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. RV
    Apart from a funny turn by "Arrested Development's" Will Arnett as Williams' evil boss, nobody appears to be having a good time. And the feeling is infectious.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Skinwalkers
    While it isn't particularly scary or suspenseful, it's fun and surprisingly breezy compared with its big-budget brethren.
  3. The Last Song
    Offers a taming-of-the-shrew scenario so relentlessly bland and old-fashioned it makes "Dear John," the Sparks adaptation from two months ago, look like "Last Tango In Paris."
  4. Rites of Spring
    Rites Of Spring does have a real "no idea what's going to happen next" quality, which is rare. Then again, that's because the movie feels haphazard and unfinished: more weed than plant.
  5. Amnesiac
    The film uses minimal locations, minimal cast, and minimal blood for a story that, in another director’s hands, could play like Grand Guignol. But this sense of restraint — which, combined with some stylish choices on Polish’s part, can be quite elegant — is also what makes it largely forgettable.
  6. Annie
    Broadway purists determined to hate Annie need not fear, because there’s plenty worth complaining about.
  7. The Amityville Horror
    The remake simply replaces the laughably dated horror tropes of the 1979 version with a commercial-slick J-horror aesthetic that's sure to look just as silly to audiences in another 15 years.
  8. Superhero Movie
    Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need look no further.
  9. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Guttenberg adapts James Kirkwood Jr.'s humanist black comedy -- and drains all the recognizable humanity out of it, turning it into a morose, unlikable reflection of its sad-sack lead character.
  10. Uptown Girls
    Uptown Girls refuses to make Fanning likable, which speaks to a certain misplaced integrity, and tends to throw a wrench in the film's halfhearted attempts at formula.
  11. Impostor
    It essentially uses the setup of an early Dick short story as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene.
  12. The Ritual
    The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions.
  13. Mindhunters
    Trashy and indefensible in most respects, Mindhunters may be a good-bad movie, but entertainment is entertainment, however it comes.
  14. Fifty Shades Darker
    It’s a female-driven fantasy, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. And God help the poor woman who believes it.
  15. Just Go with It
    Aniston and Sandler, however, play characters too awful to deserve anyone better than each other. But what did we do to deserve them?
  16. Trash Humpers
    With every project, he pops open the same trunkload of shtick and leaves everyone to argue over whether it’s art. It’s a win-win situation for Korine, who’s either a genius or a provocateur who’s succeeded in gaming his stuffy critics.
  17. Old Guy
    Old Guy, as is, is just a film about an old guy, free of complexity or nuance, coasting towards its formulaic conclusion.
  18. Thinner
    Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.
  19. Regretting You
    The best that can be said about the film is that The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone, well-versed with the teen weepy, sometimes approaches the schlock with a bit of self-deflating slyness—something more attuned to the audience’s eyerolls and the cast’s barely-hidden smirks than to the serious source material.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    About Cherry
    Demanding everyone accept you as you are can be a way of refusing to compromise, and the film's failure to explore this aspect of the lifestyle its portraying is almost as disappointing as moralizing would be.
  21. Dear Wendy
    Its mad rush to offer shallow takes on every Big American Issue would be offensive if it weren't so misguided. It's almost cute the way Dear Wendy thinks it knows what it's talking about and then just keeps going and going long after it's stopped making sense.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    After Earth
    Shyamalan’s sensibility may not be enough to turn After Earth into a great (or even very good) film, but it does yield interesting — and at times strikingly realized — results.
  23. Dragon Wars: D-War
    All the thought seems to have gone into the marketing, and none into the unfathomably terrible script.
  24. 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.
  25. The Out-of-Towners
    Director Sam Weisman's pushy, subtlety-free direction certainly doesn't help. Martin is still capable of making a decent film, but The Out-Of-Towners isn't it.
  26. Run the Tide
    This isn’t a terrible film, by any means. It’s a completely forgettable film, which is arguably worse—especially for Lautner, who at this point is on the verge of vanishing down the memory hole with it.
  27. Phoenix Forgotten
    First-time director Justin Barber, who cowrote the screenplay with T.S. Nowlin, builds his narrative around the Phoenix Lights, but sticks so close to formula that they might as well be called the Blair Lights.
  28. Very Bad Things
    It's a worthless bit of low-grade satire that's as sophisticated and entertaining as a pile of twigs.
  29. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    Borrowing every single component of its complicated plot from other sources, The Mortal Instruments is hodgepodge claptrap, but there’s a faint flicker of fun in its introducing-the-world passages.
  30. The Man
    It's the kind of featherweight slot-filler people turn off after 15 minutes on a plane or have on in the background on cable while they vacuum the floor.
  31. The Dukes of Hazzard
    It's got a few laughs and some impressive car chases, but mostly, it's just a puzzling jumble of gags and exhaust fumes.
  32. Haunt
    In Haunt, scares are scarce and tropes are liberally lifted from better movies.
  33. The 5th Wave
    Aside from a taste for Visual Storytelling 101 basics (a close-up of a dropped teddy bear, held for what seems like half a minute), British director J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) doesn’t do much to distinguish himself from any number of hired guns.
  34. 54
    The film's sole redeeming facet is Mike Myers' rich, multilayered performance as Rubell: Simultaneously repulsive and charming, hedonistic and oddly paternal, Myers steals every scene he's in. It's a great performance that deserves to be in a much better film.
  35. Soul Plane
    In the midst of this comic black hole, only Snoop Dogg and Method Man emerge unscathed, as even material this bad can't mask their languid, long-limbed charisma.
  36. Sleepover
    That points to the problem at Sleepover's heart: It buys into the caste system it ostensibly flouts.
  37. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Doesn't have a mean bone in its body, but it's so sloppily assembled that even Lohan's charm can't keep it together.
  38. New York Minute
    An unabashedly pop confection, but it's flat where it should fizz, lumbering when it should skip.
  39. Jenny's Wedding
    This is a movie displaced in time. And it’s barely a movie. It’s more like a dusty, faded old pamphlet: “So your daughter’s decided to get gay-married…”
  40. Cat Run
    Words like "smug," "derivative," and "shallow" could all be fairly applied to the film, but as a piece of late-night exploitation, it delivers the violence and nudity with the regularity of an IV drip, and some familiar faces in the cast help class it up.
  41. The Longest Ride
    Despite undermining its own better qualities, The Longest Ride still qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer’s works.
  42. Like a Boss
    If you’re looking for something truly groundbreaking—or hilarious—Like A Boss isn’t it.
  43. God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
    A Light In Darkness isn’t as offensive as the first film—it lacks the requisite misogyny and Islamophobia, and does a better job of looking like it’s almost a real movie—but it’s not far behind, an emblematic film for the foul moment.
  44. Leap Year
    There isn’t a spontaneous or unpredictable moment in this loving, perversely reverent homage to rom-com, road-movie, and mismatched-romance conventions.
  45. The Punisher
    Sadly, The Punisher is about little more than bullets hitting bone, and how good it might feel to be on the right end of a gun.
  46. The Shack
    There’s nothing about this unconscionably long movie (it runs a whopping 132 minutes) that suggests anyone involved ever watched it from start to finish. But it looks nice enough, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, with lots of flowers and flannel.
  47. Euphoria
    The film exhibits almost nothing that resembles recognizable human behavior.
  48. The Wedding Date
    The lucky Mulroney gets to play the kind of sensitive hunk that women want and men want to be, but he's the only one who can be heard over the tired wheezing of the romantic-comedy machinery.
  49. The Brothers Solomon
    A better film would have matched Arnett's seemingly effortless intensity throughout. This okay film does merely okay by it.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Viewers are left to wonder if it's all actually some sort of vehicle for subliminal messaging.
  51. The Ex
    It never comes close to being funny.
  52. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    The second interesting thing about Every Thing Will Be Fine is that it’s very bad, and that its bizarre throwaway lines and shrugged-off subplots brings to mind Tommy Wiseau instead of Douglas Sirk — an impression underscored by extensive, largely mismatched dubbing.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    October Baby
    This is no mere tale of redemption or reaffirming of faith; this is a film with an extreme agenda.
  54. Regression
    One can make a creepy demonic horror movie, or one can make a sorrowful exposé about a real-world phenomenon that destroyed multiple families, but it’s exceedingly difficult to make both at the same time.
  55. The Sweetest Thing
    Diaz does what she can under adverse circumstances, but she doesn't come close to salvaging this ramshackle vehicle.
  56. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    The fourth, longest, and flimsiest entry in the director’s signature franchise finds Bay mostly in cruise control, snapping to only when the movie veers away from the “robots fighting in tax-friendly locations” formula—which, unfortunately, isn’t very often.
  57. Legion
    A cartoonishly grim supernatural thriller that could stand a lot less talk and a lot more thrills.
  58. Ride Along 2
    The implausibilities, cop-movie checkboxes, and mildly wasted talent make Ride Along 2 lazy, but not downright loathsome. If anything, it’s perhaps slightly more amusing and agreeable than the original—a sign of how little that film’s seemingly surefire premise wound up mattering.
  59. 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.
  60. Chapter 27
    Perhaps the harshest criticism that can be directed at Chapter 27 is that it's awful even for a late-period Lindsay Lohan movie. It might even be bad enough to inspire "Catcher" author J.D. Salinger to break his decades of public silence to speak out against this high-camp fiasco.
  61. Redeeming Love
    Redeeming Love is a kinky power fantasy in the halfway convincing disguise of wholesome faith-based entertainment.
  62. Primal
    One hires Cage for a generic timewaster like this in the hope that he’ll make it at least a little more interesting on screen than it was on paper, by virtue of some crazed facial expressions and off-the-wall line readings, but he evidently wasn’t in the experimenting mood.
  63. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    There’s hardly an authentic second in the film.
  64. The Hills Have Eyes II
    Assembles the most motley group of incompetents this side of a "Police Academy" movie, yet somehow misses the laughs. But humorlessness is probably the least of the film's problems, lagging behind amateur-night performances from the no-name cast, a homogenous visual palette (and from a music-video director, no less!), and lots of pointless sadism.
