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. 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.
  2. How to Deal
    There's a surprising intelligence and gravity working beneath its bubbly surface, informed by an unusual degree of empathy for its adolescent audience and a rare willingness to confront the darker regions of youth experience.
  3. Love Object
    Love Object's plot is reminiscent of Guy Colwell's underground comic-book series "Doll," only Colwell dealt more with sex toys as emblematic of the systematic objectification of women, while Parigi just uses the concept for a bunch of weird shocks, dark laughs, and a fairly repellent twist ending.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack and Diane
    Werewolves aren't a new metaphor for the wildness of adolescent urges, but Jack & Diane is a trudgingly self-serious affair that doesn't manage to be transporting on either its literal or conceptual levels.
  5. Fire and Ice
    Surprisingly realistic for an animated film of the time, but it's also as visually stiff and staid as any cut-rate sword-and-sorcery film, and just as formula-bound.
  6. House of Spoils
    The result is too serious to ever go full B-movie bonkers and too silly to ever actually scare, let alone say something meaningful.
  7. The Pope's Exorcist
    It’s impossible to take any of this remotely seriously, or find it particularly frightening. But it is its own sort of fun, at least for a while.
  8. The Invasion
    Opting for car chases instead of the thought-provoking ideas of its predecessors, the film looks like the work of, if not pod people, folks who gave up any kind of passion for the material long before the cameras started to roll.
  9. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    While the film's gags don't always jibe with its sincere interviews of Middle Eastern citizens, or its worrisome encounters with the soldiers serving in dangerous territory--the constantly shifting tone provides as many hit bits as misses.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    Olsen, so good in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," is stuck playing a judgmental scold, while Wolff waves a video camera around and insists he wants to be Werner Herzog.
  11. The Greatest
    It’s when the small moments become large ones that Feste overreaches and the shaky performances don’t bail her out.
  12. Colombiana
    It uses a story about family as a vehicle for glorifying gangsterism. In other words, it's empty, amoral, and - in the style of other Besson productions - surprisingly easy to digest.
  13. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    Purists will balk at a pointless--and boring--revamp of a major villain, but that's the least of the film's worries. Only a few isolated shots of the group striding together as a team make Surfer feel like a Fantastic Four movie.
  14. Justice League
    The “new and improved” model looks claustrophobically like an overpriced TV pilot, and not in a good way. Say what you want about the tenets of brooding, art-school-fascist superhero worship, but at least it’s an ethos.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    It may be impossible for anyone but existing fans to take this seriously, but for the unconverted, it's still a legitimately engaging, gape-worthy nutso spectacle.
  16. The Platform 2
    Gaztelu-Urrutia’s expansion feels redundant and over-explained, but also sludgy and disjointed. It’s like being served a second dinner after you’re uncomfortably full; the flavors taste the same, but the experience is far less fulfilling.
  17. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Parts of Get Rich Or Die Tryin' crackle with energy, vitality, and texture, like the prison-shower fight that descends into a weird sort of slapstick farce. But 50's leaden turn drags the film down. Scenes celebrating his personal and professional triumph ring hollow, since Rich never really gets under his skin.
  18. 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?
  19. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe feels like a homemade quilt: It's warm and comforting, but visually busy, with a repeating pattern that some will find stuffy and overwhelming.
  20. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights In Maine’s grieving has a short-story quality, and many movies would do well to follow that model.
  21. Mr. Brooks
    Sadly, only Hurt seems to recognize that the only way to make this material work is to play it with lunatic enthusiasm instead of grave seriousness.
  22. Madea's Big Happy Family
    Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.
  23. The Deep End of the Ocean
    It's not the implausibility of its plot, the shallowness of its characters, its funereal pace, its tenuous understanding of teenage behavior, its commercial-ready TV-movie-style direction, or the fact that Pfeiffer and Williams may be the most implausible Italian-Americans since James Caan -- the film is most undone by its near-complete lack of genuine drama.
  24. 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.
  25. Latter Days
    Stranding an able supporting cast in mostly disposable roles--including Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Kay Place, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Amber Benson--Cox writes himself into several corners, then plots honking contrivances to get out of them.
  26. Love Me If You Dare
    The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.
  27. Evergreen
    Evergreen suffers from creeping indie-itis, epitomized by the low-light digital video and droning electric-guitar soundtrack, but its biggest weakness lies in Zentelis' apparent fear of surprise.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    The roughness of Happy Life's production values and the inconsistency of its amateur actors would be forgivable if it showed any heart, but this low-budget ramble about techno's glory days instead inspires relief that things have moved on.
  29. Valiant
    It was made fast and cheap, which shows in every none-too-slick frame.
  30. American Dreamz
    Weitz has a winning way with a one-liner, and he's recruited a stellar cast that gets the most out of his material.
  31. The Possession
    The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.
  32. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    Apart from Cruz, who throws herself lustily into her tough-seductress role, the actors give negligible performances, with McShane, Rush, and Keith Richards in a repeat cameo all playing nigh-identical smug glowerers.
