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 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.
  2. Balls of Fury
    Add Balls Of Fury to the list of movies that not even Walken's moon-man delivery and oddball comic energy can save.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Extinction
    How about Resident Evil: Game Over?
  4. Trade
    Trade is a pulpy Hollywood-style melodrama disguised as a harrowing message movie about Important Social Issues. It labors under the delusion that it's this year's revelatory, eye-opening Maria Full Of Grace, when it's little more than a B-movie with an overwrought conscience.
  5. The Game Plan
    It's a squeaky clean pre-John Hughes, pre-Farrelly brothers throwback to an era where the words "Disney film" meant something: a movie free of crotch slams, gross-out gags, and tittery innuendo.
  6. The Comebacks
    Adhering to few solid comedic principles, The Comebacks swings wildly between lame movie references and slapstick, slightly less lame funny names (such as Aseel Tare, the running back who couldn't possibly be injured) and Airplane!-style spoof, and a few mildly amusing stabs at irony.
  7. Music Within
    Sheen is often the saving grace of Music Within, thanks to an aggressively profane wit that gives an otherwise tapioca-bland story a little edge.
  8. Rails & Ties
    Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience.
  9. The Final Season
    All these stereotypes are meant to exalt small-town values, but The Final Season is proof that it's hard to paint masterpiece in broad strokes.
  10. Saw IV
    Fans know exactly what they're in for, while everyone else knows to stay far away. Everyone can agree, however, that this is probably the worst date movie ever. For non-sadists, at least.
  11. Southland Tales
    The further Kelly bends his funhouse mirror, the more he loses sight of what it was supposed to reflect. By the end, the image has twisted beyond coherence.
  12. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    The idea of a toy store as a living, responsive being is a good one, but Helm doesn't take that idea to imaginative places.
  13. Alvin and the Chipmunks
    There's just not enough here for a movie. It's almost as if some ideas were meant to live for three and a half minutes each Christmas season, not to get stretched to the breaking point for 50 years.
  14. 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?
  15. One Missed Call
    On the shortlist for least essential movie of the decade, a copy of a copy of a copy that's so worn down, it's about as fresh and vital as a fifth-generation dub of "The Star Wars Holiday Special."
  16. Mad Money
    As a comedy, it relies on Keaton and Latifah playing the same characters they always play, and Holmes overcompensating by switching into bug-eyed manic-comedienne mode. Her performance is part Lucille Ball, part overcaffeinated chicken, and it deserves some credit for daring, but none for execution.
  17. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    It's all good-natured enough. It just isn't actually good.
  18. Untraceable
    Not only does Untraceable unmask its initially hidden killer with little ceremony, it's the sort of film that telegraphs every new development.
  19. The Eye
    The major problem is the death of a horror film: It's startling, but not particularly scary.
  20. Over Her Dead Body
    It's said that opposites attract, but for the brief period they're onscreen together in the dire comedy Over Her Dead Body, Eva Longoria Parker and Paul Rudd are one of the more bizarrely mismatched couples in recent memory.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    Strange Wilderness has three bad comic ideas for every good joke, and it botches many of those, too, thanks to slack comic timing and a nonexistent grasp of storytelling basics. But just when the flop-sweat stench is about to become unbearable, Strange Wilderness stumbles upon an uproarious, laugh-out moment, and suddenly it's tolerable again for another few minutes.
  22. Jumper
    No exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen.
  23. Vantage Point
    The loaded cast does what it can with the paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers thriller with the numbers out of order.
  24. 10,000 BC
    "The Day After Tomorrow" was kind of stupidly fun, and 10,000 B.C. might be too, if it weren't so stupidly dull.
  25. Shutter
    The photography hook gives Shutter the potential to be a genuinely creepy ghosts-in-the-machine story like the original "Pulse," or better still, a horror twist on "Blowup." But one effective scene lit solely by a camera flash isn't enough to rescue this from the J-horror slushpile.
  26. 21
    Short of counting the cards out loud, these geniuses seem to do everything they can to get caught.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. Mister Lonely
    Has its moments of wonder and beauty, but the film is obscure by design, and meant to appeal to those who favor the alternative canon of directing greats: the one that includes the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, John Cassavetes, Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara, and Vincent Gallo.
  30. Noise
    Bean always writes interesting scripts that toy with big ideas, but the films that result aren't always good. (Or even bearable.) Here he sets out to make an aural "Fight Club," but instead he's made a movie about a guy who really needs to buy earplugs.
  31. Get Smart
    There are many stretches when it's easy to forget that Get Smart is a spoof; it's more like a third-rate James Bond with pratfalls.
  32. Postal
    A provocation first, an insult second, a publicity stunt third, and a film a distant fourth.
  33. Meet Dave
    Proven comic talents like Judah Friedlander and Ed Helms make up much of Murphy's crew, but apart from speaking in contraction-free spaceman-ese, the film doesn't give them anything funny to do.
  34. Mother of Tears
    Compared to a recent Argento dud like "The Stendhal Syndrome," Mother Of Tears at least has some of the go-for-broke gothic spirit of his earlier work. He's just lost the ability to shape it into something artful.
  35. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    By the time it reaches an action-packed finale that's choreographed like an ancient Keystone Kops short, Kit Kittredge has cornered the market on bland.
  36. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    Carter and his underachieving cohorts have seldom given cultists less to believe.
  37. Space Chimps
    Story remains Vanguard's weak point.
  38. August
    Chick's underwhelming exploration of post-millennial angst is as empty and vacant as its protagonist's inexpressive peepers.
  39. Swing Vote
    This potentially sharp working-class fantasy proves strangely unsatisfying.
  40. Righteous Kill
    Trudging through a thriller that would have felt warmed over in 1988, the pair investigate a serial killer.
  41. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    Most of the film isn't as willing to reach out to viewers, and most won't be willing to do all the work in order to connect with it.
  42. Lakeview Terrace
    Ultimately, Lakeview Terrace isn't about race so much as it's about being a man, which has been LaBute's fallback theme from the start.
  43. Forever Strong
    Forever Strong is generic faith-and-redemption fare, devoid of nuance.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Miracle at St. Anna
    Miracle plays like "School Daze" transplanted to the European front, with the token militant, the token uplift-the-race type, and the token buffoon all marching inexorably toward Checkpoint Irony.
  45. Choke
    Cluttered, flavorless Choke, which crams the novel's nervy narration into an irritating voiceover, and leaps around in time and space with all the attention span of an ADD-addled child.
  46. Nights in Rodanthe
    This isn't a movie: it's a feature-length Ralph Lauren commercial.
  47. Max Payne
    In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.
  48. Beverly Hills Chihuahua
    This is not a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing. It's paced for little minds with short attention spans.
  49. Four Christmases
    The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.
  50. Cadillac Records
    Martin attempts to present the whole oversized Chess story, but instead winds up reducing the lives and art that give it shape.
  51. Lake City
    All the performers are fine--even the miscast Romijn--but they're still too much like actors playing dress-up.
  52. Dark Streets
    The main pitfall of modern noirs is that filmmakers get so caught up in the chiaroscuro lighting schemes and florid twists of dialogue and voiceover that they forget noir was about expressing more than just attitude and style.
  53. Chandni Chowk to China
    A more accurate way to describe it would be "conceptual nightmare"--crass, schizophrenic, culturally insensitive, horribly paced, and shameless in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.
  54. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.
  55. Echelon Conspiracy
    Unlike, say, "Eagle Eye," Echelon Conspiracy doesn't put enough conviction behind its stupidity. It's mostly just bland.
  56. 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.
  57. Dragonball: Evolution
    The film is crammed with treats for old-school "Dragonball" fans, from the inclusion of all these characters (who don't actually do much) to the moment when spiky-haired Goku dons his orange gi. For everyone else, this amounts to another seen-it-before, probably-willing-to-see-it-again distraction.
  58. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
    Only Sarsgaard shows a pulse, creating a self-destructive, omnisexual rogue who, for all his faults, would probably be great company. The same can't be said for the film around him.
  59. Little Ashes
    The film’s biggest problem, beyond the overheated melodrama and paper-thin period trappings, is that the trio's fictionalized dalliances diminish their real art.
  60. Year One
    Year One isn't dreadful; it just isn't nearly as funny as it hopes to be.
  61. Dance Flick
    It would be hard to imagine a film with less going for it than Dance Flick.
  62. My Life in Ruins
    Vardalos has brought back the tourist comedy and delivered the dumbed-down "If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium" no one wanted.
  63. Surveillance
    Surveillance suggests "Jennifer Lynchian" should be used for films that aspire to David’s moody, idiosyncratic genius and fall woefully short.
  64. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Every scrap of footage here has been done better somewhere else.
  65. G-Force
    Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film.
  66. Aliens in the Attic
    Like those mild old Disney comedies of the ’60s and ’70s, it seems perfectly content with being a harmless distraction.
  67. The Answer Man
    Unoriginality is the greatest and most flagrant of its many sins.
  68. Shrink
    Shrink is exactly like virtually all his (Spacey) post-"American Beauty" vehicles: flashy, phony, nakedly melodramatic, and full of big actorly moments disconnected from real life.
  69. The Collector
    For his directorial debut, The Collector, Dunstan streamlines the "Saw" concept slightly by silencing the killer and focusing more intently on a house that’s been converted into a jury-rigged deathtrap.
  70. Tooth Fairy
    For a bad, broad comedy, Tooth Fairy boasts a surprising number of positives. Which isn’t to say that it’s good, but it could be much, much worse.
  71. Remember Me
    The major problem with Pattinson’s ascendancy to the Dean throne: His soulfulness is a pose, an effect achieved more by hair and makeup (and yes, genetics) than the scenes where he’s required to emote at high volume.
  72. Knight and Day
    Cruise is thrown into many sticky situations, with legions of trained assassins surrounding him on all sides, but he never once suggests that things aren’t entirely under control. It’s profoundly boring to watch a hero without weaknesses; after all, even Superman has Kryptonite.
  73. The A-Team
    The film's featherweight tone and self-conscious excess would be a lot more palatable if everyone didn't seem so insufferably pleased with themselves. The film acts as if it's won the race before the starting gun has even been fired.
  74. Piranha 3-D
    Piranha 3D realizes its guilty-pleasure camp potential for about a minute and a half, proving yet again that there's no concept so foolproof filmmakers can't screw it up.
  75. Shrek Forever After
    That’s no huge surprise, given the last two Shrek films, but it’s still dispiriting watching a once-promising series make ever-greater commitments to apathy.
  76. 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?
  77. Peaceful Warrior
    The "What The Bleep Do We Know?" crowd may well receive the film's wisdom like communion, but the rest of us are free to gag when Salva tries to jam it down our throats.
  78. 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.
  79. 51 Birch Street
    The joys of watching a man carry out his own therapy onscreen are fairly limited.
  80. Provoked: A True Story
    There's a noble cause buried under all the clumsy speeches, blatant manipulations, and foreordained conflicts, but the thudding lack of subtlety proves exhausting.
  81. Amu
    The flat, pat talk is symptomatic of Amu's overriding problem: It has no sense of personal style.
  82. 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.
  83. Self Medicated
    It's a personal story that feels like it's been constructed from other movies.
  84. Elsa y Fred
    It's hard to overlook how much of Elsa & Fred is rote and pre-chewed.
  85. How About You ...
    Nothing in How About You is the least bit surprising; the film hits its marks with dreary precision.
  86. 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.
  87. Loot
    Undoubtedly, everything documentarian Darius Marder shows in his debut film Loot actually happened, but Marder’s approach to this “truth is stranger than fiction” story is so forced that the movie FEELS phony.
  88. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    The movie’s like an old sofa, overstuffed and misshapen, but so familiar that it gives comfort all the same.
  89. After.Life
    Caught in a pretentious no-man’s land between horror and melodrama.
  90. When You're Strange
    Director Tom DiCillo does his damnedest to make his documentary about The Doors unwatchable, but the subject matter is too compelling--and the vintage footage too electrifying--to be completely worthless.
  91. Furry Vengeance
    While Fraser’s presence doesn’t necessarily elevate Furry Vengeance into something better than the dumb, lowbrow timewaster it aspires to be, Fraser does make it a little easier to digest.
  92. The Good Heart
    Cox’s character is a living, hissing embodiment of the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. As an actor stuck in a movie that wastes his talents, Cox can surely relate.
  93. Multiple Sarcasms
    Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
  94. The Living Wake
    The Living Wake is cursed with a permanent smirk of smug self-satisfaction: It’s so delighted with itself that it leaves audiences out of the equation.
  95. Holy Rollers
    Director Kevin Asch takes protagonist Jesse Eisenberg on a dour, depressingly straightforward trip from naïveté to spiritual exhaustion.
  96. Princess Kaiulani
    While Princess Kaiulani makes do with what story it has, the film feels stretched and straining, full of sleepy scenes and pregnant pauses.
  97. 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.
  98. The Adjustment Bureau
    It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.
  99. Agora
    Weisz makes for a vivid, charismatic Hypatia, but the script lets her down.
  100. Love Ranch
    So with two great, ideally cast actors and such potentially fascinating subject matter, why does Love Ranch feel like a clumsy TV movie?
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