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. Prometheus
    Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.
  2. Piranha 3DD
    For the much-cheaper-looking sequel, Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager mostly seems to be trying to see how much he can degrade the old "Jaws" formula and still have it interpreted as parody rather than apathy.
  3. Sexual Chronicles of a French Family
    It's a celebration of libertine sexuality - nothing more, nothing less - and almost remarkably untroubled by any of the dramatic issues it raises. Much of its 79 minutes is spent marveling over how skillfully the actors simulate the real thing.
  4. Wish Me Away
    While it's fascinating to observe the workings of the mammoth apparatus grafted onto an intensely personal decision, the movie's heart is the moments that take place in private (meaning, in this case, in front of only one camera).
  5. A Cat in Paris
    It's stylish, pretty fun, but not the kind of ambitious effort that should make the world sit up and take notice.
  6. Snow White and the Huntsman
    There are complicated elements at work here, with threads of curdled vengeance, victim entitlement, and insanity bound together in ways it would take a much smarter film to unravel. Snow White And The Huntsman doesn't try, and the film just keeps getting dumber as it goes along.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    5 Broken Cameras
    That intertwining of Burnat's home life and his political one make 5 Broken Cameras an unusual, moving work about a much-explored topic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    Horowitz has Michael Moore's smug tendencies without his schlubby everyman charm, which makes his attempts at goading humor out of uncomfortable interviews come off as unpleasant.
  9. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.
  10. High School
    Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.
  11. For Greater Glory
    With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."
  12. Virginia
    Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.
  13. Chernobyl Diaries
    It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.
  14. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.
  15. The Intouchables
    Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.
  16. Oslo, August 31st
    Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.
  17. Men in Black III
    The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.
  18. The Samaritan
    It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely Molly
    Lovely Molly is a portrait of either spiraling madness or a haunting, and it deftly handles the slow erosion of its title character's consciousness. Landing somewhere between "Repulsion" and "Paranormal Activity," it keeps the jump scares to a minimum and allows its formidable lead performance to be its best special effect.
  20. Polisse
    The best moments of Maïwenn's Polisse, about the dedicated members of a Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, have the same quality, a fly-on-the-wall docu-realism that feels eerily like the real thing.
  21. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Beyond The Black Rainbow is more surface than substance, but those surfaces are gleamingly polished enough to make for a hypnotic experiment that goes beyond genre pastiche or art-school wankery to seem formally daring.
  23. Mansome
    If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.
  24. Elena
    It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.
  25. Battleship
    Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.
  26. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.
  27. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The rigors of identifying and training companion dogs are fascinating, but they would fit more comfortably in a non-fiction format, where nobody has to play pretend. As it stands, the dog is the only creature who acts naturally.
  28. The Dictator
    The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate.
  29. Girl in Progress
    Girl In Progress is ultimately less interested in subverting the clichés of the genre than in recycling them. It wants audiences to know it's in on the joke though it's not always apparent that there even is a joke in the first place.
  30. Where Do We Go Now?
    What the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances.
  31. God Bless America
    The key point about God Bless America is that it's extreme but not exaggerated, a dark comedy that indulges - and questions - a violent, misanthropic fantasy about laying waste to the cultural landscape while staying grounded in a recognizable reality.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Tonight You're Mine
    Musicians, according to Tonight You're Mine, are a callous, narcissistic lot - fortunately, the music they make gets a pass.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sleepless Night
    Given how much it's in motion, Sleepless Night doesn't have much time for character development, but Sisley is a memorable antihero whose toughness barely masks his growing desperation and exhaustion, as his bleeding knife wound serves as the film's version of a countdown clock.
  34. The Road
    Moving fluidly between gory sight gags and implied, insinuating terror, The Road is a movie made to be seen after midnight, preferably in a mildly dilapidated theater with a full house.
  35. Portrait of Wally
    Portrait Of Wally tells a gripping story, but the filmmakers should have been more forthright about their own part in it.
  36. Patience (After Sebald)
    Patience reveals through images and tone as well as through the interviews how Sebald yearned for restorative meaning in the places he toured, only to end up lost in thought.
  37. A Bag of Hammers
    The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.
  38. I Wish
    I Wish is still amply Kore-eda-esque, full of life, heart, and funny little details about daily existence, as it meanders its way toward moments of real profundity.
  39. Dark Shadows
    Any proper adaptation of Dark Shadows, even one that acknowledges and celebrates its camp silliness as much as Burton's does, has to immerse itself in soap opera, too, and it's here that the director's lack of conviction becomes apparent.
  40. Last Call at the Oasis
    It's true that Americans contribute disproportionately to the problem, but catering to the idea that we're separate from the rest of the world isn't part of the solution.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    First Position
    Fortunately, first-time filmmaker Bess Kargman has selected a diverse array of competitors from different backgrounds who have significant talent in common.
  42. 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.
  43. A Little Bit of Heaven
    Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.
  44. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Mostly The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stays focused on the cutesy, low-stakes personal journeys of its English characters, characters it would be hard to care about if they weren't brought to life by actors who give the film substance and gravity it doesn't otherwise know how to earn.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Perfect Family
    Turner's interactions with Deschanel are so much weightier than the rest of the film that the other storylines seem extraneous.
  46. The Avengers
    Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.
  47. Safe
    The character-building is proffered in bad faith, like every scene in Safe that doesn't involve bloodshed. Statham can sell a punch, but not his own vulnerability.
  48. The Raven
    Poe was a flawed figure, but his greatest strength was in avoiding convention, or reinterpreting it to create something new. The Raven aspires to both, but abandons those ambitions to lie limply on the floor - only this, and nothing more.
  49. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    Pirates! comes with all the usual Aardman strengths intact, particularly the sense that its characters and creators alike are too good-hearted and sweet to nitpick.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    Like "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Sound Of My Voice plausibly demonstrates how someone's sense of self and certainty can be eroded, and like "Another Earth," it was co-written by actress Brit Marling, a melancholy, luminous presence as the group's leader.
  51. Darling Companion
    The tone is mild, the setting is peaceful to the point of sleepiness, and the stakes are incredibly low, even with the heart-tugging central presence of an adorable animal in danger.
  52. Payback
    Payback attempts something impressively difficult, but it succeeds primarily in its individual moments.
  53. Whores' Glory
    Glawogger studiously avoids explicitness until he gets to Mexico, where he finally goes past the bartering stage and behind closed doors as business is conducted. Pleasure isn't part of the transaction.
  54. 96 Minutes
    Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross' uncle and guardian, but they don't have much to work with.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Citizen Gangster
    It feels like Morlando is juggling two movies at a time. And only one of them works really well-the one about a disaffected workaday vet avenging himself on the banality of his daily grind.
  56. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    At two and a half hours, Warriors Of The Rainbow has the shape of something weightier than the simplified good-vs.-evil movie it actually is.
  57. Headhunters
    Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.
  58. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Fischer at least has personal and romantic reasons to be involved with this film, but audiences are unencumbered by such obligations, and should heed the title's warning sign and opt out of Kirk, Fischer, and Messina's fruitless little circle of pain.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Elles
    Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger.
  60. Bernie
    Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.
  61. The Five-Year Engagement
    A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.
  62. Fightville
    The dramatic stakes are high in Fightville, and Epperlein and Tucker shine a little light on the margins of this marginalized sport.
  63. Oki's Movie
    As always with Hong's films, Oki's Movie goes through stretches where it seems aimless and self-indulgent, followed by stretches where it's sharp, funny, and poetic.
  64. The Day He Arrives
    The Day He Arrives is a talky movie, full of long, boozy scenes and cosmic coincidences - and in that it echoes Allen, as well as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the best of British kitchen-sink drama.
  65. The Moth Diaries
    Writer-director Mary Harron, a supremely intelligent adaptor who did wonders with the screen version of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," simply doesn't have the chops to give this story the florid kick it needs.
  66. Chimpanzee
    It isn't easy to insult the intelligence of preschoolers, but Chimpanzee's insistence on turning the two gangs into the Sharks and the Jets does the job long before Allen lapses into his Home Improvement grunting.
  67. Marley
    That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.
  68. Think Like a Man
    An insanely overlong infomercial for the book.
  69. Goodbye First Love
    The result is a movie that's poignant, bittersweet, and true.
  70. The Lucky One
    As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Monsieur Lazhar
    More than a class full of convincing child actors and a genuinely affecting performance by Fellag, Falardeau offers a film as believably wrenching, and finally cathartic, as the grieving process itself.
  72. Lockout
    More than any masculine heroics, Pearce's primary job is maintaining the tone: smug, irreverent, and giddily punch-drunk.
  73. Life Happens
    The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Late Bloomers
    As a portrait of aging, Late Bloomers is a little too easy, but its cast makes it worth a look, even so.
  75. The Lady
    This is an inspiring and important story, but worthiness doesn't automatically equal quality. Had Besson looked for unexpected ways into Suu Kyi's life, or even had he indulged his old impulses and made a slick, surface-y Luc Besson movie, then The Lady might've been more memorable.
  76. How to Grow a Band
    Thile has the charisma, presence, and emotional transparency of a great documentary subject, but How To Grow A Band maintains a respectable distance from its subject that ultimately doesn't work in its favor.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard offers glimpses of the ragged heyday of grunge that are so compelling, it's a shame the film didn't stay with them instead of continuing along a standard story of a rock 'n' roll downfall by way of drug addiction followed by a slow recovery.
  78. Here
    There's a weary soul to HERE, embodied by Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal as two loners who meet in a café and impulsively decide to travel the country together, prompted more by mutual intuition than any meaningful exchange of words.
  79. Detention
    Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.
  80. The Cabin in the Woods
    It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?
  81. Blue Like Jazz
    For all its low-key charms, the coming-of-age story risks being too Christian for secular audiences and too secular and colorful for Christian audiences: Like its spiritual seeker of a protagonist, it's caught between worlds.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Three Stooges
    The Three Stooges isn't very funny, but it is, like last year's far superior "The Muppets," a sincere act of fandom on an epic scale.
  83. Touchback
    Entering the minor canon of movies named after sports regulations - move over, "Offside!" - Don Handfield's Touchback takes a handoff from "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "It's A Wonderful Life" and runs it up the middle for a modest gain.
  84. Post Mortem
    Larrain crafts Post Mortem as a slow, quiet character study, narrowing in on Castro in his home and office while the world outside descends into madness.
  85. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    For a documentary supposedly focused on fans-it's right there in the title-Comic-Con Episode IV gets awfully distracted by the star power of professional smartasses like Smith and industry titans like Lee.
  86. The Hunter
    The movie fumbles badly when it's time to turn those actions toward resolution, forcing an ending that seems both arbitrary and cruel. At under 80 minutes, the movie is terse enough that it could do without trumped-up events.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    We the Party
    Van Peebles compensates for his stylistic clunkiness - the film overuses split screens and sometimes looks so bright, it could be a '90s sitcom - with funny, unexpected sparks of life.
  88. ATM
    No, the indie horror movie ATM is not about a psychotic automated teller that charges the steepest of convenience fees - your life! - but it isn't much smarter than that premise, either.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Assault
    Brisk and technically efficient, The Assault is a dull film based on a real event that certainly wasn't.
  90. We Have a Pope
    It's a shame that a movie about the pope as a man shows such scant fascination with the actual papacy - or with humanity, for that matter.
  91. Keyhole
    Keyhole's flashes of actual B-movie coherence are enough to make longtime Maddin-watchers wonder if he could've played this material straighter, with more of a plot and fewer reveries.
  92. American Reunion
    The film alternates sloppily executed sex gags with sentiment, as did its predecessors. And it's all just slightly more endearing and amusing than it has any right to be.
  93. Damsels in Distress
    Even though I'm not sure I understand what Stillman was going for minute-to-minute, I was swept away by how original Damsels is, and how funny.
  94. Wrath of the Titans
    Wrath Of The Titans is shopworn and derivative even by the degraded standards of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.
  95. Mirror Mirror
    All of Mirror Mirror is visually striking, even when it works on no other levels. But the humor is erratic, the heroism isn't necessarily compelling, and the whole thing feels like a grab bag of bits that don't entirely cohere.
  96. Bully
    There are many appalling moments witnessed and described in Lee Hirsch's documentary Bully: children beaten and humiliated, ostracized by their peers and misunderstood by their parents, left to face an apparently heartless world without a soul to turn to.
  97. Womb
    It's a fascinating film to think about, but far too cool to touch.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Losing Control
    As onscreen professions go, it'd be a nice change of pace, were Miranda Kent not the least credible scientist since Denise Richards donned short shorts to play Dr. Christmas Jones.
  99. The Island President
    The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.
  100. Intruders
    Feels tentative and weak whenever it isn't simply baldly derivative. It's old-fashioned to the point of ossification.
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