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. Uncle Nino
    Written and directed by Robert Shallcross, and seemingly misdirected into theaters from its natural home on the ABC Family Channel, Uncle Nino is a sweet but not particularly distinguished effort.
  2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
    Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.
  3. Love, Rosie
    On the plus side, Collins (Mirror Mirror, The Blind Side) and Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games franchise) are both appealing enough, even if their chemistry makes Rosie and Alex’s we’re-just-pals stance appear even more ludicrous than intended.
  4. Head of State
    Offers a smattering of big laughs and an overall tone of ramshackle likability, but considering Rock's talent and the film's potential for smart satire, Head Of State registers as a somewhat wasted opportunity.
  5. Into the Storm
    Into The Storm is an uncanny valley disaster movie — not as consciously cheesy and cheap as something like "Sharknado 2," but built around a similar equation of unreality and gratification.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Double Team
    Someone involved in the making of this movie is clearly insane; it should be just a standard buddy/action movie, but aside from lots of kickboxing and shooting and a big fight at the end, it doesn't follow any of the genre's chimp-simple conventions. It may be the worst Van Damme movie ever made.
  7. The Raven
    Poe was a flawed figure, but his greatest strength was in avoiding convention, or reinterpreting it to create something new. The Raven aspires to both, but abandons those ambitions to lie limply on the floor - only this, and nothing more.
  8. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
    Out-and-out dud, underlining how far the mighty have fallen.
  9. We're the Millers
    Loud and annoying? Occasionally. Funny? Sometimes. Likely to be noticed by filmgoers six months from now? Not really.
  10. Damn!
    Damn! would be a more insightful condemnation of the exploitation process if it didn't reek so strongly of exploitation itself.
  11. The Hangover Part II
    Never as edgy as it imagines itself to be. Bangkok may swallow innocents whole, but director Todd Phillips has a lucrative franchise to protect, so the film's flirtation with the comic abyss gets compromised into something that looks more like a rock-solid mainstream comedy with a prominent dark side.
  12. Hot Summer Nights
    For all of this ersatz panache, the plot of Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script—less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.
  13. 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.
  14. The Old Guard 2
    The Old Guard 2 is broader, zippier, and more caught up in explaining the rules of its immortal superheroes rather than simply living in their complex emotional reality.
  15. Along Came Polly
    With a cast this gifted, some of the throwaway jokes stick, but when Along Came Polly goes for its biggest, grossest laughs, the strings show well in advance.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    End of the Road
    Director Millicent Shelton, a veteran of dozens of music videos and television shows (including two episodes of Latifah’s series Star), wisely builds tension while exploring their family dynamic, and then stomps on the gas to bring it all home.
  17. Hey Bartender
    While incapable of comprehensively contextualizing the craze and only somewhat convincing in its portrait of the power of cocktails to reenergize the traditional local-dive scene, the documentary remains a succinct and lively tribute to the art of the drink—not to mention a handy compendium for those seeking a prime NYC joint to quench their thirst.
  18. The Ring Two
    It's passably gripping and occasionally lively.
  19. What Dreams May Come
    Despite its numerous missteps and miscalculations, What Dreams May Come is often a powerful, affecting piece of filmmaking.
  20. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    Still, no matter how Grebin and Nigro are selling it, American Cannibal isn't about the horrors of reality TV. It's about guys like Roberts and Ripley, who convince themselves that ANY job in show business would be preferable to waiting tables.
  21. Wolf Creek 2
    McLean puts the pedal to the metal from the start, forgoing suspense in favor of instant, gruesome gratification.
  22. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    Alas, there’s no covert greatness to the just-plain-underwhelming Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City, a reboot totally bereft of the visual distinction or creative personality that often made its predecessors intriguing diamonds in the rough.
  23. Forever Mine
    Forever Mine explores many of Schrader's pet themes—obsession, revenge, jealousy, betrayal, guilt—but they've seldom felt as empty, shallow, or ridiculous.
  24. Barney's Great Adventure
    Barney's Great Adventure will bore adults to tears.
  25. Unknown
    Unknown manages a hat trick by making its march toward the climax so tedious and unlikely that it unravels even as it gets off the ground.
  26. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Batman V Superman takes a title fight kids of all ages have been speculating about for decades—costumed titan from the cosmos, meet costumed vigilante from the city—and invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.
  27. This Is Where I Leave You
    This Is Where I Leave You demonstrates, a great cast is a terrible thing to waste.
  28. 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.
  29. The Answer Man
    Unoriginality is the greatest and most flagrant of its many sins.
  30. Connie and Carla
    Seems as much an imposter in the drag-queen world as its heroines; it fronts the sort of safely asexual gay characters found on network TV.
  31. The Village
    The Village may have finally emptied his usual bag of tricks, but considered on its own merits, its skillful fusion of Grimm fairy-tale horror and pointed social parable find Shyamalan in peak form.
  32. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    When a sequel has to hit the reset button and take all its characters back to where they started, it probably didn't need to be made.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Cook County
    Cook County is an evocative portrait of the drug blight that's infected swaths of our country, but not only does it not get beyond that, its almost-gleeful horrorshow quality comes with the tinge of exploitation. Misery begets more misery, but to what end?
  34. Gut Renovation
    Friedrich’s snide tone gets in the way, turning a study of capitalism run amok into one artist who just can’t stand all these rich squares and their “fancy dogs.”
  35. Police Story: Lockdown
    Instead of a claustrophobic thriller à la "Die Hard" or "The Raid," Lockdown is a kind of puzzle-box movie, but it hardly seems worth the effort, for the filmmakers or for the audience. Ol’ Jackie needn’t have bothered getting up for this.
  36. Deadly Friend
    Remains a mesmerizing time-capsule portrait of ’80s-era hopes and fears about computers.
  37. The Night Clerk
    The Night Clerk will be remembered, if at all, as a movie de Armas was way too good for — an unfortunate mile marker on her road to movie stardom.
  38. Mortal Kombat
    This is supposed to be a world of fighters with bizarre outfits and combat abilities, but a lot of the time, the viewer will just find themselves staring at a screen that’s mostly rocks.
  39. The Bronze
    It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust to the film’s shticky conception of its main character, Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch).
  40. One Last Thing...
    The real problem with One Last Thing… isn't that it's a teen sex comedy or a sappy melodrama, it's that it can't make up its mind.
  41. Bloodshot
    The real issue, though, isn’t that Bloodshot would fail an IQ test. It’s that its dumb fun isn’t executed with panache, smart or otherwise.
  42. Jobs
    For (nearly) every yin of Ashton Kutcher’s Steve Jobs flashing a moment of brilliance, there’s a yang of someone saying he’s changed or is his own worst enemy. The unwritten, but understood, full title of Joshua Michael Stern’s film is "Jobs: Brilliant Asshole."
  43. The Libertine
    Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.
  44. The Losers
    There isn’t a whiff of humility or self-deprecation to Clay, Roque, Jensen, Cougar, and Pooch, a collection of black-ops douchebags and our ostensible heroes.
  45. 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.
  46. Devil
    Perhaps someday, in the greatest twist of all, Shyamalan will be remembered as the Hitchcock of the early 21st century. Until then, movies like Devil will be misunderstood as schlock.
  47. Life Happens
    The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.
  48. Schizopolis
    Fast-paced and ambitious, it never bores, and Soderbergh proves himself interesting to watch in addition to being gifted behind the camera.
  49. Aftermath
    In fact, Aftermath only becomes interesting if considered as a dour subversion of the daughter-and-wife revenge scenarios of Schwarzenegger’s action movies — as star text, in other words.
  50. Superman III
    The ideas might sound good, particularly the synthetic Kryptonite that turns Superman into a boozing jerk, but they never get developed, while high-profile guest star Richard Pryor appears somewhat puzzled at his own presence in the film.
  51. Sex with Strangers
    The film is ostensibly about sex and swinging, but in depicting the complex boundaries of the sexual fringe, it ends up saying a lot about the joys and frustrations of maintaining any relationship.
  52. Killer Elite
    This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.
  53. Steve + Sky
    Has more flavor than leftovers have a right to.
  54. Blood
    This move is both redundant and counterproductive because it weakens one of the screenplay’s central conceits — the way Bettany’s guilt is shared and experienced by other characters.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Prom Dates
    Not many modern comedies boast the ability to make you laugh more than cringe, but I’m more than happy to give Prom Dates that trophy.
  56. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Fischer at least has personal and romantic reasons to be involved with this film, but audiences are unencumbered by such obligations, and should heed the title's warning sign and opt out of Kirk, Fischer, and Messina's fruitless little circle of pain.
  57. Night Swim
    Despite some choppy waters in the back half, this is a fun, funny, often genuinely unnerving horror movie experience, one that might make you think twice about that first swim of the year when summer rolls around.
  58. Firehouse Dog
    The lesson here is that dogs don't need "attitude." They're loveable enough on their own.
  59. Racing Stripes
    A film divided against itself. Granted, neither part is particularly distinguished or appealing but the old-timey sports-movie elements at least possess a quaint charm. Unfortunately, that's wholly negated by the film's stumbling attempts at comic relief.
  60. Eagle Eye
    It'd probably feel just a little bit timelier and more relevant if it took place in a universe that bore even the faintest resemblance to our own.
  61. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Malibu's screenplay inexplicably required the creative efforts of four screenwriters (including Kennedy), which works out to about half a funny gag apiece.
  62. Hillsong - Let Hope Rise
    Structurally, Hillsong: Let Hope Rise is hopelessly confused, jumping back and forth in time and space documenting the buildup to a big Hillsong United show at The Forum in Los Angeles, where the band will debut its new album.
  63. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.
  64. The Princess
    A yawningly simplistic and roundly inconsequential action movie, The Princess lacks, on a narrative level, the certitude and clarity of purpose of its title character.
  65. Survival of the Dead
    Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn't provide enough reason for them to be.
  66. Larger Than Life
    While it may sound like pairing Murray with a pachyderm couldn't fail, Larger Than Life suffers from a stifling air of blandness.
  67. Backwards
    Thomas, credited as writer, producer, and executive producer, is the obvious auteur, orchestrating a star vehicle she lacks the screen presence to anchor.
  68. Step Up Revolution
    Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.
  69. Army of One
    The problem is that Army Of One doesn’t add up to much. It’s not quite a satire nor quite a full character study.
  70. Poker Face
    When the entire theme is about misdirection, then yes, assessing how enjoyable the swerves and bluffs are, both narratively and conceptually, feels entirely appropriate. And they all too often feel like letdowns.
  71. Hunter Killer
    The problem with this sort of Hungry-Man dinner theater is that it needs a true believer or at least a testosterone junkie behind the camera to rise above the lowest-common-denominator appeal of watching men yell at and rescue each other. Donovan Marsh is neither; his direction is perfunctory, unable to evoke even something as basic as the claustrophobia of a submarine’s interior. Perhaps he’s just following orders.
  72. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway
    Uncharacteristically true to his word, Peter does less insufferable blathering this time around, but the subtitle The Runaway still threatens the audience with a better time.
  73. Looking for Kitty
    Burns has continued to cram one-dimensional characters into thinly plotted comedy-dramas, hoping to re-impress moviegoers with his aloof leading-man charm and faux-natural, trying-too-hard-to-be-funny dialogue.
  74. San Andreas
    Handsomely shot by Steve Yedlin, Rian Johnson’s regular cinematographer, and boasting a typically likable Dwayne Johnson as its star, San Andreas nonetheless struggles to drum up tension or interest, even as skyscrapers topple like Jenga towers and massive tidal waves sweep through San Francisco Bay.
  75. The Last American Virgin
    A powerhouse soundtrack–with the songs deployed slyly, as comment and foreshadowing–and a stunning ending balance the copious nudity and slapstick raunch which have led some to dismiss The Last American Virgin as distasteful. Really, the film's frankness makes it more honest than its dreamy-eyed descendants; even the shallow treatment of girls captures the point of view of a luckless teenage boy.
  76. The Transformers: The Movie
    As an '80s curio and perhaps the only film to feature the voices of both Welles and That Guy From The Micro Machines Ad Who Talks Real Fast, it possesses a kitschy, low-budget charm.
  77. American Pastoral
    This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.
  78. Madison
    Madison couldn't be more wholesome if they served it with a tall glass of fresh milk.
  79. Catch and Release
    Take away the death and revelations that follow, and Catch And Release has the makings of a weekly half-hour network comedy--call it "Four's Company."
  80. The Tempest
    The best thing about Taymor's Tempest is also the worst: It's not stunning but it is sturdy, a handsome-enough showcase of a film that never really comes to life. It plays like a challenge politely declined.
  81. True Wolf
    Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.
  82. The Omen
    Pretty much everyone in the cast is wildly overqualified, including Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis in key supporting roles.
  83. The Great Role
    A short and soppy story that Coyote lends some dignity, but not much power.
  84. Suicide Kings
    The only redeeming moments come from Walken, whose assured, effortless screen presence stands out from his faceless co-stars. Taped to a leather chair and bleeding profusely from a severed finger, he's still the most powerful person in the room.
  85. Jersey Girl
    Though Smith loses many of his past efforts' familiar trappings--Jay and Silent Bob are now confined to the production-company logo--Jersey Girl plays to Smith's strengths like no film since "Clerks."
  86. Fathers' Day
    Add to these problems the fact that Fathers' Day is a comedy starring two reputedly hilarious people who don't make you laugh once, and you have a movie that would be great if everything about it weren't terrible.
  87. 9 Songs
    Between the performances in the bedroom and on stage, 9 Songs gives off plenty of heat, but the whole project seems half-thought-out and hastily arranged, hampered by butt-ugly DV photography that turn skin tones grimy and make the Brixton scenes look as high-grain as a bowl of Mueslix.
  88. The Vow
    It's unashamedly escapist, but a turn for the serious as The Vow nears the finish line only underscores its essential silliness and what a poor job the film has done making it seem like its characters need each other for reasons beyond looking good together.
  89. Bob Marley: One Love
    Unfortunately director Reinaldo Marcus Green, along with his co-screenwriters Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, waste this opportunity and Marley’s legacy with a rather limp story full of cliches and perplexing choices.
  90. Hot Rod
    Hot Rod keeps a sweet tone that's filled with affection for its characters, and enough laughs to become this summer's most mildly recommendable comedy.
  91. Antebellum
    If only the filmmakers trusted their actors to convey the messages of this story, instead of burdening them with obvious, explanatory lines and speeches.
  92. The Angry Birds Movie
    Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.
  93. Equals
    Equals brings Stewart’s charisma back to a genre framework — though its form of low-key science fiction is no longer the kind of genre material that actually gets wide exposure.
  94. Rabid
    Horror remakes don’t have to be inferior rehashes, as films like Jim Mickle’s "We Are What We Are" (2013) and Luca Guadagnino’s "Suspiria" (2018) have demonstrated. But this Rabid nibbles where it should clamp down hard.
  95. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    While Alvarez acquits himself with thrilling action sequences and breakneck pacing, the overall impression left by this “New Dragon Tattoo Story” is one of a razor-sharp blade dulled by the demands of franchise filmmaking.
  96. 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.
  97. MacGruber
    It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.
  98. The Shaggy Dog
    Okay, so when does the fun start?
  99. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.
  100. Anything Else
    A joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners.
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