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. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.
  2. Outside the Wire
    Mackie’s performance, for better and worse, is anything but robotic. He plays more or less the same charismatic wiseacre he usually does, interpreting Leo as a machine that’s every bit as uniquely expressive as is any human being. That injects some welcome levity into what’s generally a flat, dour adventure, directed by Sweden’s Mikael Håfström with little of the old-school verve that he brought to Escape Plan.
  3. A Million Little Pieces
    The movie version plays exactly like every other rehab-facility melodrama ever made. Even the stuff that Frey invented seems overly familiar, borrowed from sources ranging from "28 Days" to (somewhat improbably — people in recovery aren’t necessarily allowed dental anesthetic, it turns out) "Marathon Man."
  4. Smokin' Aces
    The plot tangles until it seems irrelevant, the jokes can't push through the somber tone, and the most interesting moment apart from the action scenes involves one character using the corpse of one of the more famous cast members for a grisly ventriloquist act.
  5. Mean Machine
    While competently staged and punched up by Lock, Stock's changing camera speeds, it doesn't have the wit or intrigue to sustain its half-length.
  6. Secret in Their Eyes
    Yet nothing short of overhauling the material into something genuinely fresh could make Ray’s Secret feel essential. Tweaks aside, it remains, by in large, the same movie — which is to say, fundamentally redundant.
  7. Sand Castle
    It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."
  8. Sleeping Dogs
    Crowe is quite capable of being compelling even when doing banal stuff—the highlight here is a variation on the “falling off the wagon” trope, as he captures the sheer delight of a guy who has literally forgotten how much he loves whiskey. The end point, like the movie’s, feels inevitable, but the journey there contains small joys.
  9. Angel Has Fallen
    Given the awfulness of its predecessor, which was this publication’s pick for the worst film of 2016, a sequel that’s merely pedestrian represents a dramatic improvement.
  10. The Mother
    It’s decent but a tad too restrained for its own good.
  11. Country Strong
    When she's (Paltrow) singing, she can pass for someone who's been listening to Tammy Wynette since the cradle; when the music stops, she looks like a tourist.
  12. Seance
    When it comes to shock and delight, Seance doesn’t quite live up to Barrett’s work with other directors. It’s tough being a legacy.
  13. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  14. The Expendables
    Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.
  15. S.W.A.T.
    As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.
  16. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    As her character resorts to increasingly cruel and devious pranks, Hudson only seems funnier and more endearing.
  17. She's Funny That Way
    Plotted as a round robin of dalliances and coincidences, it’s relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.
  18. About Alex
    About Alex benefits from a uniformly strong cast that does its best to find moments of truth in the banal, derivative scenario they’ve been handed.
  19. Uncertainty
    The leads are immensely appealing, but the sum of their experiences equals nothing more profound than two earnest people wrestling with a tough decision.
  20. The Dogwalker
    While there are moments throughout when the film looks primed to break out of the indie arthouse ghetto, it never quite pulls it off.
  21. Chasing Mavericks
    It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.
  22. The Scorpion King
    Prototypical summer-movie fare, designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten all at once.
  23. Levity
    Solomon handles their crises of conscience with a studied compassion that hangs over scenes like a lead weight, though the actors (particularly Dunst) do their best to bring more range to his gray palette.
  24. Insidious: The Red Door
    Insidious: The Red Door is not a broken movie by any means. It’s a comprehensible experience, though perhaps less so if viewed as a standalone feature instead of the presumably final chapter of a continuing narrative. But Wilson was tasked with telling a pretty dull story, both in terms of its visceral horrors and its thematic ambitions.
  25. All Cheerleaders Die
    In other words, what starts as a glorified "Pretty Little Liars" episode eventually evolves (devolves?) into a flippant hybrid of "The Craft" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer."
  26. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.
  27. Off Label
    Hypocrisy aside, Off Label’s biggest problem is that, for a movie that features a lot of people talking about a lot of things, it doesn’t have a lot to say; its scatterbrained, switching-between-browser-tabs structure guarantees that no idea gets developed very far.
  28. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
    The incredible silliness doesn’t quite erase the bad taste of this kid’s movie featuring an implied dozen civilian casualties, but it helps.
  29. Willy's Wonderland
    Willy’s Wonderland is a jokey elevator pitch in search of a movie. It’s the kind of genre junk—a low-rent, one-gag cartoon slasher—whose supposed gonzo appeal begins and ends with a description of its premise.
  30. Cherry
    This is a film with nothing new to say about love, war, trauma, addiction, crime, or America. It blows through these topics on a bender of hyper-stylization, indifferently twisting its true story into the shape of other, better movies.
  31. Rails & Ties
    Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience.
  32. Wild Horses
    What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.
  33. Frontier(s)
    There's no depth, surprises, or wit to the screenplay, which seems motivated by the sole desire to generate the vilest, most disgusting people and images imaginable.
  34. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Raises the question of whether Krasinski made this movie because he really loves Wallace’s work, or because just he wanted to show Hollywood that the loveable doof from The Office can actually act.
  35. Miracles from Heaven
    Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.
  36. School for Scoundrels
    As usual, Thornton remains fully committed to the performance. Viewers could make a game of scanning his face for even the slightest hint of warmth. By the end of the film, that may be the surest source of entertainment.
  37. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    A vanity project about a vanity project.
  38. A Slipping-Down Life
    The two leads help create an atmosphere of quiet surety, but they can't elevate the film beyond its self-imposed smallness.
  39. Saban's Power Rangers
    When it comes time to morph and break out the Zords to the sound of “Go, Go, Power Rangers,” the film groans and shuffles, like a sulky teen who’s been told that they have to finish the dishes before they can borrow the minivan.
  40. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Much of Oz The Great And Powerful’s fate is tied to James Franco’s performance as Oz, and the center barely holds, with Franco often looking as overwhelmed by the task as he was by his hosting job on Oscar night.
  41. Joyful Noise
    Like so many underdog movies, Joyful Noise will go over best with those who show up hugely eager for it to be exactly what it looks like, and to tell them exactly what they want to hear.
  42. Rush Hour 3
    For a series devoted to giving audiences exactly what they want, it'd be pretty damn appropriate.
  43. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    Whenever MacFarlane — who has enough trouble maintaining basic continuity — has to stage a fight or choreograph a musical number, the whole thing falls apart.
  44. 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."
  45. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Even if Mandy Lane had been released in a timely fashion, it’s unlikely that it would have found much of an audience. For all its good intentions, it’s ultimately too half-assed and lethargic to work as a conventional horror film, and not nearly thoughtful or incisive enough to subsist on thwarted expectations alone.
  46. Bushwick
    Bushwick imagines nothing less than the collapse of the United States Of America, with half the country in armed revolt. At a time when that possibility can feel all too frighteningly real, it’s dispiriting to see it employed as little more than an excuse to engineer a live-action Grand Theft Auto.
  47. Unicorn Store
    It’s a candy necklace of a movie: sweet but chalky.
  48. Chaos Theory
    The big reason Chaos Theory doesn't work is that the gears are visibly grinding away, cranking out neat little ironies and life lessons without any liberating surprises.
  49. Brokedown Palace
    The once-reliable Danes is a particular detriment, but it's really hard to care whether either character escapes from what looks like a really unappealing summer camp.
  50. The Marksman
    If one were to diagnose a central problem with The Marksman, it’s that it isn’t actually a Clint Eastwood movie; it lacks the breathing room, the first-take nonchalance that always makes an attractive opposite to the Eastwoodian sense of purpose.
  51. The Jacket
    Still, the central mystery remains effective and compelling for most of the film, until it becomes clear that it's all image and no intent.
  52. Skills Like This
    Skills Like This is never great. But for its first half-hour, it's more fitfully amusing than a movie about a bank-robbing playwright ought to be.
  53. Road to Paloma
    Before the plot butts in, Road To Paloma works reasonably well as a moody travelogue that keeps finding new ways to show off its dingy bona fides.
  54. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    Dumber and less stylish than its predecessor, Kingsman: The Secret Service, the cartoonish secret-agent pastiche Kingsman: The Golden Circle is also even more of an incoherent right-wing text, an exaggeration of the James Bond movies’ violence, fashion sense, and sex that keeps trying to pass off its ham-fisted conservative attitudes as smirking nihilism.
  55. Dough
    Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.
  56. The Miracle Season
    It is not unusual for an underdog sports picture to be predictable. But The Miracle Season seems downright preordained, and not just in its arc. The movie is constitutionally incapable of surprise even on a moment-to-moment level.
  57. Drive Angry 3D
    Drive Angry feels like a five-minute Comic Con show reel that's been expanded beyond its limits. It's agonizingly cool.
  58. Slap Her... She's French
    Mayron tries for a junior-league "All About Eve," but that backfires horribly, not least because her diabolical Eve (Perabo) is more charismatic and imaginative than her heroine.
  59. In My Country
    Any social good the film might do gets lost in a soupy morass of histrionics, clumsy storytelling, overripe dialogue, and rampant didacticism.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    In spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center.
  61. The Legend of Tarzan
    It’s nice that The Legend Of Tarzan isn’t a nakedly mercenary franchise play that presumes dozens of sequels to come. (It’s also not a low-rent Casper Van Dien vehicle.) But it sure could use some money-grubbing set pieces to tie the genial silliness together.
  62. Stomp the Yard
    Unfortunately, it misses the one cliché that might have been welcome: the predictably plotted flashy dance movie where the actual dance makes it all worthwhile.
  63. Stalin's Wife
    Though serviceable as a primer on Soviet history under Stalin, the film's sloppy assemblage of dull interviews and stock footage never comes close to illuminating a life that the Russian people have long cherished as a precious enigma.
  64. Kidnap
    Kidnap is an asinine child-abduction thriller spliced with a touch of the early Steven Spielberg TV movie "Duel," and the most likable thing about it is that it is utter, unabashed garbage.
  65. Henry Poole Is Here
    Henry Poole cycles through so many indie film clichés--that it continually skirts self-parody.
  66. Fidel
    Estela Bravo's disgraceful documentary Fidel could have been financed by the man himself.
  67. Sympathy for Delicious
    The character's miraculous gift never plays as more than a melodramatic contrivance-it's a gimmick, not an outgrowth of faith. The movie reaches for the heart, but only comes back with a balloon filled with fake blood and chicken livers.
  68. Holidate
    Like so much of Netflix’s quantity over quality output, Holidate is broad, unsubtle, and seemingly designed to be half-watched, phone in hand. Yet within that framework, it finds a unique comedic spark that keeps it zipping along.
  69. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.
  70. Heart of Stone
    What’s there demonstrates a modicum of decent world-building, from which filmmakers can hopefully spin-off better, more capably crafted capers.
  71. Murder Mystery 2
    It’s a set-up too contrived to feel real, yet not quite over-the-top enough to be hilarious.
  72. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    The best bits come from the unexpected faces, however, as both Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain return from beyond the veil to extol the upsides of mind-altering substances.
  73. The Brothers Grimsby
    Eventually, though, The Brothers Grimsby runs out of room to fully work as a hit-or-miss comedy — and perhaps most disappointing, doesn’t reserve any of its hits for co-stars Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, Gabourey Sidibe, and Penelope Cruz; it’s a great, diverse female cast assembled to do not very much.
  74. Peter and Vandy
    The movie’s saving grace is Weixler, who manages to seem effortlessly natural without resorting to whiny faux naturalism.
  75. Nowhere
    Nowhere is Araki's most accomplished film yet, and if it never quite comes together, it's still a wildly entertaining film.
  76. Hotel Transylvania 2
    The problem is, Hotel Transylvania 2 focuses so intently on parental neuroses—Dracula needs Mavis to remain his little girl and needs his new grandson to conform to his vampire lineage—that the movie itself feels smothering (especially on the heels of the similarly themed original).
  77. 12 Mighty Orphans
    12 Mighty Orphans tells the true story of a Depression-era high school football team improbably formed at a Texas orphanage, but the screenplay may as well have been invented from whole cloth, given its relentlessly formulaic nature.
  78. Brightburn
    Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.
  79. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    A Good Old Fashioned Orgy takes its cues from Sudeikis' character and performance: It's randy, good-natured, moderately amusing, and charming in a glib, facile way.
  80. Churchill
    The result is monotonous, its only memorable image being the salacious wink of Cox’s open fly, mid-frame during a shot of Churchill getting out a car. (Presumably this was the best take.)
  81. The Belko Experiment
    The Belko Experiment teeters between “fun,” gory brutality and a more seriously disturbing variety — the latter epitomized by the film’s centerpiece, a chillingly organized process of elimination that echoes mass shootings and historic Final Solutions in equal measure.
  82. Pain Hustlers
    While it’s wildly entertaining to watch a performer walk such a tightrope, at some point you lament that the opioid crisis has been reduced to a circus sideshow.
  83. Hostage
    By the time the film escalates into a suitably ridiculous Grand Guignol finale, all connection to reality has been severed.
  84. Walking Tall
    To its credit, the new Walking Tall is a good half-hour shorter than its predecessor, but even at 86 minutes, sitting through it is a chore.
  85. The King's Man
    The concept of a supervillain hellbent on Scottish independence is, admittedly, kind of funny (not to mention in keeping with the overall politics of the Kingsman films). But The King’s Man can’t figure out what to do with the idea, apart from having the largely unseen bad guy yell a lot in a Scottish accent. Like so much of the film, it’s trying to have it both ways—to be stupid and clever at the same time, and coming across mostly as the former.
  86. Lookin' to Get Out
    Voight and Young play the kind of old friends who know each other’s many faults well enough for their bond to be characterized more by richly merited resentment than affection. After spending two plodding hours with these jerks, audiences will know that feeling all too well.
  87. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Anyone who doesn't already know and care a little about these characters might find the movie a bit thin.
  88. Ricky Stanicky
    In the wrestling ring, Cena used to wear a shirt which read “Rise Above Hate,” and indeed, he does so here. It would be better if he found a project where he didn’t have to.
  89. Delivery Man
    Delivery Man may be a change of pace for Vaughn, but it’s the exact opposite for its creator, the Québécois filmmaker Ken Scott. Belonging to the Funny Games school of carbon-copy remakes, the film is an identical Hollywood retread of Scott’s 2011 festival favorite Starbuck. Every scene, every joke, nearly every shot of the movie is straight out of the original.
  90. Faster
    Faster starts to lay on a heavy-handed message about the importance of forgiveness. That isn't what anyone showed up to see.
  91. It Runs in the Family
    Essentially the same heartwarming goo about three generations of men quarreling and bonding, with Kirk just as feisty as ever.
  92. The Boondock Saints
    As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins may not seem like the most original film, but the fact that it’s based on actual, if somewhat improbable, events means that it ultimately earns its uplifting perspective, owing largely to Waititi’s heartfelt commitment to the story.
  94. Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
  95. Voyagers
    Maybe the film’s escalating conflict would be more exciting if the characters themselves (played by the likes of Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, among an ensemble of fellow twentysomething model types) weren’t such blank-eyed nothings.
  96. Funny Games (2008)
    A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.
  97. Planetarium
    Numerous potentially interesting ideas orbit one another in Planetarium, but none boasts sufficient gravity to merit a landing, it seems.
  98. Clean
    This movie loves big, operatic gestures. At least visually, it lands them all.
  99. The Ruins
    Director Carter Smith suffers from another, more common problem: In trying to squeeze every plot point from the book into a 90-minute movie, he failed to capture its chilling essence.
  100. Mortal Engines
    This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.
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