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. True Legend
    True Legend's heart is in the right place. It's just the body that's weary.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    There Be Dragons
    Certainly looks lavish, from the battle scenes to the beautiful period costuming, but it's so stilted and humorless that it's almost campy.
  3. Daydream Nation
    It's a film about teen angst that's too caught up in its characters' state of mind to see its way through to the other side.
  4. Passion Play
    Passion Play doesn't overreach so much as it overindulges in aimless pacing, inert acting, and a romance maudlin enough to make "Twilight" look restrained.
  5. Hobo with a Shotgun
    It's a hyper-violent, self-conscious throwback, with the sickly plastic aroma of a tape that's been gathering dust in the corner of a video store since 1984.
  6. Jumping the Broom
    While Broom largely isn't a broad comedy, it still rarely goes for restraint in anything but tone.
  7. The Beaver
    While The Beaver starts with Gibson in "What Women Want" slapstick mode, it eventually goes to such exaggerated, extreme places that it becomes as much of a must-watch train-wreck as Gibson's own real-life situation.
  8. Something Borrowed
    Yes, perhaps the audience will like its favored couple more, but all the engineering that goes into making them sympathetic results in a film that feels agonizingly synthetic and alien.
  9. Thor
    It's a film with its own identity, the simple, thrilling story of a handsome god who falls to Earth and reminds everyone what heroes do.
  10. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Peter Stormare has fun engaging in some Walken-level scenery-chewing-almost literally-as the patriarch of a werewolf clan. Good for him. That means at least one person has found something to like about this tedious collection of wisecracks and hand-me-down monsters.
  11. Prom
    It's the sort of film Robert Altman might have made if he cut his teeth working for The Disney Channel.
  12. Fast Five
    Like a proper action sequel, it's bigger, louder, and sillier than its predecessors, but it's more streamlined, too, smartly dumping the tired underground racing angle in favor of a crisp, hugely satisfying "Ocean's Eleven"-style heist movie.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Lebanon, Pa.
    The turns the film takes toward the end do offer a few surprises, particularly in the form of redemption for the waffling hero-not in running after the ones he loves, but in standing by them when they need him.
  14. Sympathy for Delicious
    The character's miraculous gift never plays as more than a melodramatic contrivance-it's a gimmick, not an outgrowth of faith. The movie reaches for the heart, but only comes back with a balloon filled with fake blood and chicken livers.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    That's What I Am
    It's a dogged family entertainment determined to teach lessons about tolerance and how it should be extended to everyone, even redheads, gay people, and kids with cooties.
  16. The Robber
    It might've mattered to the audience too, if we had any inkling from the first hour of The Robber who this guy is, or why we should care what happens to him.
  17. Exporting Raymond
    At its most compelling when Rosenthal explores why the crassest entertainment is internationally successful, even in the home of theatrical naturalism.
  18. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    It raises the question of who the movie is for in the first place: Kids have seen much better animation in other films, and it's hard to imagine too many grown-ups ready to smile and nod at yet more smirking takes on famous moments from "Scarface" and "The Silence Of The Lambs."
  19. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    In spite of some thoughtful-and occasionally just bizarre-rumination on what the marvels of Chaumet really signify, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams often feels as stifling as the place it explores, rather than the sensual odyssey its evocative title suggests.
  20. The Arbor
    It helps that the actors' faces are so mesmerizing, particularly Manjinder Virk as Lorraine.
  21. Madea's Big Happy Family
    Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.
  22. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    It's just too bad that Legend Of The Fist breaks up that action with long scenes of well-dressed men and women sitting around in nightclubs, talking politics.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Dumbstruck
    The film's tendency to pull away once its character start their performances adds to the sense that director Mark Goffman knows his money shots will showcase the vents' oddities rather than their acts.
  24. Incendies
    While the film will likely stick with viewers, it's ultimately a tossup what they'll remember most: the stunning buildup, or the massive letdown.
  25. Water for Elephants
    It's a tastefully managed, passionless melodrama, full of brooding looks and reasonably sweet moments, but typified by a scantly characterized central couple who bring no sense of engagement to their relationship.
  26. The Bang Bang Club
    Silver means to get across the adrenaline rush of lives lived in dangerous extremes, but winds up trivializing their accomplishments and making them seem like men of hearty appetites, but little intellectual depth.
  27. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    The results are scattershot but entertaining, and occasionally eye-opening.
  28. The Elephant in the Living Room
    Gripping, maddening, well-told stories.
