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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    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    BASEketball
    BASEketball's effort and energy pay off with surprisingly abundant laughs and a few admirable shocks.
  2. The Ward
    Nothing about The Ward's script or direction has much snap. The dialogue is never witty, the characters are indistinct, the story is set in 1966 for no relevant reason, and the scares are strictly of the "thing jumps loudly out of the shadows" variety.
  3. Think Like a Man Too
    Think Like A Man was a memorably bad movie; the most eccentric thing about this sequel is its title.
  4. August Rush
    Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.
  5. A Case of You
    The movie is about as generic as modern romantic comedies get.
  6. Kinda Pregnant
    Apart from some slapstick abuse of her fake baby bump (sometimes funny) and the Mrs. Doubtfire-style hustle and bustle of needing to don or repair a pregnancy get-up (less funny), the actual story of Kinda Pregnant winds up feeling like a holding pattern, right down to the predictable punctuation of R-rated raunch talk and gags that gesture toward satire (gender reveal parties! So ridiculous!) without actually scoring any real points.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Free Birds
    The best moments are jokes that feel grafted onto a film that was probably close to completion before anyone involved realized they were portraying a fight between turkeys and English settlers as the largest conflict in the European colonization of North America.
  8. Girl Most Likely
    The blame belongs most plainly with Michelle Morgan’s script, which requires this gifted comedian to play straight woman to a supporting carnival of Indiewood types.
  9. A Rainy Day in New York
    This is a bad movie, with maybe two good jokes and some of Allen’s clunkiest direction.
  10. The Moth Diaries
    Writer-director Mary Harron, a supremely intelligent adaptor who did wonders with the screen version of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," simply doesn't have the chops to give this story the florid kick it needs.
  11. The Golden Glove
    Whatever pleasure there is to be found in watching a film like The Golden Glove is in the intellectualizing, and the film does prompt a series of provocative questions about the implicit contract between artist and audience.
  12. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    Singleton abandons the underground racing subculture that gave the first film its allure, relying instead on lazy thriller plotting that's only a bag of donuts and a freeze-frame away from the average TV cop show.
  13. I Don't Know How She Does It
    In theory, the film is another hoary exploration of the pressures of modern womanhood, but in practice, it offers the exact same thing as those NYC ingénue books: cookie-cutter wish-fulfillment and lifestyle porn for easily pleased, lonely romantics.
  14. Flubber
    Like everything else in this needless remake—from a heartless performance by Williams to the patented kiddie-sadism of screenwriter John Hughes—it's sloppily grafted onto a skeletal version of the original, with scenes lifted from the source and reinserted in a manner that doesn't make sense.
  15. Oh. What. Fun.
    Beyond its desperate gestures towards better movies and its countless regifted plot points, Oh. What. Fun. does end up looking a lot like a familiar Christmas fixture: a garbage bag full of torn wrapping paper.
  16. 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.
  17. And So It Goes
    A mediocre movie, starring two great actors who’ve certainly done worse, that benefits from baseline competence and lowered expectations.
  18. V/H/S: Viral
    A sequel so slapdash and ineffectual that its army of directors — six of them total, counting the poor sucker whose contribution got axed — might well be accused of intentionally burying the franchise. More charitably, perhaps they were trying to put a nail in the coffin of all found-footage horror. Some good must come from this much bad.
  19. 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.
  20. America: The Motion Picture
    Gory, horny, and at least visually bold, America is almost always fun to gawk at, even when the writing is letting it down. But that writing is a real problem.
  21. The Medallion
    Though haphazardly put together, The Medallion stays fairly entertaining until it kills Chan off and resurrects him as an immortal being.
  22. Rugrats Go Wild
    Rugrats Go Wild! represents one giant leap forward for corporate cartoon synergy, but one similarly large step back for the Rugrats franchise.
  23. Death to Smoochy
    An aggressive black comedy that seeks to satisfy a bloodlust already quelled many times over.
