The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. The Grand
    Typical of bad improv, the inmates take over the asylum, leaving a movie that's little more than a loose, wildly uneven assemblage of individual comedic shtick.
  2. Run, Fatboy, Run
    Fatboy nearly succeeds in spite of itself, thanks to Pegg, who makes a character who does some detestable things seem strangely likeable.
  3. Superhero Movie
    Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need look no further.
  4. Young@Heart
    There's a wealth of great material here, especially a shattering performance of Coldplay's "Fix You" by a soulful mountain of a man named Fred Knittle.
  5. Street Kings
    After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
  6. Baby Mama
    It's not without laughs--Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange "reward" for a job well done--but there's a lot of arid space between them.
  7. Son of Rambow
    The shooting of the movie-within-a-movie offers the brightest moments in Son Of Rambow, a testament to the innocence of the boys' creative impulse and the sheer unlikely pleasure of their friendship.
  8. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    Like its early predecessors, it's a nominally fun trip, but it's tissue-thin and instantly forgettable.
  9. Brick Lane
    Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.
  10. Bottle Shock
    Trouble is, it's too rambling and digressive to feel focused, yet too calculating to feel as observational and natural as a good Altman flick.
  11. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Video veteran Sanaa Hamri directs with smooth competence, and the leads all go pleasantly through their paces, but there are no surprises.
  12. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    With its simple-goal-driven plot, its wordy, cutscene-like interludes, and its stiffly modeled characters, it wouldn't even make for a particularly high-end videogame.
  13. The Rocker
    Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.
  14. Death Race
    It's the perfect end-of-summer film, and a sign that summer needs to end soon.
  15. The Longshots
    A sports movie like every other, but the excellent, lived-in performances of Cube and Palmer make it a mildly affecting.
  16. W.
    Stone paddles down the giant river of Bush's life without exploring any of the tributaries; he passes by two or three dozen better movies along the way.
  17. The Family That Preys
    Perry deserves due respect for exploiting an untapped niche.
  18. Sex Drive
    Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.
  19. Blindness
    There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
  20. Quarantine
    Dowdle manages a few nice shocks and some neat moments of pitch-black gallows humor, but Quarantine nevertheless feels awfully familiar, and it grows less convincing with each passing moment. At its worst, it abandons realism entirely and flirts with gory kitsch.
  21. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    Efron is the epitome of sexless Disney heartthrobs, but he's an electrifying song-and-dance man, so much so that his castmates (Bleu excepted) look like they have concrete shoes by comparison.
  22. Splinter
    There's potential for a lot more excitement in Splinter, but Wilkins seems content just to bring it across the finish line.
  23. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Like the big shiny sphere at its center, the film is fairly pretty, but there's no real sense that there's anything inside it.
  24. Seven Pounds
    It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner.
  25. Hotel for Dogs
    What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.
  26. My Bloody Valentine
    But save for a giddily gratuitous sequence involving full-frontal nudity, a little person, and a French bulldog, the film is strictly by-the-numbers slasher boilerplate. It won't endure past the weekend.
  27. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  28. Donkey Punch
    The film goes off the rails in the final third, sacrificing subtle character work at the altar of blood-and-guts survival horror. As mood-killers go, it's like a jab to the back of the neck.
  29. Confessions of a Shopaholic
    The degree to which Shopaholic actually works is a testament to the looks, charm, and comedic chops of Fisher, who stole "Wedding Crashers" and has a gift for slapstick that places her somewhere between Téa Leoni and Lucille Ball in the pantheon of foxy redheaded physical comediennes.
  30. The International
    Ultimately feel so empty and forgettable.
  31. Madea Goes to Jail
    Madea's physical comedy is loud enough to wake the dead, but its drama is just as excessive. In a neat bit of economy, Perry stages a wedding that doubles as a breakup, and triples as the villain's crowd-pleasing comeuppance. Now that is some serious multitasking.
  32. The Great Buck Howard
    Buck Howard has a nice feel for its tacky, second-rate show-business milieu--a rinky-dink world of telethons, small towns starved for entertainment, and entertainers whose careers have been in freefall since Hollywood Squares went off the air.
  33. 12 Rounds
    There's something strangely charming about films that are all artifice, explosions, and naked calculation. 12 Rounds is at least honest trash: It never pretends to be anything other than manic schlock.
  34. Fast & Furious
    The action scenes don't always get the balance between flash and danger right, but the movie remains agreeably dopey--presenting street-racing culture as a hotbed of colorful stereotypes and lipstick lesbianism--until a climax that just isn't there.
