The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. American Underdog
    Levi has a smirking quality to him that sometimes reads as if he can’t believe he’s starring in this crap. He is credible as a clean-cut, all-American boy, however, and he and Paquin work as an onscreen couple. In fact, some of their banter is kind of cute. The supporting cast has its charms as well.
  2. Five Feet Apart
    Unfortunately, welcome insight into the physical and emotional experience of living with cystic fibrosis eventually gives way to increasingly improbable romantic and dramatic scenarios...By its third act, the film almost starts to feel like a parody of the most maudlin conventions of the “sick teen romance” genre.
  3. Deep Water
    Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, both terrific in their roles, play the couple around whom the film’s meditation on modern sexual relationships revolves, while Lyne proves not only that he can film hot scenes unlike almost anyone in the business, but inject them with a psychological sophistication that complicates their (and our) postcoital bliss.
  4. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    [REC] 4 is a tight, controlled film, not the explosive epic promised by the “Apocalypse” in its title.
  5. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    It ends up a whole lot of cute, branded nothing — watchable junk for young adults of tomorrow to look back on with inordinate fondness.
  6. Atropia
    Without a tangible connection to the material—most notably to Iraq and its people—Gates’ viewpoint feels unguided, doomed to be influenced by the same pervasive prejudices that Atropia ostensibly attempts to combat.
  7. 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.
  8. The Book of Eli
    Its hero may be on a mission from above, but in a refreshing twist, the fate of mankind rests with the literate.
  9. The Quarry
    This muddled slow-burn tragedy — adapted from the Damon Galgut novel of the same name — is unfocused and overly familiar. It also fumbles its political commentary.
  10. 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.
  11. Duane Hopwood
    Duane Hopwood is suffused with hangdog dreariness, equivalent to a unsoled shoe treading rainwater.
  12. Onmyoji: The Yin Yang Master
    The film de-emphasizes plot and action in favor of lyricism and outbursts of magic-doing, but the results are more dull than enchanting, no matter how many people fly across the room.
  13. Wasabi
    Offers watchable light entertainment, even though the prospect of the most respected national cinema indulging clunky cop-movie stereotypes is, if not scandalous, then at least disappointing.
  14. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Runs more smoothly and stylishly than the average teen comedy.
  15. A House on a Hill
    The energy of Workman's editing and the innate value of seeing the creative process play out makes House watchable.
  16. Better Housekeeping
    The exaggerated white-trash environment and the naturalistic style mix poorly over time, giving off a stale odor that's funny in more ways than one.
  17. Guest of Honour
    Every so often, Egoyan takes another stab at the offbeat, achronological, weirdly intimate mode in which he originally specialized, but the spark never quite fully ignites. Guest Of Honour, his latest effort, is decidedly that sort of low-wattage Egoyan classic, serving up familiar preoccupations and structural curlicues—minus any inspiration.
  18. Girls Will Be Girls
    The Independent Film Channel is distributing Girls Will Be Girls; perhaps its executives failed to realize that this kind of mirthless, tacky independent film sends traumatized audiences racing back to the glossy production values on display at the local multiplex.
  19. Beauty Shop
    Beauty Shop's shtick gets old and tired pretty quickly, but a breezy tone and air of easygoing likeability carry it a long way.
  20. Earth to Echo
    The most derivative movie of the summer, Earth To Echo, is also the most visually unpredictable, chock-full of degraded digital textures that seem ready to boil off the screen, picture-boxed within Mac desktops and overlaid with extraterrestrial interface trees.
  21. Demons
    It owes much too much to Argento pal George Romero's zombie movies, but without enough of the suspense or metaphorical weight. That said, it still has more imagination and style going for it than most horror films.
  22. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    Let Me Explain finds Hart at the peak of his powers, so the film’s long coronation feels justified, if gaudy. Strip away the preamble and just give him a mic, and he’d earn it all the same.
  23. Big Game
    Big Game fails to live up to the kookiness of this set-up. Instead, it opts for ’90s action movie clichés and generic coming-of-age-isms. Helander’s inelegant, exposition-heavy English-language dialogue doesn’t help matters.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Samba
    On the evidence of their worldwide smash "The Intouchables," as well as their latest comedy-drama Samba, writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano specialize in well-intentioned, crowd-pleasing bullshit.
  25. Body at Brighton Rock
    While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.
  26. Malcolm & Marie
    One irony of Malcolm & Marie is that its vindictive bellyaching about judging a film on its own terms is much more interesting than the actual relationship at the center of the film. The performances remain trapped in a self-conscious mode, merely mimicking the cadence and tempo of a romance-fracturing fight.
  27. Astro Boy
    Older viewers are more likely to see a muddled film full of one-dimensional characters and insultingly strident politics.
  28. 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.
  29. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
    The first of two sequels shot in immediate succession, Dead Man's Chest bears the unenviable burden of racking the pins for both movies, which leaves it with precious few opportunities to have a little fun of its own.
  30. Rigor Mortis
    Rigor Mortis functions best as an above-average fright flick, distinguished by its sense of supernatural folklore—scads more imaginative than its Western counterparts—and Mak’s eye for bizarre close-ups.
  31. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    This is an uncharacteristically unsubtle work from Lee — yet in the end, it’s not ineffective.
  32. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.
  33. Stick It
    So along with being fake punk-rock, Stick It is also a fake protest movie. That leaves the only traces of genuineness to Bridges, who plays the coach with a fatherly patience that earns him a paycheck, but not the better film he deserves.
  34. Eight Legged Freaks
    The few isolated funny moments, particularly a witty visual gag involving a pop-up tent with legs, provide only a short break from the screen-flooding onslaught of CGI creatures and screaming extras.
  35. The Heart of Me
    A clean, tasteful drama (sex scenes aside) that's designed to attract Anglophiles who can't resist green lawns, falling leaves, precise diction, and a clean sound mix.
  36. Sky Blue
    Sky Blue is never subtle about its images of loneliness and isolation, or in fact about anything else. But as clichéd as its images are, they're still visually and tonally stunning.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Awakening
    The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.
  38. Approaching the Unknown
    Too high-minded to ever stoop to suspense or fun, Approaching The Unknown is almost completely interiorized, unspooling in voice-over narration that sounds like a writing exercise that got out of control.
  39. Black as Night
    Black As Night is assembled in an uninspired YA style that only accentuates the weaknesses of its script, which is laden with stilted dialogue and cringeworthy voiceover.
  40. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    The film’s effectiveness hinges on transferring the hallmarks of the series to the big screen, and to that end, Cross and Payne succeed.
  41. Marley & Me
    Could not be more ordinary.
  42. Deep Water
    In this case, Eckhart exudes the sort of unselfconscious paternal energy that’s needed to keep things moving in between the familiar, but well-executed disaster movie story beats. He almost single-handedly makes Deep Water a better-than-average genre exercise, though the bloody shark attacks and corny banter don’t hurt either.
  43. Big Trouble in Little China
    Big Trouble is plenty conscious of its silliness, which it embraces fully. It sets up its own parameters of ridiculousness and then runs with them, winking a little, but sticking to its story.
  44. The Hollars
    John Krasinski’s second feature has such a milquetoast, melancholy-indie sound that its most arresting and dynamic musical moment comes when three characters unexpectedly break into “Closer To Fine” by the Indigo Girls.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Can't Hardly Wait
    But the film deserves credit, both for its breezy pacing and its uncommon tendency to make its characters smarter and geekier than they might have been.
  46. I.S.S.
    It stretches credulity, as well as our patience.
  47. Red Sparrow
    It’s about halfway between "Atomic Blonde" and a Focus Features late-summer thriller, which more or less fits the Francis Lawrence aesthetic. He brings to this material what he brought to "The Hunger Games": a sense of style that feels constrained by obligations to hit a certain number of plot points.
  48. Carrie
    It’s a strange thing to say about a movie so obsessed with the red stuff, but this Carrie is bloodless.
  49. Apt Pupil
    McKellen is fine, of course, but the film as a whole offers about as much insight into evil as Ming The Merciless in a “Flash Gordon” serial.
  50. Hubie Halloween
    There is something half-satisfying and pacifying about Hubie Halloween. In true content-blurring Netflix fashion, Sandler has essentially made a likable children’s movie to babysit undemanding adults.
  51. The Artist and the Model
    A wholly fictional tale, and while it has a few lovely, tender moments, there’s a definite feeling of “been there, drawn that.”
  52. Fly Me to the Moon
    Unless you can put aside everything you know about the space program, government, advertising, and television broadcasting, you may spend a good deal of the film’s two-hour runtime frustrated by its plot holes and contrivances.
  53. The Guardian
    Tries tremendously hard to win audiences over with manly derring-do, exciting action, and impossible-obstacles-overcome uplift. And it's undeniably compelling for minutes at a time
  54. In Time
    Much like Niccol's "Gattaca," in which genetic perfection rather than time was the weapon a small group of snobby, unworthy elites used to hold down the meek masses, In Time is a chilly, stiff movie where clever ideas are delivered as self-righteous sermons.
  55. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It treats the complicated moves and countermoves of a major election as fodder for a broadly comic grudge match.
  56. Kill the Poor
    Taylor makes the most of his tiny budget with creative editing and shooting, though his New York City is anemic, narrow, and underpopulated, and his constant repetition of the same damn 60 seconds of music becomes excruciating.
  57. Redacted
    As an expression of from-the-gut anti-war rage, Redacted is admirable, but as art, it's undercooked.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Snowman's Land
    Tonally, Snowman's Land feels like a German throwback to a '90s indie, but without the energy-the pacing is languid to the point of aimlessness.
  59. 5 to 7
    It’s a movie to be mildly enjoyed and then left behind — apropos, given the subject matter.
  60. Snowtime!
    Dialogue is witless (though at least there are no pop-culture references), and the kids are all generic types with pre-packaged personalities.
  61. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Director John Hough packs the film with stunning car stunts filmed in California backwaters. Though he sacrifices meaning for trashy thrills at every opportunity—and winds it all down with a brain-damaged variation on the end of Easy Rider—the way Fonda slowly loses his initially unflappable cool throughout the film makes it worth a look.
  62. Alone Together
    While we may soon tire of movies using the pandemic as a narrative catalyst (if we haven’t already), Katie Holmes’ Alone Together feels vitally of-the-moment at a time when so many films are ignoring the poignancy of that moment altogether.
  63. Tomorrow Never Dies
    The second Pierce Brosnan-fronted James Bond movie settles into the groove of unspectacular convention-adhering that has marked the series for the last couple of decades.
  64. White House Down
    While White House Down isn’t going to score points for originality, seriousness, or subtlety (Emmerich likes his political messages blunt and loud), it is a lot of fun; if nothing else, Emmerich is a great widescreen showman who knows how to stage mayhem on a grand scale.
  65. Man of Tai Chi
    For fans of wushu flicks — or action movies in general — Man Of Tai Chi presents a rare appreciation for the art of conveying movement on screen, while also serving as an impressive physical showcase for its star, stuntman Tiger Chen.
  66. Bruised
    When it’s firing on all cylinders, Bruised finds the Sirk amid the Stallone, wringing truly grand melodrama out of women reshaping their lives while beating each other senseless.
  67. The Nativity Story
    A filmed Sunday-school lesson that favors a dry, by-the-Book approach over even a suggestion of dramatic interpretation. It's more Christmas pageant than movie.
  68. Anger Management
    Doesn't possess the discipline to peel laughs off its potentially riotous premise. Instead, Segal and company grope desperately for every low gag they can find, whether or not it has anything to do with the story.
  69. Like Father
    Perversely, it’s only after Like Father is in the clear from its potentially ridiculous set-up that it really starts to trade in phony sitcom-movie bullshit.
  70. Stonehearst Asylum
    The presence of Kingsley — as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere — might suggest "Shutter Island," but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s "Freaks," with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Absolute Power
    A murky, often confusing story riddled with half-hearted performances, erratic characters, and too many cliched lines and situations.
  72. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It’s gnarly as hell.
  73. The Protector
    Delivers a steady stream of cheap B-movie thrills, plus two positive messages for young people: Be nice to animals, and when in doubt, always aim for the tendons.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zorro: The Gay Blade
    A delightful, campy spoof not only of the old Zorro films but of swashbuckling Hollywood heroics in general. George Hamilton is hilarious in his double role. [3 Aug 1981]
    • The A.V. Club
  75. Monstrous
    Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a more stillborn finished product, an exercise in tedium which checks the barest boxes of “completed movie” and possibly delivers unknown benefits for some of those executive producers, but otherwise offers nothing that might engage an audience.
  76. LUV
    Candis and Wilson sandbag their actors with dialogue that's a mix of dull exposition and pulp clichés, and rarely natural-sounding or colorful.
  77. My Old Lady
    Apparently struggling to please two very different audiences at once, Horovitz seems to have little control over the material, ultimately wrapping things up with a neat little bow that makes a mockery of the preceding ugliness.
  78. Wild Side
    A sustained mood piece of disquieting intensity, but its almost unbearable air of morose ennui becomes hard to take even in small doses, let alone in a highly concentrated torrent of misery like this.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Devil's Own
    What makes it worth the price of admission is the energetic performance Ford pulls off in the cookie-cutter role of big-city cop.
  80. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    Dramatically speaking, it’s a failed thought experiment—you get, watching it, why no one has really told this kind of story in this way. But it’s still hard not to admire the film’s perversely un-perverse strategy, its good-faith attempt to do something more than simply trot out the awful, salacious details.
  81. XX/XY
    Though initially off-putting, Chick's distanced direction pays off as XX/XY goes along.
  82. The Wood
    A mess, a poorly paced, poorly structured, lukewarm comedy-drama that fails even to capitalize on the cheap nostalgia inherent in its plot.
  83. Down with Love
    May register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present.
  84. Hollywood Dreams
    It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.
  85. The Holiday
    Even with a wild card like Black desperately retooling his lines, there's nothing authentic or personal about The Holiday--it's as chilling as heart-warmers get.
  86. Happy Gilmore 2
    The sequel is another indication that Sandler is still undertaking his longtime mission of making silly comfort-food comedies with the stealth seriousness of older age.
  87. The 4:30 Movie
    The familiarity is, of course, the point: Anyone going to a new Kevin Smith movie in 2024 is either already well-versed in the comfort food of the View Askewniverse, or is being dragged on a date by someone who is. The result evokes a kind of bittersweet nostalgia—not for the much-mythologized pop-cultural ‘80s, but for a younger, fresher writer-director who was able to do a lot more with a lot less.
  88. Parthenope
    There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.
  89. Black Snake Moan
    Like "Hustle & Flow," Moan succeeds on languid atmosphere and the conviction of its leads. But it'd be nice if the execution matched the startling audacity of its premise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Good Doctor
    Awkward and arrogant, Bloom's character is reminiscent of The Social Network's take on Mark Zuckerberg: someone who was propelled in his nascent career by the idea that it would bring him the respect and acceptance he doesn't seem able to command in a social setting.
  91. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    The significance of that group anecdote - from the message of unity to the way Mardi Gras gave some gay New Orleanians a way to explain their lives to their parents - can't be overstated, either for its impact on human rights or its power to move.
  92. The Girl from Monaco
    Isn't slow-paced. It’s slick and audience-friendly.
  93. Elsa y Fred
    It's hard to overlook how much of Elsa & Fred is rote and pre-chewed.
  94. Mr. Right
    Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell have often been the lone bright spot in otherwise dismal movies, and it takes their combined charm to redeem Mr. Right.
  95. Love Me
    While the movie’s breadth-over-depth approach might have been more powerful as a short film, Love Me still delivers a unique blend of charm and existentialism across its 92-minute runtime.
  96. Blackhat
    Mann’s first feature in nearly six years, the hacking thriller Blackhat is rough even by the standards of its director’s current creative period.
  97. Joe Kidd
    Not particularly complicated, and sometimes as confused as it is concise, 1972’s Joe Kidd is nonetheless a lean, reasonably satisfying slice of Clint Eastwood outlaw badassery.
  98. Three Days of Rain
    Beautifully lit, with some inventive but unobtrusive framing, and the moody jazz score unifies the multiple storylines without overwhelming them. Yet while the movie never goes slack, it never really transcends its good intentions either.
  99. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    Like The Amazing Johnathan’s act, it’s a funny, trippy, lively bit of sleight of hand that can often make you feel like you’re seeing something extraordinary, even if it’s just some prankster f**king with you.
  100. Dorian Blues
    Dorian Blues covers extremely familiar territory, but does so with low-key wit and ingratiating charm.
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