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. 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.
  2. Star Maps
    Star Maps rather transparently equates prostitution with show business; both exploit the impoverished and do no favors to minorities. It's a valid equation, but once the point is made, Star Maps has no place to go.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Restoration
    Downey seems subdued in the film's central role, as if he's out of his league when it comes to dramatically stretching as an actor. Even when all decked out in foppish finery, looking absolutely ridiculous to the objective eye, he can't find a way to focus your attention on him. Instead, in looking at him, all you can do is wonder: How much did those duds cost?
  4. The Pirate Movie
    The Pirate Movie suggests what Gilbert & Sullivan's original would look and sound like if it were rewritten by a boy-crazed middle-schooler who'd rather drool over John Travolta in Grease for the 50th time than suffer through anything close to opera.
  5. Target
    Dillon comes off as a whiny, unlikable brat, the premise's comic potential goes unrealized, and the spy stuff feels familiar and halfhearted. Good as he is, Hackman can't transform the second-rate into a masterpiece.
  6. The Concorde... Airport '79
    It’s The Love Boat in the air, basically.
  7. Legion
    A cartoonishly grim supernatural thriller that could stand a lot less talk and a lot more thrills.
  8. Pandorum
    Throw out the presence of Dennis Quaid, and the new science-fiction/horror snoozer Pandorum could easily pass for a Roger Corman cheapie.
  9. Couples Retreat
    Features a running gag about a little boy in the midst of potty training who doesn’t always go where it’s appropriate. In a nutshell, that subplot explains everything that’s wrong about the film.
  10. Cop Out
    With Cop Out, Smith works from a script other than his own for the first time--this one penned by siblings Mark and Robb Cullen--but his slack direction siphons the energy out of this tongue-in-cheek throwback to ’80s mismatched-buddy comedies.
  11. Jennifer's Body
    Cody’s script fails in the fundamentals.
  12. Orphan
    If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) set out to make a parody of horror-film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly.
  13. Babylon A.D.
    As long it sticks to that chase, Babylon A.D. remains a sub-passable lead-footed action film with neat scenery.
  14. Death at a Funeral
    Rock acquits himself nicely as the responsible brother and resident straight man, but everyone else in the cast has apparently been advised to mug shamelessly and yell their lines as loudly as possible.
  15. The Libertine
    Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.
  16. Grandma's Boy
    Grandma's Boy aspires to nothing more than the frathouse goofiness and juvenile high spirits of early Sandler vehicles, but it possesses the energy of a funeral dirge played at half-speed.
  17. BloodRayne
    With minimal flare and maximal gore, Boll simply delivers the turgid drama and incompetently staged action sequences that have made him the unstoppable Big Boss of the gaming community.
  18. The Shaggy Dog
    Okay, so when does the fun start?
  19. The Wild
    There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are at least films that dress up old tropes in new ways. This isn't one of them.
  20. The Break-Up
    A lot of The Break-Up doesn't work. Actually, apart from some funny moments between old Swingers sparring partners Favreau and Vaughn, and a nice scene with Jason Bateman as the couple's realtor, virtually none of it works.
  21. Loverboy
    Though he labors endlessly to account for her behavior, which is explained away by flashbacks to her decadent parents and a glamorous mother-figure played under Vaseline lens by an uncredited Sandra Bullock, Bacon fails to make her seem human.
  22. Little Man
    It's seldom a good sign when a Rob Schneider cameo elevates a comedy, but Little Man aims so low and fires so often that it can't miss all the time.
  23. 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.
  24. The Wicker Man
    Turns a cultishly creepy classic into a dull and windy farce.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Covenant
    Okay, so it isn't challenging. There are worse things for a horror-thriller about supernatural high-schoolers to not be. Like not scary. Or not thrilling. Or not as entertaining as an episode of "Charmed."
  26. All the King's Men
    The movie's more damnable problem is it irrelevance.
  27. Open Season
    No one makes it out of this laughless mess unscathed.
