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 Polar Express
    As a spectacle, The Polar Express looks remarkable. As a film, however, it's the equivalent of an elaborately wrapped Christmas present containing a nice new pair of socks.
  2. Ray
    As Ray nears its abrupt ending, it veers into camp silliness, complete with a psychedelic freak-out withdrawal sequence straight out of a Roger Corman LSD epic.
  3. The Sea Inside
    When pinned mostly in the man's bedroom, Amenábar's flashier instincts are stifled by a bolted camera and a procession of issue-of-the-week clichés.
  4. Taking Sides
    Taking Sides is really no less simplistic than "Sunshine," but its predecessor succeeded because of its length and scope. Taking Sides stays rooted in one place and one discussion, and never gets anywhere.
  5. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    After a sentimental opening sequence, he (Kang) scarcely lets the film pause to breathe, which dulls its effectiveness.
  6. Thirteen
    Though thirteen too often mistakes hard realism for overheated spectacle, the heightened drama brings out the best in Wood and Hunter, who turn their climactic scene into an actors' workshop, charged with raw emotion. As the film barrels toward the outrageously histrionic, they nearly pull it back from the brink.
  7. Code 46
    Though Robbins acts a little stiff, Morton remains stunning throughout, playing a mixture of her wide-eyed, deeply sensitive characters from "Morvern Callar" and "Minority Report." She suggests worlds within worlds.
  8. Little Black Book
    Casual moviegoers looking for a bubbly romantic comedy with Brittany Murphy will get more than they bargained for in Little Black Book, which builds to a nasty twist that's more Lars von Trier than Meg Ryan.
  9. Open Water
    Writer-director Chris Kentis has dreamed up an ingenious premise, but he botches its execution. Every once in a while, the film stumbles upon a twist that ratchets up the tension, but then haphazardly discards it.
  10. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Takes too long to get going to qualify unequivocally as a good movie, but when Jovovich finally starts kicking zombified ass, it becomes good enough.
  11. Wimbledon
    The perfect movie for 14-year-old girls having a slumber party, and a must for everyone else to avoid.
  12. Touch of Pink
    A tepid variation on the rash of cartoonishly drawn Indian-Anglo culture-clash comedies afflicting both sides of the Atlantic.
  13. 13 Going on 30
    Cheers and many happy returns to Garner as she makes her first starring film role. She's the real deal. But jeers to every other aspect of 13 Going On 30.
  14. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Much of the film feels like watching "Home Alone" and "Mr. Mom" on 12 different TVs at once.
  15. Blade: Trinity
    Swimming in computer-enhanced mayhem and a non-stop hip-hop-and-techno soundtrack, Blade: Trinity might as well come equipped with joysticks attached to the seats, so everyone can play along.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sleepers
    Muddy, confused, and worst of all boring, Sleepers grinds to the preordained halt shared by any over-budgeted epic that lacks the simple necessity of good story.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    Adds up to another prefab youth-culture event and a mediocre movie.
  18. The Chamber
    Even more sad is an embarrassingly shrill performance by Faye Dunaway, and an ending which insults the ability of the audience to watch a movie without having a conclusion spoon-fed to them.
  19. The Relic
    The monster effects, as designed by Stan Winston, are stunners, but after Twister, it should be obvious that it's not the quality of the effects that matter so much as the quality of the film in which they appear.
  20. Mimic
    The latter half, set in the less visited parts of New York's subway system, bogs down considerably, abandoning its hybrid approach and becoming content to simply clone Aliens.
  21. The House of Yes
    Director Mark Waters has done probably the best possible job translating the material to film, and the truly filmic moments work well, but with this dialogue-heavy material, it's like trying to translate Run-DMC lyrics into Old French.
  22. A Time to Kill
    A Time to Kill embodies all that is wrong with Hollywood attempts to address important issues, raising questions of race and justice but refusing to deal with them on anything but the most simplified, manipulative moral terms.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    Not much reason to see this one, because in 1961 Disney made an animated version called 101 Dalmatians, which is better.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Return to Paradise
    Although Vaughn and Heche do a decent job in standard roles, the movie bogs itself down with enough silly plot twists and subplots to effectively dilute the viewers' interest.
  25. Empire Records
    The film exists for its shots of telegenic youngsters busting loose to a bankable soundtrack, and it's the cheesy dialogue, overstuffed plot, and predictable character arcs that come across as superfluous.
  26. Fire
    Fire is designed to provoke questions and spark debate. Mission accomplished, but, despite a heartfelt tone that pervades its every moment, it doesn't do much else.
  27. Step Up 3-D
    The advanced 3-D technology of today meets the mothballed clichés of yesteryear in Step Up 3D.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    While Eclipse’s action highs are higher, its expositional lows are lower, particularly during the numerous scenes featuring Lautner.
  29. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Spinning a handsome Disney adventure out of a videogame is a testament to Bruckheimer’s commercial savvy. The fact that it still isn’t particularly good seems beside the point.
  30. The Back-up Plan
    A film divided against itself. It’s really two movies, one silly and one serious. Too bad neither is particularly compelling.
  31. Beyond the Ocean
    Doesn't have the content to match the form, never cohering into anything more substantial than a glum navel-gazer about a little girl lost, unable to find a permanent home (literally or figuratively) on either side of the Atlantic.
  32. Some Body
    At times approaches the flavor and shapelessness of real life.
  33. Standing by Yourself
    There's too much missing from Josh Koury's documentary Standing By Yourself to call it a great film, but it contains some undeniably riveting, visceral moments.
  34. New Suit
    The sturdy premise delivers little in the way of actual laughs.
  35. Catching Out
    Catching Out could stand to be half an hour longer, which speaks to both its scruffy charm and its frustrating inability to dig beneath the surface.
  36. Risk/Reward
    For all the film's aggressive crosscutting, the individual stories would work just as well apart as together, because they pack less cumulative power when yoked awkwardly into one sweeping statement.
  37. Red Betsy
    Though Burmester and Elliott make able sparring partners, Red Betsy literally succumbs to an on-the-nose staging of Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol,” with the old man cast as the model for Scrooge in a school play.
  38. The Blonds
    Grapples with tough subject matter, and earns a little leeway in its approach.
  39. Wake
    The situation plays out in a haze of shouting and debauchery so excessive that it becomes silly. The movie looks great and sounds great--apart from what the people in it do and say.
  40. I'll Sing for You
    Director Jacques Sarasin lazily relies on a talking-heads/archival-footage approach to tell Traoré's story, doing little to put it in context and assuming a lot more knowledge of Malian history than most viewers possess.
  41. Foreign Sister
    The particulars of her situation are well-imagined, but Wolman's characters remain little more than mouthpieces.
  42. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    An awkward marriage of fairy-tale and social realism.
  43. Ya lyublyu tebya
    The filmmakers have a keen eye for striking compositions, but unlike most advertising, movies have to amount to more than just a succession of vivid images.
  44. Last Dance
    Displays, in all its discomfort and occasional fruitfulness, the trouble inherent in aesthetics by committee.
  45. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    The main problem with The Promised Land is that Jhally and Ratzkoff are eager to foster dissent, but not to invite it into their own movie. Their talking heads sound rehearsed and repetitive, and the righteous anger dissipates without a contrary opinion to provide a ceiling.
  46. Army of One
    By the end, even Goodman seems to have lost interest.
  47. Freak Weather
    Though the whole of Freak Weather is too forced and fitful, significant stretches of the movie hold together. McKenzie gives a magnetic performance.
  48. With Friends Like These...
    Not even amusing cameos from Bill Murray as a freeloading producer and Michael McKean as a proctologist can keep With Friends Like These... from being as minor as the film careers of its two-bit protagonists.
  49. Beyond the Sea
    The stories Pérez-Rey's subjects tell are shocking, even moving. But they're also narrow, limited, and staid, and so is the film that contains them.
  50. David Hockney: The Colors of Music
    A pleasant but fairly dull documentary that's long on affability and taste, but short on human drama and compelling conflict.
  51. Eros
    It's a triptych of erotic-themed short films directed by contemporary giants Wong Kar-wai and Steven Soderbergh, and nonagenarian master Michelangelo Antonioni. But the auteurist feast turns out to be a paltry spread, with one director on autopilot, another playing it safe, and the last apparently working on assignment for the European "Red Shoe Diaries."
  52. Raging Dove
    In the frustrating, underachieving documentary Raging Dove, the filmmakers seem to get shut down every time the film threatens to become interesting.
  53. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    The documentary is fair-minded but vague, and disturbing only when it describes the cat-killing in gruesome detail...Someone should take another crack at this story. Call it "The Art Of Killing Of A Movie."
  54. A Man's Gotta Do
    A fine cast and breezy tone elevate it to exactly the type of adequate time-waster made for intercontinental airplane flights.
  55. Return to the Land of Wonders
    Pachachi doesn't integrate her interviews into any kind of comprehensive portrait of recent Iraq history. They're bunched together randomly, like a collection of vignettes.
  56. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Viewers will either be transported by Honkasalo's somber artistry or begging for someone to stick a gasoline-filled syringe into their veins...As art, 3 Rooms is magnificent, but as a viewing experience, it's almost impossible.
  57. Yat luk che
    Fantasy sequences in which Yu and his friends are thrown into the world of a '70s kung-fu film or melodrama seem like a clever way to evoke the period and bring their story to another plane, but they just end up looking cheesy, spoiled by half-executed effects. "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" this ain't.
  58. Lustre
    Argo's job should only be a minor piece of this Gotham mosaic, but Jones makes the racketeering scenes so familiar that they grate against the rest of the movie.
  59. Cup of My Blood
    Working under a limited budget, Catania stirs up a thick gothic atmosphere and delivers the goods with a certain amount of proficiency, but when professionalism is the best thing a film has going for it, there isn't much else to discuss.
  60. Finding Eleazar
    But compared to great documentaries about the process behind performance-"Last Dance" and "Original Cast Album: Company" spring to mind-Finding Eléazar is too choppy and fussy.
  61. Derailroaded
    Having a Rutgers psychology professor comment on Fischer's general symptoms is downright amateurish. In a documentary about a living subject, conclusions are better drawn through rigorous observation, not explained away in some tidy pop-psychological portraiture.
  62. The Swenkas
    It all feels formal and unreal, the product of high ritual. But it also feels like one of the few rituals they're playing out entirely for themselves rather than for the sake of Rønde's neatly packaged modern fairy tale.
  63. Romántico
    There's nothing extraordinary about mariachi singer Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez, and nothing extraordinary about Mark Becker's documentary profile Romántico.
  64. Stolen Childhoods
    Documentaries like Stolen Childhoods present an uncomfortable dilemma for anyone who cares how movies are made: They have virtually no aesthetic value, but compensate with unimpeachable social worth.
  65. Full of It
    Despite a novel premise and an appealing, energetic cast, Full Of It seldom finds magic in its supernatural whimsy.
  66. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
    Truth be told, Sachiko Hanai is probably an accomplished "pink film"; just don't mistake it for something classier.
  67. Day Night Day Night
    Loktev's efforts to universalize this story by avoiding specifics ends up making Day Night Day Night broad and blank, reducing the lead character to one more generic nutcase for us to fear and pity.
  68. Pierrepoint
    Pierrepoint is handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.
  69. El cantante
    Anthony delivers a respectable performance, but his character never comes into sharp focus. Consequently, Lavoe emerges as a supporting character in his own story.
  70. Diminished Capacity
    Broderick, Alda, and Madsen are all fine--and Alda has some poignant moments as he realizes the implications of his forgetfulness--but their presence in a movie like this reaffirms its conventionality.
  71. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    The music isn't much of a relief either, mostly because Young keeps cutting away from the performances.
