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. Baby Mama
    It's not without laughs--Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange "reward" for a job well done--but there's a lot of arid space between them.
  2. Deception
    The dynamic between Jackman and McGregor bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy from "In The Company Of Men": the cool, suave, experienced philosopher of excess and his weaker, more earnest pupil.
  3. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    The big payoff, of course, is Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as "Neil Patrick Harris."
  4. Roman de gare
    Roman De Gare's neatest trick is Pinon's performance, which draws out a hitherto unseen leading-man allure.
  5. Standard Operating Procedure
    With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts And Minds.
  6. Then She Found Me
    With Midler missing in action much of the time, the film drowns in a sea of thudding earnestness.
  7. Up the Yangtze
    Goes from sleepily hypnotic to riveting over the course of 90 minutes.
  8. Deal
    To think that a semi-major studio financed a production this low-rent and listless is amazing: Since when did MGM start making student films?
  9. Stuff and Dough
    There's no question of the mood Puiu means to capture, the sullen anomie of a rootless generation, but too often, he's just spinning his wheels.
  10. 88 Minutes
    Actually, it's pretty much the definition of absurd.
  11. The Forbidden Kingdom
    At best, The Forbidden Kingdom counts as an amiable time-waster for kids, but much more should be expected from the momentous union of two kung-fu titans.
  12. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Segel has always played more a serial monogamist than a horndog, and his earnest, self-deprecating screen persona graces the film's crudest moments with a kind of innocence.
  13. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.
  14. Pathology
    Much like "Crank," it's the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
  15. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    While the film's gags don't always jibe with its sincere interviews of Middle Eastern citizens, or its worrisome encounters with the soldiers serving in dangerous territory--the constantly shifting tone provides as many hit bits as misses.
  16. Zombie Strippers!
    Currently stopping by theaters briefly en route to DVD, the film tries to position Jameson as the next Linnea Quigley, the B-movie queen behind such enduring titles as "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" and "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama."
    • 20 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    Surely there's a more nuanced argument to be made in favor of ID than pinning the old "bad as Hitler" canard on pro-evolution scientists?
  18. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    As fascinating as Glass often is, it's simultaneously too conventional and not conventional enough.
  19. The First Saturday in May
    "May" uses the quirks and well-worn traditions of horse racing as a vehicle to quietly explore idiosyncrasies of the human condition.
  20. Prom Night
    There's really nothing much to Prom Night: No twists, no atmosphere, no big Grand Guignol setpieces, not a single moment when it tries to do something novel with the event, the killings, the villain, or the victims. It's a little like going on a tour of the slaughterhouse, where death is meted out with mechanical regularity, but visitors are kept at a safe, PG-13 distance from all the butchering.
  21. Street Kings
    After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
  22. The Visitor
    Like few of his filmmaking peers, McCarthy understands and respects the power of quiet, and how a whisper can be as explosive as a shout.
  23. Chaos Theory
    The big reason Chaos Theory doesn't work is that the gears are visibly grinding away, cranking out neat little ironies and life lessons without any liberating surprises.
  24. Smart People
    Dennis Quaid could stand in for Jeff Daniels' similarly toxic snob in "The Squid And The Whale," if only he were a little smarter and a little better-dressed.
  25. Body of War
    Body Of War purposefully depicts an America in turmoil. But it also depicts an America far more capable of living with contradictions than the "Red State/Blue State"-obsessed cable-news pundits would have us believe.
  26. Young@Heart
    There's a wealth of great material here, especially a shattering performance of Coldplay's "Fix You" by a soulful mountain of a man named Fred Knittle.
  27. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.
  28. Meduzot
    Jellyfish is the kind of film that will ring true for some viewers, while striking others as too slight and precious.
  29. Leatherheads
    Too much of Leatherheads feels like studied motions, and its charms never plaster over a story that takes forever to get going, and doesn't go too far once it does.
  30. My Blueberry Nights
    Wong's visions of a New York café, a Memphis bar, and a Vegas casino--not to mention the swaths of beautiful country in the Southwest--have that enveloping quality that make his films so persistently seductive. The natives should feel flattered.
  31. Nim's Island
    Directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin deliver some eye-catching fantasy sequences in the early scenes, but the film grows more mundane and the tone more uneven as it goes on.
  32. The Ruins
    Director Carter Smith suffers from another, more common problem: In trying to squeeze every plot point from the book into a 90-minute movie, he failed to capture its chilling essence.
  33. Shine a Light
    Shine A Light pays tribute to the band's essential agelessness.
  34. Flawless
    Moore hasn't tackled a lead role since the turn of the century, and judging by her eminently forgettable work here, she hasn't spent that time painstakingly honing her chops.
  35. Run, Fatboy, Run
    Fatboy nearly succeeds in spite of itself, thanks to Pegg, who makes a character who does some detestable things seem strangely likeable.
  36. 21
    Short of counting the cards out loud, these geniuses seem to do everything they can to get caught.
