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. Black Rock
    Ultimately, it’s hard to shake the sense that her picture is a character study bending itself, painfully and unnaturally, into the shape of a nightmare-in-the-boonies horror flick. Is this the only way films about female friendship can get greenlighted these days—by drenching themselves in genre tropes?
  2. Justin Bieber: Our World
    Those who aren’t fans of his music to begin with may respect the stagecraft of his producers more than the artist himself, or be turned off altogether by the clumsy hagiography. In other words, this is a for-the-fans endeavor—no one else will want to get near Bieber here, especially since he’s unmasked.
  3. For the Love of Benji
    An improvement on its predecessor insofar as it takes place in Athens rather than small-town Texas, meaning the scenery is better.
  4. Forces of Nature
    Only succeeds sporadically, even if it's never quite the unwatchable monstrosity it so clearly could have been.
  5. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
    Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.
  6. 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.
  7. Autumn
    The one bit of artsy business that McGee pulls off well is the recurring image of snapshots, serving as a kind of map to who these people were and who they're becoming.
  8. The Dilemma
    It never coheres as well as it should, but the film makes a fine mess.
  9. Wrong Turn
    Although its many complications quickly devolve into absurdity, Wrong Turn does deserve some credit for the boldness with which it deviates from its franchise inspiration. This is no paint-by-numbers remake. And although it’s just got way too much going on, the gore is gnarly, the paranoia is palpable, and the characters, while sometimes annoying, have motivations and arcs that make sense.
  10. Gringo
    Solid chunks of the screwball humor land like bricks, and the characters — most of them idiots, a**holes, or suckers — are colorfully over-the-top but not especially memorable.
  11. Wonder Wheel
    Wonder Wheel is uncomfortably revealing, its real-life parallels too blatant to be anything but intentional. But to what end?
  12. Typhoon
    This may be the biggest production in Korean-film history, but viewers should search elsewhere for a better sampling of what the country has to offer.
  13. Now You See Me 2
    Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.
  14. Dr. Dolittle
    Isn't as sharp or consistent as Murphy's "The Nutty Professor," but it's an amusing, lightweight diversion.
  15. Payback
    Consider that in “Point Blank,” Lee Marvin walks through the film with the look of a man who's lost his soul. You can see it in his eyes. Look in Gibson's eyes in this one and you'll see soullessness, but it doesn't seem to come from anywhere within his character.
  16. The Little Death
    The Little Death never feels remotely of a piece, and is likely to find its proper audience months from now when the individual sketches show up on YouTube.
  17. Jellyfish
    Jellyfish takes the kitchen-sink approach, piling on external inequities and indignities on its protagonist.
  18. Red Tails
    The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.
  19. Burke and Hare
    The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.
  20. 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?
  21. Medieval
    Jákl’s film is precisely as generic as its title would suggest, and what little there is to recommend is buried under a mountain of tedium
  22. In the Tall Grass
    The movie is a mixed bag, well shot and well acted enough to mostly keep the viewer’s attention, but meandering enough to frustrate at the same time. It’s bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.
  23. 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.
  24. The Broken Tower
    It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.
  25. Agnes and His Brothers
    Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.
  26. The Flowers of War
    Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."
  27. Ballad of a Small Player
    Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt.
  28. Breakthrough
    Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clay Pigeons
    Perhaps this will seem fresh and interesting years down the road, when the self-aware-thriller genre has long played out, but for now, it's a tired horse that should have been put down in the pitch meeting.
  30. Deliver Us from Eva
    Hardwick switches gears from wacky comedy to romantic drama about halfway through Deliver Us, but it's too late, and what follows is far too dull to make any difference.
  31. Foreign Sister
    The particulars of her situation are well-imagined, but Wolman's characters remain little more than mouthpieces.
  32. The Nanny Diaries
    The film belongs to Linney, whose caustic putdowns and status-seeking veneer barely hides her genuine hurt over her husband's philandering and her distant relationship to her own child. No doubt her diaries would be more compelling than the nanny's.
  33. Reservation Road
    It's a relentlessly downbeat, well-acted melodrama that's easy to admire, but intentionally impossible to enjoy.
  34. 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.
  35. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The handful of songs are catchy, and the whole film feels pleasantly airy. But this is a dark story with a heavy message, and it's been transformed into a harmless, pretty confection. In defanging it for comic effect, the filmmakers have done Seuss as much of a disrespectful disservice as if they'd laid on the fart gags.
  36. My Spy
    The action material in My Spy undermines its would-be cuteness, while remaining questionable on a level of cheap thrills.
  37. Lolita
    Lyne doesn't seem to get the novel, failing to incorporate any of Nabokov's black comedy -- which is to say, Lolita's heart and soul.
  38. Ali G Indahouse
    In jumping from the small screen to the big one, the franchise seems to have dropped its collective IQ by a good 50 points. Cohen's HBO series was a smart show pretending to be stupid. Making its debut on DVD after a brief 2002 theatrical run, Ali G Indahouse feels like a stupid movie made by smart people.
  39. Something from Tiffany's
    Director Daryl Wein makes a commendable, if ultimately flawed, attempt at making a memorable holiday romance from Tamara Chestna’s anemic screenplay, adapted from the novel by Melissa Hill. Though it bears the appearance of a winter confection, it has about as much substance as an over-yeasted loaf of bread.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    Ultimately, Nintendo fans are sure to find the second Mario film (unlike the first) well worth a trip to the cinema, and with a runtime of only 92 minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. But to swipe a metaphor from the original NES Super Mario Bros. game, while the film may complete the level, it doesn’t quite nail the leap to the top of the flagpole.
  41. The Oranges
    Overall, The Oranges appears to have been forcibly wrested into a conventional indie-dramedy package, rather than finding the length, style, structure, and perhaps medium that would best suit it.
  42. Seed of Chucky
    Seed Of Chucky goes even further toward comedy over horror, but the Chucky-as-comic-antihero gag has grown stale.
  43. We Are Your Friends
    As with "Catfish," Joseph is there with his soulful handheld camera-bobbing, trying to convey the pensive thoughtfulness of a person who may not be thinking all that much. And as with "Catfish," the audience catches on long before anyone on screen.
  44. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    It will always be "too soon" for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it's somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life.
  45. Immortals
    As mythic spectacles go, it beats "Clash Of The Titans," particularly in the areas of intimidating villainy and actual Titan-clashing. Nonetheless, it isn't any smarter than its inspirations, just prettier.
  46. The Players Club
    Sleazy, exploitative, cheap, and nonsensical, The Players Club is an unwatchable waste of time.
  47. Tank Girl
    Sure Tank Girl has a lot of energy but then so does a Pixie Stix-addled eleven-year-old screaming in your ear about the intricacies of Pokemon for hours at a time during a cross-country road trip. That doesn't mean either ordeal should be experienced by any reasonable human except perhaps as a form of torture.
  48. Sweet Girl
    As hellaciously predictable and preposterous as Sweet Girl is, it could win over viewers nursing their own grudge against Big Pharma. Mainly, though, this is a vehicle for its star, that brawny softie Momoa.
  49. Mirror Mirror
    All of Mirror Mirror is visually striking, even when it works on no other levels. But the humor is erratic, the heroism isn't necessarily compelling, and the whole thing feels like a grab bag of bits that don't entirely cohere.
  50. El Chicano
    The story never even grazes the sublime; it’s dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don’t celebrate a reunion. They’re at war.
  51. Food of Love
    A reserved coming-of-age story that overcomes flat acting and one-dimensional scene-building thanks to its lively plot.
  52. Festival in Cannes
    Even when better members of Jaglom's cast make connections, the atmosphere remains one of dull chaos.
  53. Breakin' All the Rules
    Written and directed by Daniel Taplitz, Breakin' has a hard time building up steam and an even harder time distinguishing itself from any number of UPN sitcoms.
  54. Beyond the Sea
    Anyone who thinks Beyond The Sea is a movie about Bobby Darin isn't paying close enough attention.
  55. 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.
  56. Bigbug
    Subtlety has never been one of Jeunet’s tools, and the comedy in Bigbug is enjoyably over-the-top, occasionally a bit too mannered, and often laugh-out-loud funny.
  57. The Apology
    Where The Apology slips up, and where it slips up frequently, is in the journey between that wonderful opening turn towards darkness and the heart-wrenching conclusion, in which all three stars give it everything they’ve got and Locke’s script once again ratchets the tension and the darkness all the way up.
  58. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    While both actors have been hammier and more hilarious, and neither one overdoes things enough to be notable, they at least seem to be having loads of flailing fun as they conjure up CGI scenery to chew on. And when Apprentice limits itself to their battle, it's generally fitful dumb fun.
  59. The Addams Family
    Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.
  60. Johnny English Reborn
    Johnny English Reborn's sharpest gags riff on its protagonist's unshakeable Britishness.
  61. Hunky Dory
    It’s too broad in both its humor and its melodrama, and there are so many narrative threads that none of them aside from Driver’s really get their due.
  62. Next Day Air
    A very pleasant surprise, Next Day Air is the rare crime comedy that does justice to both sides of the equation.
  63. You, Me and Dupree
    You, Me And Dupree isn't terribly democratic about spreading the laughs around; whenever Wilson disappears from the screen, the comedy evaporates in kind.
  64. Rebecca
    Manderley is in part a state of mind. In this Rebecca, that state is exasperating boredom.
  65. You Should Have Left
    At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.
  66. The Exorcism
    By the climax, The Exorcism is buried in plot points that obscure whatever the power of Christ is compelling us to do.
  67. Unlocked
    Unlocked starts off sturdily and then wobbles more and more as the plot twists multiply.
  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. Yes Day
    The difficult negotiations of childrearing might have been a fine subtext—something to occupy the attention of parents in the audience—for a comedy so unmistakably family-oriented in tone. But in Yes Day, that element of the story is less of a side dish served for a more mature palate than the whole entrée.
  70. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    Overall, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire makes for a serviceable entry in this now four-decade-running franchise. No matter that, in tone and in structure, it all but replicates what’s worked in the past.
  71. Reminiscence
    The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases.
  72. The Deal
    If Epstein and Kahn's plot mechanics were as fresh as the headlines from which they borrow, they might have been on to something.
  73. She's Out of My League
    Baruchel and Eve never shed that awkward first-date chemistry, which speaks less to their talents or the possibilities of mismatched romance than to a movie that forces them together like animals being mated in captivity.
  74. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him?
  75. The Comedy
    There's genuine pain at the core of Heidecker's character - or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside - but the film is keen on obscuring it.
  76. How Do You Know
    That's How Do You Know in a nutshell: preposterous characters lurching through painfully contrived scenarios.
  77. King Arthur
    Conceptually compelling, but the interest ends there, in part because the humans get squeezed to the margins in favor of pseudo-history and clashing battleaxes.
  78. Hostel: Part II
    It's also, in its sick, sick way, a real crowd-pleaser.
  79. The Nun
    If your heart skips a beat during this movie, it’ll probably be from laughter. But if you adjust your expectations and go in expecting something loud, lurid, and frequently utterly ridiculous, it’s good for a cheap adrenaline rush all the same.
  80. If I Stay
    Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.
  81. Don't Breathe 2
    The increasingly ornate violence (much of it taking place in a newer if no less creaky location) fuels an effective thrill machine, and if that machine can’t match the unexpected sweetness of the T-800’s relationship with John Connor, well, maybe that’s for the best.
  82. Esther Kahn
    Summer Phoenix has a screen presence that's simultaneously distancing and transfixing, an inscrutability that makes her seem either mysterious or a complete blank.
  83. Secret Window
    Secret Window is almost worth seeing for his characteristically assured performance alone, but Koepp sabotages Depp and his surroundings with an ending so atrocious, it callously betrays everything that came before it.
  84. Fast & Furious
    The action scenes don't always get the balance between flash and danger right, but the movie remains agreeably dopey--presenting street-racing culture as a hotbed of colorful stereotypes and lipstick lesbianism--until a climax that just isn't there.
  85. Hoot
    The kids Hoot is aimed at weren't around to see all the previous films it echoes, particularly the toothless Disney live-action films of the '70s. They'll probably like Hoot fine. Everyone else in the audience is likely to nod off and have genial, bland, easygoing dreams.
  86. Musical Chairs
    Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.
  87. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.
  88. Rebel in the Rye
    Most great-author biopics are just faintly dull and unnecessary. Rebel In The Rye, true to its ridiculous title, is proudly, even aggressively hackneyed.
  89. Above Suspicion
    For all the star’s efforts, though, Above Suspicion will mostly just appeal to the crowd that found Hillbilly Elegy compelling. Everyone else will be left wishing they could see Khaleesi fly high and free again.
  90. Shotgun Wedding
    Although the madcap antics come up short in some areas, and it’s unable to strike a good balance between its main and supporting players, you’ll find it easy to say “I do” to this one.
  91. The Gospel
    Unsurprisingly, the unimaginatively filmed but high-intensity gospel performances prove a highlight, radiating an energy and urgency that the film's stilted dialogue, awkward romance, and clunky plotting can only aspire to.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Ghost and the Darkness
    Some might even say the movie's messages and themes are racist attempts to justify colonialism, but they're wrong; this forgettable movie doesn't have any messages, or anything else, at all.
    • The A.V. Club
  93. Play Dirty
    A potentially interesting-if-imperfect mash-up of contrasting sensibilities (Stark vs. Black) turns out to be just another one of the curiously fake-looking blockbusters that emerge every now and then from streaming’s abyssal money pit and immediately disappear from the public consciousness.
  94. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    Finishing The Game doesn't get anywhere that "Hollywood Shuffle" didn't go to first, even if it has its own set of specific complaints about how show business treats Asians.
  95. The Whole Truth
    The Whole Truth is a moderately clever, reasonably entertaining courtroom drama, which is only a problem given the talent involved with bringing something this middle-of-the-road to the screen.
  96. Capone
    Capone presents the man’s health problems as a different sort of comeuppance: a reckoning of the mind and body, though not necessarily of the soul. But that doesn’t leave Hardy terribly much to do but dismantle his intimidating presence; it’s a commanding physical performance in search of a richer characterization, of any sense of who Capone was.
  97. The Da Vinci Code
    The Da Vinci Code isn't terrible. Brown's novel presented its concepts seriously, as food for thought; Howard's glossy version is more of a snack, designed to be taken only slightly more seriously than "National Treasure," and with the much the same sense of a puzzle-based thrill ride.
  98. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    The film has a warmth and raucousness that's surprisingly disarming.
  99. Mortal Kombat II
    It’s because Mortal Kombat II is neither campy enough to revel in its violent bad taste, nor earnest enough to pull off its sprawling ambitions that it most resembles a late-stage Marvel entry.
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