The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Drawing Restraint 9
    It's hard to shake the sense that there's less here than meets the eye, but what meets the eye burns with a rare intensity.
  2. Inside Man
    With juicy supporting roles for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe as Washington's fellow officers, the film works best when the characters are just sitting back and shooting the breeze, which is what they're doing much of the time. Here, puzzling out a robbery is more fun than stopping it.
  3. Stay Alive
    A laughable would-be fright-fest that's as strikingly inept as a Boll movie, but nowhere near as much guilty fun.
  4. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    Mermin presents all this without editorial comment, and her film would be worth watching if only for its look at a profound culture-clash. But it goes one better, and delves into one of those clashing cultures, capturing it in a moment of change that goes far beyond one beauty academy's superficial concerns.
  5. Lonesome Jim
    It finds some fine comedic moments when it stops focusing on Affleck's never-ending angst and starts exploring small-town oddness.
  6. L'Enfant (The Child)
    L'Enfant is intended as a pointed critique of pop culture's celebration of arrested adolescence. The title could refer to Renier's baby, Renier himself, or even the gang of schoolboy robbers that he's gathered around himself.
  7. Stoned
    Apart from Considine, the actors all deliver superficial performances beneath several layers of slathered-on Summer Of Love drag, and Woolley's use of multiple film stocks and flash-cut editing jumbles together a bunch of '60s filmmaking clichés without putting them to any particular use.
  8. Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
    Laughing at this turkey might not necessarily make you a redneck, but it sure does make you easily amused.
  9. American Gun
    The Sutherland segments are the most bothersome, because they never really reach a resolution, and because they're betrayed by Avelino's uni-faceted approach.
    • The A.V. Club
  10. V for Vendetta
    Mostly, it's content to remain a compelling, visually striking political mystery with some big ideas woven into it--subversive notions about integrity, liberty, and political change.
  11. Find Me Guilty
    A new courtroom comedy that finds Diesel chewing scenery in a role originally intended, and seemingly custom-made, for Joe Pesci.
  12. She's the Man
    Bynes appears in practically every scene, and the film seems to have been designed as a showcase for her comedic skills, which she apparently left behind in the trailer.
  13. Thank You for Smoking
    Much like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters), first-time director Jason Reitman has a broad, anything-goes comedic sensibility that allows silly gags and incidental humor to sneak in alongside the satirical barbs.
  14. Take My Eyes
    Take My Eyes might look and sound like an earnest message movie, but its bone-deep understanding of the tricky psychology of abuse feels effortlessly authentic.
  15. Don't Come Knocking
    It's a beautiful mess, but it's a mess all the same.
  16. The Devil's Miner
    So polished that it might pass for a scripted narrative feature, but that's not a bad thing. They found a remarkable spokesman in Bolivian teenager Basilio Vargas, and while his cogent, organized descriptions of his life, beliefs, history, and ambitions sometimes seem too calculated, at least they're calculated to communicate efficiently and appealingly.
  17. Iluzija
    Ristovski wants the plight of a bullied moppet to serve as a sweeping metaphor for Macedonian struggle, but his miserablist excesses have the effect of converting realism into a graphic cartoon.
  18. Failure to Launch
    The only bright spot--beyond McConaughey's boyish Southern charm and a pleasant soundtrack--is Zooey Deschanel as Parker's acid-tongued roommate, whose quirks include alcoholism and nihilism. Someone really should tell Deschanel that she's already too big and too good for thankless Eve Arden roles.
  19. The Hills Have Eyes
    Thanks to assured direction and a fine cast, Hills isn't terrible, only terribly unnecessary.
  20. The Shaggy Dog
    Okay, so when does the fun start?
  21. Ask the Dust
    Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.
  22. Duck Season
    Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke got his start in short films and documentaries, and his first feature reveals a gift for concision: It doesn't overexert itself trying to come to big conclusions about these characters, and even the comedic scenes settle for gentle quirks over broad guffaws.
  23. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    The Heart Is Deceitful has a daring that's hard to dismiss, even when it only amounts to Argento shamelessly getting off on human rot.
  24. Evil
    It's more about giving rich bullies the same comeuppance afforded to sneering wardens with bullwhips, and on those superficial grounds, it's reasonably gripping.
  25. Game 6
    Hoffman makes impressive use of his low budget, thanks to a talented cast, an atmospheric soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, and the general feeling of confidence that a veteran director can bring to a project. But too much of Game 6 is designed to seem deeper than it really is.
  26. 16 Blocks
    Richard Wenk's familiar screenplay laboriously establishes Willis as an exhausted, limping shell of a man rotting internally from decades of alcoholism and self-hatred. Yet whenever the film requires it, Willis magically morphs into a super-cop with the lightning-fast reflexes of an 18-year-old Navy SEAL.
  27. Aquamarine
    Adapted (and significantly reshaped) from a young-adult book by novelist Alice Hoffman, Aquamarine has the tossed-off quality of an ABC Family TV movie. Its lessons come pre-digested.
  28. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Block Party is largely a giant love-fest, which is fitting given the staggering amount of simpatico musical and comic talent on display, though some conflict surfaces nevertheless.
  29. Ultraviolet
    Underdeveloped antagonist Nick Chinlund sums up the entire film during one of his rants about Jovovich's latest casual, offhand slaughter: "One woman against 14 men! It's ridiculous!" Well, yeah.
  30. Merry Christmas
    Though a painless time-passer, Joyeux Noël ultimately contributes little to the venerable anti-war genre beyond its curious message that to some degree, war is hell because it prevents soldiers from making really neat friends and pen-pals from different counties.
  31. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Rosner works for famed Democratic strategist James Carville, who stops just short of dry-humping the camera lens in his hunger for the spotlight here. Our Brand Is Crisis is full of strangely resonant parallels to American politics.
  32. Sorry, Haters
    So long as Sorry, Haters stays ambiguous and sticks to long, winding conversations between Penn and Kechiche, the movie rolls along and builds momentum.
  33. Tsotsi
    In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."
  34. Doogal
    It'd take more than potentially lethal amounts of alcohol to make this derivative trash endurable.
  35. Madea's Family Reunion
    Madea's Family Reunion represents an advance on Diary, if only because it dials down Madea's shtick (she no longer waves a gun around) and irons out some of those awkward tonal transitions. The chance that Perry's followers will leave disappointed is approximately 0 percent.
  36. Running Scared
    The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."
  37. Unknown White Male
    Unknown White Male has flashes of brilliance: Murray stretches out the dramatic tale of Bruce's first terrifying hours of recall, and Bruce's raw misery as he recounts those events is deeply affecting.
  38. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    Though some of the heated exchanges in Forgiving Dr. Mengele seem awkward and staged, they put Kor at the center of a riveting debate over how best to come to terms with past horrors, and the potential (and limits) of putting them to rest.
  39. Trudell
    Anyone looking for history lessons from Rae's documentary will have to be patient and alert enough to pick through the poetry.
  40. Workingman's Death
    Workingman's Death's primary pleasures are aesthetic. Glawogger is an extraordinarily elegant filmmaker with a photographer's eye for striking compositions.
  41. Kirikou and the Wild Beasts
    Ocelot's 2005 semi-sequel, Kirikou And The Wild Beast, retains the gorgeously detailed visuals and that hilarious tonal bluntness, but loses much of the compelling mystery, and the urgency of life-and-death situations.
  42. Date Movie
    It's kind of amazing that a joke-a-second comedy like Date Movie doesn't contain a single laugh.
  43. Eight Below
    Longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Frank Marshall is smart enough to know his core audience of kiddies came to see the dogs, who take center stage in many of the film's best sequences, especially a jolting leopard-seal attack that's as terrifying as anything in "Jurassic Park."
  44. Freedomland
    Only Edie Falco, appearing as a bereft mother leading a citizen's group that searches for missing children, suggests the great film that Freedomland might have been.
  45. Battle in Heaven
    Battle In Heaven is like a serious of artful photographs, except that Reygadas also moves the camera in astonishing and unusual ways, swooping around the conventional x- and y-axes while teasing the audience with what he's about to show. He's got an astonishing technique. Here's hoping that someday he'll use it to make a movie.
  46. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    The filmmakers don't seem to realize that if a movie with a mythology this groan-inducingly convoluted doesn't have a sense of humor about itself, the laughs are going to come anyway. They just won't be of the intentional variety.
  47. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    While the film doesn't dig deep, or hit particularly hard, it neatly achieves its modest goals: presenting a real-life heroine in real-life terms. A film this fictionalized rarely feels this much like fact.
  48. Winter Passing
    Winter Passing is full of nice dramatic turns, including one from relative-unknown Amelia Warner as Harris' former student-turned-nanny (and possible lover). What Winter Passing lacks, however, is a reason to exist other than as a dramatic exercise.
  49. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    For the most part, Willmott succeeds thrillingly.
  50. Desert Wind
    The problem with Desert Wind is that Kohler takes everything at face value. Wouldn't it have been more useful to make this trip the centerpiece of a longer documentary that follows the men before Tunisia and, more importantly, after?
  51. Curious George
    What makes Curious George such an enduring figure is that he embodies much of what's wonderful about childhood.
  52. Final Destination 3
    Fans of the genre might appreciate the decidedly R-rated violence and nudity, but that's really all the film has to offer.
  53. Firewall
    Everything here is a known quantity except one question that could have been inspired by a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: How many twists does it take to finally, at long last, get to the predictable ending?
  54. The Pink Panther
    Martin makes a fine Clouseau, re-energizing musty old physical gags involving chandeliers and priceless vases, and rolling his tongue around a zesty form of pidgin French. If he ever finds his Blake Edwards, there may be hope for this franchise yet.
  55. London
    London has a distinct Off-Off-Broadway feel. There's a stagebound quality to its handful of claustrophobic locations, its endless assault of intense coke talk, and its third-rate invocation of David Mamet, David Rabe, and Neil LaBute.
  56. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    It's hard to film icons like Young as anything BUT icons, but Demme's film gets past the legend, zooming in on Young's aged, heroic face and finding an artist as human as the rest of us.
  57. Through the Fire
    Through The Fire posits Telfair's good fortune as the belated fulfillment of Jamal's dreams and his family's desire to leave the projects, but it rarely gives a thought to the many thousands of gifted inner-city ballers who devote their lives to a goal that never materializes.
  58. A Good Woman
    The trick to staging Wilde is to hint at the gravity beneath the witticisms. A Good Woman barely even gets the witticisms out, though it does contain Wilde's line about people being either tedious or charming.
  59. When a Stranger Calls
    The original should have been a short film; the new version shouldn't exist at all.
  60. Something New
    Something New sets out to dramatize just how little society's attitudes toward interracial relationships have changed over the past few decades, but instead ends up documenting just how little the interracial-romance message movie has evolved since the clumsy days of "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner."
  61. Who Gets to Call It Art?
    Comes closer than most to seeing the whole picture.
  62. Bubble
    It's almost condescending, as though Soderbergh were challenging himself to make Middle America interesting. And yet the movie IS interesting, almost in spite of itself.
  63. Annapolis
    At a time when movies, even from Hollywood, are finally turning their eyes to conflicts abroad, Annapolis seems conspicuously myopic and reactionary in its denial of the world outside campus, though a movie this formulaic wouldn't pass muster during peacetime, either.
  64. Big Momma's House 2
    There's something depressing about seeing the low-energy, family-friendly Lawrence sleepwalk through the film's sappy plot points.
  65. Nanny McPhee
    There are times when Nanny McPhee seems designed to drive all but the most sugar-crazed spazzes out of the theater: Colors that should never go together clash like a tempest, the camera whisks around in manic curlicues, and a musical score makes certain that nothing magical goes underemphasized.
  66. Dai si gin
    The movie is one of To's typically tangled meditations on the smearing of good and evil, in moments where instinct overcomes morality. And ultimately, To cares less about the motivations of opposing forces than about the spectacular collisions they produce.
  67. Imagine Me & You
    The film nearly works in spite of its adherence to formula, thanks to clever one-liners and appealing, sharply drawn supporting performances.
  68. Manderlay
    It's an extremely cynical perspective, enforced by some disappointingly turgid melodrama, but keep in mind, this movie was made before an almost uniformly poor and black population was left to rot in New Orleans floodwaters. Even at his worst, von Trier can still strike a nerve.
  69. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    Has about a dozen layers of in-joke, and up to the eighth or ninth layer, they mostly work.
  70. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Like "The Aristocrats," Looking succeeds smashingly both as a comedy and as a savvy deconstruction of comedy.
  71. Why We Fight
    Ultimately, Why We Fight reveals itself as yet another leftie doc with an anti-war agenda. But the mere fact that it takes time to ask questions and listen to opposing viewpoints sets it apart from the pack.
  72. End of the Spear
    In spite of End Of The Spear's fundamental conservatism, the missionaries' disastrous initial encounter with the Waodani ultimately teaches the progressive message that when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of foreign cultures, Bibles and superior technology are no substitute for a thorough understanding of their language and culture.
