The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Leap Year
    There isn’t a spontaneous or unpredictable moment in this loving, perversely reverent homage to rom-com, road-movie, and mismatched-romance conventions.
  2. Waiting for Armageddon
    Davis and company do get at the odd mix of middle-class lifestyle and cheerful doom-saying that defines the mainstream apocalypticons.
  3. Wonderful World
    Broderick’s tendency to hang all his problems on corporate greed and heartless bureaucracy leads to some strange missteps.
  4. The White Ribbon
    Haneke’s latest is essentially an inquiry into the roots of a certain kind of evil.
  5. Sherlock Holmes
    This is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era.
  6. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    In a real sort of way, Gilliam IS Parnassus, carrying his tatterdemalion show forward from year to year and trying to get people to pay attention, and the mingled sense of bitterness and hope in his story makes this whole crazed fantasy into something far more real.
  7. 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.
  8. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Sure enough, director Betty Thomas delivers pretty much the bare minimum: peppy, brightly colored, tune-filled nonsense sure to meet the low, low standards of its pre-kindergarten core audience.
  9. Police, Adjective
    A clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he's told.
  10. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant's pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he's making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking.
  11. Avatar
    Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films: the leaden voiceover from "Terminator 2" here, the military/civilian conflict from "Aliens" there, even a Jack-and-Rose-style forbidden love story cued to adult-contempo soundtrack.
  12. Nine
    A joyless trudge, particularly when compared to Fellini’s vibrant original?
  13. The Young Victoria
    The film lays on its politics-as-chess-game metaphor a little thick, however, and its refusal to leave the corridors of power to see the impact of its developments on the country at large makes it feel stuffy after a while.
  14. Crazy Heart
    Crazy Heart could use more rough edges, but while it’s a little too sentimental and tidy, Bridges’ humane, deeply empathetic lead performance makes it easy to root for one man’s redemption.
  15. A Town Called Panic
    It's more clever than funny, but it's very clever.
  16. Ricky
    The frisson between the two halves is intriguing for a while, but it leaves the film feeling adrift.
  17. Invictus
    It’s a simplistic, superficial approach to a real-life story that marginalizes most historical details not involving scrums and tackles. It’s also pretty effective, in spite of the gloss.
  18. The Lovely Bones
    For all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.
  19. A Single Man
    It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.
  20. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether My Son is a terrible, terrible movie or an uncompromising Herzog experiment in reality-bending. Here’s a suggestion: consider the track record.
  21. Up in the Air
    What Up In The Air lacks in surprises--apart from an elusive final scene--it compensates for by conveying the pleasures of living from landing to landing, and the terror of floating away.
  22. The Last Station
    Little more than a gilded trifle, though it offers its share of light enjoyments.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Transylmania
    Transylmania is so inept that it even fails as an adolescent breast-delivery device.
  24. Brothers
    The intrinsically powerful material occasionally pierces through.
  25. Armored
    It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.
  26. Everybody's Fine
    Follows a dispiritingly predictable arc.
  27. Serious Moonlight
    The bitter comedy Serious Moonlight is meant to be both funny and painful, but manages only the latter.
  28. Loot
    Undoubtedly, everything documentarian Darius Marder shows in his debut film Loot actually happened, but Marder’s approach to this “truth is stranger than fiction” story is so forced that the movie FEELS phony.
  29. Le jour avant le lendemain
    As the movie’s title implies, everything is about to change for these two. These are the last happy days before destructive modernity encroaches.
  30. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    For a movie about the unpredictability of life, Pippa Lee plays it awfully safe.
  31. The Road
    Aas grim as The Road gets, Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness.
  32. The Princess and the Frog
    Disney’s triumphant return to hand-drawn 2-D animation still holds an awful lot of familiar, comfort-food charm.
  33. Old Dogs
    Adults should steer clear. Kids should be sent to it only if they’ve been extraordinarily naughty.
  34. Ninja Assassin
    How is an action movie that aims for kinetic thrills supposed to develop any forward momentum when it spends so much time looking back?
  35. Me and Orson Welles
    Efron has yet to learn that smiling pretty is merely a component of acting, not its entirety. He makes for a supremely passive lead whose chemistry with Danes is nonexistent.
  36. The Blind Side
    Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.
  37. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    It’s not always easy to sort out the legitimately inspired touches from the merely campy ones, but the film has a deranged, go-for-broke spirit that makes such distinctions irrelevant.
  38. Broken Embraces
    Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    In spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center.
  40. Planet 51
    Largely, it’s a jellybean of a movie: bright, colorful, sugary, and with no real content.
  41. The Sun
    The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.
  42. Mammoth
    While Mammoth is frequently poignant and beautifully acted--especially by Williams, who’s so lost and lonely that she becomes casually cruel--the movie lacks the personal touch that’s distinguished even Moodysson’s “difficult” films.
  43. 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.
  44. Red Cliff
    The film is both traditional and modern: austere in its engagement with history, and insistent in its showy action beats.
  45. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.
  46. 2012
    2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.
  47. The Messenger
    Foster and Harrelson always stick to the Army's orders about what to say and how to behave. After a while, The Messenger starts to feel equally dogged about following a pat script.
  48. Pirate Radio
    Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you.
  49. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
    Disturbing The Universe doesn’t mix it up enough.
  50. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    Like "Art & Copy," Ten9Eight is blindingly slick, with a glossy visual aesthetic more rooted in music videos and commercials than cinéma vérité.
  51. Uncertainty
    The leads are immensely appealing, but the sum of their experiences equals nothing more profound than two earnest people wrestling with a tough decision.
  52. 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.
  53. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much abuse on a heroine. And yet, on its own melodramatic, tear-jerking terms, Precious works.
  54. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    This is a movie about a “New Earth Army” full of misfit soldiers yearning for a chance to be non-conformists with a cause, which means it’s already two-thirds of the way to being awesome. Had Heslov eased back a bit, Goats might’ve made it the rest of the way.
  55. The Box
    Whenever The Box threatens to crash, Kelly summons up another haunting image or heartfelt, albeit thin, moral inquiry. It’s an unwieldy, ambitious, one-of-a-kind film waiting for a cult to find it.
  56. The Fourth Kind
    Terminally awkward in the way it meshes fake real footage with faker fake footage. It isn’t required to be convincing as fact, but it doesn’t convince as fiction, either.
  57. A Christmas Carol
    The holiday spirit feels real, but the film does not.
  58. Collapse
    There are many layers to the man and the movie, and it’s hard not to leave the theater shaken.
  59. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    Duffy's inept command of actors, not to mention his utterly juvenile morality and his comically clumsy use of religious iconography, should keep all but the diehards away.
  60. Gentlemen Broncos
    Crammed with so much deliberate tackiness that it borders on exhausting self-parody.
  61. The House of the Devil
    If nothing else, Ti West’s retro “Satan rules!” thriller The House Of The Devil gets the look and tone of early-’80s horror schlock exactly right.
  62. This Is It
    At best, it angrily demands to be rechristened This Is It! Too often, however, an incredulous This Is It? seems more apt.
  63. Antichrist
    Antichrist is a boldly personal film, tossing all von Trier’s ideas about faith, fear, and human nature into an unfettered phantasmagoria, full of repulsive visions and fierce scorn. It’s also the most lush-looking movie von Trier has made in about 20 years.
  64. Amelia
    Considering its focus on a pioneering, rule-breaking icon, the film’s utter lack of personality isn’t just a failure. It’s close to an insult.
  65. Astro Boy
    Older viewers are more likely to see a muddled film full of one-dimensional characters and insultingly strident politics.
  66. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Actually, by way of a sequel, the filmmakers could just set Cerveris, Dafoe, and Reilly up for a purr-off. That’d be more fun than most of this film.
  67. Saw VI
    Because Saw does nothing to alter the look, tone, and engineered gimmickry from one movie to the next, it keeps going deeper into backstory and character arcs than horror series past, as if this ugly, cheap-looking schlock were somehow "The Lord Of The Rings."
  68. (Untitled)
    The three main characters aren’t cardboard-cutout poseurs, and for that alone, (Untitled) stands apart.
  69. Motherhood
    Dieckmann fails to notice that Thurman doesn’t have the comic chops for the material--she comes off more like a self-pitying loser than a witty, put-upon everywoman.
  70. Ong Bak 2
    What sold the original Ong Bak was the action, not the story, and on an action level, Ong Bak 2 lives up to its title.
  71. 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.
