The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Cars 2
    Cars 2 looks fantastic, but the studio has never given audiences - especially audiences over the age of 10 - less reason to be emotionally invested in the beautiful shiny things flying across the screen.
  2. 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.
  3. The Revenant
    The result is a horror film that progresses organically and unpredictably, even willing to take a turn for the tragic, if that's what's inevitable.
  4. France
    Dumont does not make conventionally satisfying films, and, for all of his visual minimalism, he loves a mess. But he is more than capable of making movies that are engaging on a level beyond the purely intellectual. France, for the most part, isn’t one of them.
  5. Cirkus Columbia
    Like its characters, who can't believe their stable nation could be threatened by ethnic unrest, Cirkus Columbia looks to the past, evoking the kind of unreal, vaguely politicized tales that were once the lifeblood of arthouse cinema.
  6. Cold Pursuit
    One thing that does translate is Morland’s extremely dry, extremely dark sense of humor, which manifests at the bleakest moments of the story like whoopee cushions lining the pews at a funeral.
  7. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The fantasy and horror sections of The House With A Clock In Its Walls, including a scene where our core trio must fight reanimated jack-o’-lanterns, are full of wonder. Some of them — and this is a sentence we never thought we’d write about an Eli Roth movie — downright sparkle.
  8. Generation War
    By conveniently exempting its protagonists from ideology or culpability, Generation War feels less like a reckoning than a dodge: Yes, your grandparents may have been Nazis—but they could have been these nice people, too.
  9. Strangers with Candy
    Lives and dies on the strength of individual gags, most of which are clever, but none of which quite make up for the absence of a strong narrative drive. Sometimes being funny isn't enough.
  10. 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.
  11. The Wall
    In its best moments, The Wall is just a movie, a tense and nasty black-box thriller that conveys its politics through the microcosmic stakes of its life-and-death scenario. Pity that when the characters open their mouths, they sometimes unleash some very heavy-handed artillery, their speech coated too often in cliché.
  12. Mekong Hotel (2012)
    For the most part, though, this hour-long curiosity feels like a fans-only doodle, riffing on motifs Joe has done better elsewhere. Even for a filmmaker who takes pride in scaling the fantastic down to everyday proportions, there’s such a thing as going too slight.
  13. The Wildest Dream
    Given the subject matter, the answer to "Why watch this doc?" should be "Because it is fantastic." But Geffen, like Everest, will have to settle for "Because it is there."
  14. Charlie Says
    For as much as Charlie Says tries to reframe everything we know about the Manson Family, its characterization of the women remains shallow.
  15. Bubba Ho-tep
    Playing against rubber-faced type, cult icon Bruce Campbell grounds his Elvis in a wry, understated swagger that holds the film's wacky excesses in orbit and does more honor to the legend himself than a thousand Vegas lounge-show wannabes.
  16. Tornado
    It’s more that the specific combination of jidaigeki period piece, highland character study, and frontier justice that’s new, making Tornado a harrowing, blustery, violent amalgamation of an idiosyncratic spirit.
  17. 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.
  18. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Algrant’s film — which he co-wrote with Emma Sheanshang and David Brendel — is really about Tim Buckley’s son, Jeff, an equally adventurous rocker whose fame ultimately eclipsed his father’s, though he too died young.
  19. Finch
    Finch’s main problem is its amiable, low-key vibe, which feels at odds with such a grim scenario.
  20. Coach Carter
    Coach Carter eventually curdles into a grim love letter to discipline and accountability, which makes it the perfect sports film for W.'s second term, but not a whole lot of fun.
  21. Assisted Living
    Assisted Living gets a little better as it wears on, and at least it's refreshingly short.
  22. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Turns out to be a disappointingly standard-issue addiction melodrama, this one the tearful case study of an adrenaline junkie whose compulsion threatens to push her family and loved ones away.
