The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. Splinter
    There's potential for a lot more excitement in Splinter, but Wilkins seems content just to bring it across the finish line.
  2. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The film is clumsily unfunny at times--particularly when Smith makes tone-deaf efforts at gay-and black-themed comedy--and it's occasionally gross just for the sake of being gross.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    It's a sweetly queasy film that suggests the spirit that sustains us, the demons we hide from the world, and the monsters that prey upon us in the dark might all be variations on the same beast.
  4. Synecdoche, New York
    For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.
  5. Changeling
    Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along.
  6. I've Loved You So Long
    The film deftly sketches a sibling relationship complicated by obligation, guilt, mistrust, and, not least, an abiding love.
  7. Saw V
    Devotes so much time and energy to flashbacks and recycling footage from its predecessors that it threatens to implode.
  8. Pride and Glory
    Norton is infamous for rewriting scripts and acting as a de facto director on his movies yet he seems lost and defeated here.
  9. 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.
  10. The Universe of Keith Haring
    Universe deals extensively with Haring's personal life--his open homosexuality, his regular visits with his family, etc.--but it doesn't penetrate too far below the surface.
  11. Fear(s) of the Dark
    These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.
  12. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Arijon's choice to film the survivors returning to the Andes with their children pays huge dividends, leading to an ending that puts the real meaning of their ordeal in moving terms.
  13. 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.
  14. Filth and Wisdom
    Madonna presents the three leads as flawed but essentially decent and redeemable, but they're bound up in a story that's meant to affirm a vague set of values. If she needs to justify the "Sex" book by charting her own contrived path from filth to heavenly wisdom, that's fine. But she should do it on her own time.
  15. Max Payne
    In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.
  16. The Secret Life of Bees
    It's pleasant and often touching, and the well-chosen cast sells what little drama they get, but there's no depth and little affect, and every would-be conflict peters out noncommittally.
  17. Sex Drive
    Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.
  18. Frontrunners
    What makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns.
  19. Body of Lies
    It's not like the screens are so flooded with decent movies that we couldn't use another, particularly a timely, clear-eyed thriller about the Middle East and the role of the U.S. therein.
  20. City of Ember
    Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.
  21. The Express
    Long on inspiration, short on specifics.
  22. Good Dick
    Mainly, Good Dick just proves that TV actors like Ritter make good indie-film hires, because they'll go along with whatever ridiculous nonsense a novice filmmaker concocts.
  23. Happy-Go-Lucky
    Typically, Leigh withholds his own judgment as to whether Hawkins is a delight or a terror. But he does create a noticeable tension between the audience's expectations and the way the story plays out.
  24. 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.
  25. Dung che sai duk
    Yet for all Ashes' frustrations, it's still a gorgeous piece of filmmaking.
  26. Nights and Weekends
    To some extent, if you've seen one Swanberg film, you've seen them all; Nights And Weekends contains the usual mix of frank, awkward sex scenes and couples talking passive-aggressively around each other.
  27. RocknRolla
    As is the norm for Ritchie, Rocknrolla is also too long, too coolly violent, and too populated by characters who all talk like they've been reading the same pulp novelist.
  28. Rachel Getting Married
    It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting Married sure is one heck of a party.
  29. Religulous
    Maher's too smart to make a movie this dumb.
  30. Beverly Hills Chihuahua
    This is not a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing. It's paced for little minds with short attention spans.
  31. Blindness
    There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
  32. Flash of Genius
    It's a smart movie for grownups, an increasingly rare commodity.
  33. An American Carol
    Great satire never fits neatly within an ideological box. Attention, the ghosts of H.L. Mencken, Stanley Kubrick, and Jonathan Swift: David Zucker could use a visit.
  34. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    People's title proves prophetic, only this time the people being alienated are the suckers in the paying audience.
  35. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    It's the journey that matters, however, and sometimes the film doesn't seem to know where it's going.
  36. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    There's little here that's especially cage-rattling or side-splitting. Ultimately, Allah only made these guys mildly likable.
  37. Ballast
    Hammer has a nice eye, and his premise develops engagingly in the final half hour, as he raises provocative questions about whether one man can truly step in for another.
  38. The Lucky Ones
    Like its lead characters, Lucky is wounded, lost, and impractical, but it has a messy, winning humanity and an agreeably leisurely pace that almost redeems it.
  39. Fireproof
    Cameron acts like a childish jerk, even in the reconciliation phase, and the underlying reason is that he--and the movie--hates women.
  40. Forever Strong
    Forever Strong is generic faith-and-redemption fare, devoid of nuance.
  41. Eagle Eye
    It'd probably feel just a little bit timelier and more relevant if it took place in a universe that bore even the faintest resemblance to our own.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Miracle at St. Anna
    Miracle plays like "School Daze" transplanted to the European front, with the token militant, the token uplift-the-race type, and the token buffoon all marching inexorably toward Checkpoint Irony.
  43. Choke
    Cluttered, flavorless Choke, which crams the novel's nervy narration into an irritating voiceover, and leaps around in time and space with all the attention span of an ADD-addled child.
  44. Nights in Rodanthe
    This isn't a movie: it's a feature-length Ralph Lauren commercial.
  45. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Queen Raquela's plotty elements don't always work: The acting in the story-driving scenes sometimes comes off as amateurish, and the circumstances that send Rios halfway around the world seem contrived. But de Fleur gets an astonishingly good performance from Stefan C. Schaefer.
  46. Obscene
    Yhough Obscene tells the story without fully exploring its nuances, that story is both fascinating and more than a little inspiring.
  47. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Boogie Man doesn't delve too deep into its subject's private life, beyond some cheap psychology positing his brother's horrible early death as the root of his winner-takes-all philosophy. But then, Atwater's work was his life.
  48. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    Most of the film isn't as willing to reach out to viewers, and most won't be willing to do all the work in order to connect with it.
  49. Appaloosa
    As with many other mediocre actor-directors, Harris' attention to the performances, including his own fine turn, has cost him in other areas.
  50. Battle in Seattle
    It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.
  51. The Duchess
    Thoroughly populist and middlebrow, full of all the high wigs, thick powder, perfect diction, and straightforward dialogue that define bodice-ripping prestige pictures about silently suffering souls.
  52. Hounddog
    Pretty but overwrought, Hounddog doesn't deserve its infamy, nor does it merit being seen or remembered.
  53. Lakeview Terrace
    Ultimately, Lakeview Terrace isn't about race so much as it's about being a man, which has been LaBute's fallback theme from the start.
  54. Ghost Town
    Though the plot contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often missing from movies about people falling in love.
  55. Igor
    While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.
  56. My Best Friend's Girl
    Dane Cook plays a smug jerk in the dismal comedy My Best Friend's Girl. Strike that: He's only ACTING like a smug jerk.
  57. Burn After Reading
    This feels like a second-shelf Coen comedy, particularly when compared to their no-less-shaggy "The Big Lebowski."
  58. Flow: For Love of Water
    Skips right past depressing on its way to apocalyptic.
  59. Towelhead
    From its title on down, Towelhead alarms and manipulates, and succeeds in goading the audience like a schoolyard bully, but apart from Bishil's harrowing attempts to find herself, the strings stay too visible.
  60. The Family That Preys
    Perry deserves due respect for exploiting an untapped niche.
  61. Righteous Kill
    Trudging through a thriller that would have felt warmed over in 1988, the pair investigate a serial killer.
  62. The Women
    The original was a tart dipped in acid; this one's a biscuit sprinkled in Splenda.
  63. Forgiveness
    Moshonov's capering, wheedling, and stagey monologuing become deeply taxing, and so does the conclusion, which makes more sense as metaphor than narrative.
  64. Ping Pong Playa
    Something is missing here.
