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. The City of Your Final Destination
    It’s a frustratingly oblique film where few events connect, and fewer moments matter.
  2. Remember
    Egoyan will not be getting an Oscar nomination for this picture. But after a long creative slump, he may have found a new calling.
  3. Fay Grim
    Sadly, there's a thin line between goofing irreverently on the maddeningly convoluted nature of spy thrillers and actually being a muddled mess, and Fay Grim crosses it constantly during its deadly second hour.
  4. The Mothman Prophecies
    Nonetheless, the film never amounts to more than the sum of a few good moments, and it leaves the aftertaste of a second-tier X-Files episode.
  5. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    In the wake of T"he Passion Of The Christ," the three-hour chore takes on some positive qualities it wouldn't have had otherwise.
  6. Greendale
    There's no forgiving the home-movie slackness of Greendale for its numbing dearth of imagination.
  7. Blade II
    Everything "Blade" should have been but wasn't: stylish, fast-paced, and comfortable with its own ridiculousness.
  8. Wolf
    What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.
  9. Coming 2 America
    Coming 2 America—with its endless callbacks and Easter eggs—seems all too ready to rely on nostalgia. It’s clearly meant to function as a celebration of the original film’s enduring legacy. Fans should just watch that movie again instead.
  10. Insidious: Chapter 3
    The motif of grief runs throughout Insidious: Chapter 3, which is surprisingly thematically rich for the third installment of a horror franchise. This emotional undercurrent informs the fright scenes, which otherwise lean rather heavily on jump scares.
  11. Who Do You Love
    Works best when it isn’t about freezing time and explaining moments in pop-music history, but is instead about guys playing music together.
  12. The Switch
    Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.
  13. Citizen Koch
    What ultimately helps Citizen Koch rise above the dozens of other movies like it is a focus not just on recent developments in American politics, but also on the bedrock of what has made this country such an enduringly great, astoundingly troubled experiment: one person, one vote.
  14. Kill Your Idols
    One of the film's oddest aspects is the way the 2002 footage appears more dated than the scenes from 1978.
  15. Cuban Fury
    Only one scene — the very one that Pegg shows up in — demonstrates any real creativity, and even that mostly amounts to a couple of goofy dudes attempting to intimidate each other with terrible dance moves.
  16. Gridiron Gang
    None of their stories are particularly resonant, but the film is really about a grand social experiment gone right, and it succeeds well enough on that front, even while it isn't that convincing in the particulars.
  17. Pusher (2012)
    Luis Prieto's remake capably mimics the original's breakneck energy without adding a single thing. It seems to exist mostly to stuff more violence into Britain's insatiable maw for crime pictures.
  18. The Lodgers
    It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.
  19. Boulevard
    It doesn’t help that Boulevard is a movie that feels at least a decade past its sell-by date, if not two.
  20. The Lake House
    Elegantly scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn, The Lake House never establishes any clear rules about how and when these strands of time can intertwine, but it succeeds at forging a bond between people who only know each other on the page.
  21. Deadfall
    The best parts of Deadfall are absorbed into a scenario that frequently ditches the cat-and-mouse routine and tries instead to be about three dysfunctional families working toward reconciliation.
  22. Trap
    On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.
  23. Death on the Nile
    Death On The Nile feels chintzier in every respect, with a much lower-wattage cast of potential murderers and a digitally summoned exotic locale about as immersive as a screensaver. If a viewer didn’t know better, they might assume they were seeing the fourth or fifth entry in a sputtering franchise, not the direct follow-up to a global box-office hit.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bean
    When Atkinson tries to stretch familiar Beanisms into 80 minutes, the results are mostly unsatisfying.
  25. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    It's handsomely mounted, and its heart seems in the right place, but that's not reason enough to put on a show.
  26. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    The remake features riveting tension, assured performances, and hallmarks of an exciting new director’s narrative fascinations, all while the politics of its central dynamic continue to cry out for examination.
  27. Eternals
    Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat?
  28. 47 Meters Down
    47 Meters Down never remotely approaches greatness, but for an hour or so, its unfussy, workmanlike portrait of ordinary people in crisis (plus killer sharks) gets the job done.
  29. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Day, who’s very good, moves through it with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is as much a star in the green room as she is onstage, faced with applause or the harsh bathroom-mirror reflection of abuse and addiction. But many of the other characters might as well be reading off of cue cards.
  30. The Next Three Days
    Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.
  31. The Weird World of Blowfly
    The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.
  32. G20
    If G20 barely registers as original, its star remains commanding. Even when Davis dutifully goes through the motions as stern government official Amanda Waller in the recent DC films, she seems incapable of phoning in a role or winking to the audience.
  33. Maggie
    The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.
  34. VHYes
    Unfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    This comedy from writer-director Philippe Le Guay is really a testament to how much more charming things sound in French, given how much its setup parallels that of James L. Brooks' clunkier 2004 "Spanglish," complete with a blonde harpy of a spouse.
  36. Bomb the System
    Has an exhilarating edge. It's only when they open their mouths that the movie gets into trouble.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    London Boulevard
    The directorial debut of William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Departed," London Boulevard collapses under the weight of its own ideas and the amount of talent it has to burn.