  23. Lorne
    If, somehow, you’re just now getting into Saturday Night Live and haven’t already ingested endless lore about the most enduring of sketch shows, Lorne might be a meaningful primer. For everyone else, you’ve heard this joke before.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. Somebody I Used to Know
    The film’s rom-com template feels more like a structure to play with, a solid foundation on which to question the very tenets of romance and comedy.
  27. The People Under the Stairs
    It’s that intuitive fusion of whiplash-inducing plot twists and political anger that makes The People Under The Stairs so fascinating, even when the humor’s too blunt or the scares too soft.
  28. The Munsters
    As a love letter to the sitcom that so inspired Zombie as a child, The Munsters might be the most authentic-feeling television revival ever put on film, warts and all.
  29. The Dinner
    The Dinner wants to chill bloodstreams by revealing what decent, civilized people — the kind that adopt children from other countries, consider their politics liberal, and wine and dine in high class — are truly capable of. But as food for thought goes, that’s pretty lukewarm.
  30. Home for the Holidays
    The result is a movie that feels both fussed-over and meaninglessly cruel.
  31. Confetti
    Anyone who's been closely involved with a wedding knows exactly how these beleaguered schmucks feel. Those who haven't may just take Confetti as a lighthearted but convincing argument for elopement.
  32. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Every year, so many artless, gormless, generically slick thrillers make their way into theaters that any time a genre director displays basic filmmaking smarts, the result ends up seeming like a retro novelty. Such is the case with writer-director Scott Frank’s murky potboiler A Walk Among The Tombstones.
  33. Significant Other
    At the halfway mark, a little spice gets shaken into the otherwise thin soup. It’s still far from a must-see, but there are rewards for those who stick to the end.
  34. Backstage
    Bercot moves the characters up and down like lines on a chart, never granting full access to what any of them are thinking. And access is what Backstage promised.
  35. Morning Glory
    Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.
  36. American Pop
    All that aside, American Pop is still worth watching. Bakshi may not have perfectly captured eight decades of American music history, but his attempt to do so is often thrilling for reasons other than ambition.
  37. The Last Kiss
    Unfortunately, nothing about Tony Goldwyn's vapid, navel-gazing, claustrophobic adaptation of a 2001 Italian film rings remotely true.
  38. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Less a fantasy than a somber, enveloping mood piece, which is a large part of what makes it so strangely, irrationally compelling.
  39. Wrath of Man
    Wrath is also fun, after a fashion, only with the grim undercurrent of a movie more interested in generating violence than truly motivating it. This is especially true in the second half, when Ritchie offers solutions to a mystery that never really had any viable suspects.
  40. Today's Special
    So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.
  41. Mascots
    The only thing Mascots has to be is laugh-out-loud funny, and yet, most of the time, the only things it elicits are reflexive chuckles and a sense of creeping boredom.
  42. The Ritual
    Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.
  43. Last Chance Harvey
    If nothing else, Last Chance Harvey proves that you're never too old to be the subject of a zany trying-on-dresses montage, but considering the prestige of its leads, that's a minor victory at best.
  44. Horrible Bosses
    In the film's funniest scene, a coked-up Day rocks out to The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" in a car in a state of ecstatic frenzy.
  45. Mama
    Plenty of horror movies are willing to settle for making audiences jump. Mama is more ambitious by far: It makes sure viewers are emotionally committed even when they aren't clutching their armrests or covering their eyes.
  46. The Company You Keep
    The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.
  47. Them That Follow
    Perhaps that’s why, despite some skillful scene-setting and committed supporting performances, Them That Follow is lifeless enough that small inconsistencies in accents, costuming, and set dressing appear more significant than they would in a more, well, thrilling thriller.
  48. Proxy
    Proxy’s greatest attribute is its deliberate dismantling of the audience’s assumptions.
  49. Galveston
    This latest film isn’t entirely successful — Pizzolatto’s book stubbornly resists first-time screenwriter Jim Hammett’s efforts to reshape its narrative for the screen — but it confirms Laurent as a significant talent behind the lens, particularly adept at building queasy tension.
