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. Sanctum
    While Sanctum is frustratingly familiar, it's easy to get caught up in the action.
  2. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Unlike a recent franchise reimagination like 28 Years Later or even the pop culture savvy remix of 2022’s Scream (side note: both Wes Craven and Gillespie’s original films were written by Kevin Williamson), I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t successfully subvert its storyline nor glean anything remarkable by setting it in our current era.
  3. The Adderall Diaries
    On a purely technical level, the film is fine, if overly reliant on indie-movie clichés. It features some good performances from proven actors, and touches on some interesting philosophical questions.
  4. Home of the Brave
    Whatever its model, the film is assembled from much poorer material, leftover parts of Lifetime movies and well-meaning indie films seen only on opening nights at some forgotten festival in Tampa.
  5. Downrange
    Downrange is trash, but in an almost elemental vein.
  6. Fatale
    What keeps Fatale from really working as a noir pastiche (or, dare to dream, a Coens-esque ghoulish comedy of violently incompetent malfeasance) is its gentle, kid-gloved deference to the idea that Derrick is a good guy, rather than a weak-willed dope or even an affable bumbler in over his head.
  7. Locked Down
    Maybe this all works, accidentally or not, as a time capsule of very contemporary irritation. Will future audiences look back on Locked Down and feel some of our pain, watching two good actors sputter through a simulacrum of cabin-fever conflict?
  8. Won't Back Down
    The film's clumsy sloganeering, however, largely defeats the leads' fine efforts.
  9. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    It’s an easier-to-follow variation on the template than most of its predecessors, but still one dependent on long-winded exposition dumps. And the character-based material here lacks Bumblebee’s sweetness, coming off as cloyingly manipulative instead.
  10. Love the Hard Way
    Brody's Oscar victory and newfound star power might have secured Love The Hard Way its theatrical release, but his depth and charisma are what make the film haunting and surprisingly resonant.
  11. Daredevil
    Casting Affleck would have paid off had the conflicted, acerbic star of “Boiler Room,” “Changing Lanes,” or even “Bounce” shown up. Instead we're left with the cardboard hero of “Armageddon” and “The Sum Of All Fears,” a caretaker leading man wholly dependent on the quality of the movie around him. Sadly, there's not much of that.
  12. The Abandoned
    The Abandoned is a rare horror film that moves from the real world into a kind of psychic space, and slowly suffocates its characters inside their own heads.
  13. Robert the Bruce
    For an uncertainly paced and fabricated historical side quest, much of Robert The Bruce is painlessly watchable.
  14. 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.
  15. South of Heaven
    Straight-faced and suspenseful at first, wacky and almost randomly nihilistic afterwards, South Of Heaven just doesn’t know what it wants to be.
  16. 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.
  17. 24 Exposures
    Like countless Swanberg films (the prolific director has completed 17 features in less than a decade), 24 Exposures is populated by characters who are defined not by their actions, but by their unwillingness to act. The difference here is the presence of an exterior force—the murders—that makes Swanberg’s naturalistic style seem affected.
  18. The Current War
    The truth is that a movie about deeply personal obsessions can’t work if it doesn’t have some of its own, and the prevailing mood of The Current War is indifference.
  19. Ironclad
    The movie's gathering of third-rank action heroes provides sufficient brawn but precious little onscreen charisma, although Brian Cox's reliable bluster lights up his handful of scenes as a bellicose baron.
  20. The Internship
    The real star of The Internship is Google itself, and what a self-aggrandizing diva she is.
  21. The Duel
    Blessed with solid supporting character work and several scenes of genuine good fun, the movie manages to make its nearly two-hour run-time pass by easily enough, but not so much so that the seams on this patchwork quilt don’t still show.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Mafia Mamma
    If it all sounds silly, it is. But it works, far, far better than it should, for one main reason. Well, two, actually. The mighty Toni Collette (who also co-produced the movie) stars as Kristin, and she delivers a funny, touching, and effervescent performance that sweeps you along in its wake. Monica Bellucci plays Bianca oh-so-drolly and bounces beautifully off of Collette.
  23. Overboard
    The way the script pulls its punches is less offensive than simply toothless, giving Overboard the feel of a film written by a focus group, or maybe a script-writing robot programmed with the latest demographic trends.
  24. Mister America
    Running only a little shorter than the average season of On Cinema At The Cinema, it’s never as cringe-inducingly funny or inventive as the webseries that spawned it.
  25. Lazer Team
    Lazer Team is carried along by the sheer enthusiasm of its main quartet....It’s just too bad that there’s less wit in the dialogue than there is in the Barenaked Ladies’ closing-credits song.
  26. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    This is a film that takes big swing after big swing, and leaves us filled up with spectacle, warmth, and a sense that the wait was probably worth it.
  27. The Ice Road
    Even at its dumbest, The Ice Road holds your attention; a climactic fight/chase scene even acknowledges that it’s hard to look badass on a slippery surface.
  28. Swiped
    James is a compelling leading presence for the saga, capturing both Whitney’s youthful effervescence and the gripping fear that begins to take over her life. That the film can depict the emotional abuse Whitney experiences while still keeping an eye on the misogyny she herself perpetuates is an impressive tightrope. And James’ charisma helps carry the story through its occasional script stumble or on-the-nose moment.
  29. Pizza
    Christopher delivers cutesy jabber and one-note characters, as oily and devoid of substance as... well, you know.
  30. Piggie
    Reilly's appearance in Piggie amounts to little more than a cameo, but he's lively and real in ways that the rest of Bagnall's cast is not. It's the material's fault.
  31. Inferno
    This latest film, which was made on about half the budget of either of its predecessors, is as close as the Langdon-Howard cycle has gotten to actually being fun.
  32. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Here, the monsters are entirely incidental to the story. Instead we are forced to sit through 119 punishing minutes of what plays like a dorm-room answer to modern war films, complete with the constant profanity and masculine hysterics that pass for impact in an immature script.
  33. Captain America: Brave New World
    Brave New World doesn’t even seem sure about what it’s selling—just that it has to get a movie-shaped something-or-other to market.
  34. 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.
  35. Holy Man
    A pleasant piece of commercial filmmaking, but as a satirical comedy, it's devoid of laughs and insight.
  36. Burnt
    Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.
  37. Books of Blood
    Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
  38. Two Weeks Notice
    Lawrence is fortunate to have appealing pros like Grant and Bullock around to bail him out with romantic chemistry and enough crisply delivered one-liners to survive the barren stretches of script.
  39. Jackass: The Movie
    Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.
  40. Bad Samaritan
    This comparatively low-budget effort represents a marked improvement from Devlin’s debut theatrical feature, Geostorm, which was among last year’s very worst films. He’s graduated from painful tedium to an acceptable means of killing two hours. One step at a time.
  41. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Take away the gorgeous setting, however, and you’re left with a romantic comedy that’s never romantic and only occasionally funny.
  42. The Wolf Hour
    A gloomy psychological thriller interested in the distinct paranoia of a woman living in self-exile in the South Bronx.
  43. Parker
    Though Parker starts off fairly strong, the action gets more predictable as it meanders toward its conclusion.
  44. Maybe I Do
    Instead of gags, we’re treated to endless observations about love, commitment, romance, parental responsibilities, and other well-trod subjects. None of this is particularly insightful or interesting.
  45. Celebrity
    Celebrity is a waste, a tedious and depressingly routine film by a filmmaker on a steep, possibly permanent artistic decline.
  46. The Immaculate Room
    Despite its thrilling central performances and its sleek production design, The Immaculate Room has more ideas than it can hold together, and emerges, quite ironically it must be said, as quite a muddled mess.
  47. The Taqwacores
    Deepens as it plays out, and rewards viewers who stick with it through the clumsier passages. The film is moving and thought-provoking.
  48. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  49. The English Teacher
    Even the sitcom stylings might not matter if the movie were funny, but in spite of the potential for Guffman-esque comedy, The English Teacher boasts few surprises—except perhaps its message, which seems to be that selling out isn’t so bad. Chalk it up to a case of “write what you know.”
  50. The Event
    A deadly earnest, relentlessly solemn affair.
  51. The Rage: Carrie 2
    Better than an opportunistic sequel has any right to be, but still pretty flawed.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vampires
    Profoundly disappointing--though Carpenter's score is, as usual, good fun.
  53. The Stepford Wives
    Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.
  54. Amityville: The Awakening
    The script is just as lazy as the acting, leaning on a fitfully applied, Scream-esque meta subplot to justify why the hell we’re all here in the first place.
  55. Marauders
    Marauders is like a sophomoric college essay: It’s full of interesting ideas that get bungled in the execution.
  56. Austenland
    In Austenland, her directorial debut, Hess adapts a 2007 beach book into another broad comedy of caricature. It’s a truly half-assed satire, one whose senseless sensibility seems less informed by the best of English literature than the worst of Saturday Night Live.
  57. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    The essential question here, of course, is how kickass those action scenes are, since no one’s watching an xXx movie for the plot. (That particular assumption may explain how loose the continuity remains throughout.) The answer is variable.
  58. Armageddon
    Bay directs Armageddon in a way that seems more concerned with constantly assaulting the senses than anything else, hoping perhaps that the quick cuts and constant explosions will distract from his film's many flaws.
  59. The Great Wall
    If The Great Wall is too spotty to really satisfy as the old-fashioned medieval adventure it sometimes aspires to be, it is consistently engaging as an almost abstract exercise in visual sumptuousness.
  60. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.
  61. A Journal for Jordan
    Adapted from a 2008 memoir by former New York Times writer and editor Dana Canedy, it trades in cloying sentimentality and romance, the gooey melodrama done no favors by Washington’s stiff, anonymous direction.
  62. Reincarnated
    Part of Snoop’s protean quality comes from the fact that his rhymes only cut so far: He can pivot freely because he’s never dug in too deep.
  63. The Bucket List
    There are certainly worse ways to spend the holiday season than in the company of two charming old actors, being reminded that human companionship makes life worth living, even as it makes dying a little tougher.
  64. The Family
    It’s at its best in the brief moments when Besson plunges into complete, comic-book-panel unreality, as in an early shot where a hitman in a black trenchcoat, black trilby hat, and black gloves emerges silencer-first from behind a wall of smoke. It's the rare occasion when you might wish a director were more over-indulgent.
  65. Fred Claus
    Leave it to Giamatti to bring gravitas to the fat guy in the red suit; he's naturally the straight man in the sibling duo, but whenever Fred Claus goes for the heartstrings, he's the only one capable of plucking in tune.
  66. Opus
    If Opus has anything to say about celebrity, fandom, and the state of arts criticism, it’s both not much and not new, so vague and so unrealized that it’s difficult to even parse exactly what it is.
  67. From Paris with Love
    With his flamboyant ridiculousness, Travolta does, however, give From Paris With Love a pulse, which is more than can be said for the film’s petulant hero, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
  68. Trapped
    A tone of lurid idiocy permeates Trapped, a Z-grade woman-in-peril thriller starring scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon.
  69. Underworld
    Not since "Battlefield Earth" pitted overacting, nine-foot-tall Psychlos against puny man-animals has there been an interspecies match-up this perversely uninteresting.
  70. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Solidly mindless, breathless summer fun.
  71. Strangerland
    Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.
  72. Clown
    While Watts deserves some credit for treating a totally ridiculous premise with a straight face, his grisly first feature plays very much like what it is: a 90-second joke stretched uncomfortably to full length.
  73. Madea's Witness Protection
    There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)
  74. Lost River
    Lost River displays almost no distinctive personality of its own. The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he’s a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.
  75. Breaking In
    The film’s sense of time lacks precision and urgency, and just having characters periodically point out that the clock is ticking doesn’t cut it.
  76. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot is an inert exercise, visually and dramatically on par with "Drew Peterson: Untouchable."
  77. The Haunting
    You can buy the special effects, but if that's all you have to offer, it won't amount to much.
  78. The Perfect Game
    Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.
  79. Endings, Beginnings
    A complete dud.
  80. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    It’s a busier and less coherent film, too, with a baffling master plot and a crowded pileup of special effects in search of something to do.
  81. Aliens in the Attic
    Like those mild old Disney comedies of the ’60s and ’70s, it seems perfectly content with being a harmless distraction.
  82. 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."
  83. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    The training montage where Lincoln learns to twirl his axe around his body like a baton for no apparent purpose is neither the movie's first laughable sequence nor its last, but it sums up the movie's aesthetic: The filmmakers mistakenly think nothing is silly if it's done with a grim enough facial expression.
  84. Orphan
    If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) set out to make a parody of horror-film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly.
  85. The Last House on the Left
    It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.
  86. Persuasion
    Despite these modern constraints, Cracknell’s adaptation crackles with life. Especially with an effervescent actress and hunky actor delivering compelling performances—in Johnson’s case, sometimes directly to the camera—this funny, poignant and enrapturing film gives ingenious new power to some of the Jane Austen’s greatest hits.
  87. Next
    Next bears some resemblance to another Dick adaptation, "Minority Report," about "pre-cogs" who can anticipate murders before they happen, but it doesn't really bother exploring the moral or emotional implications of Cage's power.
  88. High Tension
    Though staged with technical skill and unflinching brutality, it's an awfully familiar-looking slaughter filled with moments on loan from other movies.
  89. The House That Jack Built
    The film lands somewhere between self-flagellation and apologia; however hard von Trier is on himself, he’s not above mounting defenses, and he spares plenty of punishment for us, too.
  90. A Little White Lie
    The execution of the simultaneous mistaken identity and fish-out-of-water shenanigans that ensue is oddly muted; you keep waiting for Maren to amp up the comic energy and narrative complications, but it isn’t until the satisfyingly madcap climax that he really does.
  91. Take Me Home Tonight
    Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.
  92. Bel Ami
    This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.
  93. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    Although marginally more woke than other Madea installments (the fam has an unexpected response when one of them publicly comes out), Homecoming is just more of the same. The characters are one-note, and the actors portray them that way.
  94. The Boy
    At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Heavyweights
    The lovable losers get one over the pretty people, making incremental improvements to their lives without fundamentally changing what makes them unique—a hallmark of Apatow films to come that’s a decent fit for a family movie.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    Tennant and Macdonald are appealing performers, but they aren't given scenes that convey they even like each other, much less that they're irresistibly drawn to each other, circumstances be damned.
  97. Night Teeth
    First-time screenwriter Brent Dillon’s script excels at the little details of social structure, human and vampire, that distinguish Night Teeth from other politically minded genre picks.
  98. Big Daddy
    Sandler's best movie, a surprisingly touching and consistent comedy that finds him reaching out to new audiences without abandoning the transgressive meanness that has enlivened his best work.
  99. Jem and the Holograms
    Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.
  100. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.
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