  38. The Hills Have Eyes
    Thanks to assured direction and a fine cast, Hills isn't terrible, only terribly unnecessary.
  39. Murder on the Orient Express
    Suspense remains a foreign concept for actor-director Kenneth Branagh. His erratic direction — more interested in cut glass and overhead shots than in suspicions and uncertainties — bungles both the perfect puzzle logic of the crime and its devious solution.
  40. Nanny McPhee Returns
    On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.
  41. Eleanor the Great
    This tonally tricky comedy-drama tackles aging, loss, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and the difficulty of determining the truth in a fake-news world. But Johansson’s well-meaning film couldn’t be more aggravating, and its biggest problem is its insistence that we find Eleanor so damn endearing, no matter what.
  42. [Rec] 2
    What Balagueró and Plaza lose in novelty, they partially gain back by sheer relentlessness: The film is a slab of raw meat for horror addicts, impeccably crafted mayhem that clocks in at under 90 minutes. Just don’t give it too much thought.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Putin's Kiss maintains a wry distance that unnecessarily trivializes the shocking act that finalizes Drokova's parting of ways with Nashi, but the melancholy of her disillusionment remains. Underneath all this heated discussion of democracy in Russia, it becomes clear, there may not be much actual democracy at work.
  44. Electric Dreams
    For all the liberties it takes with what the computers of that era could really do, Electric Dreams offers a portrait of our relationship to technology that’s fairly prescient—while still being silly in that early-’80s Radio Shack kind of way, of course.
  45. Three Amigos!
    Martin’s script—co-written with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and songwriter Randy Newman—is full of inspired bits of comic business, such as Martin making a “lookuphere!” bird call to get his chums’ attention, Chase pouring water all over his face while his mates’ canteens are dry, and the Amigos summoning an invisible swordsman whom Chase accidentally shoots.
  46. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.
  47. House of Fools
    Never finds any forward momentum, but Vysotskaya's sweet performance and the unsubtle but effective use of the war-torn asylum as a stand-in for the former USSR keep it compelling.
  48. Ghost River
    La Vie Promise's style is too slick for the subject matter.
  49. Possession
    For a film that depends so much on the interaction between words and passion -- and the drama of how each shapes the other -- the shortage of both leaves Possession looking like nothing more than an "Indiana Jones" in which card catalogs stand in for treasure maps, and footnotes for bullwhips.
  50. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    The story is thrown together in the most perfunctory way possible, and director Steve Miner's ("Friday The 13th Part 3: 3D," "My Father The Hero") idea of a scary moment is having things spookily jump out of the blue.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Know What You Did Last Summer
    The characters are never really more than stereotypes (the brain, the beauty, the dreamer, the jock), but as the body count begins to mount, you feel their terror build.
  52. 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.
  53. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
  54. Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
  55. The Amateur
    It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
  56. Greed
    Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure.
  57. SuperFly
    When the new SuperFly does show flashes of street-smart wit...its energy is infectious. Mostly, though, it needs to take its hero’s advice and take things up a notch.
  58. Winter in the Blood
    Cursed with a vague, rambling script and an equally indistinct lead performance, the film is a scattershot series of vignettes about self-definition that, ultimately, never coheres into a lucid whole.
  59. Gracie
    There's a reason the underdog sports formula is followed over and over: When it's executed as skillfully as it is here, the damned thing works every time.
  60. Dark Water
    Dark Water devolves into something resembling genre schlock, albeit the kind featuring zesty supporting performances from the classy, Oscar-nominated likes of John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Anyone But You
    The film is made as fun escapism, and it succeeds at that.
  62. Ghost in the Shell
    It is in its designs, more so than in its generic corporate-conspiracy plot, that this new Ghost In The Shell finds tantalizing expressions of theme.
  63. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Since more moviegoers are likely coming to a Magic Mike movie for the moves than the plot, let it be stated the moves are outstanding, even if the movers remain mostly blank slates.
  64. Detachment
    For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
  65. Running with Scissors
    The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill.
  66. Central Intelligence
    That it manages to score a good laugh every couple of minutes is mostly a credit to stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who make for a better mismatched-buddy comic duo than the movie probably deserves.
  67. Over Your Dead Body
    Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.
  68. Silent Night
    For a film written and nearly finished before the pandemic (with some reshoots in late 2020), Silent Night practically bleats for relevancy.
  69. Last Holiday
    For a film ostensibly about how life means nothing without adventure and unpredictability, Last Holiday all feels as preordained as the film-ending Emeril cameo.
  70. Insidious
    All calculation aside, scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality.
  71. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    Despite this unevenness, there’s a lot to love in The Last Voyage Of The Demeter for horror fans and casual moviegoers alike.
  72. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Although the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult novel finds welcome specificity in its world and character building, it never rises above the most generic of platitudes in its central teen love story.
  73. Alone in Berlin
    A lump in the throat inspired by real-life heroism is all that this dour, monotonous drama has to offer. Indeed, it’s easy to guess that the story is fact-based—it’s far too blah to have been invented from scratch.
  74. The Iron Lady
    Strangely, this Thatcher biopic might have been far more worthwhile if it wasn't about Thatcher: The aged, dotty stranger hanging out with her dead husband is a more compelling subject.
  75. Madame Bovary
    Wasikowska gives a solid, emotionally precise performance, ably supported by the men around her (especially Ifans, who relishes Monsieur Lheureux’s unctuous cajolery), and the result is intelligent and eminently watchable.
  76. After the Hunt
    After The Hunt does eventually add up to something greater than its flood of but-what-about details.
  77. The Longshots
    A sports movie like every other, but the excellent, lived-in performances of Cube and Palmer make it a mildly affecting.
  78. A Girl Missing
    A Girl Missing feels torn between a slippery character study and a social thriller, and it suffers from the absence of the puzzle pieces it declines to reveal.
  79. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    If nothing else, Exodus: Gods And Kings makes it easier to appreciate Darren Aronofsky’s "Noah," which, for all of its flaws, was at least animated by a personal relationship to the Old Testament.
  80. The Contractor
    Even moderately seasoned viewers will find few surprises in its twists and turns, and little to excite them on a purely visceral level. That leaves Pine and Foster as the constant—and a reliable one—in this emerging cinematic universe of theirs, but even they might not be enough in this to earn another installment this time around.
  81. The Paranoids
    The Paranoids summons a scuzzy, winning nocturnal ambience, particularly when Hendler breaks out of his funk, hits the dance floor, and does his best impression of Michael Stipe in the “Losing My Religion” video. For a few brief moments, he and the movie transcend their four-walled ennui.
  82. The Devil's Double
    Dominic Cooper is electrifying yet stiff in The Devil's Double; he's simultaneously the film's biggest asset and its greatest flaw.
  83. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Harry Potter, for all his nice-kid incorruptibility, looks downright four-dimensional compared to Redmayne’s milquetoast Newt—an impossibly twee soul with few discernible flaws or even particularly interesting characteristics.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Comes as close as the film series has gotten to reconciling the epic romance it's billed as and the self-aware camp-fest it often hints at wanting to be, but it's still a messy, unwieldy slab of film product that's targeted directly at fans of the book series, with little regard for anyone else.
  85. 80 for Brady
    The film is by no means distinctive, hilarious, or memorable in any way, but, for as cloying as this attempt at Brady brand rehabilitation could have been, it’s a testament to the magnetic appeal of ageless stars who know how to carry a film to the end zone.
  86. Breathless
    But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.
  87. National Champions
    This movie is all talk and no action. It’s a two-hour pregame show, with no game.
  88. The Black Hole
    The Black Hole will likely bore anyone not immediately captivated by V.I.N.CENT, the prissy, Cicero-quoting robot with a voice provided by Roddy McDowall and a body that looks like an art-nouveau reinterpretation of a can of beans.
  89. The Christmas Chronicles
    Close inspection reveals that The Christmas Chronicles suffers from the same acute condition as one of Freddy’s or Jason’s lesser vehicles. The film doesn’t know how to get out of its own way and foreground what’s working, namely the dynamo of screen presence placed more prominently in the advertising than the feature itself.
  90. A Working Man
    The beats become terribly repetitive even when the fight choreography is at times satisfying, and the R-rating at least allows for some CGI blood spurts. But in spite of the dreary tedium, there are moments of genuine levity that shine through the gloom, be they intentional or not.
  91. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Much of what’s around them is rote and uneven, but Kunis and McKinnon are a comedic duo worth hanging on to.
  92. The Sea
    The acidic Shakespearean family drama The Sea can't be faulted for lack of ambition. It can, however, be faulted for a fatal lack of heart.
  93. Dopamine
    The issues Decena raises rarely get treated on any but the most superficial of levels, and the flatly realized characters make it difficult to care what becomes of them.
  94. Secondhand Lions
    Writer-director Tim McCanlies works in broad, kid-friendly strokes, and he's not afraid to lay on the sentiment, but his cast makes sure it's well-earned.
  95. A Horrible Way to Die
    The credibility Bowen and Amy Seimetz, as his fearful ex-girlfriend, bring to their roles nearly legitimizes the movie's underlying silliness.
  96. The Tall Man
    In easily her best performance - and sadly, one few will see, given the film's modest release strategy - Jessica Biel stars as a single mother in Cold Rock, Washington.
  97. Tai Chi Zero
    The story's fundamentals remain solid, and the battle between the village of kung-fu experts and an army of 19th century technophiles is so cleverly staged and exciting that the inevitable sequel (already in the works) will be welcome, as will any future martial-arts movies that Tai Chi Zero may inspire.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    The film's premise-that Bieber achieved his superstardom through years of hard work overcoming towering obstacles-is so ludicrously flawed that everything built upon it borders on self-parody.
  99. 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.
  100. Every Day
    There are any number of metaphorical applications for A’s condition, some implied more strongly than others, including trans struggles, gender fluidity...teenage desire to fit in, even accidental catfishing.... Every Day is sweet and sincere enough to remain open to these interpretations, but too gentle to assert itself into anything of real consequence.
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