The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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 2.6 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 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. The Family Stone
    Most of it falls on Bezucha, not just for devising these monstrously cruel characters, but for putting them in situations that are far too serious to be resolved by Christmas morning. When the melodrama gets too intense, the film collapses in slapstick.
  2. Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    In its absolute commitment to inoffensive, fun-for-the-whole-family entertainment, it's as extreme in its own way as hardcore pornography.
  3. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    There's enough mystery and agony here for an engaging documentary, but Rossier fails to produce one, largely because he doesn't approach the material in the spirit of true inquiry.
  4. Swimfan
    At least Christensen seems to have the right idea: She gives her character a look that's part lust, part thousand-yard stare, and part Machiavelli in tight sweaters and form-fitting skirts. It's not exactly acting, but it's not predictable, either, which makes it stand out all the more.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Asphalt Zahov
    Though it's tempting to praise Verete for having the courage to show the worst of both worlds, only a propagandist could get away with being so reductive; an artist should be held to a higher standard.
  8. The In-Laws
    Perhaps the oddest thing about The In-Laws is that it's aimed at an audience old enough to remember not only the original, but also how much funnier it seemed at the time.
  9. The Mystic Masseur
    The Mystic Masseur shows more signs of life than "Cotton Mary," but it's still a producer's movie: attractively mounted, dramatically inert.
  10. The Guys
    In spite of some affecting moments, the film never quite works. It's too theatrical, perhaps unavoidably.
  11. Stolen Summer
    Beyond fulfilling the dreams of a seemingly nice fellow, the whole venture is a victory of hype over substance, loudly accomplishing nothing.
  12. Circuit
    As slick and attractive as its cast. But the movie gets away from Shafer.
  13. Secret Society
    A feeble and self-congratulatory heart-warmer.
  14. The Cherry Orchard
    Cacoyannis errs on the side of genteel respectability, sacrificing emotion and verve at the altar of good taste.
  15. Scarlet Diva
    Though Scarlet Diva contains flashes of pungent black humor and self-deprecation, it's hard to know how seriously Argento takes herself, or how much her real life has been inflated for dramatic effect.
  16. Murder by Numbers
    A moralizing thriller so listless that it plays out like a game of mouse and mouse.
  17. My Wife Is an Actress
    Sadly, that thin premise snaps after a while, and when Wife takes a serious turn, it becomes apparent how little the director has to say.
  18. 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.
  19. Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.
  20. Kaaterskill Falls
    Testy characters don't really make for enjoyable viewing, and as game as the actors are, their arguing sounds forced, and they can't improvise their way around the contrivance of the story.
  21. 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.
  22. The Last Man
    By the time Arnott's whining monologues begin to number in the dozens, the notion of a swift apocalypse seems like a good idea.
  23. The Next Big Thing
    John Waters covered the same territory in his underrated 1998 comedy "Pecker," but without Waters' colorful mix of outrageousness and affection, Posner can't stir up the rancor to score even a few glancing blows at an easy target.
  24. 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.
  25. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Voices is visually impressive, and it sustains a mood of downbeat romanticism throughout, but because it lacks an essential core of humanity, it's never as haunting or resonant as it should be.
  26. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Bounce Ko Gals ultimately devolves into a litany of social ills, with not enough of a proper story, and Harada loses the thread of the film whenever he slips into slapstick comedy, or has his female leads play the role of giggly best friends.
  27. The Mothman Prophecies
    Nonetheless, the film never amounts to more than the sum of a few good moments, and it leaves the aftertaste of a second-tier X-Files episode.
  28. Knockaround Guys
    Knockaround Guys proceeds with a gravity that's constantly tripped up by its characters' stupidity.
  29. Martin & Orloff
    The film too often gets bogged down by a rhythmless pace and an overabundance of the kind of wacky physical business better left to experts in a dumber brand of comedy.
  30. Stuart Little 2
    Never becomes more than a just-acceptable kiddie time-filler.
  31. The Country Bears
    It has the courage to feature some refreshingly lousy bear costumes, but the film seems likely to send most kids tugging at sleeves for the cinematic equivalent of Space Mountain.
  32. No Good Deed
    The film doesn't begin to take off until its second half, when it thankfully shucks its weak supporting cast and turns into a three-way battle of wits involving Jackson, Jovovich, and Skarsgård, its wiliest and most compelling characters.
  33. Freeze Me
    Comfortable with the inherent contradictions, Ishii throws all sexual politics to the wind in his highly stylized, fearlessly gratuitous fantasy, an unsettling mix of titillation, morality, victimization, and empowerment.
  34. AKA
    Divided into a triptych of images sprawled across a Cinemascope frame, AKA rarely uses the extra screens for information that couldn't be conveyed well enough in one.
  35. 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.
  36. Eight Legged Freaks
    The few isolated funny moments, particularly a witty visual gag involving a pop-up tent with legs, provide only a short break from the screen-flooding onslaught of CGI creatures and screaming extras.
  37. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    The pleasure to be derived from watching a loopy Australian risk life and limb is not to be dismissed or underrated, but Collision Course proves that that guilty pleasure, no matter how potent, just isn't a solid basis for a film.
  38. Alex & Emma
    The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.
  39. 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.
  40. The Opposite of Sex
    Consistently clever without ever being funny. The film is so in love with its own carefully calibrated outrageousness that it doesn't bother to give its characters any depth beyond sitcom-level stereotypes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clay Pigeons
    Perhaps this will seem fresh and interesting years down the road, when the self-aware-thriller genre has long played out, but for now, it's a tired horse that should have been put down in the pitch meeting.
  42. Bollywood/Hollywood
    It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.
  43. Journeys with George
    Pelosi should be roughed up some, though, for what little she does with her access to the then-president-to-be and the political circus surrounding him.
  44. Phone Booth
    Schumacher choose to start the movie in outer space? The opening shot epitomizes everything wrong with Phone Booth: Given the chance to stage human drama on an intimate, suffocating scale, Schumacher begins in the endless expanse of the void, tricked out with gratuitous CGI effects.
  45. Uptown Girls
    Uptown Girls refuses to make Fanning likable, which speaks to a certain misplaced integrity, and tends to throw a wrench in the film's halfhearted attempts at formula.
  46. Home Fries
    Veering wildly from macabre Southern Gothic to quirky small-town romance, Home Fries is too busy cross-pollinating genres to bother with consistent behavior and tone.
  47. Abandon
    Gaghan shows promise as a director, but Abandon leaves a lot of room for improvement.
  48. Dopamine
    The issues Decena raises rarely get treated on any but the most superficial of levels, and the flatly realized characters make it difficult to care what becomes of them.
  49. 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.
  50. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    The story is thrown together in the most perfunctory way possible, and director Steve Miner's ("Friday The 13th Part 3: 3D," "My Father The Hero") idea of a scary moment is having things spookily jump out of the blue.
  51. Prey for Rock & Roll
    An actress of magnetizing screen presence whose inability to land choice roles can only be attributed to her post-TRL age, Gershon easily identifies with her character, giving her performance an edge that this lazy, punked-up melodrama otherwise lacks.
  52. 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Object of My Affection
    The film is being marketed as a romantic comedy, but it's neither romantic nor funny.
  54. Together
    Miles away from "Farewell, My Concubine" in form and function, with thinly defined characters and unreflective attitudes about urban values vs. country values, the film would be impossible to identify as Chen's if his name weren't in the opening credits.
  55. Life
    Sluggish, laugh-free comedy (or is it an ineffectual drama?).
  56. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    A vanity project about a vanity project.
  57. Frailty
    When the twists arrive, they feel like much of the film: creepy and cliché-free, but still terribly wrong.
  58. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Better Luck Tomorrow is that, on a slow night, it's easy to imagine these delinquents wanting to rent a film just like it.
  59. The Sea Is Watching
    Though the episodic, low-key action bears a resemblance to Kurosawa's Madadayo -- his little-seen, underrated final film -- neither the characters nor the plot lend it even a hint of dynamism.
  60. Agent Cody Banks
    The generic intrigue and chase scenes take over, leaving poor Muniz at the mercy of stunt doubles and chintzy special effects.
  61. 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.
  62. Psycho
    Hitchcock's Psycho had a lot more than watchability going for it. Van Sant's film impresses only on the level of a cinematic parlor trick, and while that makes it an interesting curiosity, the world doesn't need it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Real Blonde
    Unfortunately, this slight, dull film would have benefited from a bit more style, as well as substance, as its lame characters and obvious observations never rise too far above the soap operas DiCillo parodies.
  64. Life or Something Like It
    A banal message movie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    Kudrow and Sorvino aren't really given a script to work with; most jokes consist of the two women being vacuous together.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    G.I. Jane
    If you're looking for a film that addresses a woman's place in a combat unit, keep waiting. If you want a film where a woman can get big muscles and shoot guns and have her husband still love her, here you are.
  67. Orange County
    Ultimately it lacks even the conviction of its own nastiness.
  68. Cold Creek Manor
    In one of the most laughable confrontations between humanity and nature since Elisha Cuthbert stared down the cougar on "24," Quaid's family runs amok in the house, as each member simultaneously discovers a carefully placed snake meant to scare them off the property, almost as if the snakes were working off a timer system. The film never recovers.
  69. 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.
  70. Wrong Turn
    Lacks the creepiness and craft of the films that inspired it.
  71. The Guru
    It's refreshing to see an American movie with an Indian protagonist not played by a white actor in makeup, but it would be a lot more refreshing if that actor (Jimi Mistry) were given a character to play, not just a comic conceit and near-toxic levels of enthusiasm.
  72. Jason X
    Feels like it was written as a fairly straight horror/sci-fi movie, then script-doctored by a comedy writer intent on satirizing the original script. As a result, the film's intentional and unintentional laughs mingle so freely that it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two.
  73. Practical Magic
    Its flat whimsy, VH1-ready musical montage sequences, and less-than-magic magic realism will probably not be enough to hold the attention of all but the most undiscriminating fans of witches and Stockard Channing.
    • 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.
  75. Six Days Seven Nights
    Not especially funny, romantic, or exciting.
  76. Nicotina
    Nicotina's lack of originality ultimately proves forgivable. Its glib, heartless nihilism doesn't.
  77. Deep Blue Sea
    It's every bit as silly as it sounds, sillier really.
  78. Laws of Attraction
    Moore works to feign vitality where none exists, but that just makes it even more embarrassing to watch her writhe around fruitlessly in the most thankless and ill-fitting of roles.
  79. Virgin
    Shot on shaky-cam digital video, filtered through what appears to be an old sweatsock, the film mimics Dogme-style realism in its vision of modern persecution, but in the end, it offers the sort of touchy-feely mysticism that belongs to the crystal-ball and tarot-reading set.
  80. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    Without the mythical power or giddy adventurousness of the first two Star Wars movies, the impact is strangely numbing, like watching a two-and-a-half-hour ILM show reel in search of moneyed investors.
  81. Storytelling
    It would be tempting to call Storytelling a narrow and simplistic examination of the creative process, if only Solondz weren't so quick to agree.
  82. Go
    Escapism of the worst sort, a manipulative exercise in style that preys on the passivity of its characters and its audience. In the end, Go offers little more than the sour, impermanent rush of a pixie stick.
  83. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    League begins as a smart variation on the summer blockbuster, then loses its nerve in a second half sure to satisfy neither cheap-thrill-seekers nor fans of neglected literary oddities.
  84. World Traveler
    A hopelessly stolid and distant evocation of Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces."
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Message in a Bottle
    The depressing results will likely make viewers feel jerked around when it's all over.
  86. Secret Window
    Secret Window is almost worth seeing for his characteristically assured performance alone, but Koepp sabotages Depp and his surroundings with an ending so atrocious, it callously betrays everything that came before it.
  87. Reconstruction
    Reconstruction doesn't evoke much emotion beyond cool ennui. At that, the film excels.
  88. House of 1000 Corpses
    The setup almost needs footnotes, which makes it all the more puzzling that Zombie's obvious love for horror's past would translate into such a joyless, grisly rehashing.
  89. Head in the Clouds
    The film feels more at home with sex than war, like a romance novel where the swinging lovers find their passions stirred by bombs exploding in the distance. Their three-way dalliances are so frivolous and silly that once the action turns dark, Duigan and his cast leave audiences unprepared for the emotional fallout.
  90. Taking Lives
    Sadly, Taking Lives, adapted from a novel by Michael Pye, proves to be one long wallow in elements that have long since had their effectiveness dulled flat.
  91. Festival in Cannes
    Even when better members of Jaglom's cast make connections, the atmosphere remains one of dull chaos.
  92. Breakin' All the Rules
    Written and directed by Daniel Taplitz, Breakin' has a hard time building up steam and an even harder time distinguishing itself from any number of UPN sitcoms.
  93. Brother Bear
    Unfortunately, Brother Bear doesn't offer much to marvel at beyond its animation.
  94. 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.
  95. The Other Side of Heaven
    Movies don't get much more wholesome and earnest than The Other Side Of Heaven, a handsomely mounted but empty-headed drama that attempts to do for fresh-faced Mormon missionaries what Top Gun did for cocky fighter pilots.
  96. Against the Ropes
    Right up to the ludicrous finale and an even more improbable denouement, everything rings Hollywood-false. More galling still, the filmmakers' inventions take the zing out of the facts.
  97. Mean Machine
    While competently staged and punched up by Lock, Stock's changing camera speeds, it doesn't have the wit or intrigue to sustain its half-length.
  98. Fools Rush In
    The best that can be said is that neither Matthew Perry nor Salma Hayek embarrass themselves, but they're both appealing enough that the same could probably be said if they were starring in a commercial for a hair-replacement system.
  99. Go Further
    Like much of Mann's work, it's an unabashed love letter to the counterculture. But this time out, Mann has made an unintentionally vicious satire of the fuzzyheaded self-intoxication and impracticality of the progressive left, a film that's far more scathing than anything Tom Wolfe could dream up.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Best Friend's Wedding
    Just as crippling is the movie's tendency to waver back and forth between black comedy and Nora Ephron-esque schmaltz.
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