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 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.
  2. Trash Fire
    While it doesn’t include any literal blazing piles of garbage, Trash Fire is spiteful and unpleasant from beginning to end, using every technique at its disposal — from stinging dialogue to grotesque prosthetics to morbid black comedy — to make the audience uncomfortable.
  3. Deadfall
    Compared to Deadfall, films The Wicker Man, Face/Off, and even Vampire’s Kiss look like Merchant-Ivory productions. It may be a crowded field at the top of Cage’s most entertaining performances, but this one deserves to stand above the fold, if for no other reason than that its general lack of public awareness means a retroactive popular appreciation is long overdue.
  4. The Replacement Killers
    Chow has a future in a America if given better material with which to work; here, he's wasted in a movie that's forgotten 20 minutes after the credits roll.
  5. Halloween Kills
    The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.
  6. Barnyard
    It shouldn't be surprising that writer-director Steve Oedekerk, the man responsible for "Kung Pow! Enter The Fist" and the second "Ace Ventura" movie, considers single-celled organisms as he shoots for the lowest common denominator.
  7. Arthur Newman
    Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it’s all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path.
  8. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    Rourke's hammy, eyeliner-enhanced acting alone almost makes Alex Rider worth a look.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The People We Hate at the Wedding
    This slog of a film will have you checking your watch, wishing for an open bar, and begging for the sparkler sendoff.
  10. Suburbicon
    The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.
  11. Courageous
    Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.
  12. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.
  13. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    The franchise-hungry tentpole-itis of the present studio model has produced oh-so-many dumb rehashes of classic myths and fairy tales, but this is the first that is always funny on purpose.
  14. 6 Underground
    Between the movie’s subtext and its new-digital-world distributor, Bay seems to be communicating the frustration of constraint, but why? What has he been barred from doing?
  15. 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.
  16. Knowing
    Knowing frequently feels one Revelation quote away from turning into a chiding, fundamentalist-friendly end-of-the-world movie in the "Left Behind" mold.
  17. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.
  18. 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.
  19. Larry Crowne
    The story feels half-considered, the relationships thin, and the direction visually indifferent.
  20. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t merely fall flat dramatically, but dashes any opportunity for visual intrigue in terms of cinematography, costume design, and, most vitally, its on-screen carnage.
  21. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    The middling new Milwaukee, Minnesota, on the other hand, qualifies as 100 percent faux-noir. It recycles much from classic thrillers but has little to add.
  22. Memory
    It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.
  23. John Tucker Must Die
    Revenge movies often end with the message that vengeance is empty and futile, but it's never encouraging when revenge seems pointless from the start.
  24. 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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    The use of a real war to give added emotional heft to this already potentially manipulative story make this film an act of callous calculation behind the beautiful shots of the French countryside.
  26. Desert Warrior
    The movie’s basic appeal––that of rebels rising up against evil empires––still works to some extent, but Desert Warrior does little to make it memorable beyond its historic production.
  27. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Adam
    There’s a good movie, at times, a really good movie, hiding out in all the soulless clutter of Black Adam’s plot. Unfortunately, all the considerable talents here struggle to deliver it.
  29. Pound of Flesh
    The action hit being evoked here is "Crank."
  30. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.
  31. Superintelligence
    The consistent failure of imagination is all that keeps the film’s scenes from feeling like a random selection.
  32. Cinderella
    While this version of Cinderella likely won’t top anyone’s list of all-time best adaptations, it’s a winking, glittering family comedy that’s cohesive in tone and confident in what it wants to be. And mostly it just wants to be flashy, toe-tapping karaoke.
  33. Fountain of Youth
    Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.
  34. Machete Kills
    Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them.
  35. TMNT
    Only those already predisposed to love a TMNT movie that at least LOOKS edgy are likely to care.
  36. Battleship
    Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.
  37. What a Girl Wants
    It's a tame, hypocritical fantasy.
  38. Torque
    Torque has a sense of humor about itself, but the laughs stick in the throat.
  39. Mambo italiano
    If Gaudreault's 90-minute pilot ever makes it to television, French-Canadians can look forward to their own Italian version of A.K.A. Pablo.
  40. Home Again
    The younger Meyers has a lot to learn about creating believable character motivations and relationships to anchor the aspirational fantasy.
  41. A Man's Gotta Do
    A fine cast and breezy tone elevate it to exactly the type of adequate time-waster made for intercontinental airplane flights.
  42. Venom: The Last Dance
    Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance has a little fun in the meantime. But in the end, it’s just a writhing symbiote waiting for a host that never shows up.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Marlowe
    A small elegance, expressed in decent production values, terse pacing and long lateral camera takes, is the main thing director Neil Jordan has to offer in the mostly misguided Marlowe, the latest of perhaps too many attempts to pour the old wine of Chandler’s fiction into new bottles, and then sell the resulting concoction as vintage.
  44. 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.
  45. Struck by Lightning
    Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.
  46. In the Lost Lands
    Throughout, one is continually reminded of other, better movies—not least of all, the kind of eminently watchable genre films Anderson was producing at his peak.
  47. Zerophilia
    All the nudity in Zerophilia is either prosthetic or body-doubled. Which means the sex scenes--and the feeling and meaning behind them--are just as phony.
  48. Student Bodies
    What Student Bodies lacks in incisiveness—and laughs, frankly—it makes up in gusto. The advantage of having a creative team drawn from middle-aged pros with decades of industry experience is that they knew how to put together a picture teeming with ideas and shot through with energy.
  49. The Purge
    The result is inchoate: not involving enough to work as a thriller, and too self-defeating to mean anything.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Extinction
    How about Resident Evil: Game Over?
  51. Stand Up Guys
    The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.
  52. At First Sight
    It's drainingly mediocre.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Tonight You're Mine
    Musicians, according to Tonight You're Mine, are a callous, narcissistic lot - fortunately, the music they make gets a pass.
  54. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Offering memorable imagery and little more, it eventually devolves into distasteful gore for its own sake. It's far less compelling than its no less bloody but far more intelligent inspiration.
  55. 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.
  56. Love Wedding Repeat
    The film’s desire to lampoon its rom-com cake and eat it too leaves it on an uncomfortable middle ground; a third act shift toward emotional earnestness doesn’t land, because the main players possess no depth.
  57. Never Been Thawed
    What's most surprising about Never Been Thawed is that it's not completely awful. It's just a little awful.
  58. Ride Along
    Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.
  59. Mr. Woodcock
    Thornton is one of America's finest actors, but after this, "Bad News Bears," and "School For Scoundrels," his run of loveably irascible authority-figure roles should probably come to a close. He's kicked around one child too many.
  60. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Sure enough, director Betty Thomas delivers pretty much the bare minimum: peppy, brightly colored, tune-filled nonsense sure to meet the low, low standards of its pre-kindergarten core audience.
  61. Dragon Blade
    Whether it’s introducing random flashes of white screen or slowing down shots to a stuttered chop, Dragon Blade seems to be going out of its way to make sure the action never rises above the level of “watchable enough.”
  62. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    The movie’s attempts at ruthless pulp manipulation don’t land; cruelly offing a character whose entire personality is “pregnant” is a cheap bid for John Wick stakes.
  63. Protector
    It’s both more and less than “Taken: Mom Edition,” another boneheaded poking of conservative’s self-inflicted wounds around human trafficking with a title just as deluded as its content.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Waterboy
    A mess of bad timing, bad jokes, and bad ideas so lame that even Sandler's idiot man-child mugging can't enliven the proceedings.
  65. Crop Circles: Quest for Truth
    The film remains frustratingly focused on uncontextualized individual events rather than the phenomenon as a whole, and as such, it rapidly becomes redundant in its grainy, washed-out digital-video images of excited people poking at bent plants, or studying and manipulating computer-generated images.
  66. Agent Cody Banks
    The generic intrigue and chase scenes take over, leaving poor Muniz at the mercy of stunt doubles and chintzy special effects.
  67. Meet the Fockers
    Meet The Fockers has assembled a historic, once-in-a-lifetime cast, then stranded them in the laziest, most mercenary kind of sequel imaginable. It's like the 1927 Yankees taking on the Special Olympics softball team.
  68. Moonfall
    The film’s more or less a mashup of Emmerich’s two wheelhouses: alien contact (Stargate, Independence Day) and cataclysmic disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), with some Armageddon thrown in for good measure. You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.
  69. I'm Charlie Walker
    It is a bewildering misfire which roundly illustrates the differences between a historically under-told story which arguably should be amplified and a movie that actually does a good job of accomplishing that task.
  70. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    This movie can’t decide how it wants to look or what it wants to say. You could even call the jumble of styles and tones “quirky,” were you so inclined.
  71. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    For all its gender-bending, La Mujer De Mi Hermano's primary appeal is Mori's stunning beauty.
  72. First Sunday
    A corny yet unexpectedly moving scene in which Morgan is moved to tears by Loretta Devine's simple kindness helps make the film's shift into inspirational drama far more palatable than it really has any right to be.
  73. Olympus Has Fallen
    Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.
  74. Kick-Ass 2
    Even with its edges sanded down, Kick-Ass 2 is unmistakably Millaresque — a juvenile comedy of excess, in which skewering adolescent power fantasies looks an awful lot like indulging in them.
  75. Hell Baby
    Functions exactly like a sketch movie, using its meager, essentially irrelevant plot as a clothesline upon which to string a series of self-contained bits. At least half of the bits are pretty damn funny, though, and that’s arguably all that matters.
  76. 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.
  77. Stay
    It's become a tired cliché for characters in "serious" science-fiction movies not to realize they're dead or dying, but Stay as a film doesn't seem to realize that it's dead from the outset, an unconvincing automaton grimly going through the motions.
  78. The Curse of La Llorona
    More fitfully funny than it is frightening, The Curse Of La Llorona might be the first film in the Conjuring universe to remain a standalone.
  79. Spun
    A dark comedy about speed freaks that feels like it was directed and edited by someone in the midst of a methamphetamine jag.
  80. Sal
    Despite its modest proportions and chilling finale, Sal is foremost an affectionate tribute, conjuring ample warmth out of relatively little.
  81. Village of the Damned
    Village Of The Damned is probably the worst movie John Carpenter ever directed: hokey, miscast, devoid of tension and atmosphere.
  82. Drillbit Taylor
    Wilson's funny. Mann's funny. But paired together here, nothing works.
  83. Desperados
    The cast as a whole persists mightily throughout this shambling, frustrating, overplotted film.
  84. Pompeii
    Fortunately, Pompeii’s second half is tailor-made for Anderson’s established skill set, unfolding over a matter of hours, with many scenes set in and under a gladiatorial amphitheatre that recalls the arenas, subterranean tunnels, and cavernous vessels of Anderson’s best movies.
  85. Stoned
    Apart from Considine, the actors all deliver superficial performances beneath several layers of slathered-on Summer Of Love drag, and Woolley's use of multiple film stocks and flash-cut editing jumbles together a bunch of '60s filmmaking clichés without putting them to any particular use.
  86. The Perfect Match
    Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.
  87. The Woman in the Window
    Watching the overqualified likes of Adams, Moore, Leigh, Henry, Oldman, et al. get tangled up in this gaslighting mystery is, admittedly, one of the pleasures of The Woman In The Window.
  88. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  89. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    A film this slipshod needs much more star-power than it's able to muster.
  90. Sahara
    McConaughey is usually a welcome presence, but here, he looks like making the movie was getting in the way of his exciting African adventure.
  91. I Still Believe
    In attempting to tell the story of this young woman’s death — not her life, no time for that either — I Still Believe cheapens it.
  92. The Limits of Control
    Too much of The Limits Of Control feels canned and airless, so stifled by Jarmusch's obsessions that it loses all sense of surprise.
  93. Nowhere Man
    Cheap and ugly in every sense--morally, cinematically, creatively--Nowhere Man accomplishes the seemingly impossible by dragging the seedy revenge genre to a horrific new nadir.
  94. Crank: High Voltage
    It'd be silly to call Crank: High Voltage over the top: The top is so far below that it isn't even visible. But at this mostly unexplored altitude--only 2007's inferior "Shoot 'Em Up" comes close.
  95. The Hebrew Hammer
    Ultimately more interested in exploiting clichés than subverting or commenting on them, and Coyote and Dunn's grotesque caricatures are embarrassing.
  96. Supergirl
    Slater not only makes for a dull Supergirl, but she's stuck in a clumsy, silly film that tries for the light touch of Richard Lester's Superman II and fails decisively.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Eight Seven
    Jackson's performance is impressive: He effectively conveys every nervous and belligerent nuance, but his character eventually disappears beneath a morass of gimmicks, clichés, and political cynicism.
  98. 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.
  99. The Woman in Cabin 10
    This is Hitchcock lite, with a great leading lady and a story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It may not be the kind of film that lingers after it’s done, but for a good trip, rather than a long trip, it’s worth climbing aboard.
  100. The Salton Sea
    A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.
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