  73. Underworld: Evolution
    There's a ton of backstory behind Underworld: Evolution, which gets slightly denser and rowdier than its predecessor, but it's ultimately all in the service of a nigh-endless series of numbing, mechanical battles in which snarling protagonists and CGI monsters shoot, claw, and bloodily eviscerate each other. In other words, it's "Underworld," but more of it.
  74. Pizza
    Christopher delivers cutesy jabber and one-note characters, as oily and devoid of substance as... well, you know.
  75. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Angio captures the outlandish twists and turns of Van Peebles' life with humor, color, and a welcome lightness of touch.
  76. The Fall of Fujimori
    If the end justifies the means, it would be hard to deny that the legacy of Alberto Fujimori, the disgraced former President of Peru, is largely triumphant.
  77. Glory Road
    Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.
  78. 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.
  79. Tristan and Isolde
    Moves so sluggishly that someone must have been dosing the cast and crew with Nyquil.
  80. When the Sea Rises
    It's content enough just to drink in the regional flavor, appreciate the carefree heartiness of the locals, and allows these two eccentrics to have some good times before the carriage turns into a pumpkin. The film treads lightly, but leaves little impression.
  81. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    It isn't a biography of the legendary photographer, and it's not exactly an essay. Mostly, Bütler fills the screen with Cartier-Bresson's photographs while people explain their greatness.
  82. State of Fear
    Builds to a key point about the consequences of democracies fighting terrorism by erasing its central tenets, but in doing so, it doesn't underplay the horrors wrought by Guzmán's organization.
  83. Fateless
    Fateless is a strangely beautiful film, enhanced by a typically lyrical Ennio Morricone score and by Koltai's hazy, grayed-out images.
  84. Hostel
    Roth gets the notes right while missing the music: He studiously replicates Miike's unblinking depiction of torture, but without much reflection or wit. It's merely unpleasant and more than a little dumb.
  85. Grandma's Boy
    Grandma's Boy aspires to nothing more than the frathouse goofiness and juvenile high spirits of early Sandler vehicles, but it possesses the energy of a funeral dirge played at half-speed.
  86. Kill the Poor
    Taylor makes the most of his tiny budget with creative editing and shooting, though his New York City is anemic, narrow, and underpopulated, and his constant repetition of the same damn 60 seconds of music becomes excruciating.
  87. BloodRayne
    With minimal flare and maximal gore, Boll simply delivers the turgid drama and incompetently staged action sequences that have made him the unstoppable Big Boss of the gaming community.
  88. The Promise
    For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.
  89. Match Point
    Just when the seemingly endless scenes of Johansson's nagging threaten to sink Match Point for good, the movie becomes the thriller that early reports promised.
  90. Wolf Creek
    Wolf Creek is the kind of well-executed sleazefest that makes audiences feel not just creeped-out but downright dirty, as if it would take a three-hour-long shower just to wash all the grit and grease away.
  91. Casanova
    At best, it's a light, boisterous little confection, but hasn't Hugh Grant already starred in this film a few times?
  92. Rumor Has It...
    Like the film itself, Ruffalo and Aniston exacerbate a bad, unfeasible idea with clumsy execution, exerting a whole lot of energy and effort for very little payoff.
  93. The New World
    However complicated the historical issues at play, the poetic introspection that consumes The New World's characters could only take place in a Terrence Malick movie. But, here at least, history and lyrical drift go together surprisingly well.
  94. The Matador
    The Matador is brilliantly cast right down to the secondary supporting roles, played by the formidable likes of Dylan Baker and Philip Baker Hall, but it's the leads who really deliver.
  95. Munich
    Breaking from the Spielberg oeuvre, Munich isn't a particularly hopeful movie, but it's a fair and morally dignified one.
  96. Caché (Hidden)
    On a deeper level, Haneke tries to reach for political allegory on the French-Algerian War, but the film functions best as a perfectly calibrated thriller, perhaps his most accessible to date.
  97. The Ringer
    If anything, The Ringer doesn't go far enough to exploit its edgy premise, but it does have two conceits that consistently pay off: Knoxville turns out to be a lesser athlete than his competitors, and he's so bad at acting "retarded" that only the unchallenged buy into his ruse.
  98. Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    In its absolute commitment to inoffensive, fun-for-the-whole-family entertainment, it's as extreme in its own way as hardcore pornography.
  99. Fun with Dick and Jane
    So how can a project that began with such promise end up such a slick, pandering misfire? The answer, unsurprisingly, has a lot to do with Jim Carrey.
  100. The White Countess
    As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.
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