  35. American Violet
    It’s hard not to get swept up by the film's progressive zeal, but Disney doesn’t allow for much grey area.
  36. Management
    Like its protagonist, Management is dopey and impractical, but strangely winning all the same.
  37. What Goes Up
    What Goes Up has a one-of-a-kind character in Coogan, a cynic with a savior complex, who lies partly out of convenience, and partly because he knows--as Glatzer and Lawson know--that even a messy story can still inspire.
  38. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    The series kept it going for one more entry, but throws its commitment to the era away with movie number three, a ploy sure to anger Ice Age purists everywhere.
  39. The Girl from Monaco
    Isn't slow-paced. It’s slick and audience-friendly.
  40. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    Listening to Berg's characters talk so naturally, honestly, and colorfully about the small, surmountable problems of their daily life is so engaging that whenever Kempner cuts away to another dry historian or fervent fan, it's doubly aggravating.
  41. Adam
    Dancy’s character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.
  42. Taking Woodstock
    Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions.
  43. Amreeka
    Amreeka lacks the sense of humor that set "Aliens In America" apart--and frankly, it’s rarely as insightful about the biases and strengths either of Arab émigrés or of sheltered Midwesterners.
  44. Capitalism: A Love Story
    The tone is so smart-ass that it’s bound to put a lot of viewers into a default defensive posture.
  45. More Than a Game
    Belman doesn’t look into the bigger problems of James’ team jet-setting across the country during the school year, or the spectacle allowed to build up around him. He cares most about what happens on the court, which is diverting and fun as far as it goes, but not close to the whole story.
  46. The Wedding Song
    It takes more than just the ominous tread of Nazi boots to infuse gravitas into this well-intentioned but dreary look at the female mind and body during wartime.
  47. The Karate Kid
    That the film works as well as it does--as an attractive, rousing time-passer for children--speaks more to the endurance of a good formula than its revitalization.
  48. Frozen
    While the actors are game, their characters are awfully generic.
  49. The Crazies
    The crazies themselves could be a lot more terrifying. Without the rotting ickiness of proper zombies, they just seem like methed-out Iowans looking for a fix. That’s scary, but not scary enough.
  50. Alice in Wonderland
    The best adaptations have found ways to put a personal stamp on the familiar stories. Others have simply reproduced an Alice facsimile in the image of their own era. Surprisingly, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland belongs to the latter camp. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, just another frustratingly impersonal one from a director who once had trouble compacting his personality down to movie size.
  51. Brooklyn's Finest
    To quote Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.
  52. Repo Men
    It’s a time-waster with brains, but ultimately not enough brains, and one that wastes too much time.
  53. Hot Tub Time Machine
    Engaging enough, but its characters’ path to redemption would be more satisfying if it weren’t greased with authentically ’80s-style casual sexism, gay panic, and frat-comedy clichés.
  54. Chloe
    It all goes awry in the end, but for a good stretch, Chloe neatly fixes Egoyan’s career-long obsessions with identity and communication to the familiar framework of the erotic thriller.
  55. Lethal Weapon 3
    The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.
  56. North Face
    The historical backdrop is fascinating and an important part of this story, but there’s a pervasive sense that director Philipp Stölzl and his screenwriters soft-pedal it as much as possible in order to exalt their heroes.
  57. 24 City
    Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
  58. Eat Pray Love
    Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.
  59. Survival of the Dead
    Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn't provide enough reason for them to be.
  60. MacGruber
    It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.
  61. Robin Hood
    Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.
  62. Kick-Ass
    Vaughn opts for comic-book bigness—big fights, big laugh lines, big explosions—but without a Spider-Man or Batman at the front of the action, Kick-Ass’s heroes and villains look smaller-than-life in a larger-than-life world.
  63. The Joneses
    The inevitable breakdown on this commercial façade might have led The Joneses into more disturbing territory, but Borte goes the other direction, away from jagged comedy and toward well-meaning homilies. No sale.
  64. Trudell
    Anyone looking for history lessons from Rae's documentary will have to be patient and alert enough to pick through the poetry.
  65. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Perhaps it was inevitable that a movie about the ultimate stoner would be undone by fuzzy execution and lack of ambition.
  66. Heading South
    Heading South's gender politics keep the movie from being too simple, since these women's self-indulgence can be read as a kind of unfettered (and even laudable) feminism, instead of just unintentional racism.
  67. From Other Worlds
    The word "slight" doesn't even begin to describe how minor the quirky indie comedy From Other Worlds turns out to be, though its sheer lack of pretension may be its greatest asset.
  68. Fay Grim
    Sadly, there's a thin line between goofing irreverently on the maddeningly convoluted nature of spy thrillers and actually being a muddled mess, and Fay Grim crosses it constantly during its deadly second hour.
  69. Hollywood Dreams
    It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.
  70. Joshua
    It's regrettable that Joshua veers into outlandish "Omen/Bad Seed/Good Son" territory when the real terror lies much closer to home.
  71. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    The film seems even more one-note when compared to the recent indie feature "Chop Shop," which also follows young immigrant hustlers in NYC, yet takes the time to provide a fuller picture of the city and its opportunities. Zalla prefers to wallow in the dead-end, an approach that's initially powerful, then numbing.
  72. Full Grown Men
    Full Grown Men often becomes as intolerably silly as the twee Amerindies it's reacting to.
  73. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    The paltry amount of live performances is a crime. In some ways, Smith singing "Gloria" live would've been all the context anyone would ever need.
  74. What We Do Is Secret
    The movie is exciting at times, moving at times, and watchable throughout, but fans of The Germs and L.A. punk may start to pine for what's missing around the time Michele Hicks shows up.
  75. The Dukes
    The Dukes could use more music and less sap, but it's refreshing to see a film about the problems of working-class men on the far side of middle age, struggling just to get by.
  76. Shadows
    A respectable enough little ghost story, but it loses a lot of sparkle by being similar to such other guy-talks-to-the-dead thrillers as "The Sixth Sense" and "Ghost Town."
  77. Memorial Day
    Most of the last hour of Memorial Day feels like a retread at least, and horribly exploitative at worst.
  78. My One and Only
    Dying to hear George Hamilton’s origin story? No? Well, too bad, because the mediocre, nostalgic-soaked comedy-drama My One And Only, loosely inspired by Hamilton’s childhood, has been produced with a few big stars attached.
  79. Wolke Neun
    Ultimately though, apart from the ages of the protagonists, Cloud 9 is a standard-issue infidelity story.
  80. American Casino
    The film doesn’t come to life until too late in the game.
  81. Women in Trouble
    What does it all mean? Nothing much greater than the sum of its seriocomic vignettes. To that end, Women In Trouble tends to sputter to life whenever the stories get racy.
  82. The Missing Person
    Shannon’s performance takes The Missing Person as far as it goes, but when a real-world tragedy commandeers the story, Buschel’s thin pastiche falls to pieces.
  83. Pop Star on Ice
    Perhaps television will prove a better medium to explore Weir’s idiosyncrasies than this engaging yet superficial documentary.
  84. City Island
    The movie too often equates drama with volume, and agita with authenticity.
  85. Who Do You Love
    Works best when it isn’t about freezing time and explaining moments in pop-music history, but is instead about guys playing music together.
  86. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    There’s a great story to be told here, but After The Cup feels more like an outline than a finished draft
  87. John Rabe
    In spite of a subtle performance by Ulrich Tukur in the eponymous role, Gallenberger’s film feels labored and emotionally disengaged, an autumn-hued history lesson that’s as studiously reserved as its steel-spined subject.
  88. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.
  89. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    So why, given its moment-to-moment surplus of visual imagination, does the film feel so hollow and unsatisfying?
  90. Countdown to Zero
    Walker has something important to say with Countdown To Zero, but if this movie were standing on a doorstep with a petition, most reasonable people would sign it quickly and send it on its way, rather than inviting it in to chat.
  91. Life During Wartime
    "Happiness" was, in its own dry, muted way, a howl of fatalistic despair discernible to anyone who's ever felt life had run out of cruel tricks to play. Life During Wartime is less a reprise of that howl than its echo.
  92. Halloween II (2009)
    Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.
  93. Centurion
    Centurion offers little beyond viscera for its own sake, without anything like the bold abstraction of "Valhalla Rising."
  94. Secretariat
    The film ultimately feels like a well-trod journey to a familiar destination with not enough wonder along the way.
  95. Student Bodies
    What Student Bodies lacks in incisiveness—and laughs, frankly—it makes up in gusto. The advantage of having a creative team drawn from middle-aged pros with decades of industry experience is that they knew how to put together a picture teeming with ideas and shot through with energy.
  96. Machete
    It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.
  97. Conviction
    Conviction is like "Erin Brockovich" meets "Rudy."
  98. Faster
    Faster starts to lay on a heavy-handed message about the importance of forgiveness. That isn't what anyone showed up to see.
  99. The Green Hornet
    It's a strange, shapeless, rarely satisfying, but generally amiable movie in which everyone appears to be faking it as they go along, and almost-almost-getting away with it.
  100. Neshoba
    For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.
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