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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    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    5 Star Day is a middling indie, but it offers evidence of how far a synthetic setup can get just by allowing characters to react and reflect.
  2. Monster Trucks
    Monster Trucks, in all its stupid, misguided, laughable anti-glory, is difficult to hate. Its stupidity is, at times, vaguely likable, and if not redeemed by strong craft, not harmed by technical deficiencies.
  3. House Party
    To its credit, and this isn’t damning with faint praise, the new House Party is frequently very funny. (The R-rated language and creative insults are a great asset, even if they might restrict the potential teen audience.) What it has in humor, though, it lacks in pace.
  4. Running Scared
    The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."
  5. Sabotage
    David Ayer’s latest, Sabotage, is a sloppy DEA whodunit, distinguished by its scatological humor and gore.
  6. G-Force
    Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    Gilliam captures the chaotic visions of debauchery with his trademark aplomb, bringing to life the already trippy patterns of hotel carpets and populating the dark bars of Vegas with genuinely reptilian lounge lizards.
  8. Miss Bala
    It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.
  9. Before I Go to Sleep
    Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Chumscrubber
    The resulting film is an example of how a film with camera and acting skills in its corner can still fall flat on its face.
  11. Four Christmases
    The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.
  12. Super Troopers 2
    Its very existence is a testament to lowered expectations. That said, it seems like a real missed opportunity for Broken Lizard, which has only seen diminishing returns since the original.
  13. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  14. The Grudge
    Overall, though, the director and co-writer’s merciless style is muffled by The Grudge’s over-reliance on clichéd jump scares; more damningly, only some of these are effective, even in terms of cheap thrills. This becomes especially true in the film’s second half, when the ghosts become at once more human and less creepy.
  15. Shelby Oaks
    Unfortunately, even taking into consideration the fact that this is a first time filmmaker, the result is a mass of half-baked ideas and poorly executed tonal shifts, squandering the promise of its early premise and devolving into a middling mess.
  16. A Girl and a Gun
    Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it can’t maintain its muddled thesis for even that brief period.
  17. Staten Island Summer
    Frustratingly, the movie is plenty likable when it’s not trying to show off its wistfulness.
  18. 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.
  19. O'Dessa
    Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.
  20. Easter Sunday
    Easter Sunday, for all its faults, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland of unfocused potential.
  21. White Chicks
    Stupidity has worked for the Wayans brothers in the past, but White Chicks will likely test the patience of even their most loyal fans.
  22. Chappie
    Like "Elysium," this rusty A.I. story is basically just "District 9" with a new coat of paint; it’s distinguished only by the jabbering, irritating personality of its title character.
  23. Hop
    Candy-coated or otherwise, crap's still crap.
  24. The Unforgivable
    The whole thing comes across as a movie star’s anti-vanity project, just an opportunity for Bullock to demonstrate her ostensible range. Okay, she can be hard and stoic and affectless. Noted.
  25. Romeo & Juliet
    Romeo & Juliet looks chintzy. The Capulets’ masked balls is designed in Pier 1 Imports colors and texture, the lovers’ secret marriage is performed in front of a green screen, and when Romeo goes up to Juliet’s balcony, he climbs a plastic vine with cloth leaves.
  26. The Quiet Ones
    all the retro production design in the world can’t disguise the sheer familiarity of the film’s paranormal parlor tricks.
  27. The Week Of
    Smigel may not want to take up permanent residence in the Happy Madison offices, but he raises his old friend’s game considerably.
  28. Priest
    Bettany's performance consists entirely of a purposeful frown paired with a menacing glare: He goes about his godly business with solemn, no-frills intensity. The film follows suit.
  29. Darling Companion
    The tone is mild, the setting is peaceful to the point of sleepiness, and the stakes are incredibly low, even with the heart-tugging central presence of an adorable animal in danger.
  30. House of Wax
    Like too many horror movies these days, House of Wax goes for scares, but settles for being gory and deeply unpleasant.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Metro
    It never aspires to be high art—even the title is meaningless—but Metro is too lazily assembled, and too stingy with the jokes, to even live up to its modest ambitions.
  32. Illegal Tender
    For a film about growing up, Illegal Tender loses itself in a lot of silly juvenilia.
  33. Outlander
    Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.
  34. The Hunted
    Aided by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Friedkin works economically, lending the film the mark of a master craftsman, albeit of the coldly efficient variety. The terseness and surplus of technical skill make The Hunted surprisingly engaging.
  35. Kaena: The Prophecy
    With so many plot hooks and so many story demands, it's incomprehensible that Kaena spends so much time on meaningless action.
  36. Some Body
    At times approaches the flavor and shapelessness of real life.
  37. Here Today
    A deadly combination of enfeebled comedy and maudlin melodrama.
  38. America the Beautiful
    Roberts blunders amiably and cluelessly through his amateurish eyesore of a documentary on society's obsession with beauty, perpetually searching for a thesis that will transform a shambling mess of half-baked thoughts and pointless digressions into a real documentary.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Girl from the Naked Eye
    Too bad the film itself is so derivative, it could have been assembled from Robert Rodriguez's discard bin.
  40. Falling for Christmas
    It’s silly, sitcom-y, and impossible to call “good,” but Falling For Christmas is the kind of bad that feels almost appealing.
  41. Gangster Squad
    Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.
  42. Lethal Weapon 3
    The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.
  43. Anna
    Think of it as a downmarket Atomic Blonde (a film that does Besson’s established shtick with a lot more panache and less ick) or Red Sparrow without the surface-level professionalism; what’s clear is that Besson doesn’t want anyone to think about Anna very hard.
  44. Vantage Point
    The loaded cast does what it can with the paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers thriller with the numbers out of order.
  45. Paranormal Activity 4
    The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Perfect Family
    Turner's interactions with Deschanel are so much weightier than the rest of the film that the other storylines seem extraneous.
  47. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.
  48. Table 19
    And yes, it’s as tired as “The Breakfast Club remade with adults” implies.
  49. Act of Valor
    It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.
  50. The Boss
    The Boss, without quite reaching the heights of McCarthy’s work with Paul Feig, establishes its star as sort of a comic auteur — which is not the same as repeating herself.
  51. The Carpenter's Son
    It takes dedication to make a dull movie where Nicolas Cage plays Joseph and Jesus gets into a fistfight with Satan, but The Carpenter’s Son sets to its task with devotion, if little else.
  52. Horrible Bosses 2
    The laughs don't linger, even within individual scenes. What remains, reinforced by a set of end-credit outtakes, is the sense that Sudeikis, Day, Bateman, and Pine had a really good time making a sort of okay movie.
  53. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie talks a lot about storytelling, but practices very little of it.
  54. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is heavier on the goofery than the relevance.
  55. Unhinged
    This may be the first role that’s really capitalized on Crowe’s celebrity reputation as a hothead, even if the unnamed lunatic he’s playing only barks threats into a phone instead of chucking it at anyone.
  56. Shaft
    Among all the cardinal sins of moviemaking it commits (up to and including reusing an iconic needle drop from a Martin Scorsese movie), the worst is this: It makes Shaft look uncool.
  57. The Good Heart
    Cox’s character is a living, hissing embodiment of the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. As an actor stuck in a movie that wastes his talents, Cox can surely relate.
  58. Igor
    While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.
  59. Here Comes the Boom
    Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.
  60. In the Blood
    In The Blood plays like demented cruise-commercial fan fiction.
  61. Derailed
    Much of the second half is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, though you don't have to have 20/20 vision in order to see the big twist coming from miles away. Once it arrives, the film officially disembarks from reality with an over-the-top climax and denouement that play shamelessly to the bloodthirsty masses.
  62. Suicide Squad
    Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.
  63. Appleseed
    Its busy, stiff, artificial graphics are a perfect match for its busy, stiff, artificial plot. A simple Shirow pinup parade might almost be preferable.
  64. 65
    Aiming to be a gripping survival thriller, 65 rarely surprises. With only two characters to speak of, the stakes feel decidedly low.
  65. Ceremony
    Trouble is, it feels like a film going through the motions, never finding mooring in believable human feelings.
  66. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    Lawrence's public foibles haven't magically transformed him into a comic genius, but they have made his act surprisingly poignant, if never especially funny or profound.
  67. The Phantom of the Opera
    Adding an additional layer of cheese to a project that already reeks hopelessly of Velveeta, Schumacher pumps up the empty spectacle, stranding his fetching-but-lifeless mannequins amid giant sets and overblown production numbers.
  68. Bloat
    Though it’s clear that Bloat is riffing on the digital ghosts of Ringu and Pulse, this approach doesn’t mesh with the mythology it attempts to flesh out for itself. But it’s unfair to say that the film is completely devoid of commentary.
  69. Dance Flick
    It would be hard to imagine a film with less going for it than Dance Flick.
  70. The Goldfinch
    It’s an empty approximation of art, all gleaming surfaces masking a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there’s no basic utility to this imitation.
  71. Meg 2: The Trench
    It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.
  72. The Virginity Hit
    Bennett never lets us forget that his character is in profound pain, even while attempting to perform oral sex on a transsexual blow-up doll. It's a daring, sweet performance that almost single-handedly elevates The Virginity Hit from a standard Superbad knock-off into a film that feels raw, painful, and real.
  73. Over the Top
    With Over The Top, Stallone had clearly exploited the Rocky formula once too often and audiences rebelled against its condescending family melodrama and heavy-handed working-class trappings.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Message in a Bottle
    The depressing results will likely make viewers feel jerked around when it's all over.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bliss
    The emotional impact of those shots comes mainly from Wilson, who’s captured in several dialogue-free long takes. His signature drawl is silenced, and his face is forced to do work the screenplay hasn’t. He gives a weighty performance, delivered into a simulated void.
  76. Father Stu
    Distilled, it is a fairly well-sketched portrait of self-care — spiritual, yes, but also psychological and physical — and the outwardly rippling effects of healing that can flow from that single choice.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tanner Hall
    The result isn't bad, it just lacks momentum and a strong reason for existing.
  78. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In a timid comic world, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie feels genuinely dangerous and transgressive: it makes a virtue of going way too far because other comedies don't go far enough.
  79. 3 Days to Kill
    Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.
  80. Welcome To Marwen
    It’s the weirdest film of his (Zemeckis) career. One of the worst, too.
  81. Wicker Park
    Instead of building toward a grand romantic climax, it just gets sillier before exploding into a torrent of unintended laughs.
  82. Paris 36
    The overstuffed film lumbers across clichés of the heart and of history until it reaches a big, tune-filled climax that isn't worth the wait.
  83. Good
    It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.
  84. The Last Word
    Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.
  85. Remember Me
    The major problem with Pattinson’s ascendancy to the Dean throne: His soulfulness is a pose, an effect achieved more by hair and makeup (and yes, genetics) than the scenes where he’s required to emote at high volume.
  86. Phantom
    Though pitched as a thriller, Robinson’s woefully underbudgeted film plays instead like a chamber drama, so simple and unadorned that it could just as easily be staged as an off-off-Broadway play without anyone telling the difference. And that isn’t entirely to the film’s detriment, either: With a cast choked with great character actors like Ed Harris, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, less is sometimes more.
  87. Fantastic Four
    A garish mediocrity.
  88. Deliver Us From Evil
    The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.
  89. 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.
  90. 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.
  91. Sleepwalking
    Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.
  92. Alexander
    Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages.
  93. Scary Movie 4
    The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.
  94. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.
  95. Mango Yellow
    It's a lot to suffer through for a film that has nothing to say, but insists on saying it anyway. Repeatedly.
  96. Bulletproof Monk
    Sadly, it's yet another intercultural mishmash that hopes for its iconic star's charisma to overcome a dire script, cardboard characters, indifferently directed action scenes, and an atrocious villain buried under layers of unconvincing old-man makeup.
  97. Clockstoppers
    Botches what could be the most mischievous power since Scott Baio's telekinesis in the 1982 comedy "Zapped!": a wristwatch that speeds up time for the user until the rest of the world seems to be standing still.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Fire Down Below
    Like most Seagal movies, the violence is poorly choreographed, the clothes are bad, and you weren't going to see it anyway, were you?
  99. The Twin
    Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.
  100. National Treasure
    It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.
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