  28. Man of the Year
    If there's anything sadder than a satire without teeth, it's a thriller without thrills. Even sadder is the rare movie that fails at both genres simultaneously. That, and that alone, makes Man Of The Year exceptional.
  29. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
    There must be some solid marketing reason for putting out a Christmas movie before the jack o'lanterns have begun to rot, but if so, it's elusive. Couldn't this lump of coal have waited another month?
  30. 3 Needles
    Give Fitzgerald credit for ambition and good intentions, but for all its truth-to-power saber-rattling, 3 Needles is distressingly dim.
  31. Dreamgirls
    It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.
  32. Home of the Brave
    Whatever its model, the film is assembled from much poorer material, leftover parts of Lifetime movies and well-meaning indie films seen only on opening nights at some forgotten festival in Tampa.
  33. Night at the Museum
    Stiller's continued efforts to court the broadest possible audience has taken the edge off his comedy. Whenever he shares screen time with Williams, it looks like the grim future he's mapping out for himself.
  34. Primeval
    If there were a shred of sincerity to its straight-faced exposé of African strife, the film would be easier to forgive, but since it's really just a cheap horror-thriller about an ancient predator, the austere tone does it no favors.
  35. The Situation
    It's a rare moment when the STORY makes the point, not the speeches.
  36. Fired!
    At one point, David Cross tells Gurwitch to enjoy being unemployed, because "When you're fired, you're interesting." But as Fired! proves, that ain't necessarily so.
  37. Ghost Rider
    Cage has some fun with the role, making Blaze a kind of Zen Elvis with a strange fixation on Carpenters songs, but the film's priorities lie with the digital effects and not the story, and even the effects aren't that hot.
  38. First Snow
    Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.
  39. Redline
    A PG-13 celebration of hot chicks, fast cars, and deplorable behavior is like diet Mountain Dew, near-beer, or an expletive-free version of Straight Outta Compton--a tame, watered-down version of the real thing.
  40. The Wedding Weekend
    At least when they're singing, they aren't sniping and griping at each other. That original title really would have worked a lot better.
  41. Radiant City
    The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off. If anything, the movie's observations about the corrupting social influence of cluttered mall spaces get undercut by the fact that Burns and Brown feel the need to INVENT characters to prove their truth.
  42. License to Wed
    Krasinski knows how to play off Williams--his pained looks are all too appropriate in the face of Williams' desperate shtick--but it's disillusioning to see him here, because he seems too smart for this film.
  43. Mr. Woodcock
    Thornton is one of America's finest actors, but after this, "Bad News Bears," and "School For Scoundrels," his run of loveably irascible authority-figure roles should probably come to a close. He's kicked around one child too many.
  44. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Final score: Book 1, Movie 0.
  45. Bella
    The emotions at play in Bella are no doubt heartfelt--and must have resonated with a few hundred people, anyway--but they're so cut-and-dried that the mawkish script virtually writes itself.
  46. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.
  47. Sleuth
    No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.
  48. Slipstream
    The result is either one of the most self-indulgent vanity projects in the history of the Hollywood star system, or a rare revealing look at a distinguished actor who usually keeps his real self out of the spotlight.
  49. August Rush
    Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.
  50. Hitman
    By the time Olyphant leaves an enemy in the most ridiculous deathtrap since the '60s "Batman," just because it looks kinda neat, the whole project has started to feel like "Ultraviolet 2: The Further Stupidening."
  51. Awake
    Only the so-bad-it's-good crowd need apply.
  52. The Perfect Holiday
    It's a measure of the film's lack of imagination that Morris Chestnut, as an aspiring songwriter logging time as a mall Santa, can't even think of a good fake occupation.
  53. Flakes
    The characters Lehmann and company use as generational mouthpieces bear no relation to any people who have ever existed, and they barely work as parody.
  54. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    West is heavy on Vaughn, at least initially, but woefully short on comedy.
  55. Meet the Browns
    Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."
  56. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.
  57. The Happening
    Shyamalan still has an abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.
  58. The Love Guru
    Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness.
  59. Garden Party
    Taken together, these stories are a symphony of inconsequentiality, drained of tension and purpose until all that remains is a vague sense of collective ennui.
  60. Religulous
    Maher's too smart to make a movie this dumb.
  61. Mirrors
    The film looks to do for reflective surfaces what "Amityville 4" did for killer lamps.
  62. The Women
    The original was a tart dipped in acid; this one's a biscuit sprinkled in Splenda.
  63. My Best Friend's Girl
    Dane Cook plays a smug jerk in the dismal comedy My Best Friend's Girl. Strike that: He's only ACTING like a smug jerk.
  64. Good Dick
    Mainly, Good Dick just proves that TV actors like Ritter make good indie-film hires, because they'll go along with whatever ridiculous nonsense a novice filmmaker concocts.
  65. The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    It's a horror film better suited for skittish cats than humans.
  66. The Lodger
    It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.
  67. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
    Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.
  68. The Last House on the Left
    It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.
  69. The Haunting in Connecticut
    As a piece of storytelling, The Haunting In Connecticut is pretty lazy. As a horror movie, it’s lazier still, bringing out every annoying shock-cut and disorienting sound-design trick of the last decade.
  70. Alien Trespass
    Even the movie's rubber monsters look tired.
  71. Land of the Lost
    It doesn't help that neither Ferrell nor McBride bring their best material, with McBride offering yet another variation on an angry redneck, and Ferrell falling back on Ron Burgundy-like bluster and nonsense exclamations.
  72. Downloading Nancy
    In short, this is a movie about bruised people bruising each other, and if Downloading Nancy had more of an openly pulpy sensibility, then the repugnant premise might’ve had some lasting impact.
  73. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves.
  74. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    About Piven: When did it go wrong? When did the caustic character actor guaranteed to liven up even the dullest movie turn into a walking black hole of smarm from which no joy can escape?
  75. Paper Heart
    This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.
  76. Post Grad
    When a film whose cast includes Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Fred Armisen, Craig Robinson, Demetri Martin, and the now rarely seen Carol Burnett can’t scare up more than a smattering of laughs, the patient was never meant to live in the first place.
  77. The Marc Pease Experience
    In a squandered lead performance, the adorable, winning Schwartzman plays the non-adorable, non-winning title character.
  78. The Burning Plain
    The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.
  79. Gentlemen Broncos
    Crammed with so much deliberate tackiness that it borders on exhausting self-parody.
  80. Serious Moonlight
    The bitter comedy Serious Moonlight is meant to be both funny and painful, but manages only the latter.
  81. Arthur and the Invisibles
    It's a film for kids who want to know what headaches feel like.
  82. What Would Jesus Buy?
    It's neither conceptually bold nor slyly satirical when Billy dresses up as a Southern evangelical and sings made-up hymns about "the shopacalypse."
  83. Backseat
    This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill at writing dialogue.
  84. La mission
    Bratt’s character is stuck in old ways of thinking, and the movie, for all its well-meaning social intent, is right there with him.
  85. The Perfect Game
    Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.
  86. The Dry Land
    A painfully earnest drama about post-traumatic stress disorder that sticks so closely to the soldiers-coming-home template, writer-director Ryan Piers Williams seems to be diligently working through a checklist of returning-warrior-movie clichés.
  87. Nanny McPhee Returns
    On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.
  88. TRON: Legacy
    Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.
  89. Barry Munday
    This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.
  90. My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
  91. Casino Jack
    Spacey has made a career out of projecting the smarmy elitism of the powerful, but Casino Jack is so painfully clunky that he gets dragged down along with it.
  92. Red Dawn
    Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    The film's premise-that Bieber achieved his superstardom through years of hard work overcoming towering obstacles-is so ludicrously flawed that everything built upon it borders on self-parody.
  94. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    The film isn't erotic or profound. It is occasionally comic, though-like reading the finalists for one of those Bad Sex In Fiction awards.
  95. 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.
  96. Battle: Los Angeles
    It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
  97. Hop
    Candy-coated or otherwise, crap's still crap.
  98. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.
  99. Madea's Big Happy Family
    Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.
  100. The Help
    The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.
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