  72. Where the Wild Things Are
    Spike Jonze has recently said in interviews that his chief goal ...was to try to capture the feeling of being 9. By that measure--by just about any measure, really--he succeeded wildly.
  73. Law Abiding Citizen
    A flagrantly ridiculous thriller that tries to retrofit "Saw" to function as a mainstream, semi-respectable vigilante picture
  74. New York, I Love You
    The segments don’t form anything like a coherent whole, but they aren’t distinctive enough to clash meaningfully with each other, either.
  75. Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
    Jaud isn’t telling a story so much as he’s making a case, and while his case is persuasive, it doesn’t really work as a movie. The information in Food Beware could fit just as easily--and just as effectively--into a pamphlet.
  76. The Stepfather
    Walsh is just a dumb bully who can’t see more than one or two steps ahead. He’s doomed to generic slasher villainy, and the film thoughtlessly obliges.
  77. The Maid
    Even at its most upbeat, The Maid is something of a tragedy.
  78. An Education
    An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.
  79. The Damned United
    Meaney’s Flintstone-ian brute makes a terrific foil to Sheen’s prissy arrogance, but the other supporting players don’t make much of an impression. Ditto for this slice of history itself, though mileage may vary for soccer fans.
  80. Couples Retreat
    Features a running gag about a little boy in the midst of potty training who doesn’t always go where it’s appropriate. In a nutshell, that subplot explains everything that’s wrong about the film.
  81. Bronson
    There are two Bronsons on display here: the impossible thug that we don’t dare release into polite society, and the guy we enjoy watching do his terrible thing. The man and the movie are both living, punching contradictions.
  82. Good Hair
    Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair.
  83. Peter and Vandy
    The movie’s saving grace is Weixler, who manages to seem effortlessly natural without resorting to whiny faux naturalism.
  84. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Given the duo’s withering take on capitalism, it’s ironic that their stumbling second feature feels throughout like an infomercial for a shtick whose expiration date is rapidly approaching.
  85. Araya
    As a piece of documentary filmmaking though, Araya is more noteworthy for what it reveals about a changing artform than for what it has to say about its subjects.
  86. Trick 'r Treat
    The idea of a Halloween-centric anthology is solid, but the subject deserves stronger material than this reheated mush.
  87. A Serious Man
    WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.
  88. Whip It
    It’s virtually impossible to hate the film, but Barrymore’s presence behind the camera suggests more calculation than vision; like a lot of actors who direct, she tends to the performances, but her style never rises above bland proficiency.
  89. Zombieland
    The four protagonists aren’t about to let something as minor as the complete breakdown of society get in the way of having a good time, and their fun proves infectious.
  90. The Invention of Lying
    The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.
  91. 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.
  92. Afterschool
    Afterschool wears its many influences on its sleeve, but it’s very much a movie of the moment. The passing of time and the evolution of technology may give it an expiration date, but more likely, Campos’ film stands to be an essential document of what it was like to be a young person in the late ’00s.
  93. Chelsea on the Rocks
    The movie’s most enjoyable moments are the brief instances when Ferrara himself intrudes on the scene.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Regeneration
    It might, in fact, be the best straight-to-DVD action movie ever made. And the fact that there’s any competition for that title should tell you that times have changed.
  95. Surrogates
    Relentlessly plods from one dour moment to the next, coming to life only in a late-film car chase that takes the possibilities of a world filled with robots to an absurd extreme.
  96. Paranormal Activity
    The film loses some of its grimy verisimilitude toward the end, but it’s nevertheless a surprisingly effective low-budget shocker with a sensibility as current as the latest viral videos, yet rooted in the suggestive, less-is-more atmospherics of Val Lewton.
  97. Pandorum
    Throw out the presence of Dennis Quaid, and the new science-fiction/horror snoozer Pandorum could easily pass for a Roger Corman cheapie.
  98. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Tucker Max’s only real strengths are his outrageousness and his uncompromising self-confidence, but neither comes into play in this punch-pulling, frankly boring film.
  99. Coco Before Chanel
    There are indications scattered throughout Coco Before Chanel of a major designer quietly and persistently honing her craft, but most of the film could exist without the Chanel name and still smell like the same perfume.
  100. The Boys Are Back
    Not surprisingly, Boys works much better as an Owen vehicle than a movie--it’s a great, meaty part in a decidedly less-than-great film.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »