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. Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen
    Shou focuses on a meaty subject, and he has an insider's access to the world he's exploring. But his behind-the-scenes film doesn't spend nearly enough time behind the scenes.
  2. Afternoon Delight
    Alas, the film, which had at worst seemed unfocused (not a cardinal sin for a comedy), takes a bizarrely reactionary turn in the homestretch, undermining all of the goodwill Hahn had accumulated up to that point and turning her character into detestable yuppie scum.
  3. Skiptrace
    Knoxville isn’t as starry a Hollywood foil to his co-star’s iconic stoicism as either Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson, but playing a jackass is right in his wheelhouse and in one action set piece, he’s very funny as a kind of tightly bound human prop.
  4. Elevation
    None of the actors do much with the uninspired material, but perhaps Baccarin is the most enjoyable to watch as she grumbles in monotone about how she wants to kill herself and handily espouses monster factoids from her diligent research as a former Caltech professor.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mirror Has Two Faces
    The problem with The Mirror Has Two Faces isn't Streisand's well-documented ego, or the movie's indirect, probably unintentional message that beauty makes all the difference when it comes to who loves you and why. It's that, at 130 minutes, it's long and plodding, with far too many cliches—the age-old spit-take scene, and so on—and inexplicable plot points.
  6. Tombstone
    Tombstone remains a shamelessly entertaining movie, filled with lively turns from virtually every appropriate actor not working on the Costner version.
  7. Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever
    Bornedal keeps his surprises out of sight and boredom out of mind, delivering shocking payoffs that supplement the dominant plotline about Martin’s everlasting demons.
  8. War Story
    Jackson’s technique is undercut, if only a little, by story and characters that sometimes cross the line from minimalist to just plain underdeveloped. Yet as a formal exercise that gives Keener the space to really inhabit her character, War Story is effective.
  9. Tell It to the Bees
    What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Lolo
    The film is at its best when its central trio fumbles around the same circle of hell they’ve obliviously created for themselves, making the best of a situation that is much worse than they could ever imagine.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Septien
    The setup and storyline are absurd, but the angst underneath is as earnest as a campfire confession.
  12. Bloodsucking Bastards
    So while this is all rather dumb, it’s dumb fun, and aside from some incongruous soundtrack choices—the credits music encourages us to “burn down the disco,” which, sure, but during office hours?—director Brian James O’Connell plays all of his tonal elements right, which is to say fast-paced; goofy; and very, very bloody.
  13. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    That’s always been a part of Ferrell’s work — his understanding of American mediocrity, and his delight in poking at its oblivious limitations. Eurovision both softens and expands his worldview, allowing him to indulge some small-town-dreamer pathos without getting into hokey Americana. If he’s playing the hits, he’s starting to interpret them with style.
  14. Zus & zo
    Fast-paced, and entertaining in a soapy way, but plot demands require almost all of the dialogue to be flatly descriptive.
  15. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    The pleasure to be derived from watching a loopy Australian risk life and limb is not to be dismissed or underrated, but Collision Course proves that that guilty pleasure, no matter how potent, just isn't a solid basis for a film.
  16. 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.
  17. Face
    Well-intentioned but muddled, Face groans under the weight of its earnest ambition.
  18. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    Unlike the elliptical, often explanation-free "The Grudge," Marebito is wordy to the extreme. Konaka's near-constant narration underlines every point the movie is trying to make, ruminating bluntly on the meaning of fear, and how we suck on media violence like, yep, vampires.
  19. Going in Style
    It’s probably worth noting that the whippersnapper behind the camera is none other than one-time sitcom star and indie darling Zach Braff. Did he owe someone a favor, or is this his attempt to break into the studio system he scorned with his last feature, the gooey Kickstarted passion project "Wish I Was Here"?
  20. Passenger 57
    A film whose each subsequent plot turn makes less sense than the last, Passenger 57 is just about the epitome of clichéd 1990s action nonsense—and as such, it’s the perfect vehicle for Wesley Snipes and his particular brand of over-the-top, don’t-tread-on-me heroism.
  21. Prom
    It's the sort of film Robert Altman might have made if he cut his teeth working for The Disney Channel.
  22. The Zero Theorem
    If only this imaginative environment were populated with a single compelling character or stimulating idea, rather than serving as busy distraction from the narrative tedium.
  23. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    It’s everything and nothing at once.
  24. Racer and the Jailbird
    Despite Bibi’s need for speed, Racer And The Jailbird sputters more than it guns.
  25. The Guilt Trip
    Though intermittently bathed in a halo of golden light and desired by at least one handsome, distinguished older man with a thing for mature women with healthy appetites, Streisand in The Guilt Trip is largely devoid of her famous vanity and narcissism.
  26. Summering
    Summering may be a breezy little trip through the nostalgia of youth, but its stabs at deeper meaning are woefully immature.
  27. American Ultra
    American Ultra is one of those geeky genre mishmashes that’s very clever about being dumb.
  28. Meet Cute
    There aren’t any clever moments, just a parade of clichés you’ve seen in many other indie romances.
  29. Two for the Money
    For all its swaggering bravado, Pacino's turn in Two For The Money is the reverse image of his "Devil's Advocate" character: Instead of the omniscient, all-powerful operator he presents himself as, he's a gambler grasping at a lifestyle that's always just beyond his means.
  30. Jungle Cruise
    Absent cleverness, Collet-Serra offers some comfort for weary eyes, like the flashes of silent black-and-white footage of the stars shot with Lily’s newfangled movie camera. At the risk of sounding like a critic from a way-old demographic, Jungle Cruise works best when it leans in this more old-fashioned direction.
  31. Management
    Like its protagonist, Management is dopey and impractical, but strangely winning all the same.
  32. The Boss Baby
    Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.
  33. Joan of Arc
    Less intended, perhaps, is the fact that a viewer may find themselves identifying with one of Joan’s ecclesiastical jurors, who insists at every opportunity that his colleagues stop wasting their breath and burn her already. He’s right in the sense that the church court is just dragging its feet to a foregone conclusion. In its own way, so is the film.
  34. Nothing Like the Holidays
    Take a cue from Guzmán, who serves as a kind of court jester, bouncing in and out of scenes in a one-man quest to bring levity to the occasion. The movie could stand to have more of his Christmas cheer; instead, it's a recast "Family Stone."
  35. Murder by Numbers
    A moralizing thriller so listless that it plays out like a game of mouse and mouse.
  36. 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.
  37. Breakup at a Wedding
    Any rooting interest in the central lovers evaporates, as both seem so terminally stupid that the thought of them potentially having children together is frightening. Maybe their divorce proceedings will be hilarious.
  38. Time Lapse
    Time Lapse provokes thought, but mostly in spite of itself.
  39. The Night Eats the World
    In the end, though, it’s the very concepts that make The Night Eats The World sound insufferably pretentious on paper — namely, its high-minded ideas and emphasis on small moments — that tip the film toward intriguing rather than, well, zombifying.
  40. Shoplifters of the World
    Shoplifters Of The World seems intended as a love letter to The Smiths, but in trying to convey the British band’s importance, it comes across more like fan fiction—too reference-heavy for a general audience, too shallow for those already in the know.
  41. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry.
  42. Madea Goes to Jail
    Madea's physical comedy is loud enough to wake the dead, but its drama is just as excessive. In a neat bit of economy, Perry stages a wedding that doubles as a breakup, and triples as the villain's crowd-pleasing comeuppance. Now that is some serious multitasking.
  43. How About You ...
    Nothing in How About You is the least bit surprising; the film hits its marks with dreary precision.
  44. Boundaries
    It’s supposed to be evocative, but in many scenes the characters just look dim and overly backlit, to the point of obscuring the actors’ expressiveness. There might be another metaphor in there somewhere.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love in the Villa
    Admittedly, this film is to romantic comedies what Olive Garden is to Italian cuisine. But like a bowl of pasta the size of your head and unlimited breadsticks, sometimes copious portions of something completely straightforward manages to deliver exactly the experience you want.
  46. Shelter
    The pulp and action are sold by Statham with the resigned competence of a factory worker clocking in for a shift, and Breathnach’s over-eager performance is balanced out by her expressive face. They’re a decent team to watch go through the motions, running through underworld contacts and old pals who owe one last favor.
  47. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves.
  48. Trash
    But while once upon a time Daldry made a very good movie like "Billy Elliot", here he lets what should’ve been an efficient little thriller get stymied by an excess of style, and the weight of self-importance.
  49. After the Wedding
    Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Whatever emotional heft the pic may aim to harness is lost amid glib jokes, overly complicated mythic lore, and ultimately, pat platitudes about embracing who you were always meant to be.
  51. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    Fur is that rare movie that's TOO understated, so quiet and deliberate that it effectively buries consuming passions.
  52. Champions
    Harrelson is enjoyable as always, and the rest of the cast delivers, but the film is too warm, fuzzy, predictable, and by the numbers to be anything more than a pleasant diversion that will vanish from your mind by the time you leave the multiplex.
  53. The Campaign
    Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.
  54. My Policeman
    Instead of a classic tragic romance, it ends up being a turgid, airless concoction. Styles’ fans might find something to admire since they’ll get to gaze at their idol. But the rest of us should avoid looking.
  55. Ticket to Paradise
    It’s as if everyone made this movie about the joy of being on vacation—while also taking one.
  56. Storytelling
    It would be tempting to call Storytelling a narrow and simplistic examination of the creative process, if only Solondz weren't so quick to agree.
  57. Garage Days
    Proyas is a veteran music-video director, and for its first half the film feels like one long video, albeit in a good way. He initially lets music and images tell his story rather than words, but in its second half, Garage Days succumbs to its overreaching, convoluted plot.
  58. 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.
  59. 3 from Hell
    In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.
  60. The Island
    An overblown science-fiction epic in which ostensibly unthinking, unfeeling stem-cell-like entities not only think and feel, but look and act like glamorous movie stars.
  61. Lottery Ticket
    Lottery Ticket gets far on the strength of its star's charisma and a likeable tone.
  62. The Ten
    The early, explosively funny skits and a loose, engagingly adventurous spirit are enough to ensure this uneven but often delightful project the cult fame that accompanies pretty much everything associated with Stella mainstay Wain.
  63. Look
    Aside from a smattering of irony and a resolution for one of the storylines, the security cameras aren't really threaded into Look's essential purpose. If the idea is that we're always being watched, why does it seem that in this movie, no one's really paying attention?
  64. You People
    For the first half-hour, Netflix has a high-concept hit on its hands. Pause it there, and imagine the rest—you won’t do any worse than Barris and Hill’s script at conceiving an ending.
  65. Blast from the Past
    The first 20 minutes of Blast From The Past, in which the film actually does something with its central concept, aren't that bad.
  66. Child of God
    As a McCarthy adaptation, it’s an abject failure; as a piece of art - damaged trash, it occasionally delivers the requisite squirms. Visually and thematically, it has less in common with "No Country For Old Men" or "The Counselor" than with ’90s shot-on-VHS gonzo efforts like "Red Spirit Lake."
  67. My Super Ex-Girlfriend
    Confusing gender issues like the ones dredged up in Ex-Girlfriend call to mind another Reitman dud, the pregnant-Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy "Junior," and the sophistication level has only slightly improved since then.
  68. Step Up 2: The Streets
    The central romance is terminally bland, while Evigan's woozy family melodrama seems borrowed from countless superior dance movies.
  69. Welcome to the Rileys
    The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.
  70. As I Lay Dying
    Like Franco’s other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation—interesting, but only in context.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely Molly
    Lovely Molly is a portrait of either spiraling madness or a haunting, and it deftly handles the slow erosion of its title character's consciousness. Landing somewhere between "Repulsion" and "Paranormal Activity," it keeps the jump scares to a minimum and allows its formidable lead performance to be its best special effect.
  72. Home on the Range
    A sweet, raucously funny, comic Western that corrects a glaring historical injustice by finally surveying the Old West through the eyes of cows rather than cowboys.
  73. Straight-Jacket
    Loses its sass too quickly.
  74. The Case for Christ
    The Case For Christ is pretty slow going, tedious rather than offensive, with Strobel repeatedly whiteboarding out the evidence as callback voice-overs add up all the pieces until he’s convinced. “All right, God,” he finally says. “You win.”
  75. Poseidon
    "Titanic" without the metaphors, the class-consciousness, the love story, or anything resembling a theme, Poseidon invests so little in its screenplay that it might as well be an episode of "The Love Boat" gone horribly awry.
  76. Now You See Me
    Now You See Me, which is essentially an "Ocean’s" movie recast with illusionists, demands a kind of childlike fascination with swindles, and a willingness to be hoodwinked along with the characters. Walk in with those expectations and it won’t be hard to see the appeal of this ludicrous but spirited caper, which has nearly as many rug-pulls as game movie stars.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Wide Awake
    The interest-generating theme of a boy coping with loss is made top-heavy with cuteness, causing it to collapse a quarter of the way through Wide Awake, never to recover.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Airport 1975
    Where to begin with this accidental comic classic, which gives its direct descendant—the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker parody Airplane!, effectively the nail-in-the-coffin of the ’70s disaster movie cycle—some very real competition in the guffaw department?
  79. Dreamland
    In the end, Dreamland never bothers to decide whether it’s trying to be an elegiac, philosophical head trip or an over-the-top action thriller.
  80. The Other Boleyn Girl
    The film looks terrific, all Vermeer-style light/dark interplay and sleek design. And Portman is fantastic as the tempestuous Anne.
  81. 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.
  82. Dark Skies
    Good horror films are imprinted by the fears and anxieties of the day, converting real-life atrocities into abstracted scares; mediocre ones are imprinted, too, but with trends and commercial formulas. If Dark Skies resurfaced on TV or brain implant 20 or 30 years from now, horror fans would be able to carbon-date the film almost to the month.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The American Society of Magical Negroes
    A fatal lack of consequence for the film’s world or characters prevents it from ever deepening its initial premise, or unifying the sum of its disparate parts.
  84. 28 Hotel Rooms
    In its own small way, by documenting the petty panic of two people who want to be together but are otherwise entangled, 28 Hotel Rooms is often masterful.
  85. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    Once the action shifts to the dead-eyed denizens of Santa Mira, the remote town that Silver Shamrock calls home, the film becomes a sly and creepy indictment of corporate engineering. It’s not what Halloween fans wanted—and Wallace rubs it in by showing a couple of clips from the original film on TV—but take the Halloween part away and Season Of The Witch is a standalone oddity worth considering on its own terms.
  86. A Dog's Way Home
    This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Elles
    Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger.
  88. Cowboys & Aliens
    You want cowboys and aliens in the same movie? This one's for you. If you want anything beyond what the title promises, look elsewhere. And that means even anything resembling a clever mash-up of established genres.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 28, 2011
  89. The Purge: Anarchy
    Retains the original’s premise and politics, but actually puts them to use.
  90. Blonde
    What Ana de Armas does in Blonde is nothing short of transformative, but unfortunately, the film will likely do little to change the way people see Marilyn Monroe—once again, a victim of people doing what they think is best for her, perhaps with consent but certainly not enough consideration.
  91. The Four Feathers
    Ledger is a charismatic, conflicted hero who internalizes his character's shame and anguish to powerful effect. Wes Bentley is similarly strong as Ledger's best friend turned romantic rival, and Kapur makes the most of Africa's breathtaking desert, crafting a gorgeous spectacle that's at once stately and hyper-real.
  92. Alfie
    Caine played Alfie as an incorrigible S.O.B. who at least made for good company. Law makes him a delicate boy with self-control problems who can't stop talking, and his charm runs out long before the film ends.
  93. Things Heard & Seen
    Like many Netflix originals, Things Heard And Seen is the cinematic equivalent of a mass-market paperback, neither good enough to haunt the viewer nor bad enough to haunt the résumés of its cast and crew.
  94. The Mighty Macs
    There must have been a reason why the real-life Rush could do so much with seemingly so little, but The Mighty Macs never captures it. It lets canned inspiration provide the uplift, instead of something more tangible.
  95. Black Christmas
    The latest Black Christmas reboot understands the frustrations and lived horrors of modern sexual politics, but stumbles over its scares and the finer points of its feminist messaging.
  96. Cassandra's Dream
    Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he's made this movie before, but better.
  97. Chloe
    It all goes awry in the end, but for a good stretch, Chloe neatly fixes Egoyan’s career-long obsessions with identity and communication to the familiar framework of the erotic thriller.
  98. Wilson
    It’s a gamble, building a comedy around a character this boorish.
  99. Don't Let Go
    What keeps Don’t Let Go watchable is, ironically, its predictability: the cop-movie clichés, the shootouts, the mishandled evidence, the bargain-bin twists.
  100. Escape Plan
    Though this movie can’t match the formal qualities that made the pair’s most iconic films work, it goes a long way toward recapturing their sense of cheesy fun.
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