  72. Forgiveness
    Moshonov's capering, wheedling, and stagey monologuing become deeply taxing, and so does the conclusion, which makes more sense as metaphor than narrative.
  73. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    There's little here that's especially cage-rattling or side-splitting. Ultimately, Allah only made these guys mildly likable.
  74. Brothers at War
    It’s practically a feature-length infomercial for the military.
  75. Under Our Skin
    Well-produced and engaging, but it’s also anecdotal and conspiratorial, and damnably non-confrontational.
  76. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    Like "Art & Copy," Ten9Eight is blindingly slick, with a glossy visual aesthetic more rooted in music videos and commercials than cinéma vérité.
  77. 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.
  78. The Greatest
    It’s when the small moments become large ones that Feste overreaches and the shaky performances don’t bail her out.
  79. The City of Your Final Destination
    It’s a frustratingly oblique film where few events connect, and fewer moments matter.
  80. Oceans
    It comes to American theaters saddled with narration by Pierce Brosnan, who purrs through the gratingly vague script like the world’s plummiest old half-drunken uncle.
  81. Harry Brown
    There's a deceptive gravitas to the British vigilante thriller Harry Brown that some are bound to mistake for class--or even truth--in the way it grapples with one man's violent stand against societal decay. Much of that is owed to Michael Caine, an actor of such rare dignity and stature that audiences are naturally willing to follow him anywhere, including into the heart of truly risible material.
  82. Mercy
    With Glenn offscreen for huge sections of the film, Mercy devolves into yet another navel-gazing drama about a glib cad redeemed by the love of a good woman.
  83. Letters to Juliet
    If well done, a film like Letters To Juliet should need no surprises. But it does need more than the postcard-ready vistas against which director Gary Winick (13 Going On 30) frames much of the action.
  84. Just Wright
    With her (Latifah), Just Wright feels hampered by arbitrary contrivances; without her, it wouldn't be enough movie to exist at all.
  85. Predators
    The Predator series needed a shot of vitality, not another workmanlike go-around. SSDP: Same shit, different planet.
  86. Babies
    If anything, blame the kids: They’re all adorable, roly-poly delights, but the first year of life has its natural limitations.
  87. Looking for Eric
    Loach becomes his own pale imitator with Looking For Eric, a wispy little comedy that uses fantasy to gloss over even the darkest and most intractable problems.
  88. Cyrus
    Once again with the Duplasses, there just isn't enough of anything: not enough funny lines, not enough variation of mood, not enough plot. If these guys were students, Cyrus might merit a "promising." But this is their third movie. It's time for them to stop turning in first drafts.
  89. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    The movie's saving grace is its performances.
  90. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The first time around, Wall Street felt like a warning about the perils of excess just as excess started to exact its toll. This one's little more than a reminder that we all got, and remain, screwed. Noted.
  91. You Again
    Even the best performers can only do so much to elevate mediocre material. In the long run, good or bad, the material always wins.
  92. Stolen
    Stolen is mildly engaging, inasmuch as it poses a riddle and makes the audience wait for the answer, in the classic mystery mode.
  93. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    More disappointingly, the entire cast seems less committed than they were the first time out.
  94. Kisses
    Kisses is dreary to a fault. It looks fantastic, with its shadowy Dublin alleys illuminated by the heroes' light-up Heelys. But the writing doesn't have that same glow.
  95. Charlie St. Cloud
    The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.
  96. Middle Men
    Like Ribisi and Macht's miniature porn empire, Gallo's mildly diverting but overstuffed, underdeveloped opus could use the cinematic equivalent of a fix-it man like Wilson's character to transform its frenetic jumble of subplots and sleazy characters into a cohesive, satisfying whole.
  97. The Wildest Dream
    Given the subject matter, the answer to "Why watch this doc?" should be "Because it is fantastic." But Geffen, like Everest, will have to settle for "Because it is there."
  98. Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
  99. Mao's Last Dancer
    It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.
  100. Legendary
    It does strive for substance and meaning in a way that gives it an unmistakable Barton Fink feeling, if nothing close to a Barton Fink sensibility.
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