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. Trespass
    Trespass begins loopy and mounts in craziness until it's frothing-at-the-mouth insane. It's hard to sustain that level of inspired lunacy over the course of 90 minutes, but Trespass is up to the challenge. As always, it's foolish to underestimate the appeal of Cage at his most agreeably unhinged.
  2. The Skin I Live In
    Had Almodóvar embraced the genre more, and changed his style to suit a story in which human beings get hacked up and transformed, he might've naturally found his way into a more potent, satisfying narrative, rather than one that dawdles and dead-ends.
  3. The Thing
    For a film that takes place in such a cold locale, it all feels awfully warmed-over.
  4. The Big Year
    In The Big Year co-stars Owen Wilson and Jack Black appear on the verge of succumbing to the same terminal blandness that's gripped Martin for so long.
  5. Footloose
    Brewer's Footloose has sex, swagger, and even an edge of danger, but in the end, he's hamstrung by the project's innate ridiculousness.
  6. Blackthorn
    Blackthorn could use more depth and less of a sense of weary inevitability, but it never lacks for the arid, vista-prone beauty of a classic Western, or for a sense of lived-in wear and tear that remains convincing even though it's more stylized than realistic.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    This comedy from writer-director Philippe Le Guay is really a testament to how much more charming things sound in French, given how much its setup parallels that of James L. Brooks' clunkier 2004 "Spanglish," complete with a blonde harpy of a spouse.
  8. The Way
    Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.
  9. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    The significance of that group anecdote - from the message of unity to the way Mardi Gras gave some gay New Orleanians a way to explain their lives to their parents - can't be overstated, either for its impact on human rights or its power to move.
  10. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    Made with affection and access but not enough structure.
  11. Dirty Girl
    In many ways, the film is history repeating itself, as the same Weinstein brothers who famously dropped $10 million on "Happy, Texas" in 1999 have overpaid again for "Happy, Texas 2."
  12. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The first Human Centipede had audacity on its side. Human Centipede II has only excess.
  13. Real Steel
    Real Steel falls somewhere near the intersection of elation and shame, essentially reworking the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling non-classic "Over The Top" for the equally ridiculous sport of android fisticuffs, and mostly getting away with it.
  14. Courageous
    Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.
  15. Dream House
    The film's ambitions are woefully small and familiar.
  16. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe feels like a homemade quilt: It's warm and comforting, but visually busy, with a repeating pattern that some will find stuffy and overwhelming.
  17. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    Côté and Henriquez err in pressing their case too hard on occasion, especially when they cut to reaction shots of Khadr supporters watching footage of his agony; there's a line between providing context and manipulating the audience that they don't care to acknowledge. Then again, subtlety isn't likely the goal: You Don't Like The Truth beats the drum, and beats it loudly.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bunraku
    Bunraku comes up frustratingly empty, and just as many of its elements simply bloat an overlong run time. (Demi Moore shows up seemingly to give the film more than one female speaking part.) It looks good, but Bunraku feels like a Frankenstein's monster of references that someone failed to animate.
  19. Thunder Soul
    Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.
  20. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is too slick and too cute; Tudyk and Labine are terrific comic actors, but the movie might've been better served by less-recognizable faces.
  21. My Joy
    Those schooled in Eastern European history may have better luck deciphering it, but what keeps it compelling throughout is Loznitsa's direction, which favors sophisticated long takes and particularly suspenseful use of foreground and background action. His next film should be a doozy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    American Teacher
    The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it's impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.
  23. Take Shelter
    Writer-director Jeff Nichols re-teams with his "Shotgun Stories" star Michael Shannon for his second feature, Take Shelter, which has a similar setting, but a different mood. Nichols is still concerned with family legacies, and the ways people in smaller communities relate to each other, but Take Shelter is slower and smoother, deliberately developing a mood of creeping dread.
  24. What's Your Number?
    There's a smart, funny, observant comedy-drama to be made about the role our romantic pasts play in determining our futures, but director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan are less interested in making that movie than in cycling Faris through a series of non-starting encounters with one-note-joke ex-flings.
  25. 50/50
    Ideally cast as Reiser's stand-in, Joseph Gordon-Levitt digs into a character role that also gives him a chance to show off the comedic chops he developed during his years on "3rd Rock From The Sun."
  26. Abduction
    Singleton once radiated ambition and vision. These days, he seems to be aiming for mediocrity at best. Even by those extraordinarily lenient standards, the inessential, perfunctory Abduction falls short
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    The Man Nobody Knew is far better with matters of the public record than with matters of the home, which may sum up its subject better than any talking-head interview.
  28. Limelight
    As usual, Corben's style is caffeinated and a little rough around the edges, but he's a tenacious journalist, and his yen for sensationalism gives Limelight an irresistible tabloid pop.
  29. Puncture
    Puncture excels in the smaller touches, from Shaw's quiet performance to the woozy, unrushed motel idylls where the hard-driving Weiss finally slows down for a few breaths.
  30. Dolphin Tale
    Dolphin Tale is as casual as a pleasant afternoon nap and about as substantive.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Weekend
    Bittersweet, achingly authentic, and so intimate it almost feels invasive.
  32. Red State
    Red State is gloriously unencumbered by fidelity to genre conventions, which lends it a thrilling element of unpredictability even when the action frequently grows shrill and heavy-handed.
  33. Pearl Jam Twenty
    What makes Pearl Jam Twenty a little better than the average fan-friendly documentary is that Crowe focuses on the more significant parts of the Pearl Jam story: not how the group wrote "Alive," but how it's struggled with maintaining artistic credibility while selling millions.
  34. Machine Gun Preacher
    Machine Gun Preacher is stirring when it presents Childers as a hero, but it does its most impressive work when it addresses him as a flawed, struggling, but still determined man.
  35. Killer Elite
    This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.
  36. Moneyball
    Miller directs with intelligence, though not flair, but the script makes up for any flagging energy with crackling Sorkin dialogue and performances that sing with revolutionary fervor.
  37. Straw Dogs
    The original was repulsive but impossible to shake. This remake is pure applause bait, which makes it barbaric in ways Peckinpah would never have dreamed.
  38. The Weird World of Blowfly
    The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Silent Souls
    While the pace and the dour, meditative tone of Silent Souls can sometimes verge on parodically arthouse-esque, the sincerity of the film's thoughts on loss and longing, on the burdens of grief, and on reawakened awareness of existence, is always painfully heartfelt.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    While it's far from easy going, The Mill And The Cross is worth attempting for its stunning visuals alone.
  41. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Bate invites a disparate bunch of SULM true-believers to explain their obsession, and many of them point to the same spirit of voyeurism that makes YouTube videos go viral today: that sense of getting an unfiltered look into how other people live.
  42. Happy, Happy
    The characters remain governed by what they've been told about themselves for years - that they're ugly, devious, mean, low-class, or silly - until a fresh set of eyes changes what they see in the mirror. Knowing this mutual moment of stark self-awareness is coming doesn't make its arrival any less powerful.
  43. 3
    All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.
  44. Restless
    Somehow, Van Sant has made a film about life and death in which the stakes never seem higher than whether one insolent kid will stop being such a horrible mope.
  45. I Don't Know How She Does It
    In theory, the film is another hoary exploration of the pressures of modern womanhood, but in practice, it offers the exact same thing as those NYC ingénue books: cookie-cutter wish-fulfillment and lifestyle porn for easily pleased, lonely romantics.
  46. Drive
    The film is little more than an exercise in style, but it's dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.
  47. The Ides of March
    The Ides Of March goes down easily, with a sophisticated bustle and a strong third act twist to test the hero's mettle. But it all feels a bit inconsequential - perhaps by design.
  48. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    Apparently no one told Ricci she was acting in a comedy, not a touching drama about a young woman overcoming a formative trauma to achieve her dreams.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tanner Hall
    The result isn't bad, it just lacks momentum and a strong reason for existing.
  50. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Illustrates how the rhetoric of civil rights changed after the breakthroughs of Martin Luther King. With the world's media finally paying attention, critical thinkers like Carmichael, Davis, and Malcolm X were able to push back against the fretful questions about violence, and redefine the story of blacks in America over the centuries as one defined by violence.
  51. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Most likely, The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu will mean the most to actual Romanians, who will recognize the locations and fashions, and may even know what the government's documentarians left out of the picture. But the movie offers plenty to captivate even outsiders.
  52. Burke and Hare
    The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Warrior
    For all its titular bravado, Warrior never lets the audience forget the economic and spiritual desperation driving its two main characters, who bleed for the screaming arena crowd in exchange for their shots at redemption, and offer a rare glimpse of soul in a type of film that usually isn't obliged to provide one.
  54. Contagion
    Soderbergh creates an unnerving mosaic from the smaller pieces, a vision of a world that's simultaneously tightly knit, delicately balanced, and prone to breakdown, whether due to disease, bad ideas, or unenlightened self-interest.
  55. Shark Night 3D
    Shark Night 3D barely bothered to show up, let alone deliver the minimal goods.
  56. Apollo 18
    Unpleasant when it isn't dull, Apollo 18 never sells the lost-footage illusion, and never compensates for it with scares. Jolts, sure. Like so many lazy horror directors, López-Gallego knows how to startle, but not how to frighten.
  57. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    A Good Old Fashioned Orgy takes its cues from Sudeikis' character and performance: It's randy, good-natured, moderately amusing, and charming in a glib, facile way.
  58. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    A historical epic with elements of wu xia, supernatural thrillers, and drawing-room murder mysteries.
  59. Love Crime
    A corporate crime thriller that explores the relationships of women in power, but while Corneau delivers a slick, well-acted piece with a surprising mid-movie twist, Love Crime is too thin and too on-point to deliver the jolt he and co-screenwriter Nathalie Carter most likely intended.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    Until the film takes an abrupt, annoyingly melodramatic late turn, the Millers handle Rottiers' character with great delicacy, aided by strong lead performances and a refusal to show Rottiers' adopted home as either idealized or seriously lacking.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    It's a ride worth more for its journey than its destination. Resurrect Dead does offer a convincing but anticlimactic "solution" to the Toynbee tiles, but the elements along the way are what make it an engaging film.
  62. Seven Days in Utopia
    Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.
  63. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    What's surprising, and ultimately disappointing, about Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is the degree to which Sfar allows biopic obligations to smother his more whimsical instincts.
  64. The Debt
    Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.
  65. Colombiana
    It uses a story about family as a vehicle for glorifying gangsterism. In other words, it's empty, amoral, and - in the style of other Besson productions - surprisingly easy to digest.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Caller
    For a while, the two ominous elements play off each other promisingly, and then it all becomes ridiculous, despite an appearance from the excellent Lorna Raver, the malevolent gypsy woman from "Drag Me To Hell."
  67. Iron Crows
    The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    French drama Special Treatment draws a brazenly provocative parallel between the professions of psychiatry and prostitution.
  69. Brighton Rock
    Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.
  70. Circumstance
    Perhaps it's unfair to compare Circumstance to the very different "Persepolis," but it's hard not to drift off to Marjane Satrapi's more pungent and personally inflected evocation of the same terrain, in which the characters are as vivid as their surroundings.
  71. Higher Ground
    At times, Higher Ground feels like a lower-stakes "Welcome To The Dollhouse" for adults: It's a systematically built portrait of disappointment and despair, centering on a perpetual underdog looking for affection and surety in any possible form. But while Higher Ground is less painful than Dollhouse, it's also less passionate.
  72. Our Idiot Brother
    Rudd ably carries the film while retaining a light touch, though even with Rudd in the lead, it's still a featherweight trifle, an afternoon nap of a feel-good comedy.
  73. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Absent any qualities beyond the surface, like the history and politics that trouble Del Toro's best films, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark is little better than a half-decent scare machine.
  74. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.
  75. Programming the Nation?
    It's tough to keep track of everything Jeff Warrick's subliminal-advertising documentary Programming The Nation? does wrong.
  76. Mozart's Sister
    What's missing from Mozart's Sister, though, is the kind of fervor that made "Amadeus" so memorable.
  77. A Horrible Way to Die
    The credibility Bowen and Amy Seimetz, as his fearful ex-girlfriend, bring to their roles nearly legitimizes the movie's underlying silliness.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Griff the Invisible
    The little glimpses of everyday magic on offer here are lovely, from a "universe suit" to a porous apartment door, but they're not enough to hang a film or a life on.
  79. Flypaper
    Everything and everyone acts as cogs in a relentless plot machine that keeps twisting and twisting like an annoying little gizmo on Christmas morning.
  80. Amigo
    Ultimately, Amigo is as much about Iraq and Afghanistan as it is about a century-old chapter of history - and it's as much about human nature as it is about either era.
  81. Conan the Barbarian
    It shouldn't, in other words, be that hard to make a good Conan movie. John Milius did a half-decent job with "Conan The Barbarian" in 1982, but this new film of the same name feels like a half-hearted revamp of virtually any of the Conan rip-offs that clogged up video-store shelves in the '80s.
  82. One Day
    The ultimate end of the story reveals that it's all about Sturgess' suffering, which just isn't that compelling a topic. Given its lack of center and balance, the film might more appropriately be called "One Dude."
  83. Fright Night
    The film's greatest pleasures come from Noxon's script - which puts the sexual chaos created by Farrell's attractive bloodsucker front and center - and from the performances.
  84. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    One amusing disadvantage of the crystal-clear, you-are-there 3-D cinematography, and the focus on the audience experience is that in practically every shot, it's easy to pick out off-message concertgoers who are bored, tired, or otherwise disengaged.
  85. Final Destination 5
    While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.
  86. 30 Minutes or Less
    An egregiously miscast Eisenberg stars as a young man toiling as a pizza boy, even though he displays only slightly less intelligence and savvy than the world-beater Eisenberg played in "The Social Network."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Senna
    Senna is considered one of motorsporting's greats, but Asif Kapadia's film also makes it clear he was a sort of artist, his talent accompanied by an unquenchable thirst for excellence and a belief that racing offered him a connection to God.
  88. Damn!
    Damn! would be a more insightful condemnation of the exploitation process if it didn't reek so strongly of exploitation itself.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    There's something admirable to this austerity and the way it insists viewers start by engaging with Kiefer's large-scale constructions, wordless explorations of which bookend the film.
  90. The Help
    The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.
  91. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Mysteries Of Lisbon is an odd kind of epic: It's digressive and even trifling at times, and though a large cast wanders through the frame, the individual scenes tend to be focused on just two or three people, having winding conversations about political intrigue and affairs of the heart.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    The Whistleblower's loose camerawork and cool tones sometimes recall Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," but without his control or unwillingness to strip away his characters' humanity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Magic Trip
    In spite of this honey-toned self-documentation and some trippy visuals from the Imaginary Forces studio, Magic Trip is about as fun as being the only sober person at a party.
  94. Bellflower
    It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted.
  95. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Wyatt brings a light touch to the potentially grim material - too light when it drops in some groan-inducing references to the original film - but he keeps the action compelling whether focusing on apes as they run amok or as they quietly contemplate their next move.
  96. The Change-Up
    David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.
  97. Point Blank
    The actors' charisma is a draw, but mostly, the movie relies on Pavlovian reaction to the genre: The audience has its designated place as surely as any element in Cavayé's relentless machine.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Good Neighbors
    That slow reveal is Good Neighbors' finest quality: It finds tension in stilted hallway interactions, unwanted dinner parties, and complaints about the wanderings of pets.
  99. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    There's nothing particularly distinctive or engaging about Wetzel's fly-on-the-wall style, which feels like second-hand Frederick Wiseman. But for hardcore foodies, El Bulli offers a clear, unvarnished look at the master at work.
  100. Life in a Day
    If nothing else, Life In A Day serves as a fine time capsule, recording some of what life was like on Earth in 2010.
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