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. 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.
  2. 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.
  4. The Best of Me
    The Best Of Me is neither the best Sparks adaptation, nor the worst; it’s merely the most recent.
  5. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie talks a lot about storytelling, but practices very little of it.
  6. The Notebook
    Not a shred of human decency is on display in The Notebook, a handsomely made, hard-to-endure World War II parable set in an unnamed Hungarian backwater during the Nazi occupation of 1944.
  7. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    There’s more existential wisdom in five random, zombie-infested minutes of Shaun Of The Dead than in the full two hours of this feel-good folly.
  8. Open Windows
    Open Windows attempts to disguise a revenge movie by cloaking it in the flash of a voyeuristic techno-thriller, but the combined concepts are so high that the film resolves as Vigalondo reaches his Icarus moment, the corpse so mangled and unpleasant the project’s ambition can only be identified via dental records.
  9. The Pyramid
    In the end, The Pyramid seems designed not for horror, adventure, or action but to provide every possible answer to the question of its found-footage bona fides—yes, no, or maybe, depending on who’s asking. It spends most of its running time hedging uncertainly between trend and backlash, explanations and excuses.
  10. Rock the Kasbah
    It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.
  11. The Rewrite
    It’s poised to become one of the biggest rom-coms of 1998. But barring the invention of time travel, The Rewrite remains tethered to the realities of film releasing in 2015, which means it will get most of its play as a VOD simulation of earlier hits.
  12. Dirty Grandpa
    There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.
  13. The Riot Club
    Boys will be boys and wealthy a--holes will be wealthy a--holes in The Riot Club, an alleged cautionary tale that revels in bad behavior for nearly two hours before finally offering up a stern “tsk, tsk, tsk.” Unlike the great gangster and outlaw movies, however, this unpleasant, moralistic film doesn’t succeed in making transgression look cathartically appealing.
  14. Black or White
    Tempting though it might be to celebrate any earnest, good-faith attempt to talk about race in America, it’s clear that the creator of Mind Of The Married Man was not the right one to do the talking.
  15. The Hole
    Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.
  16. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    On the plus side, the film is high energy and moves quickly. And some of the zombie gore effects are fun, reaching nearly Raimi-esque heights of splatter during the climactic battle. None of it is really scary, though, especially since it’s so predictable.
  17. Extraterrestrial
    Even the downer ending plays like an unconscious nod to the over-familiarity of the material, with one character declaring that it’s “the same thing we do every time.”
  18. Taken 3
    So what, exactly, is wrong with Taken 3? A lot of things, most of which can be attributed to the fact that director Olivier Megaton—who also helmed Taken 2—couldn’t mount an action scene if his life depended on it.
  19. Justice League
    The “new and improved” model looks claustrophobically like an overpriced TV pilot, and not in a good way. Say what you want about the tenets of brooding, art-school-fascist superhero worship, but at least it’s an ethos.
  20. Late Phases
    Fails to deliver either shocks or real drama.
  21. Unfinished Business
    A once-energetic comic talent (and underrated serious actor) slows down to a pace he must feel matches his audience these days.
  22. Everly
    Alternating patches of violence with sticky sentiment between Everly and her mother and/or daughter, the film isn’t particularly convincing either as a rousing anthology of bloodsport set pieces or a deeply felt portrait of revenge and reunion.
  23. No Escape
    Despite its illegible chase scenes, awkward slow-motion shots, and fumbling attempts at political commentary, No Escape manages to be intermittently interesting, thanks to an off-beat supporting turn from Pierce Brosnan.
  24. Me Before You
    These are not good performances, exactly. Clarke is endearing, but verges on mugging. Claflin is at his best when Will gives in to his competitive urges, which happens exactly once.
  25. The Mountain Between Us
    Remove the nonsensical characterizations and The Mountain Between Us becomes a cornball paean to rock formations and (mostly male) beauty.
  26. Accidental Love
    To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    There’s a good movie in Brittain’s story, but you wouldn’t know it from this lethargic, BBC-produced bore.
  28. Rings
    Rings doesn’t end up doing much with its fresh ideas. Instead, it transforms into a kind of remake of a remake, borrowing not just the washed-out look of Verbinski’s movie—lots of blue hues and overcast skies—but also its basic plot structure, which was itself lifted from the Japanese original.
  29. Don Verdean
    Both Rockwell and Clement are back for the latest Hess production, Don Verdean, which can’t even work up enough comic energy to be considered bad.
  30. Last Knights
    There’s no reason for a film with a plot this simple to drag on to the two-hour mark. In a movie filled with public executions, that running time qualifies as truly cruel and unusual punishment.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Reconstruction of William Zero
    It’s always easy to see what Bush and Byrne are aiming for with this timely piece of speculative fiction. But their execution is, with rare exception, weakly imitative at best and exasperatingly inept at worst.
  32. Central Intelligence
    That it manages to score a good laugh every couple of minutes is mostly a credit to stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who make for a better mismatched-buddy comic duo than the movie probably deserves.
  33. Captive
    The leads acquit themselves relatively well here, hinting at the interesting character study that could have been, but by the end the only captive left is the viewer.
  34. Ride
    Hunt’s writing isn’t exactly knocking off Woody Allen (her characters do send text messages, after all), but it shares with Allen a peculiar, stylized imitation of how New Yorkers supposedly sound.
  35. Mojave
    By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes.
  36. 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.
  37. The 11th Hour
    By the time the film empties its inventory of shock tactics and reaches its (too calculated) ambiguous conclusion, we’re not sure if Maria deserves better, but it’s pretty clear that Basinger does.
  38. We Are Your Friends
    As with "Catfish," Joseph is there with his soulful handheld camera-bobbing, trying to convey the pensive thoughtfulness of a person who may not be thinking all that much. And as with "Catfish," the audience catches on long before anyone on screen.
  39. 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.
  40. 7 Minutes
    Despite its unconvincing seriousness mixing poorly with its unconvincing dark comedy, 7 Minutes proves difficult to despise outright; it’s watchably swift and somewhat engaging in the moment.
  41. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."
  42. Big Stone Gap
    The result is at once labor of love and cautionary tale: Apparently too close to the story to recognize how ill suited she was to translating its charms to the screen, Trigiani has emerged with nothing but corny, stilted Americana, like something Garrison Keillor might burp out on a really off day.
  43. The Equalizer 2
    The Equalizer 2, which reunites Washington with director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk, puts fewer disposable goons in McCall’s crosshairs, trading the original’s rote killing-up-the-ranks revenge campaign for some half-assed approximation of a murder mystery. Call it a lateral move for this unfortunate franchise.
  44. Jenny's Wedding
    This is a movie displaced in time. And it’s barely a movie. It’s more like a dusty, faded old pamphlet: “So your daughter’s decided to get gay-married…”
  45. The Curse of Downers Grove
    Post-"The Canyons," this appears to be Ellis’ new, second-rate normal.
  46. Hellions
    Plenty of striking, clever, effective movies have been made simply by re-arranging and re-calibrating familiar genre elements. Hellions might have been one of these, if it was predicated on something slightly less shallow than “kids in masks + chanting + blood = scary.”
  47. A Brilliant Young Mind
    At times plays like a case study more than a drama.
  48. The Great Man
    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.
  49. The Star
    The director, Tim Reckart, is better known for his puppet-based stop-motion (he worked on Anomalisa and was Oscar-nominated for a short film) and seems to be out of his element here.
  50. Love the Coopers
    A movie that should be punctuated like a Christmas card sign-off but instead, losing a comma, becomes an off-putting directive. How Robert De Niro didn’t make it to this set is a mystery for the ages.
  51. Pay the Ghost
    The movie’s B-movie flimsiness is pervasive, and paired with an overall lack of B-movie flair, though director Uli Edel makes some game yarn-spinning attempts.
  52. Heist
    Would the movie be as (barely) entertaining as it is without De Niro? He only has about 15 minutes’ worth of scenes in Heist, but whenever he’s on-screen the film almost feels legitimate.
  53. The Forest
    The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.
  54. The Choice
    Again and again, Sparks takes the stuff of great four-hankie melodrama—love, death, cute dogs—and grinds it into a formulaic mush. Ask more of your paperback romances. At least ask for a different one each time.
  55. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  56. Ratchet & Clank
    Like a lot of entertainment pitched at the family matinee audience, it sits at the zero point of watchability.
  57. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    In any case, what remains of John F. Donovan is a barely coherent mess, and so eager for your approval that it’s hard to feel anything but sorry for it.
  58. Moonwalkers
    By the umpteenth scene where the “joke” is that one of the characters is on drugs, the movie’s strained wackiness becomes wearisome.
  59. Fifty Shades of Black
    When Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick.
  60. Sing
    It turns out that Sing’s myriad irritations are a lot more eclectic than its long, long playlist of pop hits.
  61. Baywatch
    In spoofing something so forgettable, they’ve made something even less memorable.
  62. The Darkness
    It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.
  63. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    The whole movie falls between stylization, which it mostly lacks, and realism, which it can’t quite claim with its non-teenage teenager spouting non-swearing swears.
  64. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    Though its title and general tone lament the stifling atmosphere of the years between childhood and full-fledged teenhood, the movie misses the animal hostility and physical awkwardness of genuine tweens.
  65. Rio, I Love You
    Rio offers the uncomfortable spectacle of 10 different filmmakers mostly failing to produce a sense of place that can be sustained over 10 minutes, much less multiple senses of place that can be stitched into an interesting patchwork.
  66. Me Him Her
    Unchecked impulse can be a boon, but Landis writes his way through every scene as though it were overdue homework, and directs with nary a hint of style.
  67. An Eye for Beauty
    Beautiful people living in beautiful houses surrounded by stunningly beautiful Canadian landscapes dominate the aptly titled An Eye For Beauty, which unfortunately also demands a stomach for tedium.
  68. Special Correspondents
    The more Special Correspondents skirts bad taste — by having the heroes record an ISIS-inspired ransom tape, for instance — the closer it gets to having something to say about mass media and geopolitics.
  69. The Do-Over
    The Do-Over is a de facto R-rated movie for Sandler, with the attendant bad language and sex jokes, but most of the faux-naughty stuff seems like an afterthought. The jokes that work best fill in the sad details of Charlie’s life.
  70. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Guzmán has been a delightful presence in countless movies over the years, and it’s neat to see him take on an unambiguously leading role, especially one focusing on two Puerto Rican characters. But the movie’s Luis is a surprisingly dull Ugly American.
  71. It's So Easy and Other Lies
    The film is too much of a cut-and-paste mess to coast by on the charms of its protagonist.
  72. Incarnate
    Incarnate is a comic-book movie in search of a comic book.
  73. Insidious: The Last Key
    A clumsy and internally confused sequel to Insidious: Chapter 3 (which was, uh, a prequel to the first film) that offers strictly mechanical jolts.
  74. The Meg
    The Meg is lackadaisically paced, dull to look at, and has trouble keeping track of space and plot.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    All Eyez on Me
    At this most perfunctory level, All Eyez On Me succeeds, but on pretty much every other one imaginable, it is a failure.
  76. Max Rose
    In old age, Lewis’ vanity has become touching. But Max Rose — shelved for more than three years before finally making its way to theaters — is as trite as a film can be while piggybacking off the reality of age.
  77. Table 19
    And yes, it’s as tired as “The Breakfast Club remade with adults” implies.
  78. Rupture
    The truth is that what sinks the film is Shainberg’s insipid direction.
  79. Antibirth
    Thankfully, what it does have is Natasha Lyonne, who almost singlehandedly keeps this misconceived endeavor afloat, or at least not actively unwatchable.
  80. Max Steel
    From its thinly sketched teen protagonist to its deluge of hero-will-rise clichés, Max Steel evinces all of the imagination and ambition you’d expect from a movie based on a bestselling line of action figures.
  81. Phantasm: Ravager
    But even though it doesn’t make much sense, Phantasm is wildly imaginative and legitimately creepy, confronting death and mourning as part of the coming-of-age process while also delivering nutty Jawa-type critters and blood spurting out of peoples’ faces.
  82. The Comedian
    The uncomfortable yet not unwelcome spectacle of De Niro attempting zingers makes this movie an essential subject for future study of the actor’s comic side. Unfortunately, it is essential in no other way.
  83. Bitter Harvest
    Even if it weren’t about an atrocity, this training-wheels Doctor Zhivago would still be lame.
  84. Run the Tide
    This isn’t a terrible film, by any means. It’s a completely forgettable film, which is arguably worse—especially for Lautner, who at this point is on the verge of vanishing down the memory hole with it.
  85. Before I Fall
    What really stinks about Before I Fall is that it zaps all the fun and humor out of its time-bending premise, leaving behind a lot of moping to randomly selected pop cues.
  86. Railroad Tigers
    The Chinese film industry’s insistence on proving that it can make blockbusters that are as dull and crummy as anything to come out of Hollywood (but at only half the cost) continues unabated with Railroad Tigers.
  87. Arsenal
    Anything legitimately affecting about the movie bleeds out, and Cage delivering a blood-soaked monologue or simulating the sound of a burned esophagus isn’t enough on its own to turn Arsenal into the gory, borderline rococo thriller it starts aiming for around the halfway mark. It’s the rare case of a bonkers Cage performance counting as too little, too late.
  88. Leap!
    Rather than inspiring some kind of connection between disparate eras, Leap! uses pop music as a quick fix for kids who might be bored by ballet or orphans.
  89. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    Here is the problem with making four movies about a middle-schooler who only ages a little and learns sitcom-ready lessons: After a while, it all starts to feel as repetitive and uninspired as any number of more ambitious franchises. The Long Haul has a chance to reimagine the series and only comes up with Vacation Junior.
  90. Midnight Sun
    The authentic Sparks movies at least tend to be howlers, with shamelessly overcomplicated narratives and risible twists. Midnight Sun, on the other hand, is straightforward and trite.
  91. The Possession of Hannah Grace
    It’s exorcism’s greatest hits, if exorcism were a band playing 300 casinos and state fairs a year.
  92. Just Getting Started
    Dramatically and comically impotent.
  93. 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.
  94. Golden Exits
    If Perry’s last film, the throwback psychodrama Queen Of Earth, used Bergman worship as a jumping off point for its own genre games, Golden Exits is just a tin-eared imitation: Interiors remade as a stilted exercise.
  95. 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.)
  96. Wonder Wheel
    Wonder Wheel is uncomfortably revealing, its real-life parallels too blatant to be anything but intentional. But to what end?
  97. Bright
    Bright gestures vaguely at an allegory about police brutality and race, which may have been more impactful in the original script. It’s hard to tell. For his part, Landis has largely disowned the final product, which buries some glimmers of interesting ideas under a thick layer of adolescent tough-guy posturing.
  98. Phoenix Forgotten
    First-time director Justin Barber, who cowrote the screenplay with T.S. Nowlin, builds his narrative around the Phoenix Lights, but sticks so close to formula that they might as well be called the Blair Lights.
  99. Naked
    Let’s place the blame where it squarely belongs: on the moronic premise. Groundhog Day but he’s naked? Why?
  100. Mile 22
    In almost all respects, but especially structurally, Mile 22 is a mess.
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