  29. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.
  30. The Conspirator
    The Conspirator should skip theaters altogether and become the first film released straight to middle-school history classes, where the standards for what can generously be deemed entertainment are much lower.
  31. Scream 4
    It's rare for a sequel to extensively acknowledge its own pointlessness, let alone make the unnecessary nature of its existence a recurring theme, the way Scream 4 does. Then again, the Scream franchise has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing itself and the rules of the slasher genre.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
    The film is ultimately more interesting than engaging; Durra doesn't yet have a grasp of the simultaneous warmth and needle-sharp satirical sense that infuse Stillman's films.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Footprints
    To give credit where it's due, Footprints makes a game attempt at creating a love letter to a place that may be inherently unlovable: Hollywood Boulevard, in all its faded glory and present-day Hooters/Hard Rock Cafe tackiness.
  34. The Princess of Montpensier
    Tavernier turns a tale of courtly duty and manners into a tense, twisty drama.
  35. The Double Hour
    Pretty to look at, making good use of the scenery in and around Turin; if nothing else, the runaway plot keeps the movie unpredictable.
  36. Armadillo
    For their part, the Danes are either having more of an adventure or covering up their trauma with chest-thumping braggadocio; almost to a man, they're ready to come back for more.
  37. Ceremony
    Trouble is, it feels like a film going through the motions, never finding mooring in believable human feelings.
  38. Rio
    Rio could use fresher ingredients and more spice.
  39. To Die Like a Man
    To Die Like A Man is powerfully controlled, and builds to a moving finale in which the characters are stripped down to their essences: no flowers, just stem.
  40. Blank City
    In the end, Blank City becomes not just a salute to the artistic adventurousness of a bygone New York, but a reminder that new strains of creativity keep emerging, just when the scene looks stalest.
  41. Henry's Crime
    A grating muddle.
  42. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    Like "Man In The Moon," American applies a thick gloss of reverence and sentimentality to the story of a comic pioneer who made his living challenging the kinds of neat, convenient, slickly packaged narratives presented here.
  43. Soul Surfer
    Unique as an inspirational personal-achievement film in the way it focuses on the protagonist not merely as a bastion of strength, but as part of a supportive community and family.
  44. In a Better World
    Bier allows her film to be buried by its own overwrought ambition.
  45. Meek's Cutoff
    Meticulous and immersive, Meek's Cutoff feels like history in three dimensions.
  46. Arthur
    Russell Brand steps into the role of Arthur Bach for the 2011 remake, and while it's one of the more reined-in performances of his short, busy big-screen career, Brand's unvarying onscreen persona just doesn't do soulful.
  47. Your Highness
    If Your Highness often feels like an inside joke, the principals neglected to let the audience in on the fun.
  48. Hanna
    Superficially exciting and handled with great aplomb. But the film is running to go nowhere.
  49. Circo
    Though Circo is pretty bleak, Schock doesn't skimp on the exotic wonder of a life on the road, surrounded by color and danger.
  50. Trust
    With a little tweaking, this easily could have veered into grindhouse exploitation or mindless wish-fulfillment, but Schwimmer's detached, theatrical approach to his material makes it is more cerebral than visceral, and more Steppenwolf Theatre than Charles Bronson.
  51. Super
    Super exists in the no-man's land between indie quirk and raw exploitation, and when it works, it's thrillingly off-balance.
  52. Hop
    Candy-coated or otherwise, crap's still crap.
  53. Insidious
    All calculation aside, scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality.
  54. Source Code
    For a while it's the rare film that-in the mold of the first "Matrix" movie and "Inception," although on a more modest scale than either-mixes heady puzzles with gripping suspense.
  55. Cat Run
    Words like "smug," "derivative," and "shallow" could all be fairly applied to the film, but as a piece of late-night exploitation, it delivers the violence and nudity with the regularity of an IV drip, and some familiar faces in the cast help class it up.
  56. Rubber
    While it's admirably perverse for a "killer-tire movie" to be this snooty, it's about half as clever as it thinks it is.
  57. Queen to Play
    Queen To Play has a winning heroine, who fantasizes about being special and then works hard to make it happen. Too bad the rest of the movie is so common.
  58. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    It's a remote location, but Frammartino's canny eye, wry humor, and careful sense of rhythm make it feel like the best possible spot to observe the workings of the world, from ashes to ashes.
  59. Kill the Irishman
    It's just another gangster movie for the pile.