  24. The Pink Panther
    Martin makes a fine Clouseau, re-energizing musty old physical gags involving chandeliers and priceless vases, and rolling his tongue around a zesty form of pidgin French. If he ever finds his Blake Edwards, there may be hope for this franchise yet.
  25. Yours, Mine and Ours
    Pretty painless by kiddie movie standards.
  26. Brake
    Ridiculousness aside, though, Brake is reasonably impressive both as a performance piece and as an exercise in staging.
  27. The Curse of Bridge Hollow
    Watching it feels like attending a Halloween party and never striking up a conversation with anyone; you can only look at the decorations for so long before getting bored.
  28. Third Person
    As schematic as Third Person is on a whole, it’s downright risible on a moment-to-moment basis.
  29. Men, Women & Children
    While many of the individual storylines are ludicrously melodramatic, building toward emotional meltdowns (and one suicide attempt), it’s the cumulative fear and loathing of everything digital that crosses the line into absurdity.
  30. The Beyond
    The Beyond's first half-hour or so is extremely entertaining, alternating between genuinely frightening, gory shocks and hilariously awkward, atonal acting. After a while, however, it becomes as dull as its repetitive Italian prog-rock soundtrack, neither good nor bad enough to hold your attention for long.
  31. Devil's Peak
    The cast is solid, the film’s pedigree is good, there’s a sense of direction and competence laced through it all, but the whole is lesser than its parts. It’s hard to watch not just because it fails, but because you see all the ways it might have succeeded.
  32. Crossing Over
    Tied together with endless, flattening shots of L.A.’s cloverleaf freeways, Crossing Over is often simplistic and occasionally lugubrious, but it's rarely boring.
  33. Ben-Hur
    The Wyler film’s rousing chariot sequence—filmed separately and at lavish expense by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived — is hard to beat. But Bekmambetov acquits himself nicely, offering up a loud and vicious circular chase, with point-of-view shots of people getting hit by chariots as armored Romans scamper around like rodeo clowns.
  34. 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.
  35. Jurassic World Dominion
    There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.
  36. Tulip Fever
    The filmmakers might claim the sexy superficiality as their whole point; if so, it’s a thin one. Chadwick and Stoppard seem to be making a movie about the impulsivity of desire, but they never dig into those feelings beyond depicting them.
  37. Murder Mystery
    The mystery itself is rote and, despite its jokey foreshadowing and its constant winks to the audience, never smart enough to really work as a genre parody. Instead, the movie just breezes along on the strength of Aniston and Sandler’s easygoing rapport.
  38. Hillbilly Elegy
    Like the book, the film version of Hillbilly Elegy goes for easy over honest every time, which is one reason why the former has been sharply criticized by those it claims to represent.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    Even in an old T-shirt and scruff of beard, Hall seems too canny and calculated a presence to entirely inhabit this man-child role, which lends a compelling edge to an otherwise scattershot story of urban misadventure and coming of age.
  40. Blade: Trinity
    Swimming in computer-enhanced mayhem and a non-stop hip-hop-and-techno soundtrack, Blade: Trinity might as well come equipped with joysticks attached to the seats, so everyone can play along.
  41. I Am
    Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.
  42. Her Private Hell
    There’s still evidence of his sardonic wit and stylistic flourishes but, save for brief blasts of cool brilliance, the film is for the most part a dud, as floaty and ephemeral as the fading mist that passes for one of the film’s central menaces.
  43. The Return
    It's more haunting than it has any right to be, thanks to its love of long, lonesome highways and the way the violence of the past bleeds into the present.
  44. 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.”
  45. Cell
    Directed by Tod Williams (Paranormal Activity 2) and co-scripted by King himself, it brings a best seller to the big screen with a minimum of spectacle, a maximum of affordable Georgia locations, and a couple of names to splash prominently across the Amazon rental thumbnail.
  46. Final Destination 2
    While “Final Destination” was gimmicky enough, its sequel begins with the same flawed premise, then piles on layers of contrivances until it reaches a level of implausibility rarely seen outside of films pitting giant radioactive monsters against each other.
  47. Gothika
    While stylistic excess keeps Gothika mildly diverting, though suspense-and horror-free, Kassovitz can't do anything to keep the film's ending from degenerating into camp.
  48. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Sadly, the film's creaky, sometimes painful dialogue makes it all too easy to believe that it was genuinely co-written by a small child.
  49. The Estate
    The execution is where it’s lacking: the wit, the timing, the headlong comic drive, and the ability to make us laugh at actions and dialogue that, in any other context, would be rude or distasteful.
  50. Adore
    The setup promises more intrigue than the film ultimately delivers.
  51. The Addams Family 2
    What’s missing, among other things, is the dark humor that is the Addams family’s whole raison d’être.
  52. The Words
    The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.
  53. Made of Honor
    What do you call it when someone pulls a gender reversal on someone else's movie? If that movie is "My Best Friend's Wedding," you call it Made Of Honor.
  54. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    Though Eubank and Landon deserve some credit for mixing up the Paranormal Activity storytelling formula, it remains clear that there’s not many scares left to milk from this franchise.
  55. Amelia
    Considering its focus on a pioneering, rule-breaking icon, the film’s utter lack of personality isn’t just a failure. It’s close to an insult.
  56. Mr. Church
    A small, unflashy, borderline incompetent movie like Mr. Church is certainly another sign that Murphy does what he wants. Maybe this guarded performance in a lousy movie is a sign of him wanting to do something better.
  57. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    Almost as schlocky as the original, but not nearly as fun.
  58. Point Blank
    This one feels one-size-fits-all—which is to say, it isn’t especially tailored to either of its stars. It just sort of hangs on them, getting more and more tattered as it goes along.
  59. Striptease
    I don't know that Striptease could ever have been anything more than second-rate Elmore Leonard, but Moore's dour lead performance sabotages the film from the get-go.
  60. Trespass
    Trespass begins loopy and mounts in craziness until it's frothing-at-the-mouth insane. It's hard to sustain that level of inspired lunacy over the course of 90 minutes, but Trespass is up to the challenge. As always, it's foolish to underestimate the appeal of Cage at his most agreeably unhinged.
  61. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    It’s the sort of film that’s destined to be the answer to a trivia question, and not much more.
  62. Marfa Girl
    This feels more like porn than any solo feature Clark has ever made, in part because his non-pro cast is unusually wooden even by his standards.
  63. Traffik
    Trying to figure it out makes Traffik weirdly compelling, but nowhere near good.
  64. Forever Strong
    Forever Strong is generic faith-and-redemption fare, devoid of nuance.
  65. Underdog
    The result is unfit for humankind.
  66. A Hole in One
    Looks and sounds better than the average indie film debut.
  67. The Last Legion
    Though it's never wise to underestimate the power or universal appeal of Rai's cleavage and lustrous hair, that's about all that sets the doggedly mediocre The Last Legion apart from every other sword-and-sandal epic about the origins of Camelot.
  68. Knock Off
    Essentially just an above-average Hong Kong action movie, but as such, it's still far better than just about anything else Van Damme has done.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Winnie Mandela
    Poor Hudson tries to live up to both the character and the clothes, but she isn’t anywhere near assertive enough a screen presence; whenever she’s supposed to be rallying a crowd or shouting down her oppressors she looks painfully aware of her own inadequacy.
  70. Annapolis
    At a time when movies, even from Hollywood, are finally turning their eyes to conflicts abroad, Annapolis seems conspicuously myopic and reactionary in its denial of the world outside campus, though a movie this formulaic wouldn't pass muster during peacetime, either.
  71. Autómata
    Once the film hits the desert, a little before the halfway point, Jacq has the energy sucked out of him and so does the film, limping along while he repeatedly throws histrionic fits.
  72. Baywatch
    In spoofing something so forgettable, they’ve made something even less memorable.
  73. Another Gay Movie
    Arriving late to the scene, Another Gay Movie coughs up the same awkward gags about coming of age via false starts and sexual humiliation, only the genuine sweetness and camaraderie that made the first "Pie" movie bearable has been replaced by glib self-awareness.
  74. Girl Play
    In the process of becoming characters, the writer-stars have diminished themselves.
  75. Ass Backwards
    Although some of the road-trip clichés are unavoidable, Ass Backwards overcomes the obvious beats with clever, occasionally dark jokes that reveal the sharpness of its stars’ writing.
  76. Flypaper
    Everything and everyone acts as cogs in a relentless plot machine that keeps twisting and twisting like an annoying little gizmo on Christmas morning.
  77. Inescapable
    It’s a deeply confused movie, sometimes productively so.
  78. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."
  79. Freddy vs. Jason
    Aside from a promising scene involving a cornfield rave and the pyrotechnic potential for grain alcohol, it drags along, taking a small eternity to set up a final showdown that plays more like a bloody pro-wrestling event than the stuff of nightmares.
  80. Be Cool
    Be Cool more often evokes the image of a screenwriter furiously trying draft after draft to accommodate all the stars. Accommodating the audience becomes a distant priority.
  81. Resident Evil: Afterlife
    Really, the whole series would be unthinkable without the films of George Romero. In that respect, Anderson has taken another page from the Corman playbook for his superior B-movie: If you're going to steal, at least steal well.
  82. Gimme Shelter
    There’s nothing wrong with social-cause filmmaking, and the movie’s chief problem is less its political talking points than the corny way it tries to impart them.
  83. Burying the Ex
    In spite of its modest running time, Burying The Ex feels stretched thin; it takes a good 35 minutes to get going, only kicking into gear once Evelyn returns from the dead.
  84. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    Not that anything in Judy Moody is meant to be taken seriously - or could be, even if it was meant to - but even for sugary neon fluff, it's awfully lightweight.
  85. Son of God
    It’s hard to think of another movie in which Jesus’ followers are so clearly shown as Jews themselves. There’s a quietly powerful post-Crucifixion scene in which the disciples say Kaddish for their fallen leader.
  86. Serenity
    Though Serenity is blessed with a goofily enjoyable high concept, it doesn’t exploit it very effectively. You can make the viewers detectives themselves, allowing us to slowly unravel a mystery, or you can give up the charade early and just run with the premise you’ve opted not to conceal very carefully. There’s little sense in doing neither.
  87. The Tourist
    von Donnersmarck's meat-and-potatoes direction makes The Tourist astonishingly lifeless and awkward, reducing two of the world's biggest movie stars to something akin to shy, pimply teenagers on their first date.
  88. The Living Wake
    The Living Wake is cursed with a permanent smirk of smug self-satisfaction: It’s so delighted with itself that it leaves audiences out of the equation.
  89. Atlas
    Without a visionary director at the helm to make better use of its simplistic concept and with no infusion of camp to match its zanier facets, Atlas is a shrug.
  90. Domino
    Domino de-emphasizes the human element--not to mention such niceties as plot and clarity--to such a degree that only those who show up purely to watch combustibles go "boom" won't feel insulted.
  91. xXx: State of the Union
    Thankfully, State Of The Union's pulpy, adrenalized blaxploitation spin on the secret-agent genre provides the dumb fun its predecessor should have dished out.
  92. Wrath of the Titans
    Wrath Of The Titans is shopworn and derivative even by the degraded standards of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.
  93. The Lone Ranger
    Hammer’s performance — always game, never mugging — certainly helps; his likable but buffoonish Lone Ranger is an essential part of the movie’s irreverent tone.
  94. Evan Almighty
    It goes without saying that Evan Almighty, a kid-friendly follow-up to the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty," is more Ronald McDonald than Holy Bible, but it didn't have to be this epically trite.
  95. The Face of an Angel
    Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.
  96. Waist Deep
    Like the forgotten blaxploitation schlock it often resembles, the film aspires to nothing but cheap thrills, but while it's plenty cheap, it's far from thrilling.
  97. Seven Days in Utopia
    Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.
  98. Charlie St. Cloud
    The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.
  99. Walking with Dinosaurs
    Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.
  100. Annabelle
    As a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap.
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