  65. Bangkok Dangerous
    Dimly lit, emotionally empty, and devoid of thrills, Bangkok Dangerous should disappoint Cage fans looking for Wicker Man-style camp thrills just as thoroughly as action buffs looking for a passable thriller. It's never close to good, and it can't even get bad right.
  66. A Secret
    A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no mater how well-maintained.
  67. August Evening
    The unforced ease of the performances make August Evening an intermittent pleasure, but its images aren't strong enough to sustain its undisciplined length.
  68. The Pool
    It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece.
  69. Babylon A.D.
    As long it sticks to that chase, Babylon A.D. remains a sub-passable lead-footed action film with neat scenery.
  70. I Served the King of England
    I Served The King Of England views diabolical events from the sidelines, something like "The Remains Of The Day" reworked as an absurdist comedy.
  71. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Loses some of its appeal once the novelty of Miike's conceptual shenanigans wears off.
  72. College
    God-awful.
  73. Disaster Movie
    It's too easy to say Disaster Movie deserves its title, but why put more effort into trashing it than the filmmakers did into writing it?
  74. Year of the Fish
    To some degree, it's trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are cringe-inducing and problematic.
  75. Traitor
    Without its mesmerizing lead performance, Traitor easily could have devolved into direct-to-DVD fodder.
  76. Death Race
    It's the perfect end-of-summer film, and a sign that summer needs to end soon.
  77. The House Bunny
    Faris has mostly logged time in dire vehicles like The House Bunny, which are dumb-dumb to her smart-dumb.
  78. The Longshots
    A sports movie like every other, but the excellent, lived-in performances of Cube and Palmer make it a mildly affecting.
  79. Hamlet 2
    Funny excuses an awful lot, and at its best, Hamlet 2 is nothing short of hilarious.
  80. Trouble the Water
    Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus.
  81. I.O.U.S.A.
    Though the filmmaking is playful at times, the film is essentially 90 percent message, 10 percent movie.
  82. Momma's Man
    A comedy of sorts, though to Jacobs' credit, he doesn't aim for cheap laughs.
  83. The Rocker
    Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.
  84. 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.
  85. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Through it all, Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains unaccountably romantic, a confirmation that love, elusive and painful as it can be, is still worth pursuing.
  86. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    The film still suffers from cheap plasticky design, a klutzy overall look, dim preschooler humor, and a nearly impact-free story that thinks it's clever when it steals cues from 2001.
  87. Mirrors
    The film looks to do for reflective surfaces what "Amityville 4" did for killer lamps.
  88. Henry Poole Is Here
    Henry Poole cycles through so many indie film clichés--that it continually skirts self-parody.
  89. The Girl Cut in Two
    Chabrol develops the inevitable confrontation between the two men like a car wreck in slow motion, and getting there takes a little more work than it should; the film takes the form of a thriller, but it doesn't have the pace of one.
  90. Tropic Thunder
    Maybe Stiller just seems stilted because he's the only one here who isn't playing to the rafters.
  91. Elegy
    As an acting showcase that builds to some unexpectedly moving moments, Elegy has much to recommend it. Had Coixet found better ways to connect those moments, she might have REALLY had something to rival what Roth does on the page.
  92. Hell Ride
    A witless reprise of '60s and '70s biker movies.
  93. Red
    Red's dialogue is a bit blunt, its characters are too broadly outlined, and the situation verges on the ludicrous at times, especially in the way these dumb kids keep committing terrible crimes without leaving any evidence. But the movie isn't meant to be an exercise in realism.
  94. 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.
  95. Pineapple Express
    As loose and playful as major studio movies get.
  96. 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.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  99. Frozen River
    If the role brings her more recognition and work, all the better, but Leo certainly isn't lobbying for it. She doesn't show off. She just does what she's always done: Reveals a character for who she is, nothing more, nothing less.
  100. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Dragon Emperor succeeds largely through sheer excess: It's doubtful that any idea was thrown out for being too implausible.
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