  60. Potiche
    Funny, twisty, and sometimes bittersweet, Potiche is a fluffy good time, but not entirely insubstantial.
  61. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    The sequel, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, isn't motivated to change the formula in the least, but it's ever-so-slightly more palatable, if only for being less of a total spazz.
  62. Sucker Punch
    Browning has wildly expressive eyes and body language, but she turns wooden when delivering Snyder and Steve Shibuya's alternately purple and stilted banter. Like the film, she seems to regard plot and dialogue as necessary evils.
  63. Bal
    Bal mingles the bitter and the sweet, but it gets mired in its own stickiness.
  64. My Perestroika
    My Perestroika is fairly foursquare as documentary filmmaking goes; it isn't stylistically snazzy, nor doggedly vérité. Its closest kin in the genre is Michael Apted's "Up" films, which are similarly focused on how people change over time.
  65. Nostalgia for the Light
    It's also poetic and meditative in a way that never feels pretentious.
  66. The Music Never Stopped
    The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.
  67. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.
  68. Win Win
    Win Win is less quirky than "The Station Agent" and less soulful (and political) than "The Visitor," but it still does little to buck the trend.
  69. Paul
    Paul is a little sloppy and a little sappy, but the filmmakers' passion for their subject matter carries it over the occasional rough spot.
  70. Cracks
    Cracks stumbles down the stretch, when the melodrama finally washes in and the behavior becomes more extreme.
  71. Bill Cunningham New York
    It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.
  72. Limitless
    It's a small victory for flash in its eternal war with substance, but in this case, the flash is enough.
  73. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.
  74. Red Riding Hood
    The main difference is that while the "Twilight" films strive for straight-faced grimness, Red Riding Hood often verges on outright florid hilarity. It isn't laughing at itself, but that needn't stop the audience.
  75. I Am
    Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.
  76. Elektra Luxx
    As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.
  77. Black Death
    Black Death bears some similarities to a zombie movie in the way the plague inevitably overtakes the populace, and it also has one foot in the "creepy community" genre, alongside films like "The Wicker Man" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!"
  78. Jane Eyre
    Wasikowska doesn't seem much changed from her "Alice" role, and she trips through Jane's adulthood as though it were a fantasia instead of a moody suspense story.
  79. Certified Copy
    Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).
  80. Mars Needs Moms
    Any satirical points about contemporary gender roles get lost in a mad rush through the matriarchy's beautifully realized, Death Star-like gray fortress. It's a fun rush, though, and an intense one, too.
  81. Battle: Los Angeles
    It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
  82. Happythankyoumoreplease
    HappyThankYouMorePlease has a different vibe than "Garden State" or "HIMYM." It's more like a late-'80s/early-'90s Woody Allen film, after Allen stopped separating his comedy and drama.
  83. I Saw the Devil
    A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.
  84. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.
  85. Take Me Home Tonight
    Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.
  86. The Adjustment Bureau
    It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.
  87. Rango
    Ignoring the weak storyline entirely, Rango is a joyously weird experience.
  88. Beastly
    In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.
  89. Drive Angry 3D
    Drive Angry feels like a five-minute Comic Con show reel that's been expanded beyond its limits. It's agonizingly cool.
  90. Of Gods and Men
    Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.
  91. Heartbeats
    Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.
  92. Hall Pass
    Though the film never balances the grown-up stuff with the gross-out gags, it suggests the Farrellys might be able to do mature after all.
  93. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    Star Martin Lawrence, now the sole remaining element from the original "Big Momma's House" 11 years ago, looks pretty tired both in and out of makeup here.
  94. Zero Bridge
    Zero Bridge is a rigorous piece of filmmaking, but it's played at too minor a key, honoring the neo-realist tradition so slavishly that it lacks an identity of its own.
  95. Putty Hill
    This is a movie about the casual ways people know each other, even when their relationships are hard to explain-or perhaps even justify.
  96. We Are What We Are
    Mixing social commentary and black humor with copious amounts of blood and cracking bones, We Are What We Are offers a cannibal's-eye view of Mexico City's seamier side.
  97. Vanishing on 7th Street
    Vanishing On 7th Street does work well as a kind of mood-piece, observing all the ways we surround ourselves with the illusion of warmth and security, before the shadows creep in.
  98. The Chaperone
    The Chaperone is being marketed as a comedy, though no one seems to have told anyone involved.
  99. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.
  100. I Am Number Four
    Frey didn't really need a ghostwriter for this story, he just needed an archivist with a Xerox machine and a mercenary streak.
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