The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.
  2. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Characters scream, throw glasses, screw, and strip nude for the self-gratifying viewing pleasure of others, but Jayne Mansfield’s Car never musters up even the faintest trace of Tennessee Williams-style hothouse drama.
  3. Rites of Spring
    Rites Of Spring does have a real "no idea what's going to happen next" quality, which is rare. Then again, that's because the movie feels haphazard and unfinished: more weed than plant.
  4. 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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    This Time
    Not only does the film lack focus in its chosen spectrum of likeable performers, it also feels short of any kind of structure or arc, leaving its subjects to toil along in place for an overlong runtime with no end in sight.
  6. Supercapitalist
    With its minimal settings and focus on the abstract lingo of market transactions, "Margin Call" stands as the new model for how to do Wall Street on a budget, embedding its moral themes in language and complex characters. By comparison, $upercapitalist seems naïve about both the market and the humans who operate in it.
  7. The Equalizer
    It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.
  8. Little White Lies
    Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Bringing Up Bobby
    Bringing Up Bobby centers around a mugging performance by Jovovich, who can't ground the film's attempts to tie together sentiments from "Paper Moon" and "Miss Saigon."
  10. The Collection
    It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.
  11. Getaway
    For the most part, Getaway lacks tension and violence. Strobe cuts rob the stunts of any sense of motion; twisting metal, seen in half-second snippets, becomes abstracted texture. While it’s possible to appreciate this stuff on an individual level, it doesn’t quite add up to an action-movie whole.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. The ABCs of Death
    Many of the shorts are visibly impressive, given their scant budgets, and there’s no end of visual and thematic creativity stretched throughout the anthology; there are, after all, a million horrible, memorable ways to die.
  15. Fairhaven
    Fairhaven's location is lovely. Its actors are terrific. All of them beg for something better.
  16. At Any Price
    This time out, Bahrani’s push to make a point wins out over the strong sense of character he’s cultivated in his earlier films.
  17. 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.
  18. The Sweeney
    From its lone-wolf mythology to the high, pealing guitar wails in its score, The Sweeney plays like a forgotten ’80s action movie recently discovered in a dusty vault. A treat, perhaps, for those who prefer their cop thrillers pre-meta, but tiresomely plodding for everyone else.
  19. 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.”
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Kings of Summer
    The Kings Of Summer doesn’t take itself seriously; short of having the actors break character, it’ll do anything for a laugh. It leans heavily on interminable improv scenes and interminable montages edited from improv scenes. In other words, much of it plays like the outtakes reel that would be shown at the wrap party of a better, more tightly structured film.
  21. Transcendence
    This humorless science-fiction cautionary tale feels like a relic from an earlier era, pulled out of a dusty old box of zip disks and 56k modems.
  22. Silver Circle
    Like a Rand Paul rally rendered in the style of Grand Theft Auto, Silver Circle engineers the perfect marriage of sub-par animation and sloppy thinking.
  23. Stuck in Love
    As writer-director Josh Boone introduces these characters, he superimposes words on the screen to suggest how they channel their thoughts and conversations into their work. But that’s the extent of the film’s interest in writing, which serves strictly as a “classy” backdrop for a series of painfully contrived amorous meltdowns among a family who might as well run a dry-cleaning business.
  24. Salinger
    When Salinger succeeds, it’s in spite of Salerno’s heavy hand and because of the implicit intrigue of J.D. Salinger’s life story. For a director who clearly reveres his subject’s work, he doesn’t grasp how the flashy, eardrum-busting pomp and circumstance of his film is exactly the kind of thing Salinger abhorred.
  25. Sightseers
    The relentless contrast of banality with horror seems to be Wheatley’s signature move, and like his "Kill List" (2011), Sightseers can claim a sizable fan base, especially in its native U.K. But the humor here, ironically, doesn’t travel well.
  26. Violet & Daisy
    Geoffrey Fletcher’s directorial debut, Violet & Daisy, has a lot of arch dialogue and very little depth. Talky and artificial, it moves like a sort of lobotomized Hal Hartley movie; it has plenty of Hartley-esque rhetorical devices — theatrical speech patterns, naïve characters, jokey plotting — but lacks Hartley’s sense of curiosity or engagement with the real world.
  27. The Patience Stone
    There’s only so much anyone can do with a conceit that amounts to a movie-length speech delivered to a coma patient.
  28. Girl Most Likely
    The blame belongs most plainly with Michelle Morgan’s script, which requires this gifted comedian to play straight woman to a supporting carnival of Indiewood types.
  29. The Hot Flashes
    Early in The Hot Flashes, Brooke Shields is seen reading Menopause For Dummies, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s precisely what you’re watching.
  30. Blended
    The movie feels like a throwback; it brings to mind the blandly crappy movies Sandler made 10 years ago, rather than the brazenly crappy movies he makes today. In that sense, it’s a double disappointment, neither consistently funny nor endurance-testing.
  31. Drift
    The mediocre ones, like the new Australian drama Drift, squeeze surfing scenes into conventional narratives, presuming that, because surfing looks exciting, any story related to surfing is inherently interesting.
  32. Deliver Us From Evil
    The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.
  33. 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.
  34. 33 Postcards
    This sort of global co-production is becoming more and more common, but it’s rarely quite so calculated; you can practically see the scale being used to ensure that each location receives equal narrative weight, as characters take actions that make sense only according to that metric.
  35. Frankenstein's Army
    Frankenstein’s Army is a ludicrous World War II horror flick bogged down by its found-footage gimmick, which is compromised and contradicted so often that it becomes a distraction.
  36. The Other Woman
    Somewhere around the 60-minute mark, director Nick Cassavetes — whose career makes one wish that John Cassavetes had been a better father — pushes the movie into Tyler Perry territory, with the final third playing as a tone-deaf mixture of wish fulfillment, punishment, and bawdy innuendo.
  37. Assassin's Creed
    The movie is at least interestingly confusing until about the halfway mark, when monotony sets in for good.
  38. Labor Day
    Improbably, this saccharine melodrama comes courtesy of Jason Reitman, the Hollywood scion director who made "Juno" and "Up In The Air." Clearly, he’s chasing a change of pace, a hard right turn away from the sardonic redemption stories that have previously sported his byline and into the unfamiliar realm of Sirksian soap.
  39. Breaking the Girls
    Literalizing "Strangers On A Train’s" gay subtext might theoretically have been interesting, but Breaking The Girls’ LGBT angle, like everything else about it, seems pandering rather than heartfelt — a “contemporary rethinking” of material that was once sturdy enough not to require a pseudo-sleazy hard sell.
  40. Killing Season
    With casting this unconvincing, no one is watching to get a lesson in the horrors of war.
  41. The Look of Love
    The movie is a character study in search of a character.
  42. Rushlights
    Unabashedly pulpy, Rushlights brings to mind the noir cheapies churned out by the studios of Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early 1950s. It has a few of the better qualities of sub-B noir—above-average camerawork, a rogues gallery of bit players — and all of the flaws.
  43. Homefront
    The basic ingredients of a throwback action movie are all there; what’s missing is action and style.
  44. The Lifeguard
    Like its lead character, The Lifeguard is stuck in a rut. After establishing Bell’s frustration within the first five minutes, the movie continually reiterates it.
  45. Good Ol' Freda
    The impression left is that of a movie bending over backward to not let its subject tell her life story.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    A Single Shot
    It’s largely just an opportunity for the actors to try on Ozark-y mannerisms, swig moonshine, and hock loogies. And like most exercises in authenticity, it couldn’t be more inauthentic if it tried.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    When Comedy Went to School
    Not all styles of humor stand the test of time, and the documentary When Comedy Went To School, about the Borscht Belt stand-ups who worked the Catskills during the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, helplessly drives the point home.
  48. National Lampoon's Vacation
    There's hardly a shot in the film where Chase doesn't try to swallow the camera with one broad expression or another, and Vacation follows in turn, laboring too hard to drive every punchline home.
  49. Bad Milo!
    :ike a lot of intentionally shoddy or derivative movies, Bad Milo! can’t overcome what it’s trying to be. It’s neither focused enough to work as straight parody, nor outrageous enough to be appreciated for its excess; it’s a movie about butt monsters where butts are never shown.
  50. 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.
  51. The Loft
    Besides being an early contender for the worst date movie of 2015, The Loft is a film that can’t decide what it wants. It’s a male fantasy, and a cautionary tale. It’s sleazy in concept, and timid in execution.
  52. Winter's Tale
    Though viewers may have trouble watching any of this with a straight face, the movie’s goofy corniness becomes marginally endearing, in a hobbling-puppy sort of way.
  53. The Zero Theorem
    If only this imaginative environment were populated with a single compelling character or stimulating idea, rather than serving as busy distraction from the narrative tedium.
  54. Search Party
    Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.
  55. La Maison de la Radio
    Aside from the Tour De France segments (the only scenes in the movie to be shot entirely handheld), La Maison lacks the warmth that’s characterized Philibert’s best work. Eventually, the film begins to resemble a cross between a radio station’s webcast and a security-camera feed.
  56. The Secret Lives of Dorks
    It’s arguable that the jocks and cheerleaders are this movie’s true heroes, without whom those pathetic dorks would never be able to find one another.
  57. Enemy
    Enemy dives into material Villeneuve has described as “personal.” But it’s hard to see much more than platitudes in the metaphoric muddle of its plot.
  58. Child of God
    As a McCarthy adaptation, it’s an abject failure; as a piece of art - damaged trash, it occasionally delivers the requisite squirms. Visually and thematically, it has less in common with "No Country For Old Men" or "The Counselor" than with ’90s shot-on-VHS gonzo efforts like "Red Spirit Lake."
  59. Addicted
    Addicted is basically a social-issue melodrama that, minus some curse words, thrusting, and frequent side nudity, could have emerged sometime in the ’50s.
  60. A Case of You
    The movie is about as generic as modern romantic comedies get.
  61. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    By the standards of Tyler Perry’s Madea series, A Madea Christmas is better than average.
  62. Charlie Countryman
    In a film this hapless, it’s hardly a surprise that no one can keep Bucharest and Budapest straight.
  63. CBGB
    Punk may not be dead, but this picture is D.O.A.
  64. Capital
    The imagery is cliché, and therefore ineffective; the characters don’t seem to operate in the world of finance, but in the world of financial thrillers.
  65. Camille Claudel 1915
    Whatever nuance the movie has, it owes to Binoche’s performance; despite the material and visual context, she’s able to convey a sense of contradiction and inner life.
  66. One Chance
    Blandly directed by "The Devil Wears Prada"-helmed David Frankel, One Chance lacks the middlebrow polish that has made his films such reliably re-watchable cable-TV fodder.
  67. Go for Sisters
    Like much of the later work by writer-director John Sayles, Go For Sisters is overlong, style-less, and dramatically undercooked.
  68. Twice Born
    One hundred minutes of snooze-inducing troubled romance eventually gives way to a strange, interesting backstory. It doesn’t manage to recast the preceding feature’s worth of movie in a different light, but instead makes the viewer wish the film had gotten to the end sooner.
  69. The Truth About Emanuel
    Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.
  70. Everyday
    Movies don’t necessarily have to tell stories, but if narrative is eschewed in favor of an unvarnished portrait of ordinary life, it’s best to cheat a little and make ordinary life feel extraordinary. Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday refuses to stoop to such measures; for better and for worse — mostly for worse — it sticks to the mundane promise of its title.
  71. Fantastic Four
    It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.
  72. Passengers
    The effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent, and to turn one of the most likable actors in Hollywood into a total fucking creep. A date movie, this is not.
  73. Sabotage
    David Ayer’s latest, Sabotage, is a sloppy DEA whodunit, distinguished by its scatological humor and gore.
  74. Child 44
    Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.
  75. The Lazarus Effect
    Like too many horror films, this one seems targeted at a hypothetical audience using only 10 percent of its brainpower.
  76. Masterminds
    Masterminds leans heavily on its cast of comic ringers—Ken Marino as a yuppie neighbor, Jason Sudeikis as a cavalier hit man, Leslie Jones as an irate federal agent—without giving them anything especially funny to say or do.
  77. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  78. Tusk
    Like most self-conscious attempts at a “midnight movie,” Tusk lacks the conviction that would make it anything more than an outré curiosity; it’s essentially a filmed dare, combined with fan service.
  79. Happy Christmas
    Nobody involved ever came up with an idea or character remotely worth exploring, yet they all forged ahead anyway, placing their faith in the filmmaking process itself, and this damp squib of an ostensible movie is the decidedly lackluster result.
  80. I Origins
    I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.
  81. 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.
  82. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.
  83. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.
  84. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.
  85. Yves Saint Laurent
    Yet another biopic that feels as though it were made by an accountant, Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent epitomizes the mediocrity of a genre that often aspires to secondhand storytelling instead of first-rate art.
  86. The Protector 2
    In brief spurts, the film is funny, but taken as a whole, it feels like a waste of talent. Cheesiness should not be the most memorable thing about a Tony Jaa movie.
  87. Moms' Night Out
    The film never seems hectoring or preachy. Unfortunately, it never seems funny either, coming across like a sanitized remake of some raunchier laughfest.
  88. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.
  89. Decoding Annie Parker
    As hackneyed as the movie’s portrayal of Parker’s life might be, it seems subtly shaded in comparison to the King narrative, which mostly consists of people in lab coats saying things aloud that they should already know, using easy-to-follow metaphors while pointing to a conveniently posted chart or diagram.
  90. 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.
  91. 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."
  92. Farmland
    A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.
  93. Rage
    Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.
  94. The Grand Seduction
    A confused, toothless comedy.
  95. Good People
    Good People might have been better titled "Dumb People", or at least "People Who Have Never Seen A Movie In Their Entire Lives."
  96. The Possession of Michael King
    After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.
  97. Max
    It is dull and weird — weird in that way that it is pronounced we-ee-eird, the stretched vowel signaling a weirdness that is probably unconscious on the part of the filmmakers.
  98. Violette
    A few excerpts of Leduc’s prose spoken in voiceover, expressing the same feelings poetically, can’t compensate for over two hours of maudlin self-pity. It’s so annoying that dull shots of Leduc writing serve as a welcome respite.
  99. The Letters
    The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Made in America
    Jay Z spends much of the film trumpeting his own keen eye for diversity, without acknowledging the fact that as festival bills go, Made In America is utterly unremarkable—and nowhere near as diverse as he claims.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »