The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Underworld: Evolution
    There's a ton of backstory behind Underworld: Evolution, which gets slightly denser and rowdier than its predecessor, but it's ultimately all in the service of a nigh-endless series of numbing, mechanical battles in which snarling protagonists and CGI monsters shoot, claw, and bloodily eviscerate each other. In other words, it's "Underworld," but more of it.
  2. The Art of Getting By
    By the end, the most charming thing about The Art Of Getting By is that while its adults cut Highmore far too much slack, they aren't Hughes-movie oblivious idiots, and they eventually draw a few firm lines. Unfortunately, the movie isn't daring enough to follow suit.
  3. Captive
    The leads acquit themselves relatively well here, hinting at the interesting character study that could have been, but by the end the only captive left is the viewer.
  4. Sex Tape
    It’s less a movie than a bad sitcom episode stretched to feature length and raunched up to an R rating.
  5. Gone
    The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.
  6. This Thing of Ours
    A shamelessly derivative mob movie.
  7. Time Cut
    Here, genre hybridization is a losing battle, sacrificing scares and intensity in favor of corny jokes about Instagram not yet being invented.
  8. Pan
    At once thinly conceived and maddeningly over-designed, irreverent and over-serious, and chock-full of strained references (to World War II, environmentalism, and drugs, among other things) and creepy violence, Pan is an elaborate flight of fancy with no vision — which makes it strangely compelling in spots.
  9. Parental Guidance
    Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.
  10. Poms
    Together, Weaver and Keaton sometimes manage to tease out the movie inside the movie, the one drawn to the connections between death and joy, youthfulness and mortality.
  11. 10th & Wolf
    It isn't exactly a waste of time, but anyone who's seen a mob movie or TV show in the past 30 years has pretty much seen 10th & Wolf.
  12. The Hot Flashes
    Early in The Hot Flashes, Brooke Shields is seen reading Menopause For Dummies, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s precisely what you’re watching.
  13. Righteous Kill
    Trudging through a thriller that would have felt warmed over in 1988, the pair investigate a serial killer.
  14. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    The film still suffers from cheap plasticky design, a klutzy overall look, dim preschooler humor, and a nearly impact-free story that thinks it's clever when it steals cues from 2001.
  15. Cradle 2 the Grave
    Its creepy use of DMX's daughter is reprehensible, but the film is otherwise so unrelentingly sleazy that its use of the child-in-danger gambit actually qualifies as one of its subtler moves.
  16. Assassin's Creed
    The movie is at least interestingly confusing until about the halfway mark, when monotony sets in for good.
  17. The Wild Life
    The sort of uninspired international pre-sales item that usually goes straight from a basement booth at the Cannes film market to a Netflix parent’s peripheral vision. The sole interesting thing about NWave’s animation is its use of the camera, which plays to 3-D’s pop-out factor.
  18. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone
    Like so many movies designed for believers first and ordinary sinners second, if at all, Gavin Stone has trouble approximating the sensibility of actual entertainment and is particularly deadly as a comedy. Even David Spade movies tend to have more laughs.
  19. Game of Death
    There’s no reason whatsoever to watch the entire thing; just skip to the end, which features a series of bone-crunching fight sequences that suggest Lee was just getting warmed up when he left.
  20. Belly
    Part incomprehensible GoodFellas rip-off and part feature-length music video, Belly is a millennial head film that subscribes to the sort of logic usually found only in acid trips, nightmares, and big-budget music videos.
  21. Conan the Barbarian
    It shouldn't, in other words, be that hard to make a good Conan movie. John Milius did a half-decent job with "Conan The Barbarian" in 1982, but this new film of the same name feels like a half-hearted revamp of virtually any of the Conan rip-offs that clogged up video-store shelves in the '80s.
  22. Special Correspondents
    The more Special Correspondents skirts bad taste — by having the heroes record an ISIS-inspired ransom tape, for instance — the closer it gets to having something to say about mass media and geopolitics.
  23. Lady in the Water
    Shockingly misconceived, poorly executed effort.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    That Awkward Moment
    That Awkward Moment desperately wants to speak to a new generation of romantic-comedy devotees without proving it has the authority to do so. It’s not as laboriously dumb as the overloaded ensemble rom-coms of Garry Marshall ("Valentine’s Day," "New Year’s Eve") or the similarly star-studded "He’s Just Not That Into You."
  25. Death Sentence
    The film has one thing going for it--it's certainly never boring.
  26. Shock Treatment
    The film looks great, with vivid colors and sharp, snappy staging, but its 92 minutes drag by interminably. Tim Curry in fishnets might have helped, but a coherent storyline would have been far better.
  27. Serena
    Played as a kind of constant wake, grimly marching on to tragedy, Serena is hurt by relentless applications of Johan Söderqvist’s unimaginatively somber score and DP Morten Søborg’s reliance on lots of over-the-shoulder handheld shots, the camera swinging close to and around people’s faces and shoulders.
  28. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    In the absence of sincerity, Cletis Tout creates a vacuum that flushes out the entire story, leaving nothing but its own hollow cleverness.
  29. Party Monster
    The film's only real bright spot is Seth Green, who, as Culkin's sidekick, brings Party Monster a droll wit it otherwise lacks. It's such a dreary mess that when Culkin insists that life in prison isn't too different from being a club kid, it's all too easy to believe him.
  30. Runner Runner
    In different hands, Runner Runner might have worked as sleazy tropical noir, but director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) never quite embraces the tawdriness of his material.
  31. The Perfect Guy
    There’s certainly an audience for these thrillers, but imagine how big that audience might be for one that really works.
  32. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.
  33. Naked
    Let’s place the blame where it squarely belongs: on the moronic premise. Groundhog Day but he’s naked? Why?
  34. Red Lights
    Red Lights' setup is silly but fun, with a fair degree of self-awareness that the film's entire "super-scientists vs. celebrity spiritualists" premise is a hoot.
  35. Forever My Girl
    The movie isn’t as off-the-charts shameless as Sparks, but it lacks the Russian roulette death-guessing game to occupy viewers who get bored.
  36. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Spade can still be funny when he lets himself be mean, and Dickie Roberts shows glimmers of that dynamic, but they're muscled out by lazy slapstick and maudlin stuff.
  37. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.
  38. The Watch
    In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.
  39. Feel the Noise
    Reggaeton has officially come of age: The burgeoning subgenre now has a terrible, opportunistic exploitation movie to call its own.
  40. 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.
  41. Turistas
    Once the torture finally commences, the film attempts to float a political point about the Third World taking back First World health-care privileges, but the chief torturers' sadistic humanitarianism is never seriously considered.
  42. Action Point
    Although its resolution is admirably non-fantastical, Action Point is ultimately more interested in telling a story about a pretty nice dad who becomes a somewhat nicer dad.
  43. Serious Moonlight
    The bitter comedy Serious Moonlight is meant to be both funny and painful, but manages only the latter.
  44. College Road Trip
    The almost perversely colorblind College Road Trip represents a strange milestone in black film.
  45. Inside
    While it’s been orchestrated with some skill and even intelligence, a question still pokes at the viewer, like rusty scissors jabbing at soft flesh: What’s the point of a less extreme version of a film whose whole raison d’être was extremity?
  46. The Captive
    The structural gamesmanship is just a smokescreen, a way to obfuscate the pulp nature of what is, ultimately, little more than a glorified, low-aiming potboiler.
  47. Rhinestone
    For all its cornball charm Rhinestone ultimately does little to disprove the widespread notion that the "funny Sylvester Stallone comedy" remains a pop-culture oxymoron.
  48. The Thirteenth Floor
    A solid, interesting B-movie, in another season it would seem a good deal fresher.
  49. The Reaping
    The Reaping is Bible camp, pure and simple. And for bad-movie lovers, it's manna from heaven.
  50. Dumb and Dumber To
    Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.
  51. I Am Number Four
    Frey didn't really need a ghostwriter for this story, he just needed an archivist with a Xerox machine and a mercenary streak.
  52. What Happens in Vegas
    Complain all you want about the affable slobs in Judd Apatow comedies; at least they're not tools.
  53. The Pink Panther 2
    Plays like an undeserved victory lap for a series that only limped to the finish line the last time.
  54. Something Borrowed
    Yes, perhaps the audience will like its favored couple more, but all the engineering that goes into making them sympathetic results in a film that feels agonizingly synthetic and alien.
  55. The Kissing Booth 3
    With its extended montages of road trips, summer bucket lists, flash mobs, water park shenanigans, and elaborate go-kart races, The Kissing Booth 3 doesn’t so much resemble a narrative film as an extended wrap party for the cast. The whole thing has the vibe of an Adam Sandler paid vacation flick, only with barely even the attempt at comedy.
  56. The Invisible
    The film disappoints on its own terms, failing to drum up any sympathy for a self-pitying rich kid who can't pry his eyes from his navel.
  57. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Most of the pleasure in Green Dragons comes simply from the opportunity to watch some underused actors dig into meatier parts than they’re usually offered.
  58. Stolen Summer
    Beyond fulfilling the dreams of a seemingly nice fellow, the whole venture is a victory of hype over substance, loudly accomplishing nothing.
  59. On_Line
    Weintrob's background in interactive media keeps the film's technology unusually current, but his predictable tongue-clucking over Internet relationships places him squarely in the Luddite camp.
  60. No Such Thing
    Hartley's most ambitious film, but it's also among his most uneven, shifting away at moments when its characters should be allowed to connect, underemphasizing some themes, overemphasizing others, and letting a general clash of ideas stand in for momentum.
  61. Walter
    Much of Walter’s behavior resembles, at very least, a movie version of mental illness, only to have the story reclassify it as a coping mechanism. This unwittingly makes the character seem as affected as any Sundance stereotype—and the movie disturbing for all the wrong reasons.
  62. Tarot
    It’s trying to be everything at once, and ends up feeling flimsy, empty, and again, very, very frustrating.
  63. Saw IV
    Fans know exactly what they're in for, while everyone else knows to stay far away. Everyone can agree, however, that this is probably the worst date movie ever. For non-sadists, at least.
  64. The Fly II
    The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.
  65. Push
    Superhero fans will likely be into Push just for the cool-factor of watching embattled heroes and villains in tense war of wits, wills, and skills. That broader audience is less likely to come along for the ride.
  66. Addicted to Fame
    Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.
  67. Why Stop Now
    Slips into the no-man's land between screwball and melodrama, squandering both the comic opportunities of an irrational search for drugs and the raw desperation of a piano prodigy who's held captive by his mother's dysfunction.
  68. Kin
    It’s a simple idea, to take this working-class family and introduce what amounts to a high-tech ray gun, but the hook is so effective that it buys Kin a fair amount of time before the story turns from scrappy to stupid.
  69. Rupture
    The truth is that what sinks the film is Shainberg’s insipid direction.
  70. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    It’s a muddled, contradictory, confusing mess, made even more so by the darkly cynical streak that runs through the film.
  71. Coffee & Kareem
    Bad plotting would be relegated to the realm of incidental if Coffee & Kareem were funnier—isn’t that always the way? Unfortunately, the movie spends a lot of time handing Helms underlined jokes, which he proceeds to underline again with his why-did-I-just-say-that delivery.
  72. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    It’s all pretty silly, but it compensates for a lack of emotional weight with star power.
  73. Grudge Match
    A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.
  74. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    People's title proves prophetic, only this time the people being alienated are the suckers in the paying audience.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Leaning into her experience as a screenwriter, Vardalos balances comedy and emotion, and her familiarity with the cultural setting, as well as her affinity for the sprawling cast, reap dividends onscreen. The result is a level of authenticity and depth that wasn’t as evident in the first two outings.
  76. Resident Evil
    Too grim and humorless to even qualify as trashy fun.
  77. Mute
    The film ignores all the potential commentary and conflict in its pulpy, hyperbolic premise (tradition technology, urban contradictions, etc.), offering only trivialities, superficialities, and contempt. It has as little to say as its protagonist. Possibly less, even
  78. Awake
    Awake becomes the saga of a mom’s redemption. Rodriguez works hard to make this personal angle compelling, exhibiting mama-bear ferocity, but the film’s ultra-bleak premise doesn’t cooperate.
  79. Stealth
    A sort of retarded "Top Gun," Rob Cohen's Stealth revisits the world of cocky fighter pilots and war games turned real, but it has some serious moral quandaries on the brain, and too much thinking gets it into trouble.
  80. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    With its simple-goal-driven plot, its wordy, cutscene-like interludes, and its stiffly modeled characters, it wouldn't even make for a particularly high-end videogame.
  81. A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    Ultimately, the film is the kind of neither-fish-nor-fowl work unlikely to satisfy anyone: There's not enough hot-and-heavy action for thrill-seekers, and not enough substance for those looking for above-the-waistline kicks.
  82. For Greater Glory
    With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."
  83. The Guillotines
    The Guillotines expends most of its energy in its first 30 minutes, leaving the audience with roughly 90 minutes of soapy Qing Dynasty fan fiction.
  84. Venom
    The best moments toy with a kind of superhero body horror, but the movie never fully commits to that angle, maybe to appease a ratings board and perceived audience of 13-year-olds (isn’t that who Venom was designed to please?), or maybe because director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is more interested in the comic possibilities than the horrific ones.
  85. Dream House
    The film's ambitions are woefully small and familiar.
  86. Home Sweet Home Alone
    An argument can be made for not parsing the social messaging of films like this one too deeply, as the creative team probably didn’t. But Home Sweet Home Alone does merit such criticism, if only because there’s really not much else going on.
  87. Jumper
    No exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen.
  88. Birth of the Dragon
    The aura of cheap-o emptiness is overwhelming: Scenes tend to be visually featureless, composed against strangely empty walls or Vancouver street corners. Even the occasionally decent fight choreography looks unappealing.
  89. Rumor Has It...
    Like the film itself, Ruffalo and Aniston exacerbate a bad, unfeasible idea with clumsy execution, exerting a whole lot of energy and effort for very little payoff.
  90. Argylle
    In trying to do both—in trying to play it straight and yet show the very absurd mechanics of what it means to do so—Argylle lands in a kind of exhausting limbo, forever stretching its premise to its breaking point only to snap it back up again.
  91. Salvation Boulevard
    Salvation Boulevard doesn't seem to have any higher aspiration than illustrating how religious people can be hypocrites. (Gosh, who knew?)
  92. The Hustle
    While The Hustle is more overt when it comes to discussing gender, including a monologue about why women are better suited to “the con” than men, it doesn’t really have all that much to say. Not about gender, not about con artistry, and definitely not about how to craft a satisfying studio comedy.
  93. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    At least in the last half-hour, Bay's incredibly sloppy continuity and overeager rush to action pays off.
  94. Bollywood/Hollywood
    It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.
  95. Scooby-Doo
    A work of Battlefield Earth-level miscalculation.
  96. Hide and Seek
    Like far too many junky post-"Sixth Sense" thrillers, Hide And Seek essentially exists for the sake of its third-act plot twist, but the climactic revelation merely pushes it from bad to worse.
  97. Very Good Girls
    The casting isn’t all together unconvincing: Olsen and Fanning’s collective ability to project intelligence beyond their years works both ways, allowing them to play both precocious youths and youthful adults. But Very Good Girls catches them in between those stages, and the effect isn’t evocative so much as muddled.
  98. Stardust
    As played by actor-musician Johnny Flynn, the Halloween-costume Bowie we meet in Stardust is a miserable, charmless wannabe. Which is to say that the film fails where a single photo of this most chameleonic of music legends would succeed: It makes Bowie boring.
  99. 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.
  100. Drift
    The mediocre ones, like the new Australian drama Drift, squeeze surfing scenes into conventional narratives, presuming that, because surfing looks exciting, any story related to surfing is inherently interesting.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »