The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. Blade II
    Everything "Blade" should have been but wasn't: stylish, fast-paced, and comfortable with its own ridiculousness.
  2. Pauline and Paulette
    Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.
  3. Harrison's Flowers
    Moves forward on the conviction of its performances. Brody, in particular, shows uncommon sensitivity as a politically committed and temperamental photographer who responds to MacDowell's half-crazed resolution with heartbreaking zeal.
  4. Showtime
    De Niro and Murphy are visibly uncomfortable with each other. Their improvisation seems chaotic and mismanaged, and the movie follows in kind.
  5. Y Tu Mamá También
    In the wild and consistently surprising Y Tu Mamá También, anything isn't the half of it.
  6. Promises
    "I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but.
  7. Resident Evil
    Too grim and humorless to even qualify as trashy fun.
  8. Ice Age
    Kids won't mind a bit, but adults accustomed to "Shrek" and Pixar will have no trouble spotting what's missing.
  9. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    As persuasive and exhaustive as the film's evidence is, the stock footage of charred corpses and bombed-out communities demands more than the smug talking heads that Bogdanich presents, safe in their offices and comfortable with their rightness.
  10. 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.
  11. All About the Benjamins
    A witless, bloody, unpleasant mismatched-buddy movie.
  12. Festival in Cannes
    Even when better members of Jaglom's cast make connections, the atmosphere remains one of dull chaos.
  13. The Time Machine
    Machine makes its look-to-the-future-not-the-past message as clear as a Grammy acceptance speech, but as an exploration of regret and the elusive quality of time, it falls well short of "Memento," another film starring a sad-eyed Pearce.
  14. Esther Kahn
    Summer Phoenix has a screen presence that's simultaneously distancing and transfixing, an inscrutability that makes her seem either mysterious or a complete blank.
  15. Stolen Summer
    Beyond fulfilling the dreams of a seemingly nice fellow, the whole venture is a victory of hype over substance, loudly accomplishing nothing.
  16. Borstal Boy
    Shows an unusual degree of generosity toward all its characters, and its tenderness yields some affecting moments, even if they don't ring entirely true.
  17. We Were Soldiers
    Leaves all the real risks to the young warriors at Ia Drang and collects easy dividends on their bravery. In the end, it honors them by paying tribute to itself.
  18. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Runs more smoothly and stylishly than the average teen comedy.
  19. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.
  20. The Cherry Orchard
    Cacoyannis errs on the side of genteel respectability, sacrificing emotion and verve at the altar of good taste.
  21. Big Bad Love
    The junk-shop surrealism ultimately gets the better of everyone's good intentions.
  22. Maryam
    Maryam is absorbing and insightful when Serry focuses on the subtleties of a family's generational and cultural conflict, but the film veers regularly into Movie Of The Week (or even Afterschool Special) "big moments" that play like forced attempts to tell a personal story while insecurely adhering to a commercial formula.
  23. 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.
  24. Monsoon Wedding
    A sight worth seeing.
  25. Dragonfly
    Awash in cheap shocks and corny sentiment, Dragonfly aspires to be an inspirational thriller about one man's spiritual journey, but it takes little time for him to reach his destination. All that's left for him and the audience to do is solve a riddle unfit for the back of a cereal box.
  26. Queen of the Damned
    A surreal piece of silliness.
  27. Return to Never Land
    The film crawls to a halt, its pace further marred by anemic, time-wasting pop songs. Even at 72 minutes, Never Land feels padded, while the animators make Never Land so unmagical that war-torn London seems preferable by comparison.
  28. Scratch
    It's a doozy of a story, too, about a group of musicians who use the technology of the present and the mindset of the future to make a delicious hash out of the best parts of the past.
  29. 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.
  30. Wendigo
    A skillfully acted and psychologically well-crafted but ultimately disappointing thriller.
  31. Hart's War
    In its amalgam of classic Hollywood war movies and courtroom dramas, Hart's War takes the audience to a place that never existed in order to teach it a lesson it already knows.
  32. Crossroads
    Spears is filmed and costumed in such a harsh, unflattering manner that it looks like Christina Aguilera bribed the crew to make her rival look as hideous as possible. Spears' ubiquity has spawned an inevitable backlash, but the awful Crossroads ought to do more harm to her career than even the most powerful Britney-basher.
  33. Super Troopers
    With no greater ambition than reworking the Police Academy movies, Broken Lizard comes up with a winning formula: one part laughs to two parts goodwill.
  34. John Q
    Plays less like an exposé than a piece of exploitation, its clear divide between good and evil allowing no breathing room for real drama.
  35. Scotland, Pa.
    Shakespeare hasn't had it this rough since Lemmy from Motörhead performed the opening soliloquy in "Tromeo And Juliet."
  36. Rollerball
    Only those attracted to "Waterworld" or "Last Action Hero" level big-budget disasters need bother with this one.
  37. Big Fat Liar
    Big Fat Liar's screenplay, co-written by Robbins and fellow Head Of The Class alumnus Dan Schneider, is a model of comic inefficiency. Like a Rube Goldberg contraption, it goes to excruciating, wildly implausible lengths for the flimsiest of payoffs.
  38. Collateral Damage
    In a way, Collateral Damage is redeemed by its implausibility, because the closer it comes to reality, the more disturbing it gets. For once, viewers have reason to be grateful for having their intelligence insulted.
  39. Swiri
    An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.
  40. Birthday Girl
    Nicole Kidman -- continuing the string of remarkable performances that have followed "Eyes Wide Shut" -- finds plenty of fodder in the long-delayed Birthday Girl. A grimy thriller with a wicked streak of humor.
  41. Slackers
    Schwartzman steals Slackers without much effort, but it's not worth the theft.
  42. Domestic Violence
    A bit too long. Conceptually, it's sensible to keep the camera running while these women bare their souls, but in practical terms, the gist of some of their stories would have sufficed. Nevertheless, Wiseman has scored another considerable achievement in the documentary form.
  43. Escaflowne: The Movie
    The film's life-affirming fable offers a richer metaphorical subtext than Vision's intricate coming-of-age soap opera. Unfortunately, clumsy dialogue, characterization, and exposition interfere with that subtext.
  44. Waydowntown
    Occasionally resembling an episode of Seinfeld taken to the big screen, waydowntown shares that show's ability to mine mundane details for humor, and its Tomorrowland-gone-awry setting provides plenty of raw material.
  45. Maelstrom
    For a movie about identity to have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the bloody talking fishes.
  46. The Son's Room
    In the end, it's that reserve that makes it work. Keeping his distance, the director lets viewers see in full the moments in which grief turns the world into a narrow, never-ending tunnel.
  47. 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.
  48. Hey, Happy!
    Like its characters, Hey, Happy! is more comfortable with music, images, and rhythms than words, but unlike raves, narrative films generally need dialogue, and whenever the characters open their mouths, the movie crawls to a halt. Even at 75 minutes, it seems less like a party than an endurance test.
  49. Metropolis
    Technologically, the film is impressive, and it readily overwhelms the senses with frenetic computer-generated activity, an apocalyptic grand finale, and a bombastic jazz score. But unlike its classic predecessor, it doesn't leave much in its wake but ringing ears and unanswered questions.
  50. 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.
  51. The Count of Monte Cristo
    While fleeting moments from Pearce and Luis Guzmán (as Caviezel's loyal servant) suggest the film might have been even more fun had they been allowed to loosen up a bit, the finished product still offers little cause for complaint.
  52. Beijing Bicycle
    Even without its bleak and affecting story, Beijing Bicycle would work beautifully as a travelogue alone.
  53. A Walk to Remember
    Basically a prim, desexualized "Carrie," told from the prom date's perspective and featuring Peter Coyote in the Piper Laurie role.
  54. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    Does this even count as a movie?
  55. Beyond the Ocean
    Doesn't have the content to match the form, never cohering into anything more substantial than a glum navel-gazer about a little girl lost, unable to find a permanent home (literally or figuratively) on either side of the Atlantic.
  56. Ha-Hesder
    Ultimately, writer-director Joseph Cedar has created a film that resembles a subtitled very special episode of "JAG."
  57. Italian for Beginners
    Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.
  58. State Property
    A singularly uncharismatic leading man, the paunchy, expressionless, frequently inarticulate Sigel makes an unintentionally comic impression as a character named, naturally, Beans.
  59. Snow Dogs
    Snow Dogs never comes close to transcending its own inherent silliness, but Coburn, Gooding, and a genial tone help make the movie harmless tomfoolery the whole family can tolerate.
  60. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    As a sketch of the twilight of a great artist, The Farewell has merit, but the sketch would be better used as the background to a mural.
  61. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    It's impossible not to admire what, apart from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," may be the most ambitious action film since "The Matrix."
  62. E-Dreams
    The story told by e-dreams is inherently compelling, full of dark humor drawn from a deep well of hubris and historical irony, but the film would be a lot sharper had the filmmakers not fallen under Park's charismatic cyber-spell.
  63. Orange County
    Ultimately it lacks even the conviction of its own nastiness.
  64. What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai's latest, What Time Is It There?, runs his usual themes and obsessions through a whimsical premise worthy of Wong Kar-Wai, striking such an exquisite balance between humor and despair that the moods comfortably coexist, just as they do in real life.
  65. Impostor
    It essentially uses the setup of an early Dick short story as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene.
  66. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    At times, Goldsworthy's philosophy edges into fuzzy New Age-isms, but with an ever-widening gulf separating humans from their environment, his work demonstrates the enlightening pleasures of reconnecting.
  67. Ali
    Ali becomes less the story of a boxer than the story of one man hanging onto his soul. With so many wrong ways to dramatize that process, Mann's approach seems all the more right.
  68. A Song for Martin
    Starts in one direction, then performs a cruel narrative fake-out, sandwiching together two different movies that are scarcely related.
  69. In July
    Every time the pace starts to flag, it coughs up one hilarious left-field interlude after another.
  70. Mysterious Object at Noon
    All of this free association falls under the wide umbrella of "experimental" cinema, meaning that the often flagging pace and incoherent stretches are balanced by sublime moments of inspiration.
  71. Berlin Babylon
    The film's deep, precise colors, which look like they belong in a Peter Greenaway movie, are Berlin Babylon's first major surprise. The second is how watchable it is, given its obsessive focus on buildings.
  72. Fighter
    Far from the solemn earnestness of most Holocaust documentaries, Fighter addresses the war and its oft-toxic reverberations with refreshing impudence and candor.
  73. Apocalypse Now Redux
    In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.
  74. The Fast and the Furious
    Better equipped to deal with the workings of nitro-injection systems than human emotions, director Rob Cohen's film grows less assured the more time it spends with its characters, particularly through its dull middle section. It does earn points for trying, however, and while Walker is a cipher, Diesel has enough personality for both of them.
  75. Chain Camera
    By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.
  76. Life and Debt
    Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.
  77. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    Barking Dogs Never Bite is uneven, unnecessarily provocative, and exhausts its central premise long before the closing credits, but it’s invigorating to watch regardless. After all, Bong is just doing what New Wave artists do: experimenting, breaking rules, showing off.
  78. Deuces Wild
    A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.
  79. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.
  80. Glamour
    Major characters drop in and out of sight, WWII begins and ends without much fanfare, and full decades pass in the space of a few cuts.
  81. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    The domestic humor is often too culture-specific to play for a non-Japanese audience, but Yamadas does have its accessible moments, particularly in the sweet extended opening flight of fantasy.
  82. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    Ocelot’s joyous mashup is a work of uncommonly vivid imagination, sharing space with Yellow Submarine, Fantastic Planet, and The Triplets Of Belleville in the omnivorous grade-schooler’s alt-canon.
  83. Hellraiser: Inferno
    The first of several low points in the series. At this point Kirsty’s out of the picture (at least temporarily), the original rules of Cenobite engagement are discarded, and Pinhead’s ultimate fate is sealed. So what’s left? You guessed it—a Gritty! Contemporary! Reboot!
  84. The Original Kings of Comedy
    As a testament to the vitality of—and sense of community engendered by—black comedy, The Original Kings Of Comedy is a success. As a comedy, however, it's sluggishly paced and not nearly funny enough to justify its two-hour running time.
  85. Gladiator
    In the end, Gladiator is overdrawn and too insubstantial for its own good, just like the old days, but it satisfies as entertainment on a grand scale.
  86. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    García apparently prefers ambiguity, implying all sorts of heavy backstory for each of his leads but leaving the details vague, and he lets his actresses carry the baggage in their performances alone.
  87. The Boondock Saints
    As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.
  88. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    This caper film possesses Miyazaki's usual good-hearted charm, but he injects a manically energetic humor that his more sedate children's films never quite achieve.
  89. Close-Up
    From the outset, the director lets us know that this won’t be some sensationalistic crime story. Close-Up is more about the power of images, and how what’s on the screen at any given moment can hold our attention completely, even if it has nothing to do with “the story.”
  90. The Suburbans
    Made without the faintest spark of inspiration, The Suburbans feels like a buried, unholy relic from the era it's purportedly satirizing.
  91. Perfect Blue
    With its fluidly changeable surfaces, animation may be the ideal medium for confronting the public's growing uncertainty with reality, but Perfect Blue is a missed opportunity, too shallow and exploitative to be taken seriously.
  92. Brokedown Palace
    The once-reliable Danes is a particular detriment, but it's really hard to care whether either character escapes from what looks like a really unappealing summer camp.
  93. Detroit Rock City
    Such a stupid, painfully obvious, gratingly unfunny dud that it's unlikely to please even the most gullible and easy-to-please members of the Kiss army.
  94. Better Than Chocolate
    The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.
  95. Mystery Men
    The characters are funny and the cast's characterizations right on, but the movie repeatedly lets them down.
  96. The Acid House
    The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.
  97. The Sixth Sense
    Teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone.
  98. Runaway Bride
    Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.
  99. Deep Blue Sea
    It's every bit as silly as it sounds, sillier really.
  100. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    It's like a cross between "Heathers" and "Waiting For Guffman," had those movies been made by morons, for morons, and the cinematic equivalent of cow-tipping, only less graceful.
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