  37. Chapter 27
    Perhaps the harshest criticism that can be directed at Chapter 27 is that it's awful even for a late-period Lindsay Lohan movie. It might even be bad enough to inspire "Catcher" author J.D. Salinger to break his decades of public silence to speak out against this high-camp fiasco.
  38. Priceless
    Unlike Salvadori's previous comedy, 2003's "Après Vous," Priceless is less preposterous, and more grounded in character.
  39. Stop-Loss
    Stop-Loss is a human story first and foremost, and Peirce and her stellar young cast ensure that the message never gets in the way of the storytelling.
  40. Superhero Movie
    Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need look no further.
  41. Backseat
    This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill at writing dialogue.
  42. Alexandra
    The contrast of a warm maternal figure and a remote army outpost is undeniably affecting. But when Vishnevskaya opens her mouth, she spoils the mood.
  43. Shotgun Stories
    Well-plotted, with a strong lead performance by Michael Shannon, and a fair amount of authentic regional flavor. It isn't really meant to be a treatise on Southern life. At heart, it's a country-fried genre film, minus the peppery white gravy.
  44. Drillbit Taylor
    Wilson's funny. Mann's funny. But paired together here, nothing works.
  45. The Grand
    Typical of bad improv, the inmates take over the asylum, leaving a movie that's little more than a loose, wildly uneven assemblage of individual comedic shtick.
  46. Meet the Browns
    Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."
  47. Shutter
    The photography hook gives Shutter the potential to be a genuinely creepy ghosts-in-the-machine story like the original "Pulse," or better still, a horror twist on "Blowup." But one effective scene lit solely by a camera flash isn't enough to rescue this from the J-horror slushpile.
  48. Boarding Gate
    Boarding Gate's surfaces are often so staggeringly beautiful that its superficiality becomes forgivable, with the pleasant distractions of Assayas' multi-layered frames, Argento's sinewy allure, and snippets of Brian Eno ambience on the soundtrack. Why can't all movies this inane be this accomplished?
  49. Love Songs
    Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against grief.
  50. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    A harmless feel-good movie that tries to tell audiences what it's like to be a victimized immigrant, and mostly winds up telling them what it's like to have their heartstrings yanked, gratuitiously and often.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Doomsday
    Marshall’s fixation on John Carpenter and early James Cameron is all too apparent, but his own distinctive cinematic style isn’t, making Doomsday a likeably rambling but generic shoot-’em-up.
  52. Horton Hears a Who!
    Just because the live-action Seusses have dialed down expectations doesn't mean that Horton shouldn't aspire to more than time-wasting mediocrity. There are precious childhoods at stake here.
  53. Never Back Down
    Director Jeff Wadlow and screenwriter Chris Hauty are so committed to following through on the "Karate Kid" formula that they don't care for novelty; it's enough for them just to hit their cues and play up the slo-mo MMA brutality. In the future, movies this derivative will be made by robots.
  54. Sleepwalking
    Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.
  55. Heartbeat Detector
    Amalric gives another in a recent string of riveting performances, and Klotz gets a lot of play out of the ironic distance between musical expression and corporate rigor.
  56. Funny Games (2008)
    A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.
  57. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain would be better-served by more touches of universality, as in the scene where a neighbor woman comforts Huang by saying, "All women go through this." That scene flirts with metaphor. The rest of the film too often descends into harangue.
  58. 10,000 BC
    "The Day After Tomorrow" was kind of stupidly fun, and 10,000 B.C. might be too, if it weren't so stupidly dull.
  59. The Bank Job
    Donaldson also misses the chance to score some easy laughs from his petty criminals, who are infinitely more audacious than they are competent.
  60. College Road Trip
    The almost perversely colorblind College Road Trip represents a strange milestone in black film.
  61. Married Life
    To a degree, the dynamic between Brosnan and Cooper resembles Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy's relationship from "In The Company Of Men."
  62. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    In trying to recapture the spirit of classic '30s screwball comedies, the film too often mistakes manic energy for wit, and it ends on a note of gloppy sentimentality that wouldn't have held water in Old Hollywood.
  63. Paranoid Park
    It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.
  64. Snow Angels
    In spite of strong performances and a characteristically vivid sense of place, the film feels disjointed and heavy.
  65. CJ7
    C7J isn't as cutesy as "Batteries Not Included" or "Short Circuit," or as grim as "Gremlins," though it resembles them all in its jerky, semi-comic look at the havoc and helpfulness of weirdo artificial life.
  66. Girls Rock!
    Girls Rock! is cutesy and quick-cut, emphasizing the absurd while trying to keep the audience's interest with animated interludes and footage from corny old industrial films.
  67. City of Men
    City Of Men has its share of problems, but being too entertaining isn't one of them.
  68. Chicago 10
    Chicago 10 is a lot of fun, but it could stand to take its subjects a little more seriously, if only because they themselves are so frequently goofy that mocking them is complete overkill.
  69. The Other Boleyn Girl
    The film looks terrific, all Vermeer-style light/dark interplay and sleek design. And Portman is fantastic as the tempestuous Anne.
  70. Penelope
    First-time director Mark Palansky is trying for a deft, hip, modern fairy-tale feel, but the odd material, sprawling story, and complicated tonal balancing act get away from him, and the film winds up as a poorly paced tug-of-war between sweet quirk and sloppy camp.
  71. Semi-Pro
    Deserves credit for attempting something more emotional and dramatic than the typical Ferrell gagfest, but Harrelson and Benjamin's earnest subplots cost the film comic momentum and big laughs without adding much in return.
  72. The Unforeseen
    Although the parts of The Unforeseen dealing with the anti-development movement are pure go-team agitprop, Dunn lends the movie a lyrical cast by combining aerial shots of the transformed countryside with the voice of Wendell Berry, reading from his poem "Sabbaths."
  73. Jar City
    Eventually, some mysteries become clear, but Kormákur's attempts to be crafty are too often clumsy, and the movie's unmotivated time leaps are close to a cheat.
  74. Chop Shop
    Though Chop Shop is an American film, it feels more like an Iranian movie or the Dardenne Brothers’ "Rosetta"; Bahrani introduces something like a plot point in the late-going, but he mostly focuses, to riveting effect, on how his young hero hustles and claws through everyday life.
  75. Charlie Bartlett
    Watching Charlie Bartlett only makes Wes Anderson's work seem more accomplished by comparison, because it underscores that thin line separating the agreeably fanciful from the overbearingly precious.
  76. The Signal
    The gimmicky yet strangely moving new fright flick The Signal distinguishes itself not through originality, but by smartly integrating just about every popular trend afflicting contemporary horror films.
  77. Be Kind Rewind
    The visual wit, game performances, and overflowing humanity have more than made up for the shortcomings by the time the film finds a final moment that's simultaneously abrupt and magical.
  78. The Counterfeiters
    Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.
  79. Vantage Point
    The loaded cast does what it can with the paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers thriller with the numbers out of order.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Witless Protection
    Larry The Cable Guy is a cancerous boil on the ass of comedy, but it's still sort of shocking how little effort he puts into his movies.
  81. The Duchess of Langeais
    Though not exactly a "comedy" of manners, since it's more melancholy than funny, The Duchess Of Langeais is very much concerned with how the rules of social etiquette interfere with raw human need.
  82. Diary of the Dead
    As in the more successful "Land Of The Dead," Romero makes an admirable attempt to update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright flick.
  83. Definitely, Maybe
    Put simply, the film excels most at not being awful.
  84. Jumper
    No exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen.
  85. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Anyone looking for handsomely presented, kid-friendly thrills need look no further.
  86. Step Up 2: The Streets
    The central romance is terminally bland, while Evigan's woozy family melodrama seems borrowed from countless superior dance movies.
  87. The Band's Visit
    Tonally, The Band's Visit steps gingerly on the line between “sweetly humane” and “cloyingly quirky.”
  88. Fool's Gold
    Tennant keeps his extravagantly stupid new comedy breezing along affably on the strength of photogenic locales, obscenely beautiful stars, a laid-back soundtrack, and a wholesale unwillingness to take itself the least bit seriously.
  89. The Hottie & the Nottie
    How is Paris Hilton in her first starring role to receive a national release? Pretty bad, actually. She's limited to a single, all-too-familiar expression of smug self-satisfaction, and she delivers her lines in a tone somewhere between "seductive" and "dish-soap commercial."
  90. In Bruges
    When it's funny, it's hilarious; when it's serious, it's powerful; and either way, it's an endless pleasant surprise.
  91. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    West is heavy on Vaughn, at least initially, but woefully short on comedy.
  92. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    The film has a warmth and raucousness that's surprisingly disarming.
  93. Caramel
    At its best, Caramel boasts a quietly engaging slice-of-slice casualness.
  94. The Eye
    The major problem is the death of a horror film: It's startling, but not particularly scary.
  95. Over Her Dead Body
    It's said that opposites attract, but for the brief period they're onscreen together in the dire comedy Over Her Dead Body, Eva Longoria Parker and Paul Rudd are one of the more bizarrely mismatched couples in recent memory.
  96. Praying with Lior
    Intimate, moving documentary.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    Strange Wilderness has three bad comic ideas for every good joke, and it botches many of those, too, thanks to slack comic timing and a nonexistent grasp of storytelling basics. But just when the flop-sweat stench is about to become unbearable, Strange Wilderness stumbles upon an uproarious, laugh-out moment, and suddenly it's tolerable again for another few minutes.
  98. Rambo
    Rambo works best as a pure action movie devoted to delivering the cheapest kicks imaginable--and to a much lesser extent, to bringing attention to human-rights violations and genocide in Asia.
  99. How She Move
    The film's good intentions gradually get lost in a sea of overwrought contrivances, stock characters, awkward cameos from B- and C-listers (R&B singer Keyshia Cole and not-so-funnyman DeRay Davis) and warmed-over family issues.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Meet the Spartans
    Meet The Spartans gamely alternates between unfunny gay jokes and violent pratfalls for a good 80 minutes, finding time for not one, but two musical dance numbers set to "I Will Survive."
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