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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    • 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.
  2. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    360
    Fittingly for its occasional ring imagery, 360 is hollow in the middle.
  4. 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.
  5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.
  6. People Like Us
    Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.
  7. Womb
    It's a fascinating film to think about, but far too cool to touch.
  8. 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.
  9. Maleficent
    More well-intentioned than accomplished.
  10. 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.
  11. Red Hook Summer
    The film's 121-minute running time is similarly cause for concern. Lee can be tight and focused as a gun-for-hire, but he's always viewed personal projects as irresistible invitations to self-indulgence and overreaching. Red Hook Summer is no exception.
  12. 42
    The Jackie Robinson biopic 42 operates in a box inside of a box—and not the batter’s box, either, because that would imply it has some freedom to swing away. It’s thoroughly embalmed in the glossy lacquer of conventional baseball movies, and limited further by trying to deal with the horrors of racism in that context.
  13. 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.
    • 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.
  15. Hit and Run
    There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.
  16. The Heat
    Part of the point here is to stake a claim on a genre that’s traditionally been a boys’ club, and in that regard, The Heat delivers: In a bonding moment, this odd couple goes on a bender as epic as anything in "The Hangover." Their enthusiasm with weapons should alarm viewers across all demographics and species.
  17. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Abandoning its more original elements, the movie opts for a banal carpe diem conceit that turns Mitty into a globetrotting bystander.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Kumaré
    Even at a slim 84 minutes, that arc is padded out with side explorations of acoustic therapy and alien-abduction communes that dilute the film's focus and only make it seem like the filmmaker's aware there just isn't much there there.
  20. Family Portrait in Black and White
    There's no organizing principle in Ivanova's documentary, which unfolds in a ragged, seat-of-the-pants style that mirrors its subject's day-to-day life all too closely. Nenya's flock proves too big for the film to wrangle.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    Courageous performances from the leads, who have to bear a lot, both emotionally and physically, still can't transform their characters into more than just symbols for contemporary urban loneliness.
  22. 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.
  23. 2 Guns
    As in "Contraband," Kormákur offers a hint of a political statement, in this case about the inherent potential for corruption whenever competing government agencies are operating in international territory. But it doesn’t quite make it. On almost every level, 2 Guns is content to be as flavorless and forgettable as its title.
    • 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. Lay the Favorite
    At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.
  28. 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.
  29. The Other Son
    The Other Son's setup is too contrived, carried along by conversations that are either confrontational or artificially elusive.
    • 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.
  31. Home
    Though it opens with the studio’s seemingly mandatory voice-over setup, the story itself, adapted from the children’s book "The True Meaning Of Smekday," shows immediate conceptual audacity.
  32. Kung Fu Panda 3
    Kung Fu Panda 3 is Kung Fu Panda minus a dramatic arc, but with way more pandas.
  33. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    As an act of storytelling, it’s curiously perfunctory, never rising to the level of effort and care put into creating its cornucopia of visual pleasures.
  34. In Our Nature
    Brian Savelson's small-scaled domestic drama In Our Nature evokes a specific, fairly common experience: when two young lovers expose a still-blossoming relationship to their relatives' stifling attention.
  35. Dark Skies
    Good horror films are imprinted by the fears and anxieties of the day, converting real-life atrocities into abstracted scares; mediocre ones are imprinted, too, but with trends and commercial formulas. If Dark Skies resurfaced on TV or brain implant 20 or 30 years from now, horror fans would be able to carbon-date the film almost to the month.
  36. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.
  37. 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.
  38. Struck by Lightning
    Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.
  39. Ride Along
    Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    In Another Country
    It almost seems as if Hong is poking fun at his own single-minded oeuvre, creating a fractal representation of how his other films obliquely interrelate.
  41. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Hur invests the period setting with an eye-popping opulence that's meant to highlight the elite decadence that came before the fall, but his Dangerous Liaisons isn't particularly sophisticated on a political or historical level.
  42. Black Rock
    Ultimately, it’s hard to shake the sense that her picture is a character study bending itself, painfully and unnaturally, into the shape of a nightmare-in-the-boonies horror flick. Is this the only way films about female friendship can get greenlighted these days—by drenching themselves in genre tropes?
  43. The Girl
    Writer-director David Riker, who previously made the accomplished 1998 Paisan homage The City (La Ciudad), has a great eye for detail: He sketches the narrow boundaries of Cornish’s sad life in Austin expertly while bringing a village square across the border to vivid life. He also gets another fine performance out of Cornish.
  44. Spring Breakers
    The overall effect is enervating, like a party that grinds on after most of the attendees have either left or passed out. And much like "Kids," the enfant terrible’s breakthrough screenplay, Korine’s film has an unintended moral hysteria, like a warning to parents of what their good girls are doing when they aren’t looking. The message: Keep them locked up. In their bikinis, if necessary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    As its title suggests, Satan grapples with the existence and nature of evil in the world, but it's hard to take such weighty matters seriously when they're explored with all the subtlety and grace of an anti-abortion pamphlet.
  46. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Waste enough of the audience’s time with the adventures of a couple of uncharismatic dinguses, and Depp’s stage-drunk, innuendo-laced, cabaret-emcee shtick starts to creep back into being funny.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Emperor
    Since Hirohito remained in ceremonial power until his death in 1989, there’s no suspense about the outcome. Instead, the film offers a labored treatise on the Japanese national character, with endless speeches about honor, devotion, loyalty, and the people’s reverence for their emperor as a human deity.
  48. The Iceman
    Alternating scenes of the psycho-as-family-man with an increasingly grisly and desperate series of hits, it makes for a surprisingly monotonous sit for a movie that also features a killer named Mr. Freezy.
  49. The Fifth Estate
    Giving the kind of mannered performance that seems predicated on careful mimicry of 60 Minutes, Cumberbatch impresses without ever coming across as more than an abstraction.
  50. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    Secret Of The Tomb plays it as a source of corny jokes, pop-culture references, and father-son bonding moments. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of film that shouldn’t be expected to engage with its assorted bizarre subtexts — but what a movie it could be if it did.
  51. About Last Night
    Despite a few deviations, About Last Night is basically the same sanitized rom-com, bearing the slightest hint of resemblance to its source material. In other words, most of the perversity of Perversity has again been excised — the Chicago too.
  52. The Company You Keep
    The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.
  53. The Condemned
    Viewers who enjoy a big rug-pull will want to keep an eye out for this one, as it essentially combines the surprise endings of several notable films into one all-encompassing “Gotcha!”
  54. The Way, Way Back
    Just about everyone and everything in The Way, Way Back feels programmed, as though the film were written using Mad Libs.
  55. August: Osage County
    It’s not so much a mangled movie as it is an unfulfilled, forgettable one: unnecessary for anyone who’s seen the play, yet sufficiently watered-down that newcomers won’t be able to tell what all the fuss was about.
  56. Populaire
    A candy-coated French throwback to the Hollywood rom-coms of the ’50s — especially the ones starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day — Populaire is old-fashioned in more than just its pastel color scheme.
  57. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    Combining Anderson’s symmetrical camera style with frenetic editing ends up imploding the sense of depth and space that has long made the director’s movies must-sees in 3-D.
  58. The Source Family
    Watching the movie is like riffling through an author’s index cards: It’s all detail and no big picture.
  59. Insidious: Chapter 2
    The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.
  60. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Lowery, it can’t be denied, has Malick’s moves down pat. It’s the Malick touch that eludes him.
  61. Maniac
    If it’s possible to be both impressed and appalled by a movie’s pull-no-punches savagery, Maniac earns that dubious distinction.
  62. The Wall
    Haushofer’s book may be a classic, but this is the least imaginative way of filming it imaginable, short of simply pointing the camera at a copy and rapidly flipping the pages.
  63. Detour
    Dickerson passes on the occasion for existential drama and goes for the race-against-the-clock urgency of an ordinary guy trying to crawl out of his predicament. It’s effective enough, but there isn’t much to it.
  64. Renoir
    Ace cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee (In The Mood For Love) does a superb job of creating an Impressionist look, especially when shooting exteriors, but the film’s loveliness is skin-deep.
  65. The Attack
    All the same, as dramatized here, The Attack skirts perilously close to being an apologia for suicide bombing.
  66. Java Heat
    Unfortunately, Java Heat is also an action movie for people who don’t mind clichéd plotting, lame dialogue, and the low-wattage charisma of third-string Twilight heartthrob Kellan Lutz.
  67. Aftershock
    Right up until the quake, Aftershock is a bland, sub-"Hangover" comedy about guys on the make in South America. Then finally, blessedly, the ground swallows up these shallow idiots.
  68. Don Jon
    To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.
  69. Lovelace
    Seyfried expertly balances the girl-next-door star power that made the real Lovelace an unlikely casting choice with a more subtle strain of fear; Sarsgaard is as terrifying and hiss-worthy as he’s been since "Boys Don’t Cry."
  70. Nebraska
    Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.
