The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. The Yellow Handkerchief
    It’s nice to see a film unafraid to be quiet and sensitive, but one good gust of coastal breeze would blow this one away.
  2. The Runaways
    They're now the first major all-girl punk band to inspire a bleary, excessive, and altogether mediocre big-screen biography.
  3. Clash of the Titans
    Modestly entertaining by the low standards of spring blockbusters. As with "Transporter 2" and "The Incredible Hulk," Leterrier aims no higher than competence and achieves just that.
  4. Around the Bend
    There are good ideas in Around The Bend, but they're presented in outline form, as the bare, dry bones of what could have been a living body.
  5. Die Another Day
    The many shots of characters operating devices with remote controls will do little to quiet the complaints that the films have started to resemble video games, and the same can be said of the proliferating digital effects.
  6. Mule Skinner Blues
    Comes uncomfortably close to mocking these unlikely filmmakers, raising questions about its director's intentions and his respect for the subjects' humanity.
  7. Slap Her... She's French
    Mayron tries for a junior-league "All About Eve," but that backfires horribly, not least because her diabolical Eve (Perabo) is more charismatic and imaginative than her heroine.
  8. Ordinary Sinner
    In spite of a little bit of sex and a lot of strong profanity, Ordinary Sinner is pretty reminiscent of an old Afterschool Special.
  9. Painted Fire
    In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The School of Flesh
    Unfortunately, contrary to the provocative title, the results are not terribly interesting. While the acting is excellent and the filmmaking exquisite, The School Of Flesh itself is yet another dry example of l'amour fou.
  11. 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.
  12. Crop Circles: Quest for Truth
    The film remains frustratingly focused on uncontextualized individual events rather than the phenomenon as a whole, and as such, it rapidly becomes redundant in its grainy, washed-out digital-video images of excited people poking at bent plants, or studying and manipulating computer-generated images.
  13. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie's heart is clearly in the right place -- but the Thornberry family's grotesquely huge heads, jutting teeth, stick limbs, and mismatched bodies look even more improbable and unpleasant on the big screen than they do on their TV show.
  14. Suddenly
    Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.
  15. DysFunktional Family
    If its star were more consistently funny, it might have worked, but the film opens with a string of dreadful Sept. 11 gags and takes a while to recover.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Voice
    Though it's got some funny one-liners, sight gags, and Blethyn's over-the-top histrionics, Little Voice is often painfully dramatic, right down to its final mother-daughter confrontation.
  17. Ha-Hesder
    Ultimately, writer-director Joseph Cedar has created a film that resembles a subtitled very special episode of "JAG."
  18. Escaflowne: The Movie
    The film's life-affirming fable offers a richer metaphorical subtext than Vision's intricate coming-of-age soap opera. Unfortunately, clumsy dialogue, characterization, and exposition interfere with that subtext.
  19. Returning Mickey Stern
    Sports broad, sitcom-ish performances and a surprising amount of sweetness and wisdom.
  20. The Triumph of Love
    Shaw and Kingsley both create crisp, comic performances, but Sorvino remains a problem throughout. Her physical transformation falls short of the "Boys Don't Cry" standard, to put it mildly.
  21. Food of Love
    A reserved coming-of-age story that overcomes flat acting and one-dimensional scene-building thanks to its lively plot.
  22. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.
  23. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    On the whole, the filmmakers hold too much to the text, and too often employ the smugly knowing, self-righteous tone typical of British telejournalism.
  24. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    Where the too-rarefied style and the too-simple substance meet, a compromise is reached, and something uniquely haunting is formed.
  25. Maelstrom
    For a movie about identity to have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the bloody talking fishes.
  26. Lucky Break
    The big musical setpiece, rife with possibilities for humor and uplift, needed to be funnier and more energetic than the half-hearted lyrics and choreography bother to muster.
  27. Bad Company
    Company almost seems like the product of a post-Sept. 11 world. Like a cartoon version of a real threat, the villains are terrorists of a non-specific nationality with an ill-defined anti-American agenda and a tendency to spout complaints too clichéd to take seriously.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    20 Dates
    Fact or fiction, it's still fun, if never really compelling.
  29. Secret Ballot
    Pleasing low-key comedy.
  30. City of Ghosts
    Has enough atmosphere for three films, enough colorful grotesques for several more, and not enough of a script for one.
  31. War Photographer
    The scenes of death, starvation, and destruction are affecting, but they don't say much about the actual subject of the film.
  32. Half Past Dead
    So audaciously bad it's good, which is about as close to quality as Seagal is likely to get these days.
  33. The Nazi Officer's Wife
    Well-crafted but frustratingly superficial documentary.
  34. Where's the Party Yaar?
    Though harmless and reasonably good-natured, Where's The Party Yaar? ("yaar" translates as "dude") doesn't add many novel touches to its predictable formula, except for a couple of limp nods to Bollywood song-and-dance numbers.
  35. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.
  36. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The fact that the story makes sense at all remains Coppola and his butchers' sole achievement.
  37. Assassination Tango
    A supremely unhurried filmmaker, Duvall lets the story meander sleepily en route to a conclusion as ho-hum as everything preceding it.
  38. Revolution #9
    Though woefully oblique and underdeveloped, writer-director Tim McCann's Revolution #9 attempts the difficult task of burrowing into the fractured mind of a modern man who loses his grip on reality.
  39. Maid in Manhattan
    Wang loses himself in an old-fashioned script that tries to recall the classic screwball ensembles of Golden Age Hollywood, but lacks the cascading wit to pull it off.
  40. Wendigo
    A skillfully acted and psychologically well-crafted but ultimately disappointing thriller.
  41. Margarita Happy Hour
    The trouble is that while Chaiken's community is nuanced, it's not exactly a warm, inviting place to spend time. It's dingy and dismal, and though not exactly humorless, Margarita Happy Hour misses many chances to be funny, at times when a laugh or two would open the picture up.
  42. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    Offers plenty of eye candy, if little else. Ultimately, the film is clearly superior to its predecessor, but that's mostly because the first Tomb Raider left so much room for improvement.
  43. Mondays in the Sun
    Fortunately, no one seems to have clued Bardem in on the game plan, and the fierceness and complexity he brings to his role nearly saves Mondays In The Sun.
  44. Cinemania
    A voyeuristic look at voyeurs, Cinemania never seems sure whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. Instead, the film just seems intent on depicting its subjects as lovable kooks, a reductive portrayal that does little to acknowledge the desperation and loneliness that permeates every frame.
  45. A Perfect Murder
    Andrew Davis ("The Fugitive," "Steal Big Steal Little") has made a technically competent thriller that's not only thrill-less, but dull.
  46. The Medallion
    Though haphazardly put together, The Medallion stays fairly entertaining until it kills Chan off and resurrects him as an immortal being.
  47. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    It works for a little while, but an Irons-narrated slideshow of the region would have worked just as well.
  48. Collateral Damage
    In a way, Collateral Damage is redeemed by its implausibility, because the closer it comes to reality, the more disturbing it gets. For once, viewers have reason to be grateful for having their intelligence insulted.
  49. Two Weeks Notice
    Lawrence is fortunate to have appealing pros like Grant and Bullock around to bail him out with romantic chemistry and enough crisply delivered one-liners to survive the barren stretches of script.
  50. Jet Lag
    In Jet Lag, Jean Reno is pressed into leading-man duty, with depressingly mediocre results.
  51. The Sum of All Fears
    At once too real for escapism and too ridiculous for a credible espionage thriller, The Sum Of All Fears unfolds like a cruel joke and treats imagined human tragedy as the punchline.
  52. 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.
  53. Sylvia
    In spite of Frieda Hughes' objections, a few snippets of Plath's poetry slip into Sylvia, but they don't do the movie any favors--they just add more weight to a story that already buckles at the knees.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Gingerbread Man
    All accusatory fingers should be pointed at director Robert Altman, who further drains his reputation surplus with this unoriginal and uninteresting piece of exploitation.
  55. Mystery Men
    The characters are funny and the cast's characterizations right on, but the movie repeatedly lets them down.
  56. 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.
  57. Boat Trip
    Has an agreeable air of anything-goes vulgarity, which is so transcendentally idiotic that it's impossible to tell whether the film is a brilliant, deadpan parody of raunchy lowbrow farces from the '70s and '80s, or one of the stupidest, most regressive films ever made. Or, more likely, it's a little of both.
  58. My Life Without Me
    Asks for sympathy for deplorable behavior.
  59. 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.
  60. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed.
  61. Real Women Have Curves
    One of the not-so-nice qualities of Real Women Have Curves is that it occasionally is as preachy as its title suggests.
  62. One Hour Photo
    Has a clean, antiseptic chilliness reminiscent of a Kubrick film. But too often, the director's stark visuals underline the naked simplicity of his story and make his picture of the suburbs seem hopelessly generic.
  63. 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.
  64. Passionada
    Milos and Rossum are like Iberian "Gilmore Girls," only with an ocean view and without the clever dialogue.
  65. 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.
  66. Like Mike
    Weirdly earnest and earnestly weird.
  67. Head of State
    Offers a smattering of big laughs and an overall tone of ramshackle likability, but considering Rock's talent and the film's potential for smart satire, Head Of State registers as a somewhat wasted opportunity.
  68. Nowhere in Africa
    With sumptuous widescreen photography and a pounding world-music score, the film makes for an absorbing travelogue at best, as pretty as a picture book and just as flat on the surface.
  69. Hey, Happy!
    Like its characters, Hey, Happy! is more comfortable with music, images, and rhythms than words, but unlike raves, narrative films generally need dialogue, and whenever the characters open their mouths, the movie crawls to a halt. Even at 75 minutes, it seems less like a party than an endurance test.
  70. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Broomfield's documentaries present life on the fringes as one long, sick joke. The joke still works, but in Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, it leaves a bitter aftertaste.
  71. Hey Arnold! The Movie
    Nothing about Hey Arnold! The Movie cries out for the big-screen treatment, but it at least makes the transition from television to film with its charm intact.
  72. Men in Black II
    None of it sticks, but with the door left open for a third Men In Black movie, the one advantage of forgetting everything is not knowing exactly what's coming two summers from now.
  73. Below
    Twohy and co-screenwriters Darren Aronofsky and Lucas Sussman don't show their hand until late in the film, but by that time, Below has grown slack and silly.
  74. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    If her adoring public doesn't mind paying for the same movie twice, Legally Blonde 2 stands to leave her star power unquestioned.
  75. All My Loved Ones
    A situation of such inherent drama only suffers from the director's attempts to intensify it, and eventually, the scenes of professional and personal rejection begin to suffer from an overabundance of pathos.
  76. Confidence
    Confidence doesn't provide anything substantial to latch on to: Its twists and turns aren't founded on the trust needed to pull them off.
  77. The Scorpion King
    Prototypical summer-movie fare, designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten all at once.
  78. Saints and Sinners
    While Saints And Sinners will strike some as a refreshingly even-toned social study, it's also a documentary heavy on talking heads and low on real drama. It's beautifully shot and deeply felt, but, for the most part, hearing a description of the film is as good as watching it.
  79. Duplex
    Looks and sounds like a black comedy, but by the time DeVito reaches the cutesy, nonsensical ending, he's lost the will to follow through on it.
  80. The Trip
    It doesn't help that Sullivan has twice as much screen time and half as much charisma as Braun.
  81. The Siege
    As a nail-biting thriller, The Siege is too confusing, and as a thought-provoking social drama, too confused.
  82. 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.
  83. Bukowski: Born into This
    Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    U.S. Marshals
    It isn't so much a bad action movie as a symptom of the greater problem with most action movies: Audiences tire of sitting through the same fitful, unfulfilling formula, no matter how much terse language and gunfire is tossed in.
  85. Amen.
    Amen should be a powderkeg of a movie, yet the urgency and force that defined Costa-Gavras' earlier work has been drained away, along with his invigorating newsreel craft.
  86. The Statement
    In Jewison's hands, this cat-and-mouse game plays like third-rate John Le Carré, treading lethargically over high-minded intrigue that mixes fact, fiction, and unlikely speculation in dubious relation to the historical record.
  87. Out of Time
    The two of them (Washington/Mendez) together, playing police-procedural dodgeball, make for a good movie. Too bad there are other people on the team, and that the pre-game show runs so long.
  88. American Chai
    The ethnicity of its leads is the only novel aspect of an otherwise bland exercise.
  89. The Mummy
    Tries for that series' breezy matinee atmosphere but the results turn out far too forced.
  90. Horns and Halos
    Isn't a particularly well-assembled documentary, but the queasy, hypnotic power of its story and subjects makes its technical shortcomings forgivable.
  91. The Bread, My Sweet
    Though The Bread, My Sweet is never even a little bit better than this description makes it sound, writer-director Melissa Martin's stagy, unattractive-looking film should at least get credit for going all the way with its manipulation.
  92. Word Wars
    Ultimately as fascinating as it is frustrating.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    It helps that Myers has Powers down pat. Still, the need to parody "Casino Royale" could have been taken care of in an eight-minute TV skit; instead, we're given nearly 90 minutes of someone else's party.
  94. My Mother Likes Women
    Zips along on smooth formula plotting and some energetic performances, but its farcical elements have the tepid rhythm of a bad situation comedy, with silly misunderstandings and embarrassing moments that could have easily been avoided.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    There's really no bad performance by the great English actress Judi Dench, but this romanticized Victorian historical drama treads close.
  96. Picture Perfect
    Though "extremely mediocre" may seem like an oxymoron, no phrase better defines Picture Perfect. Aside from wearing, with visual discomfort, a series of absurdly revealing dresses, Aniston does little to distance herself from her "Friends" persona with this slightly less likable character.
  97. Hotel
    Until he finds a style to better communicate ideas or emotions, Figgis' plans to reinvent cinema will have to go back to the drawing board.
  98. Wild Things
    The film almost redeems itself with what may be the longest, most elaborate post-film/pre-credits sequence in film history, but it will still disappoint anyone expecting more than watchable trash.
  99. Hollywood Ending
    The best thing about the movie is its premise: It's a good idea, taken from before Allen's recent losing streak, but it's stretched too thin for its own good.
  100. Big Trouble
    It's a tribute to the film's goofy, inconsequential charm that it's still possible to laugh as someone sneaks a bomb past airport security.
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