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 Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.
  2. A Late Quartet
    Yaron Zilberman's first feature has a solid structure, but as with a piece of music, the way it's played makes all the difference. His principal actors aren't great at faking their instrumental prowess, but they're perfectly in tune with each other, playing artists who've postponed life's decisions in the name of pursuing their craft.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack and Diane
    Werewolves aren't a new metaphor for the wildness of adolescent urges, but Jack & Diane is a trudgingly self-serious affair that doesn't manage to be transporting on either its literal or conceptual levels.
  4. Flight
    Directing his first live-action film since 2000's "Cast Away," Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride.
  5. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Stiff, episodic, and disjointed, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D replicates its source material all too faithfully.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Fun Size
    A laborious comedy about a Halloween night in Cleveland that feels too grown up in half of its storylines to suit younger audiences, and too juvenile or nonsensical in the rest of its gags to please anyone else.
  7. The Loneliest Planet
    The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
  8. The Other Son
    The Other Son's setup is too contrived, carried along by conversations that are either confrontational or artificially elusive.
  9. Pusher (2012)
    Luis Prieto's remake capably mimics the original's breakneck energy without adding a single thing. It seems to exist mostly to stuff more violence into Britain's insatiable maw for crime pictures.
  10. Chasing Mavericks
    It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.
  11. Sleep Tight
    This is a crime story with little to no interest in the who or the why, but only the what and the how. It's a reverse-procedural, tracking not the solution of a crime, but all of its awful particulars.
  12. Cloud Atlas
    Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.
  13. Paranormal Activity 4
    The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Simon & the Oaks
    Ponderous and heavy with its own importance, Simon And The Oaks is the kind of film that's made for awards - it nabbed 13 nominations in Sweden's equivalent of the Oscars last year.
  15. Nobody Walks
    Nobody Walks is Mumblecore 2.0: The budget is bigger, the cast is littered with recognizable faces from popular television programs, and the production values are more impressive, but the fixation with the low-key, artsy angst of rudderless twenty- and thirtysomethings remains constant.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Brooklyn Castle
    Indifferently structured but centered around charming characters, the documentary starts off as a chronicle of the scholastic chess year, but becomes a compelling plea on behalf of the importance of afterschool programs.
  17. The First Time
    In the first 15 minutes, viewers may be rolling their eyes at these kids; by the end, they might be eager to re-watch that opening scene, to get to know them all over again.
  18. Tai Chi Zero
    The story's fundamentals remain solid, and the battle between the village of kung-fu experts and an army of 19th century technophiles is so cleverly staged and exciting that the inevitable sequel (already in the works) will be welcome, as will any future martial-arts movies that Tai Chi Zero may inspire.
  19. Alex Cross
    Perry shifts into full-on badass mode... well, the best that can be said is that he's sincere. For all that, he's still less embarrassing than Lost's Matthew Fox, likewise cast against type as the film's sadistic villain.
  20. Radio Unnameable
    Radio Unnameable is at its best when it tries to find some visual analog to Fass' vibe, courtesy of cinematographer John Pirozzi, who takes beautiful snapshots of a sleepless city. It also, in the Fass way, does a little meandering.
  21. Holy Motors
    It's a glorious dream-epitaph.
  22. The Sessions
    It might just be the most poignant, moving film ever made about one man's surprisingly noble efforts to get laid.
  23. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.
  24. A Whisper to a Roar
    The film makes a convincing argument that, in spite of some recent setbacks, movements for democratic change are alive and well, but it glosses over the problems that arise once the people have to implement the power they've seized.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Everyone plays against type in 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom, none more so than Ron Perlman, who has a small role as a post-op transsexual hacker.
  26. Photographic Memory
    Photographic Memory is less wry and more melancholy than McElwee's earlier documentaries; it's a lot like his superb 2003 film "Bright Leaves," which was also concerned with family history and the shifting meaning of images.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    The use of a real war to give added emotional heft to this already potentially manipulative story make this film an act of callous calculation behind the beautiful shots of the French countryside.
  28. The Iran Job
    The sports drama gives The Iran Job a strong hook, while the cultural context enriches the movie's real story, which is less about Sheppard's life in Iran than about the people he meets.
  29. Middle of Nowhere
    The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations.
  30. The Big Picture
    For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
  31. Smiley
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
  32. The Other Dream Team
    Markevicius tells this incredible yarn through the significantly less exciting format of an ESPN-style documentary, which gets the job done with minimal flourish. Still, he employs former Lithuanian greats like Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis to serve as guides to the country's past and present, and the basketball culture that's thrived there under the best and worst of times.
  33. Smashed
    In spite of the out-of-place pregnancy subplot, Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions.
  34. Sinister
    It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.
  35. Here Comes the Boom
    Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.
