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. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.
  2. Caesar Must Die
    In Caesar Must Die, the characters are both actor and audience, looking at themselves through the lens of a centuries-old fictionalization of history.
  3. Identity Thief
    Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
  4. Side Effects
    Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.
  5. Stand Up Guys
    The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.
  6. Koch
    Neil Barsky's Koch doesn't try to do anything radical as a piece of filmmaking, but Barsky - a former newspaper reporter - covers Koch's story magnificently as a journalist.
  7. 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.
  8. The Gatekeepers
    The six men have different personalities that suggest varying styles of leadership, but what's remarkable about The Gatekeepers is how they speak in one voice about the moral complexities of their former jobs and their extreme pessimism about the future.
  9. Bullet to the Head
    The X-factors tend to be the script and the performances, and those elements largely betray him in Bullet To The Head, which is a perfunctory exercise whenever Hill isn't busying himself with gun battles, ax fights, and other mano-a-mano confrontations. He can only do so much.
  10. Warm Bodies
    For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Parker
    Though Parker starts off fairly strong, the action gets more predictable as it meanders toward its conclusion.
  14. Yossi
    In its superior first half, Yossi sustains a mood of wistful longing and inexorable loneliness as its directionless protagonist lumbers through a grey, joyless existence, but the film threatens to turn into a gay Israeli version of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" once Knoller finds his impossibly gorgeous, persistent dream man.
  15. Resolution
    Benson and Moorhead have made a horror film for jaded aficionados, deconstructing and reconstructing tired elements into a gnarled, distinctive Frankenstein's monster. This monster might ransack a village, but it would have to think about it first.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Supporting Characters
    Supporting Characters tends to meander pleasantly from scene to scene, relying on the testy rapport between its two lead actors.
  17. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    The pleasure of Happy People comes from watching these men go about their work, while they explain that the only way to make it in the taiga is to do and take exactly what's needed, and not get greedy.
  18. The Last Stand
    It's a struggle at times, mostly because the action-movie clichés haven't been weeded out of the script, but the film is cheerfully, irresistibly destructive - an old-fashioned, "Rio Bravo" shoot-'em-up with the hicktown spirit of "Tremors," though it isn't as good as either.
  19. Mama
    Plenty of horror movies are willing to settle for making audiences jump. Mama is more ambitious by far: It makes sure viewers are emotionally committed even when they aren't clutching their armrests or covering their eyes.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    As its title suggests, Satan grapples with the existence and nature of evil in the world, but it's hard to take such weighty matters seriously when they're explored with all the subtlety and grace of an anti-abortion pamphlet.
  21. LUV
    Candis and Wilson sandbag their actors with dialogue that's a mix of dull exposition and pulp clichés, and rarely natural-sounding or colorful.
  22. Broken City
    In spite of some punchy scenes, crackling dialogue, and fine performances, Broken City is hopelessly overmatched. It has Academy Award dreams, but a detective-show heart.
  23. 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.
  24. My Best Enemy
    The result is a movie largely devoid of attitude or suspense. My Best Enemy is brisk and eventful, but after a while, it begins to seem like Murnberger is rushing through this material, afraid to dwell too long on any one situation, lest it tip too far into exploitation.
  25. Fairhaven
    Fairhaven's location is lovely. Its actors are terrific. All of them beg for something better.
  26. Struck by Lightning
    Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.
  27. Quartet
    Quartet falls into the common actor-turned-director trap of valuing the performances of fellow actors over all other aesthetic concerns.
  28. Gangster Squad
    Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.
  29. John Dies at the End
    It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.
  30. I Am Not a Hipster
    It succeeds at times in spite of itself, though it ultimately adds up to less than the sum of its sometimes impressive, sometimes insufferable parts.
  31. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    The mere presence of a second layer to the story gives Texas Chainsaw 3D an intriguing kick, and it adds a couple moments of visual wit that show a willingness to fiddle around with the genre. Not being irredeemable garbage counts as a modest achievement, but it's a small step in the right direction.
  32. 56 Up
    However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.
  33. Tabu
    Like other great pastiche artists, Gomes has created a time machine to a cinematic era that never quite existed, so it feels simultaneously borrowed and new.
  34. Promised Land
    No one seems to recognize the irony of making a film about corporate rigging that is itself outrageously rigged.
  35. West of Memphis
    On its own merits, though, West Of Memphis is a well-assembled, well-argued documentary that shows how America's advocacy model of trial law can lead to government representatives spinning stories they know are probably untrue, then using their authority to stand strong against any alternate theory, no matter how many millions of people believe it.
  36. 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.
  37. Django Unchained
    Tarantino simply isn't a good enough performer for his presence to be anything but a distraction in a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser this consistently great.
  38. Les Miserables
    The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.
  39. Barbara
    Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.
  40. Not Fade Away
    Chase deals with the mundane reality that squashes those dreams, but he doesn't downplay the dreams themselves, which he keeps honoring throughout Not Fade Away, right up to an audaciously abstract final scene that rivals the end of "The Sopranos" for sheer nerve.
  41. On the Road
    Since there's no plot, just a series of anecdotes, much of the meaning in the movie version of On The Road is meta-textual, relying on the viewers' knowledge of who Kerouac was, and how the novel's vision of America differed from how most of the rest of popular culture documented the '50s.
  42. The Impossible
    Like "The Orphanage," The Impossible confirms that Bayona is a major talent, with a skill for constructing sequences that build tension as masterfully as Steven Spielberg did in his '70s heyday.
  43. Jack Reacher
    Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.
  44. This Is 40
    A few broadly comic moments aside, This Is 40 also captures the rhythms and concerns of real life in ways that slicker Hollywood comedies don't.
  45. The Guilt Trip
    Though intermittently bathed in a halo of golden light and desired by at least one handsome, distinguished older man with a thing for mature women with healthy appetites, Streisand in The Guilt Trip is largely devoid of her famous vanity and narcissism.
  46. Amour
    A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.
  47. Zero Dark Thirty
    Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.
  48. Consuming Spirits
    The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.
  49. Any Day Now
    Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.
  50. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.
  51. Save the Date
    Save The Date's achievements are modest - it could be funnier and more affecting, and it ends with a shrug - but the film is wise about sibling relationships, the uncertainty of youth, and smaller matters, like the way people relate to each other after a break-up.
  52. 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.
  53. The Rabbi's Cat
    While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.
  54. Hyde Park on Hudson
    Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.
  55. Deadfall
    The best parts of Deadfall are absorbed into a scenario that frequently ditches the cat-and-mouse routine and tries instead to be about three dysfunctional families working toward reconciliation.
  56. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.
  57. In Our Nature
    Brian Savelson's small-scaled domestic drama In Our Nature evokes a specific, fairly common experience: when two young lovers expose a still-blossoming relationship to their relatives' stifling attention.
  58. Lay the Favorite
    At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Only the Young
    Not much of real significance happens, which makes Only The Young feel a bit slight, even at a mere 70 minutes. At the same time, though, every hint of direct conflict threatens to break the spell, in part because the film's secret subject is adolescent self-consciousness.
  60. Tchoupitoulas
    A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wagner & Me
    Fry is Jewish, and his wrestling with what it means to venerate the music of someone who wrote of his revulsion for Jews adds a fascinating personal angle to this otherwise dry film.
  62. California Solo
    California Solo doesn't have much story. All of the details above are established in the first five minutes, then the movie becomes a character sketch, carried by its wealth of detail and a fantastic Carlyle performance.
  63. The Collection
    It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.
  64. Addicted to Fame
    Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Kelly
    King Kelly is a broad indictment of the emptier side of self-documentation and a more nuanced one of the Internet as a source of affirmation.
  66. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Beware Of Mr. Baker is the life story of a man who's led one hell of a fascinating life.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Dragon
    Yen's strengths have never been in his expressiveness, and Dragon plods when it centers on dramatic struggles, then leaps exhilaratingly to life whenever the fighting begins.
  68. Killing Them Softly
    For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.
  69. The Central Park Five
    This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless.
  70. Hitchcock
    Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary "Anvil: The Story Of Anvil" with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature.
  71. Red Dawn
    Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.
  72. Life of Pi
    The larger messages about spirituality often seem forced, and it's more compelling to focus on Lee's visceral cinematic experience than on the larger, fuzzier messages Martel's story conveys about humanity's connection with God.
  73. Rise of the Guardians
    While Rise Of The Guardians boasts a great deal of visual energy and amounts to a lot of fun, it's mostly lacking in that kind of depth elsewhere.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Comes as close as the film series has gotten to reconciling the epic romance it's billed as and the self-aware camp-fest it often hints at wanting to be, but it's still a messy, unwieldy slab of film product that's targeted directly at fans of the book series, with little regard for anyone else.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hitler's Children
    The subjects of Hitler's Children all speak about the actions of their infamous forebears with shame, shock, or disgust, but they also make it clear this isn't true of everyone in their families.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Chasing Ice
    As someone who admits to having harbored skepticism about climate change himself, two decades ago, Balog is trying to present an image-based response to all the denialists featured in the news montages scattered through the film, people who scoff at the numbers and lack of scientific consensus on whether global warming exists, and what it entails.
  77. Buffalo Girls
    Buffalo Girls' main problem is that Kellstein can't seem to settle on whether he's making an inspirational sports movie (complete with triumphant music on the soundtrack during the fights), or an exposé of child exploitation among the Thai underclass.
  78. Citadel
    Citadel is plenty scary: a bare-bones man-against-his-worst-fears white knuckler, shot through deep, menacing shadows.
  79. 28 Hotel Rooms
    In its own small way, by documenting the petty panic of two people who want to be together but are otherwise entangled, 28 Hotel Rooms is often masterful.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    Mea Maxima Culpa is not gentle about placing blame on a structure that elevates priests above the rest of mankind and prioritizes maintaining an appearance of pious perfection over addressing some grievous wrongs committed.
  81. Anna Karenina
    If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.
  82. Silver Linings Playbook
    It's the perfect material for Russell, who not only deals perceptively with the dizzying swings of manic depression, but makes it the fabric of a big, generous, happy-making ensemble comedy.
  83. The Law in These Parts
    But while the facts cherry-picked by Alexandrowicz won't surprise anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to what's been going on in the Middle East for the last four decades, the direct inquiries into who should be classified as a "soldier" and who a "terrorist" is still bracing (and relevant to more than just the Israelis).
  84. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Hur invests the period setting with an eye-popping opulence that's meant to highlight the elite decadence that came before the fall, but his Dangerous Liaisons isn't particularly sophisticated on a political or historical level.
  85. Miami Connection (1987)
    Hits the sweet spot between stunning ineptitude, hilariously dated period touchstones, and a touching naïveté that gives it an odd distinction. As with the other so-bad-it's-good sensations that have toured the midnight circuit over the last few years - "The Room," "Birdemic," "Troll 2" - its awkwardness comes partly from a foreign-born auteur making an American film, and the culture clash plays out for all to see.
  86. Nature Calls
    There's nothing wrong with the idea of trying to make a Bad News Bears for the '10s, and Rohal has the comic talent in front of the camera to do the job. In addition to Oswalt and Knoxville, he has Maura Tierney as Knoxville's wife.
  87. The Comedy
    There's genuine pain at the core of Heidecker's character - or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside - but the film is keen on obscuring it.
  88. Starlet
    Starlet is an unusually subtle, quiet character study - especially given the potentially salacious subject matter - that builds to a quietly powerful climax.
  89. A Royal Affair
    Newcomer Følsgaard is the wild card, but he manages to make the king both villain and victim, sometimes a vindictive schemer, at others far-eyed and helpless, a puppet for the forces behind him.
  90. Skyfall
    Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.
  91. Lincoln
    Lincoln is built around a magnetic Day-Lewis turn, and the film is a memorable, sometimes stirring look at how even the most righteous bill must struggle, and even cheat, to become a law. It demands a bigger stage than the one it's given here.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    In Another Country
    It almost seems as if Hong is poking fun at his own single-minded oeuvre, creating a fractal representation of how his other films obliquely interrelate.
  93. The Man with the Iron Fists
    The Man With The Iron Fists has the same advantages of many musical debuts. It's the product of a man who has been storing up ideas, setpieces, characters, and gags for a lifetime, in preparation for the magic moment when he'd be able to unleash his full vision on the big screen.
  94. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
    Bones Brigade is surprisingly emotional and inspirational too, as these now-grown men look back on the days when they were competitive, easily bruised kids, drawn to Peralta's calming, avuncular presence.
  95. The Bay
    The result is surprisingly satisfying, like "Jaws" for the YouTube/Skype era.
  96. The Details
    The lone standout is Linney's performance as the deranged neighbor, whose erratic combination of sexual desperation and extreme vulnerability keeps the film on life support.
  97. Wreck-It Ralph
    It's a wildly exciting ride, the fastest-moving, most enthusiastically kinetic kids' action film since "The Incredibles."
  98. Vamps
    Heckerling also struggles woefully with special effects, but even then, she's capable of pulling off a beautiful sequence where Silverstone remembers a specific city block as it's evolved through the ages. Her shambling little comedy never finds a consistent groove, but it's eager to please, and has the ancient gags to do it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be The Place practically dares viewers not to find it ridiculous, but few will accept the challenge.
  100. A Man's Story
    Trouble is, even a finely tailored suit needs a body to fill it, and A Man's Story never gets its man.
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