  33. By the Sea
    Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
  34. Damien: Omen II
    The film could be subtitled A Portrait Of The Anti-Christ As A Young Man. The emphasis has been shifted from parental anxiety to the frustration of a boy struggling to identify—and then reconcile—his demonic birthright.
  35. A Minecraft Movie
    A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.
  36. 23 Blast
    It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.
  37. The Paperboy
    So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
  38. Unforgettable
    Which brings us to the fatal flaw in Unforgettable: With its formulaic story and hackneyed dialogue, all there is to do in between moments of self-aware outrageousness is admire the decor, like an Anthropologie catalog punctuated with the occasional knife wound.
  39. The Marine
    While The Marine proves a poor showcase for the charisma-impaired Cena, it's a terrific vehicle for world-class heavy Patrick, who is clearly enjoying himself as the kind of deranged lunatic who interrupts a long string of felonies to confirm the details of his new cable package.
  40. Digging Up the Marrow
    More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.
  41. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
  42. Click
    Charlie Kaufman could have made a great movie out of Click, a soupy existential comedy about a "universal remote" that lets a man magically rewind, fast-forward, and pause his life.
  43. Blindness
    There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
  44. The Leisure Seeker
    This particular film is a collection of cutesy “going in style” clichés — old lady on a motorcycle? Check. Senior-citizen oral sex joke? Check. — compiled into a road movie with shades of "About Schmidt" and "Little Miss Sunshine," and a morbid streak that comes in to cut the quirkiness just a little bit too late.
  45. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.
  46. Pride and Glory
    Norton is infamous for rewriting scripts and acting as a de facto director on his movies yet he seems lost and defeated here.
  47. Sweet Home Alabama
    The film does coast along smoothly to the inevitable, which is a credit to the always-game Reese Witherspoon, who's courteous enough to pretend she doesn't know what's coming, then make it look like a huge surprise.
  48. Zombie Strippers!
    Currently stopping by theaters briefly en route to DVD, the film tries to position Jameson as the next Linnea Quigley, the B-movie queen behind such enduring titles as "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" and "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama."
  49. Blood Ties
    With his English-language debut, Blood Ties, Canet takes on material of even less interest to today’s big studios, constructing something much more ambitious than a straight thriller — a sprawling familial crime drama, heavier on relationships than chases or shoot-outs.
  50. A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.
  51. Upside Down
    Moment for moment, Upside Down is the most embarrassing, hilarious, obliviously stupid movie since M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Happening," and its constant pursuit of a striking image over any other consideration undermines it at every turn.
  52. Taken 2
    None of it is particularly novel or exciting.
  53. Intruders
    Feels tentative and weak whenever it isn't simply baldly derivative. It's old-fashioned to the point of ossification.
  54. Wonder Park
    Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.
  55. Detention
    Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.
  56. Step Up 3-D
    The advanced 3-D technology of today meets the mothballed clichés of yesteryear in Step Up 3D.
  57. The Lie
    After roughly 90 minutes of unbelievable behavior and botched suspense, the twist ending is too audaciously ridiculous to entirely resist. You’ll scream, but not in fear.
  58. Hall Pass
    Though the film never balances the grown-up stuff with the gross-out gags, it suggests the Farrellys might be able to do mature after all.
  59. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    The racing sequences are the series' meat and potatoes, but in terms of story, Tokyo Drift barely offers a stalk of asparagus.
  60. Sydney White
    What's the excuse for dumbing down Snow White to moron level? Are there really people out there who thought the original version just didn't have enough toilet jokes?
  61. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is an excellent movie about a beloved figure who indeed seems ageless and whose story includes the kind of comebacks usually reserved for fiction.
  62. Blood Glacier
    In an era of predictably tweaked horror premises and haunted-house flicks with 10-dollar titles, a doggedly straightforward monster movie like Blood Glacier can feel refreshing, if not exactly fresh.
  63. Loverboy
    Though he labors endlessly to account for her behavior, which is explained away by flashbacks to her decadent parents and a glamorous mother-figure played under Vaseline lens by an uncredited Sandra Bullock, Bacon fails to make her seem human.
  64. Step Up: All In
    It’s the rare movie that knows its limitations, but also understands how to use form to best convey its strengths, pulling together countless complicated dance scenes in which the relationships between teams and characters come through more clearly than they could through dialogue.
  65. The Invitation
    Emmanuel makes for an empathetic audience stand-in and charming heroine; it’s easy to see how she’s pivoted from thankless Game Of Thrones and Fast And Furious roles to leading lady status. If The Invitation proves nothing else, it’s that she belongs at the top of the call sheet.
  66. Elizabethtown
    Only a truly great director can make a film of high artistic merit, filled with personality and memorable scenes, that's still a borderline disaster. (Think One From The Heart or 1941.) So the heartfelt and woefully miscalculated Elizabethtown may be the film that marks Cameron Crowe's arrival as a truly great director.
  67. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Bounce Ko Gals ultimately devolves into a litany of social ills, with not enough of a proper story, and Harada loses the thread of the film whenever he slips into slapstick comedy, or has his female leads play the role of giggly best friends.
  68. Home Fries
    Veering wildly from macabre Southern Gothic to quirky small-town romance, Home Fries is too busy cross-pollinating genres to bother with consistent behavior and tone.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. The Situation
    It's a rare moment when the STORY makes the point, not the speeches.
  72. The Prodigy
    The filmmakers figure out how to make a creepy kid chilling again, then stop short, closing the case too early. In other words, they’ve got an underachiever on their hands.
  73. Craigslist Joe
    Craigslist Joe takes Garner on a 21st-century hitchhiking trip that not only didn't end in his gruesome murder, but in a month to remember fondly. It's an inspiring experience. For him.
  74. The 15:17 to Paris
    A failed experiment in stunt casting.
  75. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The movie feels bloodless, and not just because the gore is muted and computerized to stay within the boundaries of a PG-13 rating.
  76. Surrogates
    Relentlessly plods from one dour moment to the next, coming to life only in a late-film car chase that takes the possibilities of a world filled with robots to an absurd extreme.
  77. South of the Border
    Stone's film, more an act of boosterism than inquiry, is a tremendous missed opportunity.
  78. The Running Man
    Once things get going, The Running Man just turns into a silly chase movie populated by baddies who look like B-level pro-wrestling villains.
  79. Hold Your Breath
    For all of the horror subgenres crammed into Hold Your Breath, it never conjures sufficient scares.
  80. Fanboys
    Fanboys has a lot of talent in its margins, including Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and other usual suspects.
  81. The Rhythm Section
    An always welcome presence, Law is the only cast member in The Rhythm Section to give the impression that he had any fun making the movie, playing B as a survivalist sourpuss with impossible reflexes. Nonetheless, he is consistently dressed and lit as though he were posing for a watch ad.
  82. The Burning Plain
    The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.
  83. England Is Mine
    It’s a biopic that ends before its subject’s life-changing work even really begins, so those without the knowledge to fill in the gaps will almost certainly leave wondering why they should care.
  84. Goodnight Mommy
    The original Austrian film had shock value and genuine, gruesome horror. This new Americanized version sands the edges off of the narrative every chance it gets.
  85. Hits
    The satire of self-satisfied, opportunistic Brooklynites is cutting, but it lacks the humanity afforded the upstate characters, and quickly repeats itself, seemingly by design.
  86. She-Devil
    I found a great deal to like about She-Devil, especially Streep's performance, but it's easy to figure out why it didn't find an audience. It deals with just about everything American film-goers traditionally don't want to think about: old people, fat people, ugly people, nursing homes, class, money, and the ever-present specter of death. Also, it involves a dog dying.
  87. Snatched
    It stands apart from the majority of R-rated, coprolalic studio comedies simply by being fast-paced and, on occasion, pretty funny.
  88. The Hottest State
    Judging by the far more interesting adults in the film--Braga, a terrific Laura Linney as Webber's mother, and Hawke as his father--the solution for Webber and Moreno is to grow up and not be so full of themselves. In their current state, they make for unpleasant company, and so does the film.
  89. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    There's "so bad it's good," but there's also "just plain bad," and Skeleton's pre-processed shittiness spoils the fun.
  90. Meet the Browns
    Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."
  91. Full Frontal
    The fact that Full Frontal comes together so well removes any doubt that anyone other than a master filmmaker is pulling the strings.
  92. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Duller than a rain delay on the Golf Channel.
  93. EuroTrip
    The brain trust responsible in part for last year's "The Cat In The Hat," Eurotrip seems like the result of a particularly half-hearted brainstorming session.
  94. Lila & Eve
    Pitched somewhere between indie domestic drama and direct-to-video exploitation, Lila & Eve is the kind of film in which a sturdy, unsensational piece of acting can take the spotlight.
  95. Don't Knock Twice
    The new supernatural horror film Don’t Knock Twice benefits greatly from the direction of Caradog James. He takes a story that almost immediately plunges viewers into an unexplained and messy mythology and, for the better part of an hour, manages to distract from its weaker aspects by implying something far more interesting. Unfortunately, then the third act happens, and the spell is broken.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Paint
    While it’s possible to quibble about the weirdly sci-fi mix of period signifiers (white boy afros exist beside cellphones), and to look askance at Paint’s rather too blithe approach to sex-in-the-workplace power dynamics, few comedies in recent memory come by their laughs more honestly than Paint does because, like all the best comedies, the laughter is based on a genuine unease.
  97. Kicking & Screaming
    A sweet, inoffensive, achingly laughless comedy.
  98. Hesher
    It's all quirk, posturing, attitude, and needless exertion signifying nothing beyond its own sad need to impress.
  99. 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.
  100. Descent
    Though a clearly gifted new filmmaker, Lugacy doesn't get a handle on the combustible material, and she gets scalded in the process.
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