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. Brothers at War
    It’s practically a feature-length infomercial for the military.
  2. Watchmen
    Snyder's Watchmen keeps moving so assuredly, it's nearly impossible not to get swept along.
  3. Phoebe in Wonderland
    There's too much "problem, solution" to Phoebe, although the movie's anxieties are believable enough to earns the moments of uplift. The film may be too concerned with being a crowd-pleaser, but it least it makes the crowd suffer a little along the way.
  4. Everlasting Moments
    Heiskanen plays her layers beautifully, alternately revealing a talented artist stymied by poverty and marital problems, and a woman fiercely devoted to family first.
  5. Tokyo!
    The entries aren't equally strong, of course, but each comes from a sharp outsider's perspective, approaching Tokyo as a strange, mysterious organism that infects the populace.
  6. 12
    Rarely has the voyeuristic appeal of sitting on a jury been so cleverly expressed.
  7. Red Riding Trilogy
    Red Riding’s depiction of the avarice and corruption possible when regions become kingdoms unto themselves feels simultaneously cynical and true.
  8. Crossing Over
    Tied together with endless, flattening shots of L.A.’s cloverleaf freeways, Crossing Over is often simplistic and occasionally lugubrious, but it's rarely boring.
  9. Echelon Conspiracy
    Unlike, say, "Eagle Eye," Echelon Conspiracy doesn't put enough conviction behind its stupidity. It's mostly just bland.
  10. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    The problems with Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li began with the casting of dead-eyed, sleepy-voiced, charisma-impaired automaton Kristin Kreuk.
  11. 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.
  12. Eleven Minutes
    What's most striking about Eleven Minutes is the sheer amount of effort that goes into a show of that magnitude, quite apart from work involved in designing and executing a coherent, commercially viable line.
  13. Fired Up!
    On the off chance that anyone out there would want to spend time with guys like this—and would appreciate a bonus plug for Staples' recycled paper products, too--this movie has been made just for them.
  14. Must Read After My Death
    The relentless negativity in Must Read After My Death can become overwhelming at times, but it's undeniably mesmerizing.
  15. Katyn
    Wajda makes the murders look horrific and jangled, like something out of "Hostel," then ends Katyn with extended darkness and silence, allowing the audience to mourn for the death of a nation.
  16. Gomorrah
    Gomorrah takes place in a world where decency can't take root and we can only watch in horror as crime overwhelms society's most vulnerable-- women, children, law-abiding citizens, and the conscientious few who want to get out of the game.
  17. Two Lovers
    The characters are all a little too old for this sort of drama, and they know it, but that makes Two Lovers as much about last chances as new loves.
  18. Friday the 13th
    It's almost charming in its sheer lack of ambition, but the lack of creativity in its by-the-numbers shocks is harder to excuse.
  19. Coraline
    The results are nothing short of magical.
  20. He's Just Not That Into You
    The big names don't do needy as well as "Big Love's" Ginnifer Goodwin.
  21. The Pink Panther 2
    Plays like an undeserved victory lap for a series that only limped to the finish line the last time.
  22. Push
    Superhero fans will likely be into Push just for the cool-factor of watching embattled heroes and villains in tense war of wits, wills, and skills. That broader audience is less likely to come along for the ride.
  23. 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.
  24. The International
    Ultimately feel so empty and forgettable.
  25. Fanboys
    Fanboys has a lot of talent in its margins, including Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and other usual suspects.
  26. Memorial Day
    Most of the last hour of Memorial Day feels like a retread at least, and horribly exploitative at worst.
  27. Taken
    Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.
  28. The Uninvited
    The result is a middling Frankenstein-like hybrid of spectral mayhem and murder mystery, constructed entirely out of borrowed parts.
  29. New in Town
    New In Town grinds its plucky protagonist through a predictable arc from dispassionate big-city ice queen to redeemed small-town tenderheart.
  30. Service (Serbis)
    At its best, Serbis is a vibrant slice of life that establishes this theater as a living organism, nurturing a society of outcasts; it's like "Ship Of Fools" with blowjobs and boil-lancings.
  31. 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."
  32. The Lodger
    It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.
  33. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
    Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.
  34. 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.
  35. Inkheart
    The story itself is so charmingly dense, fractious, and complicated that it frequently leaves the obvious good-guy-fights-bad-guy groove, and noses toward Terry Gilliam-esque randomness and ebullience.
  36. Outlander
    Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.
  37. Of Time and the City
    A caustic, witty, regretful elegy for a place so transformed that it's virtually unrecognizable.
  38. Chandni Chowk to China
    A more accurate way to describe it would be "conceptual nightmare"--crass, schizophrenic, culturally insensitive, horribly paced, and shameless in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.
  39. Cherry Blossoms
    There's something a little shallow about contrasting ungrateful German kids with their respectful Japanese counterparts and presuming the cultural differences are so cut-and-dried.
  40. 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.
  41. 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.
  42. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  43. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.
  44. Bride Wars
    There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."
  45. Not Easily Broken
    For a film shamelessly trumpeting the importance of staying together through the hard times, Broken makes a disconcertingly convincing case for divorce.
  46. The Unborn
    What darkness the movie achieves comes solely from the lighting.
  47. Yonkers Joe
    Yonkers Joe is largely concerned with the delicate balance between a crook's business life and his personal life--a balance the movie itself has trouble managing effectively.
  48. Just Another Love Story
    Enjoyably moody in the early going, and it develops into a decent Hitchcockian thriller at times.
  49. Silent Light
    At bottom, Silent Light is less about faith than matters of the heart, and in Reygadas' hands, the ache is bone-deep.
  50. Defiance
    There are lots of movies about Jews suffering, dying, and surviving in Europe during World War II, but precious few about Jews fighting back. So why does everything in Defiance feel so doggedly familiar?
  51. Good
    It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.
  52. Revolutionary Road
    Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection.
  53. Waltz with Bashir
    The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.
  54. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.
  55. The Spirit
    The Spirit feels like the follow-up to "Batman & Robin" no one wanted.
  56. Bedtime Stories
    Sandler’s laziness, sloppiness, and cynical pandering are all over Bedtime Stories, and it turns what’s intended to be a graceful intersection of fairytale whimsy and real-world slapstick into an ugly, head-on collision.
  57. 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.
  58. Marley & Me
    Could not be more ordinary.
  59. Valkyrie
    Bryan Singer’s solid direction and some flavorful supporting performances from the dependable likes of Bill Nighy, Eddie Izzard, and Tom Wilkinson keep Valkyrie within the realm of handsome mediocrity.
  60. The Secret of the Grain
    The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot.
  61. Theater of War
    Though Theater Of War is informative--both about Brecht and about the effort it takes to mount a big New York production--Walter overreaches in trying to connect Brecht’s anti-war sentiment with contemporary protest movements, and doesn't do more than dabble with the themes of truth and representation in documentary filmmaking.
  62. The Tale of Despereaux
    Despereaux at least has too much ambition rather than too little, but its curiously intellectual pleasures suggest a quaint puzzle rather than a passionately loved fairy tale.
  63. The Class
    The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.
  64. 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.
  65. Yes Man
    The film contains so many plugs for Warner Bros. movies like the "Harry Potter" series and "300" that it could almost double as an infomercial.
  66. The Wrestler
    Mostly though, the movie feeds off Rourke, who plays a genuinely decent guy who never lets his dawning self-awareness interfere with his responsibility to give the fans a show.
  67. Nothing But the Truth
    Mostly, Nothing But The Truth operates a lot like Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass" and "Breach," offering up the sort of no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes docudrama that's in short supply these days.
  68. Gran Torino
    Eastwood directs with his usual relaxed pace and bursts of intensity, a style that's pleasing to watch--and which, also as usual, never fully compensates for any shortcomings of the script handed to him.
  69. Che
    In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.
  70. Timecrimes
    Yet while it isn't that hard to stay a step or two ahead of Timecrimes, the movie is still a nifty little genre piece, an old-fashioned science-fiction mind-game with a healthy dollop of "Oh, the irony."
  71. 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.
  72. Doubt
    Doubt is a complex, thematically loaded piece of work, and though it isn't enhanced on film, it deserves the wider exposure.
  73. Nothing Like the Holidays
    Take a cue from Guzmán, who serves as a kind of court jester, bouncing in and out of scenes in a one-man quest to bring levity to the occasion. The movie could stand to have more of his Christmas cheer; instead, it's a recast "Family Stone."
  74. Adam Resurrected
    In a stunning lead performance, Goldblum stars as a brilliant, apolitical jester.
  75. Dark Streets
    The main pitfall of modern noirs is that filmmakers get so caught up in the chiaroscuro lighting schemes and florid twists of dialogue and voiceover that they forget noir was about expressing more than just attitude and style.
  76. What Doesn't Kill You
    Goodman doesn't allow even a hint of postmodernism or self-consciousness to creep into What Doesn't Kill You, and though the movie's various heists and shootouts are gripping, they aren't especially kinetic or stylish.
  77. The Reader
    Kross and Winslet's intense performances and Daldry's deliberately placid control of tone make the material work as a love (and hate) story as well as a metaphor.
  78. Wendy and Lucy
    Having the dog around raises the emotional stakes tenfold, and develops a kinship with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic "Umberto D.," which also revealed societal ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship
  79. Hunger
    Hunger may be criticized for being willfully arty, or for reducing a complex political situation to a broadly allegorical vision of martyrdom, but it's never less than visually stunning.
  80. Cadillac Records
    Martin attempts to present the whole oversized Chess story, but instead winds up reducing the lives and art that give it shape.
  81. Nobel Son
    Nobel Son sadistically resurrects the Tarantino knockoff--an unloved, foul-mouthed little bastard of a subgenre that should now go away forever.
  82. Punisher: War Zone
    This is junk, a bunch of hard-R action scenes kept together by the thinnest of plots.
  83. Frost/Nixon
    In a masterful performance, Langella highlights Nixon's oily charm and guile.
  84. Four Christmases
    The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.
  85. Milk
    It's a little disappointing to see Van Sant dial back into mainstream respectability. Had he evoked Harvey Milk's life with the poetry that he did Kurt Cobain's, Milk might have been something special.
  86. Transporter 3
    In a series elevated by high-flying ridiculousness, Transporter 3 falls a couple of sequences short of the standard, but it does show off Statham's considerable dirt-biking skills. For that, at least, it's kinda rad.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Twilight
    While the movie attempts to find an compelling middle ground between gothic supernaturalism and teenage romance, it usually winds up stumbling into the inane territory implied by both descriptions.
  88. Special
    Special recalls a minor-key "Donnie Darko," but its vision is much more limited, and it sinks into Indiewood cliché whenever it reaches for profundity.
  89. Bolt
    For the first time in years, it feels like Disney has done its namesake proud.
  90. Lake City
    All the performers are fine--even the miscast Romijn--but they're still too much like actors playing dress-up.
  91. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Much like the recent "remember when" documentary "Man On Wire," Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 builds strong momentum in its home stretch, and sends the audience out on a high.
  92. Australia
    It almost goes without saying that the film looks gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a scale. Australia is big. But it never fills the screen.
  93. Quantum of Solace
    It's dark and exciting, but with little breathing room.
  94. A Christmas Tale
    It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through, as does some of the sharp wit and stylistic flourishes left over from his last film, 2004's "Kings And Queen."
  95. 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.
  96. How About You ...
    Nothing in How About You is the least bit surprising; the film hits its marks with dreary precision.
  97. Slumdog Millionaire
    Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure.
  98. Role Models
    In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane first half, Role Models suggests "School Of Rock" with Tourette's, or the original "Bad News Bears" without the baseball.
  99. JCVD
    A canny piece of autobiography that looks at the man behind the legend and the legend behind the man.
  100. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.
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