The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Son
    The Dardennes sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final third of "In The Bedroom," only without the same dreadful inevitability.
  2. Just Married
    Director Shawn Levy brings a yeoman-like joylessness to the project, spoiling whatever fun might have been had. Kutcher and Murphy seem game enough, and it's a testament to their charisma that they're the hardest element of the film to hate.
  3. The Slaughter Rule
    Though some of Slaughter Rule's conclusions are overly tidy, the film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads, especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands.
  4. Love Liza
    Love Liza needs more than mood on its side. A moment of recognizable human behavior would have been a fine place to start.
  5. Max
    Quirky, unsatisfying portrait.
  6. The Hours
    That makes it hard to watch "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry's adaptation without thinking of the one Almodóvar might have made -- which surely would have been warmer, less self-consciously tony, and less relentlessly arid than the one that did get made.
  7. The Pianist
    Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great director's imagination.
  8. Pinocchio
    An unintended gift to midnight-movie programmers and students of the bizarre, Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio could have become a "Howard The Duck" -- or "Battlefield Earth"-like synonym for cinematic miscalculation, were its title not already so familiar.
  9. Catch Me If You Can
    Part of Spielberg's skill as a filmmaker comes in choosing the right collaborators. Janusz Kaminski's gorgeous cinematography, Michael Kahn's graceful editing, Jeff Nathanson's clever script, and John Williams' score all work well in unison, but the film's masterstroke is the casting of Walken as DiCaprio's utterly decent father.
  10. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie's heart is clearly in the right place -- but the Thornberry family's grotesquely huge heads, jutting teeth, stick limbs, and mismatched bodies look even more improbable and unpleasant on the big screen than they do on their TV show.
  11. 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.
  12. Morvern Callar
    Morvern Callar not only attempts to reveal an interior life, usually the province of novels, but also focuses on the interior life of a woman who refuses to open up to anyone.
  13. Spider
    Were he only trying to remark on that world's creepiness, Cronenberg would still succeed brilliantly, if coldly, but his sympathy makes the film.
  14. Narc
    Carnahan alternates gritty neo-realism with bursts of extreme stylization -- most notably in a breathless opening chase filmed with handheld cameras -- but thankfully, his stylistic flourishes are in the service of the film's story, not the other way around.
  15. Gangs of New York
    A grand achievement in history and anthropology, supporting its ambition and scope with a sumptuous re-creation of the period and an immediacy that allows a forgotten past to barrel into the present.
  16. Antwone Fisher
    Directed without a shred of imagination by Denzel Washington -- Antwone Fisher masks a behind-the-scenes story that's far more inspiring than the phony uplift that makes it onto the screen.
  17. 25th Hour
    The film at its simplest serves as a cautionary tale, but it also functions as a meditation on how little it takes to redirect a life by choice or by chance.
  18. Devils on the Doorstep
    Though shorn of 20 minutes for its U.S. debut, the film's wry comic portrait of the Japanese Occupation during WWII hasn't lost any of its incendiary brilliance, both as a political provocation and as a brusquely humane take on the horrors and absurdity of war.
  19. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back.
  20. The Guys
    In spite of some affecting moments, the film never quite works. It's too theatrical, perhaps unavoidably.
  21. Evelyn
    From the maudlin musical cues to a senseless romantic subplot that's only barely tacked on, every aspect of Evelyn stabs blindly and insistently at emotional buttons -- Beresford has made the feel-manipulated movie of the year.
  22. Maid in Manhattan
    Wang loses himself in an old-fashioned script that tries to recall the classic screwball ensembles of Golden Age Hollywood, but lacks the cascading wit to pull it off.
  23. Star Trek: Nemesis
    Once it reaches the meat of the story, it seems to lose its confidence.
  24. Drumline
    Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.
  25. The Hot Chick
    Schneider and director/co-writer/Animal vet Tom Brady continue to subscribe to the notion that any joke worth making is worth beating to death, but there's still something strangely endearing about Schneider's willingness to do anything for a laugh.
  26. About Schmidt
    Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude.
  27. Pellet
    When El Bola isn't drawing cheap sentiment from the sight of a bruised and scarred little boy, Mañas raises vexing questions about how and why parents leave lasting impressions on their children, and whether good intentions really matter.
  28. Analyze That
    All the principals -- except, significantly, screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan -- reprised their roles for the sequel, and all seem confused as to why they returned.
  29. Empire
    Empire devolves into a bloody revenge thriller with an ending as primitive as its opening is convoluted.
  30. Blackboards
    Episodic and minimalist to a fault, Blackboards makes its ironic point about education, then makes it again a few times over for good measure, rarely expanding beyond its narrow seriocomic agenda.
  31. Equilibrium
    A terrific cast, stylish direction, and elegantly choreographed mayhem help make it far better than it might have been -- Though ultimately silly, Equilibrium's shopworn but stylish synthesis of ammo and ideas is surprisingly engrossing.
  32. Adaptation.
    Kaufman strikes just the right balance between playfulness and sincerity, leaping freely from one absurd situation to another before pulling back on the reins.
  33. Massoud, the Afghan
    A series of non-answers isn't enough to build a documentary on, especially when they're strung together by insufferably self-congratulatory voiceover narration (de Ponfilly plays up his agony over whether documentary filmmaking helps or hurts its subjects) and corny stylistic effects.
  34. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Where Noyce could easily have given Branagh a mustache and tilted the film toward old-fashioned melodrama, he leans on tactics that are less obvious and more effective.
  35. Dead or Alive: Final
    In Dead Or Alive: Final, Miike trades his grimly comic, sex-and-blood insignia for a self-consciously wacky conflation of Hong Kong action cinema and Japanese anime, with a little cheap science fiction tossed in for good measure.
  36. They
    Craven's name doesn't appear anywhere in the credits of the film otherwise known as They. That's fitting, too, since even the worst Craven-directed movies have a lot more going for them than this painfully familiar bit of oogum-boogum.
  37. Extreme Ops
    Extreme Ops seems to have only the slightest grasp of its own absurdity (or its own horribleness), which makes it almost charming.
  38. Solaris
    Though glazed in chilly surfaces -- the Kubrickian spaces, Cliff Martinez's gorgeous ambient score, the elliptical editing rhythms of Soderbergh's recent work, particularly "The Limey" -- the film contains a surprising depth of feeling within its egg-shaped head.
  39. Eight Crazy Nights
    The worst Hanukkah movie ever made, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights does for the holiday what "Santa Claus: The Movie" did for Christmas.
  40. Die Another Day
    The many shots of characters operating devices with remote controls will do little to quiet the complaints that the films have started to resemble video games, and the same can be said of the proliferating digital effects.
  41. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration. But one salvageable piece emerges in the middle: a sharp and acerbically funny segment that seems written specifically for Parker Posey.
  42. The Emperor's Club
    The film is an old-fashioned morality play writ extra-large, applying a heavy, austere tone to a sequence of events that can't bear the load. The burden falls mostly on Kevin Kline, who trades in his lithe, expressive comedic gifts for a dramatic role that fits him like a straitjacket and a pair of lead shoes.
  43. The Quiet American
    Even as The Quiet American loses focus and urgency, Caine's performance keeps the doomed spirit of Greene's hero intact.
  44. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Doesn't aspire to do much more than disseminate Chomsky's ideas. On that level, it's a success, but on every other level, it's downright snooze-inducing.
  45. Talk to Her
    The marvelous new Talk To Her has elements that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an Almodóvar film of 20 years ago
  46. Friday After Next
    Marginally better than its predecessor, but only because "Next Friday" lowered standards so far that only a homemade cockfighting video would have failed to surpass it.
  47. Better Housekeeping
    The exaggerated white-trash environment and the naturalistic style mix poorly over time, giving off a stale odor that's funny in more ways than one.
  48. The Way Home
    It's telling that this slice of milquetoast is the first to get picked up by a major studio boutique. Put in the most euphemistic terms possible, the film's banal premise contains "universal themes," meaning that its sentimental clichés translate readily to all continents and cultures.
  49. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.
  50. Interview with the Assassin
    Smartly conceived and meticulously executed, if too slight and gimmicky to have much resonance.
  51. Half Past Dead
    So audaciously bad it's good, which is about as close to quality as Seagal is likely to get these days.
  52. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.
  53. Revolution #9
    Though woefully oblique and underdeveloped, writer-director Tim McCann's Revolution #9 attempts the difficult task of burrowing into the fractured mind of a modern man who loses his grip on reality.
  54. Ararat
    Though typically engaging, Ararat occasionally suffers from what's previously been a virtue in Egoyan's filmmaking. His distancing techniques, rather than sharpening his ability to deal with a subject that lends itself to high emotion -- sometimes just seem distancing.
  55. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    A well-chosen cast helps make the wild notions convincing, and director Chris Columbus presents it all in an attractive, thoroughly watchable package. But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form.
  56. Hush!
    Hush! takes an excessive, saga-like running time to reach its conclusion, but Hashiguchi frequently makes the trudge worthwhile, particularly when he finds the energy to match his three leads' charming performances.
  57. The Bread, My Sweet
    Though The Bread, My Sweet is never even a little bit better than this description makes it sound, writer-director Melissa Martin's stagy, unattractive-looking film should at least get credit for going all the way with its manipulation.
  58. Far From Heaven
    Haynes makes it possible to forget all the layers at work and simply be swept up in the story's emotions. As in Sirk's films, these characters live and breathe within the film's exaggerated reality, thanks to rich performances by Haysbert, Quaid, and especially Moore.
  59. 'R Xmas
    A lean, well-contained slice-of-life at 83 minutes, 'R Xmas finds the director making a confident return to the hard-nosed realism on which he's staked his maverick reputation.
  60. 8 Mile
    The film's absolute conviction keeps it from feeling formulaic.
  61. Femme Fatale
    Much like David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," which it resembles in more ways than one, Femme Fatale makes a rich bouillabaisse out of De Palma's trademark themes and obsessions, stacking references to the heavens and operating with an internal logic that may take several viewings to fully unpack.
  62. Treasure Planet
    With much more success than last summer's formula-bound "Atlantis," Treasure Planet finds the common ground between classic Disney animation and newfangled action-adventure films.
  63. The Weight of Water
    Perhaps because the present-day characters are such insufferable twits -- especially the brooding Penn, who's given to tossing around stanzas by Yeats and Dylan Thomas -- the modern story feels like a device, a flimsy entrée into events that would be better accessed directly.
  64. Tully
    In its strongest moments, Tully has the quality of a good short story, in the way it details the underlying affection and resentment that creeps into the lives of its four main characters, played with great sensitivity by a cast of mostly unknowns.
  65. Daughter from Danang
    Devastating in part because it's so chillingly familiar.
  66. The Santa Clause 2
    Despite the obviously mercenary nature of this sequel, there's a thimbleful of clever ideas at work here, most notably in the way Allen's RoboSanta begins to turn his toy factory into a tiny dictatorship.
  67. I Spy
    I Spy confirms Wilson's ability to turn mediocre, mercenary endeavors into fun crowd-pleasers. Of course, Wilson starring in I Spy is like Phil Jackson coaching a junior-high basketball team, but as long as the results are this entertaining, it's doubtful audiences will care.
  68. Besotted
    Hardman never gives her material a chance to develop, because she subjects it to so much forced drama and self-conscious nudging, and when she hits a wall, she gets silly.
  69. Food of Love
    A reserved coming-of-age story that overcomes flat acting and one-dimensional scene-building thanks to its lively plot.
  70. The Bank
    LaPaglia brings the hero into a world of greed and compromised values, but his fork-tongued monologues aren't remotely seductive, which makes the ending a foregone conclusion.
  71. All the Queen's Men
    Stultifying.
  72. Frida
    Save for two spectacularly impressionistic sequences, Taymor brings little of that imagination to Frida, a turgid and conventional biopic that skips through the major incidents in Kahlo's life without giving them any special resonance, or even much visual panache.
  73. By Hook or by Crook
    The lurching plot goes off the rails about two-thirds of the way through, when Dodge's instability and her mother-quest supersede the mild criminal hijinks, but the film's acting is consistently exciting and unselfconscious.
  74. The Truth About Charlie
    Though indisputably a thriller, Charlie abandons itself to little cinematic rhapsodies, self-reflexive asides, and montages of Paris locations cued to a soundtrack of cool French pop, all of which often seems more vital than the main order of business.
  75. All or Nothing
    It's a hard-won comfort, found here over a bleak stretch of days, but All Or Nothing makes it look like the best life has to offer.
  76. Roger Dodger
    Flags as it heads toward a moralistic ending, complete with a couple of contrived (albeit charged) sexual encounters, but it's heartening that it soars as long as it does.
  77. Ghost Ship
    Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.
  78. 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.
  79. Derrida
    As the film takes shape, the form and the subject develop a fascinating symbiosis, with Derrida cast as an active participant in the deconstruction of his own documentary.
  80. Fidel
    Estela Bravo's disgraceful documentary Fidel could have been financed by the man himself.
  81. Naqoyqatsi
    Part of what made "Koyaanisqatsi" such a revelation was its purely cinematic dependence on unconstructed imagery. Here, he adds a parade of religious, corporate, and political icons, and what's already preachy turns heavy-handed.
  82. Real Women Have Curves
    One of the not-so-nice qualities of Real Women Have Curves is that it occasionally is as preachy as its title suggests.
  83. Abandon
    Gaghan shows promise as a director, but Abandon leaves a lot of room for improvement.
  84. The Grey Zone
    The atmosphere makes a deeper impression than the drama, which might represent a failing on Nelson's part, but could it be avoided? His film portrays the pinholes of light in a place of otherwise unrelenting darkness.
  85. Goyangileul butaghae
    Jeong's movie is at its best when it forgets about everything but the interactions of its cast, whether they're together or communicating via one of Cat's cleverly orchestrated cell-phone scenes.
  86. Auto Focus
    Kinnear's mesmerizing performance comes close to redeeming Auto Focus, suggesting depths the film never gets around to exposing, but Schrader's alternately flat and histrionic storytelling sends the film hurtling beyond redemption.
  87. The Ring
    As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."
  88. Formula 51
    Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.
  89. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
    Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.
  90. Comedian
    As a portrait of a man at the top of his profession starting over, it's involving throughout, and funny, too. Its range proves too narrow to support the questions it raises, but it's memorable for the point it repeats.
  91. Brown Sugar
    A good cast, terrific soundtrack, and genial spirit all help the film go down smoothly.
  92. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    Deadly dull.
  93. Knockaround Guys
    Knockaround Guys proceeds with a gravity that's constantly tripped up by its characters' stupidity.
  94. Below
    Twohy and co-screenwriters Darren Aronofsky and Lucas Sussman don't show their hand until late in the film, but by that time, Below has grown slack and silly.
  95. The Rules of Attraction
    Propelled by a fine Tomandandy score and a savvy assortment of seductive new-wave hits, Attraction is top-notch trash, a guilty pleasure designed for the decadent 14-year-old in everyone.
  96. The Transporter
    If anything, The Transporter isn't ludicrous enough; only one scene (a hand-to-hand showdown in the middle of an oil slick) reaches the inspired, delirious comic heights of the best Hong Kong movies.
  97. Punch-Drunk Love
    It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.
  98. Tuck Everlasting
    Unfortunately, Russell paces the film as if trying to demonstrate what eternity feels like. When the plot begs to move forward, the film keeps lingering over friendly fawns and long walks through the forest.
  99. White Oleander
    White Oleander goes through the paces with a little more dignity than usual, which is a mark of either director Peter Kosminsky's refusal to overplay the melodrama, or his inability to wring it for all it's worth.
  100. Bowling for Columbine
    Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »