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. Green Lantern
    A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.
  2. The Smurfs
    Actual kids may find this fun, but for adults, watching The Smurfs may feel a little too much like trying to wrangle an overcrowded kiddie birthday party.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    Mr. Popper's Penguins reins in its rubber-faced star, leaving most of the rote physical comedy (and overabundance of fart jokes) to his nonhuman counterparts, comprised of a combination of CGI and real penguins.
  4. Monte Carlo
    Monte Carlo finally resolves itself in a farcical climax that at least shows a little energy, but it isn't enough to overcome the discomfiting tensions and indifferent formula filmmaking that plagues nearly every scene.
  5. The Change-Up
    David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.
  6. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.
  7. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.
  8. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.
  9. Anonymous
    It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.
  10. Butter
    A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.
  11. New Year's Eve
    It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    There Be Dragons
    Certainly looks lavish, from the battle scenes to the beautiful period costuming, but it's so stilted and humorless that it's almost campy.
  13. Courageous
    Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.
  14. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The charismatic Idris Elba debuts in a key role as an alcoholic priest who recruits Cage's unique services. Yet instead of elevating the franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance ends up squandering even more potential.
  15. Henry's Crime
    A grating muddle.
  16. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Peter Stormare has fun engaging in some Walken-level scenery-chewing-almost literally-as the patriarch of a werewolf clan. Good for him. That means at least one person has found something to like about this tedious collection of wisecracks and hand-me-down monsters.
  17. Rock of Ages
    This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.
  18. Here Comes the Boom
    Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.
  19. Salvation Boulevard
    Salvation Boulevard doesn't seem to have any higher aspiration than illustrating how religious people can be hypocrites. (Gosh, who knew?)
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    That's What I Am
    It's a dogged family entertainment determined to teach lessons about tolerance and how it should be extended to everyone, even redheads, gay people, and kids with cooties.
  21. Man on a Ledge
    As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.
  22. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.
  23. Safe Haven
    The cutaways to this cop-on-the-edge plot are jarring and lacking in conviction, and when the whole tortured mess comes together in a twist-filled third act, Safe Haven becomes a full-blown calamity.
  24. Killer Elite
    This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    A Love Affair of Sorts
    Infuriatingly navel-gazing and insubstantial.
  26. Dredd
    Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.
  27. Gangster Squad
    Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    The roughness of Happy Life's production values and the inconsistency of its amateur actors would be forgivable if it showed any heart, but this low-budget ramble about techno's glory days instead inspires relief that things have moved on.
  29. Chasing Mavericks
    It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.
  30. 13
    For a film about a "sport" where every competition is literally a matter of life and death, the oddly inert, suspense-free 13 is strangely lacking in urgency.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Watching TV With The Red Chinese is based on a Luke Whisnant young-adult novel that co-writer/director Shimon Dotan (Diamond Dogs) seems to have fed into a blender.
  32. Answers to Nothing
    Films like these have taught us that suffering is the incontrovertible existential fate of attractive Los Angeles residents. Must these dour exercises in alienation make audiences suffer as well?
  33. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    It isn’t until Temptation grows flamboyantly bad in its final act that it rises to the level of good dumb fun in the trashy tradition of Perry’s most entertainingly awful films.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    Tennant and Macdonald are appealing performers, but they aren't given scenes that convey they even like each other, much less that they're irresistibly drawn to each other, circumstances be damned.
  35. 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.
  36. Life Happens
    The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.
  37. Alex Cross
    Perry shifts into full-on badass mode... well, the best that can be said is that he's sincere. For all that, he's still less embarrassing than Lost's Matthew Fox, likewise cast against type as the film's sadistic villain.
  38. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Fun Size
    A laborious comedy about a Halloween night in Cleveland that feels too grown up in half of its storylines to suit younger audiences, and too juvenile or nonsensical in the rest of its gags to please anyone else.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Smurfs 2
    The film undermines its rudimentary plot points at every turn with base humor.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Losing Control
    As onscreen professions go, it'd be a nice change of pace, were Miranda Kent not the least credible scientist since Denise Richards donned short shorts to play Dr. Christmas Jones.
  42. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
  43. 96 Minutes
    Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross' uncle and guardian, but they don't have much to work with.
  44. Crazy Eyes
    Sherman's feature turns out to be enamored of the kind of reality that gets left out of movies not because it's provocative or controversial, but because it isn't particularly interesting.
  45. 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."
  46. Dead Man Down
    Dead Man Down exerts an unconscionable level of effort for minimal reward: It aspires to exquisite world-weariness, but just ends up feeling exhausted by its frenzied yet fruitless exertions.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    General Education
    The film owes a lot to "Napoleon Dynamite," though it could have borrowed more of the underlying sweetness of Jared Hess' film, and less of other things, like its eyebrow-raising treatment of race.
  48. True Wolf
    Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.
  49. Death by China
    These are all legitimate concerns, which Navarro supports with testimony from economists, politicians, union leaders, and businesspeople, but they're undermined at every point by a sky-is-falling hysteria that registers as white noise. It's the documentary equivalent of a raving street-corner derelict.
  50. No Good Deed
    By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Not only doesn't achieve empathy for the minor plights of its human noodle of a hero Toby Regbo, it might actually make audiences understand the urge to bully.
  52. A Haunted House
    If the sluggishly paced, virtually laugh-free Haunted House is Wayans' conception of a passion-fueled labor of love, it's horrifying to ponder what he'd consider a mercenary cash-grab.
  53. Girls Against Boys
    LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.
  54. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington’s fifth feature — his best-known previous film was 2009’s equally gormless "Harmony And Me" — will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.
  55. Planes
    Perhaps one of the two already-in-the-works Planes sequels will crack one of these unholy machines open. That’d be about the only reason to return to this nose-diving franchise.
  56. Erased
    Erased is a snoozy, sputtering Euro chase flick—a sort of poor man’s Liam Neeson revenge movie.
  57. Sex Tape
    It’s less a movie than a bad sitcom episode stretched to feature length and raunched up to an R rating.
  58. Think Like a Man Too
    Think Like A Man was a memorably bad movie; the most eccentric thing about this sequel is its title.
  59. Walk of Shame
    The premise should provide plenty of opportunities to skewer the way women are perceived based on appearance, with Shame as the operative word, but writer/director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) uses it mostly as a magnet for broad ethnic humor.
  60. A Haunted House 2
    However rubbery and manic, though, A Haunted House 2 still can’t overcome star attraction Marlon Wayans’ severely limited comic skill set.
  61. Absence
    There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.
  62. Breathe In
    The result puts a handful of good actors on autopilot, maneuvering around Intro To Screenwriting character beats, occasionally accompanied by sappy piano music.
  63. Romeo & Juliet
    Romeo & Juliet looks chintzy. The Capulets’ masked balls is designed in Pier 1 Imports colors and texture, the lovers’ secret marriage is performed in front of a green screen, and when Romeo goes up to Juliet’s balcony, he climbs a plastic vine with cloth leaves.
  64. Breakup at a Wedding
    Any rooting interest in the central lovers evaporates, as both seem so terminally stupid that the thought of them potentially having children together is frightening. Maybe their divorce proceedings will be hilarious.
    • 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.
  66. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.
  67. Get On Up
    Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.
  68. The Last Days on Mars
    Even had it premiered at, say, London’s Frightfest, The Last Day On Mars would be a disappointment. What it was doing at Cannes is a mystery.
  69. Warcraft
    Definitively establishing that “state-of-the-art” and “chintzy” are not mutually exclusive qualities, Warcraft is a perplexing multiplex boondoggle: Rarely is so much time, money, and cutting-edge technology expended on a spectacle so devoid of wonder.
  70. Caught in the Web
    Since making an ill-fated attempt at Hollywood with 2002’s "Killing Me Softly," Chen Kaige has slipped further and further out of relevance. Now even his elegant sense of style — the one thing keeping later efforts like "Forever Enthralled" afloat — seems to be slipping away. Case in point: Chen’s new film, Caught In The Web.
  71. Dumb and Dumber To
    Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.
  72. 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.
  73. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    Partway through the film, a viewer may begin to yearn for Perry’s usual schizoid shtick, the cacophony of screeches and sobs.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    All the boilerplate aphorisms and blatant attempts at image rehabilitation make Bieber seem like a kind of mega-church preacher leading a long-converted congregation, another huckster dancing around in a white suit.
  75. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  76. Tasting Menu
    Doesn’t even remotely qualify as flavorful. Among other demerits, this is the rare foodie movie that doesn’t seem to care much about food.
  77. Anita
    The problems with Anita start with director Freida Lee Mock’s attempt to fit this story into the template of a generic empowerment narrative.
  78. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    As broad as Williams goes in these scenes, it’s not really his fault. He’s acting out a screenplay, credited to Daniel Taplitz, that’s peppered with bad writerly flourishes.
  79. SX_Tape
    Viewers will readily accept monsters, but the idea that someone would keep filming while evading said monsters — well, that’s taking it too far.
  80. Geostorm
    Butler sleepwalks through his thinly written role, and the ostensible tension between the two brothers, flaring up whenever the energy starts to sag, never feels like anything but a bald contrivance.
  81. 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.
  82. Point Break
    The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.
  83. Affluenza
    The film is an empty shell, reducing a complex lament to a shallow portrait of wealthy hedonists behaving badly.
  84. Premature
    Watching Bill Murray go through the same scenario over and over is one thing. Experiencing the same feeble dick jokes over and over is another.
  85. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.
  86. 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.
  87. Hitman: Agent 47
    Agent 47 is just slightly less dull than its disavowed predecessor — or at least its dullness seems less active, because it doesn’t turn anyone as inherently interesting as Olyphant into a dour-faced killing machine.
  88. 23 Blast
    It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.
  89. The King's Daughter
    If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.
  90. Kidnap
    Kidnap is an asinine child-abduction thriller spliced with a touch of the early Steven Spielberg TV movie "Duel," and the most likable thing about it is that it is utter, unabashed garbage.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Alien Outpost
    It’s a real slog.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    Much like the lager that gives the film its name, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is bland on the palette and best pissed away.
  93. Old Fashioned
    Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.
  94. 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.
  95. Broken Horses
    Very loosely inspired by Chopra’s 1989 feature "Parinda," this wan crime drama plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate. Everything feels rudimentary and slightly awkward, though it’s possible to discern how the material might once have been powerful.
  96. 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.
  97. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  98. Shut In
    A thriller that takes a long time to get even remotely thrilling.
  99. The Vatican Tapes
    In nearly every way—from how the movie’s being released to the way it approaches the whole satanic possession subgenre — The Vatican Tapes is dispiritingly ordinary. It’s the rote B-movie that Neveldine up to now has tried so hard not to make.
  100. Aloft
    What’s really been withheld, in this dreary drag of a movie, is a reason to care.
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