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. Casa de mi Padre
    As with "Black Dynamite," many of Casa De Mi Padre's sharpest, most inspired gags riff on the source material's ingratiatingly amateurish production values and exuberantly incompetent stylistic choices.
  2. 300
    Part of the fascination of the Thermopylae story is that it really happened, and it helped define real heroism. There's nothing remotely like reality to be had in this film.
  3. Race to Witch Mountain
    Director Andy Fickman, who previously blanded Johnson up in "The Game Plan," has fashioned the film into a one-size-fits-all, action-packed special-effects extravaganza for the whole family.
  4. Irreconcilable Differences
    Differences would have benefited from a more cerebral lead actor, but O’Neal does a good job of capturing Bogdanovich’s ingratiating passion for cinema and his fatal hubris, and the script scores some clever jabs at the vapid self-absorption of show-biz types.
  5. Mother of Tears
    Compared to a recent Argento dud like "The Stendhal Syndrome," Mother Of Tears at least has some of the go-for-broke gothic spirit of his earlier work. He's just lost the ability to shape it into something artful.
  6. Goya's Ghosts
    If Forman is trying to communicate that art isn't an effective way to change American society, he's proved his point neatly with this muddled, wandering dud.
  7. She's One of Us
    For all the smart visual design, though, She's One Of Us is frustratingly clinical.
  8. Little Secrets
    Director Blair Treu hails from Brigham Young University, and while there's nothing explicitly religious about Little Secrets, his primary influence seems to be those LDS public-service announcements in which nice people learn to become even nicer.
  9. Valentin
    It takes mere seconds for every charming moment to go from "Ahhh..." to "Aarrggh!"
  10. Scream 4
    It's rare for a sequel to extensively acknowledge its own pointlessness, let alone make the unnecessary nature of its existence a recurring theme, the way Scream 4 does. Then again, the Scream franchise has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing itself and the rules of the slasher genre.
  11. Water for Elephants
    It's a tastefully managed, passionless melodrama, full of brooding looks and reasonably sweet moments, but typified by a scantly characterized central couple who bring no sense of engagement to their relationship.
  12. Dead Man's Shoes
    For all Dead Man's Shoes' well-paced, well-observed boondocks melodrama, its premise seems simultaneously slender and overheated.
  13. Nickelodeon
    Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles.
  14. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Gus
    While a far cry from Any Given Sunday, it’s amazing how much disbelief one can suspend with a cast that also includes Tim Conway, Dick Van Patten, and Tom Bosley, along with color commentators Dick Enberg, Johnny Unitas, and former Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane.
    • The A.V. Club
  16. Despicable Me 4
    Good Enough is a few bland chuckles uttered in a vacuous 90 minutes you struggle to remember even as the credits start to roll. Good Enough is a black hole, of which Despicable Me 4 is the singularity.
  17. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men feels not just self-conscious but also a bit self-congratulatory, its creator squashing the spirit of adventure with too many grandiose lines about the Importance Of Art.
  18. The International
    Ultimately feel so empty and forgettable.
  19. Rudderless
    Rudderless accumulates puzzling details and goodwill in near-equal measure.
  20. The Producers
    The result is largely a giddy, goofy delight.
  21. Felony
    Unfortunately, Edgerton the writer creates a situation so thorny that he can’t find a way out of it.
  22. Malmkrog
    One is left to admire the literal and figurative wallpaper—to be blessedly distracted by the mise en scène and Puiu’s attempts to constantly vary how he’s filming each interaction.
  23. On the Come Up
    A committed group of dazzling actors keeps viewers consistently engaged until On The Come Up arrives at its predictable life lessons.
  24. Nacho Libre
    How can any comedy with Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler not be gut-bustingly hilarious? Nacho Libre provides an all-too-convincing answer.
  25. Beckett
    The Beckett character is sparsely written, and the sometimes bland performance Washington delivers doesn’t fill in many characterization gaps; it’s a problem that affects the pacing, too.
  26. The Drop
    The Drop isn’t really about dropping a baby. But it’s not about much else, either.
  27. Triple 9
    As a game of cops and robbers, Triple 9 was probably more fun to play than it is to watch.
  28. Everything, Everything
    The film does have its charms. The outside world, when we do reach it, is as gorgeous for the audience as it must appear to someone seeing it for the first time.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Object of My Affection
    The film is being marketed as a romantic comedy, but it's neither romantic nor funny.
  30. Epic
    Epic is heavy on celebrity voices and light on imagination.
  31. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    As movies expressly courting the faith-based audience go, Paul, Apostle Of Christ acquits itself reasonably well from moment to moment, avoiding the howlers that plague such Pure Flix titles as "Samson" and "God’s Not Dead."
  32. Snake Eyes
    Snake Eyes can't sustain its masterful first hour, but it's better than just about any action movie this year.
  33. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    The great character actor Gary Cole, in particular, stands out as Bosworth's father, who tries to impress Duhamel by reading the trades, thumbing through Julia Phillips' autobiography, and donning a Project Greenlight T-shirt.
  34. Rick
    It's hard for Rick to maintain this jangled tone, which aims to be simultaneously heartbreaking and broadly satirical. The latter tack pushes Rick too far, and too soon.
  35. Under the Tuscan Sun
    Writer-director Audrey Wells never aims higher than postcard filmmaking, and Under The Tuscan Sun at least works on that level, by casting its little operetta of self-realization and remodeling travails against some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.
  36. À cause d'un garçon
    Though its milieu is often ugly and its story fairly soft, You'll Get Over It gets by thanks to its cast. The French film industry has a knack for finding attractive, expressive young actors, and this movie is no exception.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Frighteners
    An overlong, overstuffed mess with only sporadic moments of clarity and purpose.
  38. Safe House
    Safe House does altogether too good a job establishing Washington as a seemingly unbeatable adversary: He brings so much gravity to his role that Reynolds seems hopelessly overmatched.
  39. Janie Jones
    Contrivances aside, though, Janie Jones is one of the more realistic depictions of what the rock 'n' roll lifestyle is really like.
  40. Peeples
    If Peeples had more bite, it might pass for an underhanded critique of its producer’s work.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard offers glimpses of the ragged heyday of grunge that are so compelling, it's a shame the film didn't stay with them instead of continuing along a standard story of a rock 'n' roll downfall by way of drug addiction followed by a slow recovery.
  42. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    By reducing teachings to vague platitudes and inspirational truisms, Bilal robs its religious story of any sense of grace, leaving only those components of early Islamic history generally not considered off-limits for visual interpretation—that is, a lot of early medieval warfare and violence.
  43. Labor Day
    Improbably, this saccharine melodrama comes courtesy of Jason Reitman, the Hollywood scion director who made "Juno" and "Up In The Air." Clearly, he’s chasing a change of pace, a hard right turn away from the sardonic redemption stories that have previously sported his byline and into the unfamiliar realm of Sirksian soap.
  44. One Chance
    Blandly directed by "The Devil Wears Prada"-helmed David Frankel, One Chance lacks the middlebrow polish that has made his films such reliably re-watchable cable-TV fodder.
  45. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    An overlooked gem in the annals of low-budget horror.
  46. The Interview
    The North Korea scenes are often very funny, with many of the jokes coming at the expense of the fish-out-of-water visitors.
  47. RoboCop
    This RoboCop earns its stripes, mostly for the seriousness with which it treats its Frankenstein story.
  48. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry.
  49. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    These veteran performers make these two characters likable and, more importantly, fully knowable, and through them Jerry & Marge Go Large fully breathes.
  50. Boris Without Béatrice
    Boris Without Béatrice never feels like the work of an artist who actually believes in everything he’s doing.
  51. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.
  52. Seeing Other People
    Eventually finds its rhythm with late flashes of dark humor and bedroom hijinks, but it takes too much time to get there.
  53. Gymkata
    A true masterpiece of unintentional comedy...fantastically surreal.
  54. The Intern
    The lack of comic goals allows Meyers to write and write; a key emotional scene between De Niro and Hathaway late in the movie rambles on like a first draft, and the movie swells to the two-hour mark.
  55. Dangerous Beauty
    Taken on a camp level, there's a lot of fun to be had here, even if the movie may actually take itself seriously.
  56. The Age of Adaline
    For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.
  57. 96 Minutes
    Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross' uncle and guardian, but they don't have much to work with.
  58. Girls of the Sun
    This bombastic bid for respectability mostly left me thinking that their courageous, inspiring inspiration deserved a better movie, one with more nuanced plotting and a less overbearing score.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    While spending two hours listening to Whitney Houston’s greatest hits will never be a waste of time, Dance With Somebody is a sanitized, trope-laden retelling of Houston’s life that lacks purpose and a point-of-view.
  60. Woman Walks Ahead
    Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.
  61. The Golden Compass
    The Golden Compass does manage the job of bringing Pullman's world to the screen. With luck, any future entries will try harder to get the job done right.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Black powder and Christian Slater are cool and all, but real dramatic successes come when a film has both heart and a slate of talented actors who aren’t just leaning on their oversized patchwork capes to tell the story.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Skateland
    If he were even a fraction as appealing to the audience as he so mysteriously is to everyone in the film, Skateland would be much more engaging.
  64. A Walk in the Woods
    Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.
  65. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    There is visual wit in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and some invention, too.
  66. First Descent
    Entertainingly captures the camaraderie and spirit of competition among the affable boarders as they battle nature in the form of imposing mountains, regular avalanches, and jagged rock formations.
  67. You're Cordially Invited
    You’re Cordially Invited is a rigorously unoriginal and uncreative film, in compliance with the flat mundanity of content that the streaming giants want their audiences to bask in.
  68. Zizek!
    It's a straightforward, relatively style-free piece, primarily of interest to those who want to hear Zizek's pronouncements. But what distinguishes the film is Zizek's peculiar self-awareness, which borders on paranoia
  69. Windtalkers
    Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay.
  70. Cherish
    In the end, it becomes the cinematic equivalent of one of the songs Tunney adores: enjoyable enough while it lasts, but so thin that its ingratiating charms seem as much a source of frustration as pleasure.
  71. Mammoth
    While Mammoth is frequently poignant and beautifully acted--especially by Williams, who’s so lost and lonely that she becomes casually cruel--the movie lacks the personal touch that’s distinguished even Moodysson’s “difficult” films.
  72. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    It's disheartening that a story with roots in autobiography, no matter how tentative, should end up as such an impersonal genre rehash.
  73. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    This is a much drier, more reserved affair, though it can be quite powerful on the rare occasions when it allows raw emotion to make its way to the surface.
  74. The Neon Demon
    Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.
  75. Let's Spend the Night Together
    The great Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, Being There) directs, but doesn’t make his presence felt too often. In the midst of the personal and professional problems that plagued him after his '70s heyday, Ashby mostly finds a few angles, hopes for the best, then edits it together with all the artfulness of a televised sports broadcast.
  76. Oh Mercy!
    The only real gravitas comes from the reliably excellent Zem, here doing minor wonders with the clichéd role of the good-hearted, unwaveringly calm human lie detector.
  77. The Last Full Measure
    Hagiography doesn’t magically becomes less tedious simply because its subject made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, however, and this stolid, mournful drama does little more than solicit the viewer’s respect and admiration for Pitsenbarger, whose entire life gets reduced to a single act of uncomplicated nobility.
  78. Chestnut
    Despite the actors’ best efforts, they can never quite overcome a script that simply doesn’t have anything new to add to the conversation.
  79. Contraband
    Kormákur and his collaborators want to tell a simple story cleanly, efficiently, and with a refreshing dearth of frills. They more or less realize their aspirations because they aim so low.
  80. Breathe
    Breathe seems to want nothing more than to be "The Theory Of Everything" for a slightly newer generation.
  81. Death of a Unicorn
    This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.
  82. The Brothers Grimm
    The Brothers Grimm reeks of compromise, of a brilliant fantasist losing his footing and nerve and getting hopelessly gummed up in the cruel machinery of big-budget blockbuster filmmaking.
  83. Satanic Panic
    It’s campy, it’s gory, it’s a little bit titillating, and it features one of those novelty performances from famous actors that tend to bring a lot of press to otherwise under-the-radar productions.
  84. Cesar Chavez
    What Cesar Chavez critically lacks is a unique, complicated, or personal perspective on its world-famous subject. As is often the problem with portraits of influential firebrands, the film never quite sees past the movement to the man leading it.
  85. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    True to its title, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a mildly inferior sequel, diluting the modest charms of its predecessor. Said charms do remain, however.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Everyone plays against type in 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom, none more so than Ron Perlman, who has a small role as a post-op transsexual hacker.
  87. Self Medicated
    It's a personal story that feels like it's been constructed from other movies.
  88. The Slumber Party Massacre
    What Slumber Party Massacre lacks in style, originality, and satire, it makes up in entertainment value. It’s blessedly unpretentious.
  89. Feast of Love
    Maybe Benton's serenely dull time-waster should take a cue from one of its main settings, and become the first Hollywood film released directly to coffee shops. Otherwise, it seems destined to find an indulgent second home as an unusually classy slot-plugger over at Lifetime.
  90. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    Like the worst of late-period Allen, the film recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence. They're left stranded, seven characters in search of an author.
  91. Trust Me
    Like a cocky insider, Trust Me touches success only to throw it away on a gamble.
  92. Due Date
    The situations sometimes feel contrived, but the characters never do, particularly because Galifianakis remains simultaneously charming and unrelentingly irritating.
  93. How to Be Single
    You might say that How To Be Single suffers from the influence of its older, more put-together sister Sex And The City, right down to the sappy montage and voice-over it needs to tie everything together at the end.
  94. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Those who already admire the director may not find a stunning level of insight, and the curious but unindoctrinated would be better served by starting with one his actual films rather than a rundown of them. But there’s a certain satisfaction in a rundown of a career as rich and varied as Linklater’s, not unlike the pleasure of watching a well-edited Oscar tribute reel.
  95. For the Plasma
    Three cheers, then, for Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, whose joint first effort, For The Plasma, ranks among the year’s most singular movies, even as it also ranks among the year’s most painful movies to endure.
  96. Six Days Seven Nights
    Not especially funny, romantic, or exciting.
  97. The Baxter
    That's ultimately the film's fatal flaw: it bumps Showalter's Baxter up to the role of the romantic lead without giving him an equivalent increase in complexity or depth.
  98. The Man with the Iron Fists
    The Man With The Iron Fists has the same advantages of many musical debuts. It's the product of a man who has been storing up ideas, setpieces, characters, and gags for a lifetime, in preparation for the magic moment when he'd be able to unleash his full vision on the big screen.
  99. Love
    Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.
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