  71. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  72. State 194
    As a primer, however, the film does the job, albeit less thoroughly and with more needless digressions than would even a lengthy magazine article on the subject.
  73. Out of the Furnace
    Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.
  74. Fury
    It’s all very Peckinpah — or at least it could be, if Ayer had any sense of poetry.
  75. Tammy
    McCarthy co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and appears as the heroine’s wormy tyrant of a boss. Their collaborative mojo results in some winning sweetness, but not a lot of hilarity.
  76. You Will Be My Son
    With this basic conflict established early on, You Will Be My Son endlessly spins its wheels, offering up scene after scene of Deutsch screwing up, or just plain existing, and Arestrup tossing deeply disgusted glances in his direction.
  77. Project Almanac
    As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.
  78. Devil's Due
    While it’s generally above-average for this sorry genre, it’s so derivative, in both style and narrative, that there’s still an overwhelming sense of plodding inevitability to the whole affair.
  79. Like Father, Like Son
    Like Father, Like Son has the overall depth and tenor of a Lifetime movie. Kore-Eda can do much better.
  80. Rising from Ashes
    Too bad, then, that Team Rwanda’s inspiring rise to prominence and eventual course triumphs are so thinly sketched that the film leaves the audience wanting more, in the most frustrating way possible.
  81. Blood Ties
    With his English-language debut, Blood Ties, Canet takes on material of even less interest to today’s big studios, constructing something much more ambitious than a straight thriller — a sprawling familial crime drama, heavier on relationships than chases or shoot-outs.
  82. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
  83. The Expendables 3
    With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be.
  84. Chef
    For anyone who’s followed Favreau’s career since the mid-’90s, the temptation to read Chef as veiled autobiography will be overpowering.
  85. Touchy Feely
    Without an improvisational buffer, in which actors feel their way naturally and uncertainly from moment to moment, Shelton’s scenario feels as painfully contrived as it is.
  86. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    The problem is that everything fun and resonant about the movie (like a boy whose eye works as a movie projector, unspooling his dreams onto the wall) ends up feeling rather ornamental.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    That Awkward Moment
    That Awkward Moment desperately wants to speak to a new generation of romantic-comedy devotees without proving it has the authority to do so. It’s not as laboriously dumb as the overloaded ensemble rom-coms of Garry Marshall ("Valentine’s Day," "New Year’s Eve") or the similarly star-studded "He’s Just Not That Into You."
  88. Thanks for Sharing
    Oddly, counterintuitively even, what’s most endearing about the film is how middle-of-the-road it is. While 2011’s "Shame" treated the same subject with too much seriousness, and next week’s "Don Jon" treats it with too little, Thanks For Sharing acknowledges that sex addiction, like most other problems in life, can be a source of both suffering and humor.
  89. Still Mine
    Cromwell delivers his defiantly gruff dialogue with amusing relish, while still grounding his protagonist’s actions in desperation and desolation. And his nostalgic conversations with Bujold while the two lay in bed have a naturalness that almost overshadows the creakiness of the surrounding material.
  90. I Declare War
    The problem, mainly, is that Lapeyre’s kids are stock types: runts, bullies, toadies, a girl with a big crush. In essence, they are kids’-movie tropes pretending to be war-movie tropes — one layer of generic material being used to cover another.
  91. After Tiller
    After Tiller is an hour and a half of folks on their best behavior, presented as a candid portrait.
  92. Una Noche
    Throughout, Una Noche’s details — an old man singing as he staggers down the street, young boys wasting away their days playfully leaping into the water — feel authentic.
  93. Parkland
    As vicarious, you-are-there re-creations of historical events go, it’s creditably workmanlike; whether that’s the best use of the dream factory is another matter.
  94. The Judge
    The movie isn’t without its pleasures, most of them related to performance. Farmiga, a perennially underrated actor, gives Samantha a measured confidence that sets Hank’s manic cockiness on edge, and Billy Bob Thornton does an effective variation on a slimy archetype as the prosecutor, Dwight Dickham.
  95. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.
  96. A.C.O.D.
    Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.
  97. Paradise: Faith
    A powerful final scene reveals that Seidl knew exactly where he was going. But the journey is stultifyingly static, repeating the same basic information over and over with only negligible variations.
  98. Birth of the Living Dead
    Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.
  99. Foxcatcher
    The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.
  100. Ted 2
    Either way, Ted 2 strikes a sometimes-awkward balance between sincerity and cheap provocation. It also forgets that the real draw of the first film wasn’t Ted himself, but Wahlberg, whose sweet-lug routine scored a lot of belly laughs.
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