-average for this sorry genre, it’s so derivative, in both style and narrative, that there’s still an overwhelming sense of plodding inevitability to the whole affair.
  43. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    The movie eventually evokes the sense that Branagh is better at directing in front of the camera than from behind it; its best moments are typically the ones that feature Branagh’s Viktor Cherevin on-screen.
  44. Generation War
    By conveniently exempting its protagonists from ideology or culpability, Generation War feels less like a reckoning than a dodge: Yes, your grandparents may have been Nazis—but they could have been these nice people, too.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Nut Job
    The most egregious problem with The Nut Job is how shamelessly it fills in the gaps left by expanding Lepeniotis’ short with generic and tedious rogue-to-hero cliché.
  46. Big Bad Wolves
    Believe it or not, some of this mayhem—muscularly orchestrated by directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, who made 2010’s "Rabies" — does provoke laughter.
  47. Ride Along
    Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.
  48. Like Father, Like Son
    Like Father, Like Son has the overall depth and tenor of a Lifetime movie. Kore-Eda can do much better.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
  51. The Truth About Emanuel
    Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.
  52. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  53. In Bloom
    Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.
  54. Cold Comes the Night
    The Breaking Bad star — who looks here not unlike the Heisenberg of last season — can’t buoy material so thin that it would’ve barely supported an episode of "The Killing."
  55. The Banshee Chapter
    Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."
  56. The Best Offer
    Rush has a lot of fun with Oldman’s gradual thaw, and the questions the movie raises about authenticity and deception, while not remotely in the same heady league as those in "Certified Copy," nonetheless allow it to conclude on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.
  57. Beyond Outrage
    Of all the great actor/directors, Kitano has probably come the closest to creating a style that parallels his approach to acting.
  58. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.
  59. 47 Ronin
    A multi-colored downer fantasy which combines bursts of imagination with a bleak worldview, resulting in something that rarely feels mainstream.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    All the boilerplate aphorisms and blatant attempts at image rehabilitation make Bieber seem like a kind of mega-church preacher leading a long-converted congregation, another huckster dancing around in a white suit.
  61. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.
  62. The Invisible Woman
    Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens.
  63. Lone Survivor
    For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.
  64. August: Osage County
    It’s not so much a mangled movie as it is an unfulfilled, forgettable one: unnecessary for anyone who’s seen the play, yet sufficiently watered-down that newcomers won’t be able to tell what all the fuss was about.
  65. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Abandoning its more original elements, the movie opts for a banal carpe diem conceit that turns Mitty into a globetrotting bystander.
  66. Grudge Match
    A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.
  67. 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.
  68. The Selfish Giant
    That The Selfish Giant feels familiar rather than groundbreaking makes it seem to some degree a step back for its talented director, but she’s avoided the sophomore jinx with aplomb.
  69. The Past
    The result demonstrates that Farhadi, who is cinema’s heir to the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, is so deft at ingenious narrative construction and intricate character development that he can make first-rate dramas in any country and/or language he likes.
  70. All the Light in the Sky
    Large-scale anxieties about the future of the environment mingle with the characters’ small-scale anxieties about the present. The effect of this interplay will probably vary from viewer to viewer. As with Swanberg’s production methods, a lot depends on what you bring to the movie.
  71. Walking with Dinosaurs
    Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.
  72. Her
    Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.
  73. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    All of McKay’s movies improve on repeat viewings, as they become familiar and meme worthy. If Anchorman 2 seems hit-and-miss now, there’s a significant chance that it will get funnier over the long haul.
  74. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    By the standards of Tyler Perry’s Madea series, A Madea Christmas is better than average.
  75. The Crash Reel
    The film also applies a deft touch as it addresses the morality of violent sports, like snowboarding and football, that entertain the many who watch while endangering the few who play. Rather than cast the athletes as pure victims, Walker acknowledges their agency, depicting them as prideful competitors who choose to risk their well-being — or even insist on doing so, as Pearce does.
  76. Caught in the Web
    Since making an ill-fated attempt at Hollywood with 2002’s "Killing Me Softly," Chen Kaige has slipped further and further out of relevance. Now even his elegant sense of style — the one thing keeping later efforts like "Forever Enthralled" afloat — seems to be slipping away. Case in point: Chen’s new film, Caught In The Web.
  77. Hours
    Though a screenwriter by profession, Heisserer proves to be more economical with style than storytelling. Like a few too many contemporary genre films, Hours suffers from flashbackitis, a chronic condition that leads filmmakers to believe that a tragic backstory will add gravitas.
  78. The Unknown Known
    Tackling another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in The Unknown Known, Morris has finally met his match. The film is illuminating only in its utter lack of illumination — for looking deep into the eyes of someone incapable of letting his guard down and finding, predictably, nothing whatsoever.
  79. Some Velvet Morning
    LaBute has always been fond of the last-second rug-pull that re-contextualizes everything, but Some Velvet Morning’s climactic revelation is distinct from those of his previous films in a specific, intriguing way, one that trades brutality for something more poignant. If only the journey to that destination were a bit more flavorful.
  80. Saving Mr. Banks
    The irony of Saving Mr. Banks is that it takes this true story of Hollywood conflict, of artistic integrity pitted against studio moxie, and gives it the same warm-and-fuzzy treatment the company gave Poppins. One woman’s failed battle to stop her work from being Disneyfied has itself been Disneyfied.
  81. American Hustle
    American Hustle turns out to be a freewheeling party of a movie, one that never stops adding complications and wrinkles and hungry new players to the mix.
  82. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This Hobbit is, in other words, a much more eventful affair than its year-old predecessor. And yet for all the fine spectacle Jackson crams into his lengthy sequel-within-a-prequel, it’s still hard not to mourn the single, self-contained movie that could have been.
  83. Nuclear Nation
    Tangents involving government committees and the nuclear energy lobby only serve to scatter the already-diffuse narrative, as do numerous intertitles relaying facts about nuclear power in Japan or indicating the passage of seasons; they seem like leftovers from a longer film.
  84. Twice Born
    One hundred minutes of snooze-inducing troubled romance eventually gives way to a strange, interesting backstory. It doesn’t manage to recast the preceding feature’s worth of movie in a different light, but instead makes the viewer wish the film had gotten to the end sooner.
  85. Lenny Cooke
    The question of why Cooke’s career never materialized hangs over the movie, but is never answered. What emerges instead is a portrait of a talented teenager being readied — by coaches, basketball camps, and the media — for a future that doesn’t arrive.
  86. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Beautifully shot by Amélie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis is instantly recognizable as the work of its sibling auteurs. But it’s also something of a departure — looser and more rambling than the average Coen concoction, with a lovingly recreated period setting.
  87. Out of the Furnace
    Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.
  88. Tim's Vermeer
    This is all fascinating for art-history buffs, and while a documentary is the ideal vehicle for illustrating Jenison’s process, Tim’s Vermeer plays more like an extended PBS special than it does a movie.
  89. Paradise: Hope
    This tale of a creepy pedophilic relationship is the most tender, nuanced, and deeply felt picture Seidl has ever made. What’s more, there’s no need to have seen the other two films, as Hope works beautifully all by its lonesome.
  90. The Last Days on Mars
    Even had it premiered at, say, London’s Frightfest, The Last Day On Mars would be a disappointment. What it was doing at Cannes is a mystery.
  91. White Reindeer
    If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since "Bad Santa," dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills.
  92. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Were Mandela solely interested in that early chapter of its subject’s life, when he was reluctantly turning to violent tactics in the war on apartheid, the film might have achieved a uniquely complicated perspective. Alas, the first passage is just a portion of what turns out to be a typically sprawling, bloated biopic.
  93. The Punk Singer
    A little more distance could have been beneficial, but The Punk Singer is enlightening regardless.
  94. Oldboy
    For better and worse, Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair.
  95. Black Nativity
    Black Nativity is a cut-rate musical melodrama that grafts overreaching references to black culture onto a facile family-values narrative.
  96. Homefront
    The basic ingredients of a throwback action movie are all there; what’s missing is action and style.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frozen
    In its simple pleasures, it’s every bit as enjoyable as "Winnie The Pooh," with a strong and valuable moral undercurrent to boot.
  98. Everyday
    Movies don’t necessarily have to tell stories, but if narrative is eschewed in favor of an unvarnished portrait of ordinary life, it’s best to cheat a little and make ordinary life feel extraordinary. Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday refuses to stoop to such measures; for better and for worse — mostly for worse — it sticks to the mundane promise of its title.
  99. Philomena
    Still, that doesn’t detract too much from what Philomena manages to accomplish: a sober consideration of how ideals relate to institutions — whether they’re religions or political parties — anchored by two well-rounded, funny lead performances.
  100. Delivery Man
    Delivery Man may be a change of pace for Vaughn, but it’s the exact opposite for its creator, the Québécois filmmaker Ken Scott. Belonging to the Funny Games school of carbon-copy remakes, the film is an identical Hollywood retread of Scott’s 2011 festival favorite Starbuck. Every scene, every joke, nearly every shot of the movie is straight out of the original.
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