  50. Cet amour-là
    Moreau is magnetic as the wise-but-neurotic scribe, though the same can't be said of Demarigny, whose timid portrayal of a reverent fanboy sucks the energy out of most of his scenes. Dayan's direction is even more problematic.
  51. Dark Blue
    Flaws and all, Dark Blue has a combustible energy that's usually anathema to Hollywood, reopening an old wound that has festered too quietly for more than a decade.
  52. Two Men Went to War
    Cleverly realizing a novel premise, it's a slight but charming look at the lighter side of WWII.
  53. Burden
    Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.
  54. Flash of Genius
    It's a smart movie for grownups, an increasingly rare commodity.
  55. Brother to Brother
    Well-intentioned to a fault, the film packs a strange, ultimately unsuccessful combination of prurience and clumsy identity politics.
  56. You've Been Trumped
    Aside from the corny title, Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped is a fine, powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, using old-fashioned vérité techniques - and more than a little audience manipulation - to show how political influence and media savvy help the wealthy exert their will.
  57. It's Complicated
    It’s Complicated is the sort of “mature” character piece the French do regularly and better (and without the need for quotation marks around “mature”), but the cast at least helps relieve some of the tidiness that belies the title.
  58. little man
    While Conn's story is inherently compelling, it's pretty much ruined in the telling thanks to her unnerving choice to fill it with a twinkling piano-heavy score, florid narration, and trembling slow-motion.
  59. Havoc
    Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.
  60. I Origins
    I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.
  61. Unfinished Song
    Unfinished Song is basically two movies inelegantly stuffed into one. Both are about aging — its setbacks and second chances — but only one of them feels like an honest exploration of the topic. The better half of the film is a kinder, gentler cousin to 2012’s "Amour."
  62. Casanova
    At best, it's a light, boisterous little confection, but hasn't Hugh Grant already starred in this film a few times?
  63. War Dogs
    Despite all the time War Dogs spends with these two characters, it never develops them past the initial impression that one is basically a good guy and that the other is bad news incarnate.
  64. Rubberneck
    The entire story hinges on a thinly calibrated twist ending that’s meant to provide emotional weight to Karpovsky’s actions, but instead clarifies them to the point of utter banality. There’s no mystery left to linger.
  65. The Equalizer
    It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.
  66. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    The movie eventually evokes the sense that Branagh is better at directing in front of the camera than from behind it; its best moments are typically the ones that feature Branagh’s Viktor Cherevin on-screen.
  67. Sherlock Holmes
    This is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era.
  68. Immaculate
    Uneven and sometimes predictable though it is, it’s a film that knows how to push the buttons of its particular subgenre, and you get the sense that any number of stars might have been able to carry it in the right context. You also get the sense, from the very first moment she’s onscreen to the unforgettable final frame, that none of those other possible stars could have carried it quite as well as Sweeney.
  69. The Intervention
    Clea DuVall makes her debut here as writer-director, and after two decades in front of the camera, she knows actors — but the movie’s stifling familiarity prevents it from making much of an impact.
  70. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    It's impossible not to admire what, apart from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," may be the most ambitious action film since "The Matrix."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The First Grader
    The First Grader offers a tumultuous but uplifting journey.
  72. Opal Dream
    The filmmaking here is flat, straight, and thoroughly lacking in poetry, and the script--co-written by Cattaneo, Rice, and Phil Traill--tells instead of showing.
  73. Combat Obscura
    Unsurprisingly, the results aren’t pretty.
  74. Date and Switch
    In effect, it feels a lot like the characters at its center — not terrible, just incomplete. A comic take on this premise and these themes feels like a necessity in 2014. Unfortunately, Date And Switch isn’t the movie this day and age needs.
  75. The Kingdom
    The heroes of Peter Berg's gung-ho retribution tale are fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here, but his film is indulging in a queasy brand of escapism. Winning imaginary wars isn't the same as winning real ones, but The Kingdom nonetheless smells like victory.
  76. Good for Nothing
    Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction.
  77. Extraction
    Add a script that would have seemed derivative even in the early ’90s, and you begin to get a sense of the kind of undigested pastiche that director Sam Hargrave and writer-producer Joe Russo are going for.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    3 Hearts
    While the controlling deities might have found some amusement in this narrative, in Jacquot’s hands the tale is more bland than tragic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    A Very Brady Sequel
    A Very Brady Sequel is too often content to rely on strained plot machinations that, given the subject, may be suitably uninspired, but come off as flat anyway.
  80. Christmas with the Campbells
    It’s a surprisingly thoughtful blend of earnest and silly, and Niederpruem’s confident, Hallmark-tinged direction only adds to that sense of familiar surroundings ready to be subverted.
  81. Mufasa: The Lion King
    One could even make the argument that Jenkins has made a fundamentally better film than Favreau while working with inferior, less elemental material. But that doesn’t change the fact that Mufasa is, ultimately, compromised by its studio formulas in terms of both story and style.
  82. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Ultimately, The Rise Of Gru exerts a negligible impact on the Minions’ canonical journey. If nothing else, the film serves as a reminder of the characters’ cartoonish charms, both literally and thematically, and their transcendent appeal.
  83. Buffalo Soldiers
    Tightly plotted and well-acted, the film litters its brisk run time with darkly funny and haunting setpieces.
  84. Infinite Storm
    What sustains a viewer’s interest in Infinite Storm is Watts’ controlled performance, and the film’s direction.
  85. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.
  86. The Commuter
    The Commuter’s script may not be an exercise in fool-proof logic (the actual plot makes almost no sense in retrospect), but its politics are consistent — a rare quality for a contemporary thriller.
  87. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    As it goes with the TV show, so it goes with the movie, which benefits from being shot largely in Rome and suffers from trying to stretch its sitcom antics to feature length.
  88. Hidden in Plain Sight
    Nods at objectivity but announces its activist intentions throughout.
  89. I Am Michael
    Both of Kelly’s movies so far have shown the same strengths and weaknesses. He has an emotionally distant, observational approach, which makes the most outlandish behavior seem grounded and plausible, but which also makes moments of passion and confrontation come off a little flat.
  90. Die Another Day
    The many shots of characters operating devices with remote controls will do little to quiet the complaints that the films have started to resemble video games, and the same can be said of the proliferating digital effects.
  91. La Maison de la Radio
    Aside from the Tour De France segments (the only scenes in the movie to be shot entirely handheld), La Maison lacks the warmth that’s characterized Philibert’s best work. Eventually, the film begins to resemble a cross between a radio station’s webcast and a security-camera feed.
  92. 7 Chinese Brothers
    Bob Byington’s 7 Chinese Brothers is no "Listen Up Philip," but it’s an amiable enough slacker comedy, boosted by its star.
  93. Diary of a Chambermaid
    In spurts, it resembles an homage to classic French cinema and an overheated, Tinto Brass-esque Euro skin flick, but still finds plenty of room for stultifying, upstairs-downstairs costume drama.
    • 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.
  95. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  96. The Last Vermeer
    There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been good hokey pseudo-historical fun along the lines of, say, The Imitation Game. (Let’s just ignore that some folks perceived that film as Oscar-worthy.) All it required was putting the exceptional character front and center throughout, rather than shrouding his gift in pointlessly vague mystery.
  97. The Funhouse
    Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.
  98. It's What's Inside
    While the film’s social commentary isn’t radically incisive, it does manage to capture the nature of a true party game: excitement initially abounds, but you can’t play along forever.
  99. Concussion
    The viewer is presented with a series of caustic, vignette-like scenes which tease bigger themes but end before they can tackle them, as though the film had accidentally started a conversation it didn’t want to have — an impression underscored by the tidy, arbitrary ending.
  100. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.
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