  36. Seven Psychopaths
    While Seven Psychopaths sometimes hits the philosophical shallows, its pleasures still run deep.
  37. Argo
    Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.
  38. The Paperboy
    So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
  39. V/H/S
    It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation.
  40. Taken 2
    None of it is particularly novel or exciting.
  41. Butter
    A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.
  42. Sister
    In an unusually subtle performance by a child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein stars as a crafty ragamuffin.
  43. The House I Live In
    The result is a movie that jumps all over the place, but with the ultimate intention of showing how the public's attitudes and assumptions about drugs have changed over the past half-century, guided by politicians and businessmen with a stake in misinformation.
  44. The Oranges
    Overall, The Oranges appears to have been forcibly wrested into a conventional indie-dramedy package, rather than finding the length, style, structure, and perhaps medium that would best suit it.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Not only doesn't achieve empathy for the minor plights of its human noodle of a hero Toby Regbo, it might actually make audiences understand the urge to bully.
  46. Frankenweenie
    While Frankenweenie is pleasant enough as a curated tour through horror's past, it doesn't add much to its present.
  47. Wuthering Heights
    It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.
  48. Pitch Perfect
    Theoretically, the "Bring It On" model can be applied to any remotely performative art. All it takes is a certain level of sass, some eye-catching performance showcases, and a plot where a talented outsider livens up a moribund group with some fresh ideas. Pitch Perfect slaps that stencil onto college a cappella singing groups, with a smattering of success.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Headshot
    Headshot is, unfortunately, far better with ideas than with narrative.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Bringing Up Bobby
    Bringing Up Bobby centers around a mugging performance by Jovovich, who can't ground the film's attempts to tie together sentiments from "Paper Moon" and "Miss Saigon."
  51. Won't Back Down
    The film's clumsy sloganeering, however, largely defeats the leads' fine efforts.
  52. Hotel Transylvania
    Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.
  53. The Waiting Room
    Director Peter Nicks puts faces, names, and heartbreakingly relatable stories to a social problem that can all too often feel abstract and academic.
  54. Solomon Kane
    It's taken a while for Kane to make it to the big screen, maybe because fantasy barbarians and long-ago kings have more immediate appeal than pious, slouch-hat-wearing men with poor senses of humor, but Solomon Kane gives it a go anyway. The results suggest a compelling movie could be made from the material, even if it isn't this one.
  55. Looper
    Looper is a remarkable feat of imagination and execution, entertaining from start to finish, even as it asks the audience to contemplate how and why humanity keeps making the same rotten mistakes.
  56. House at the End of the Street
    Working from a solid template is only half the battle; the other half is filling in the details, and it's here that The House At The End Of The Street goes flat and generic, substituting jump-scares and visual twitchiness for the psychological complexity that might have sold the horror.
  57. Knuckleball!
    Some of Knuckleball!'s best scenes show Dickey and Wakefield hanging out with Hough and Phil Niekro (the latter the rare knuckleballer who threw the pitch his whole career rather than turning to it out of desperation), talking about the mechanics and the mojo of the knuckler.
  58. How to Survive a Plague
    Drawing on a wealth of footage from inside ACT UP meetings and protests, David France's powerful documentary How To Survive A Plague pays tribute to their courage and relentlessness, but it's even better as a record of the tactics of effective activism.
  59. Head Games
    Head Games is particularly devastating when it shifts from the NFL and NHL, where brutality and headshots are a given, to girls' soccer and under-14 football leagues, where still-developing young necks and skulls make kids perhaps more vulnerable to head trauma than their professional counterparts.
  60. Backwards
    Thomas, credited as writer, producer, and executive producer, is the obvious auteur, orchestrating a star vehicle she lacks the screen presence to anchor.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    About Cherry
    Demanding everyone accept you as you are can be a way of refusing to compromise, and the film's failure to explore this aspect of the lifestyle its portraying is almost as disappointing as moralizing would be.
  62. End of Watch
    Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The film is also an earnest, big-hearted ode to friends as support and salvation, and to the talismanic quality a favorite song, treasured hang-out, or shared tradition can take on for a teenager.
  64. Trouble with the Curve
    In Trouble With The Curve, Eastwood plays a reminder of an older way of doing things, a professional whose likes the world won't see again once he's gone. The role isn't much of a stretch.
  65. Dredd
    Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.
  66. 17 Girls
    The insights into girlhood in the opening are coming from the viewpoint of adults, while in a story this strange-but-true, it'd be more helpful to see these kids as they see themselves.
  67. Three Stars
    Three Stars works best as straight-up food-porn.
  68. Resident Evil: Retribution
    At this point, the Resident Evil movie franchise has become a personal playground for husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich; every few years, they find another excuse to pit Jovovich's videogame-inspired dark superhero, Alice, against zombies and other gruesome monsters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Snowman's Land
    Tonally, Snowman's Land feels like a German throwback to a '90s indie, but without the energy-the pacing is languid to the point of aimlessness.
  70. Arbitrage
    Between Gere matching wits with a police detective played by Tim Roth, and Gere having to explain himself to the steely Sarandon, Arbitrage is never dull.
  71. Francine
    Francine is so minimalist that it has to rely almost entirely on Leo for solidity, and it would be a far stronger film if it supported and framed her more effectively.
  72. Liberal Arts
    Liberal Arts has the tony look and feel of a vintage Woody Allen movie, but the sophistication is all surface-level. Radnor will never ascend to Allen's rarified realm, but judging by his forgettable first two features, he could give Ed Burns competition.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Step Up To The Plate
    Step Up To The Plate is as much about the passing along of a legacy as it is about cooking.
  74. Stolen
    He seems to have given up on making art long ago; these days, all he wants to do is entertain, and with Stolen, he succeeds, albeit only on the guilty-pleasure level. Like seemingly the sum of late-period Cage, Stolen is unashamedly cheese, but at least it's cheese of a pungent, flavorful vintage.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    10 Years
    10 Years does nothing noteworthy, but it does it well, thanks to its ensemble cast.
  76. The Master
    It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.
  77. Rust and Bone
    Both actors are tremendous - especially Schoenaerts.
  78. The Cold Light of Day
    The Cold Light Of Day is the antithesis of a labor of love; it's a cold, mercenary endeavor that, like the thematically similar Taylor Lautner vehicle "Abduction," diligently ignores the potentially intriguing issues of family and identity its plot raises.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Toys in the Attic
    Toys In The Attic is its own dark creation, filled with imagery reminiscent of Tim Burton in his prime as well as the odd Cold War metaphor.
  80. Keep the Lights On
    Keep The Lights On feels less like a memoir than a collage made from diary scraps, evocative but not prescriptive.
  81. Girl Model
    Girl Model shows that even though some models make big bucks, the global economy remains the same as it ever was: Those with nothing are seduced by the prospect of something, such that they hesitate to complain, lest they end up with less than nothing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    For Ellen
    The kind of film that rises or falls on the strength of its lead performance, given that its protagonist is in every scene, often alone. It's built around a strong turn by Dano, but one that feels studied and sometimes at odds with the naturalism the film aims for with its grubby settings, loose camerawork, and tendency toward inquisitive close-ups.
  83. Detropia
    The movie's attempt to position Detroit as the canary in the coal mine - there but for the grace of God goes any other city - falls flat, but it isn't a fatal flaw. It might not happen in any city, but for it to happen to one is bad enough.
  84. Hello I Must Be Going
    The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.
  85. [REC] 3: Genesis
    Where the first two films maintained a breathless tone and found new ground in the zombie genre by linking a physical virus to demonic possession, [REC]3: Genesis runs out of ideas early, and becomes a slogging massacre spiked with callbacks and visual gags.
  86. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Anyone who doesn't already know and care a little about these characters might find the movie a bit thin.
  87. Bachelorette
    While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.
  88. 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.
  89. The Possession
    The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ambassador
    The film's tone and structure seem a little strained by the danger in which the filmmaker increasingly puts himself, and the indifference to human life exuded by some of those he meets. By the end, Brügger himself seems to be having trouble finding any of this funny.
  91. The Tall Man
    In easily her best performance - and sadly, one few will see, given the film's modest release strategy - Jessica Biel stars as a single mother in Cold Rock, Washington.
  92. Side by Side
    What's most valuable about Side By Side is how comprehensive it is in documenting how the art form changed.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Good Doctor
    Awkward and arrogant, Bloom's character is reminiscent of The Social Network's take on Mark Zuckerberg: someone who was propelled in his nascent career by the idea that it would bring him the respect and acceptance he doesn't seem able to command in a social setting.
  94. For a Good Time, Call...
    The notion of a love story that's really about two women becoming friends is gimmicky, I'll grant, but Graynor and Miller are so charming together, and the movie is so focused and funny.
  95. 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.
  96. Chicken with Plums
    Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements-some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends-so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.
  97. Little White Lies
    Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.
  98. Premium Rush
    He's Premium Rush's villain, but Shannon doesn't attempt anything like the austere derangement of a Hans Gruber type, even though he specializes in playing terrifying nutjobs. Instead, he's a buffoon of the first order, and his hapless tomfoolery sets the tone for a light, fast, frequently hilarious 90 minutes.
  99. The Revenant
    The result is a horror film that progresses organically and unpredictably, even willing to take a turn for the tragic, if that's what's inevitable.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    General Education
    The film owes a lot to "Napoleon Dynamite," though it could have borrowed more of the underlying sweetness of Jared Hess' film, and less of other things, like its eyebrow-raising treatment of race.
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