  65. Paranoia
    The film works only, if at all, as an unofficial Air Force One reunion, with Ford stopping just short of bellowing “Get off my jock!” during a pair of gritted-teeth encounters with Oldman. Some pleasures never go out of fashion.
  66. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    On the plus side, the film is high energy and moves quickly. And some of the zombie gore effects are fun, reaching nearly Raimi-esque heights of splatter during the climactic battle. None of it is really scary, though, especially since it’s so predictable.
  67. Independence Day: Resurgence
    Resurgence ends up falling victim to its attempts to differentiate itself while remaining completely derivative.
  68. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    The Rise Of Cobra holds to a thrill-ride sensibility that’s unchallenging and more than a little goofy, but exciting and consistently well-managed.
  69. 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?
  70. Masked and Anonymous
    Dylan's performance doesn't offer any clues. He's an icon and he delivers an icon's performance, literally: He could easily have been replaced by piece of wood with his face painted on it. That distance also means he remains more or less untouched by the embarrassment going on around him, even though it's largely his own creation.
  71. The 11th Hour
    By the time the film empties its inventory of shock tactics and reaches its (too calculated) ambiguous conclusion, we’re not sure if Maria deserves better, but it’s pretty clear that Basinger does.
  72. 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Footprints
    To give credit where it's due, Footprints makes a game attempt at creating a love letter to a place that may be inherently unlovable: Hollywood Boulevard, in all its faded glory and present-day Hooters/Hard Rock Cafe tackiness.
  74. Addicted
    Addicted is basically a social-issue melodrama that, minus some curse words, thrusting, and frequent side nudity, could have emerged sometime in the ’50s.
  75. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    Piles on the glam-rock spectacle and coal-black comedy at such a brusque pace that it often seems in danger of rattling off the rails entirely.
  76. Cats
    Of course, Cats has always been ridiculous, just as it has always been ridiculed. (“Cats is a dog,” declared a notorious review of the musical’s Broadway debut.) But Hooper can’t even get camp right.
  77. 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.
  78. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Opens with its snazziest effects sequences and gets cheaper from there, as if studio executives were constantly scaling back the budget as the filmmakers went along.
  79. Beyond Borders
    Send a check to UNICEF and go see "Lost In Translation," "Mystic River," or "Kill Bill" instead.
  80. Careful What You Wish For
    The dreary repetition of the affair sinks Careful What You Wish For. That, and the fact that both leads are lightweights. Lucas and Jonas are okay actors, but neither has the wit, gravity, or sensuality to stand up to the classic film noir duos they’re meant to evoke.
  81. 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sinister 2
    Not a moment of Sinister 2 is convincing or frightening.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Firestarter
    The best thing that can be said about this new iteration of Firestarter is that it at least gave us a new score by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. The rest feels like a waste of a talented cast and crew that somehow, against all odds, makes the 1984 film seem like a staggering achievement in the realm of King adaptations.
  84. Dangerous Men
    Ridiculous, artless, and wildly entertaining, Dangerous Men is more than the sum of its fascinatingly misguided parts, although it will take a special sort of moviegoer to truly appreciate (or endure, depending on your perspective) its charms. Its instant cult-classic status is all but assured.
  85. Das wilde Leben
    If the movie had greater style, it might approach the delirious badness of "The Valley Of The Dolls," but it's too dull to qualify as camp.
  86. Robin Hood
    Say this and little else for the new Robin Hood movie: It’s less of a self-serious slog than the last Robin Hood movie.
  87. Alex & Emma
    The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.
  88. Godzilla
    While the special effects are impressive, countless films have already proven that if you sink enough money into a project, you can at least make it look good. Unfortunately, good looks are all Godzilla has going for it.
  89. Wrong Turn
    Lacks the creepiness and craft of the films that inspired it.
  90. Tom & Jerry
    It’s as though Tom And Jerry was intended to be enjoyed from home all along: Not only are you free to poke around on your phone between the set pieces, but you can use that phone to call up the 90-odd Tom And Jerry cartoons that also come with your HBO Max subscription.
  91. King Kong Lives
    King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.
  92. Love Again
    This is after all a romantic comedy, not a romantic tragedy, though you might not realize it since it’s almost devoid of humor.
  93. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  94. The Secret Lives of Dorks
    It’s arguable that the jocks and cheerleaders are this movie’s true heroes, without whom those pathetic dorks would never be able to find one another.
  95. 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.
  96. Brightest Star
    So terminally bland is Brightest Star’s protagonist (played by Chris Lowell) that screenwriters Maggie Kiley (who also directed) and Matthew Mullen couldn’t be tasked to provide him with a name — the closing credits refer to him simply as The Boy.
  97. The Middle of the World
    When they (the family) arrive at their destination, the story arrives at an ending that's neither obvious nor interesting, kind of like the film leading up to it.
  98. The Transporter Refueled
    Refueled isn’t a good movie by most metrics, but it is consistently committed to mainlining the basest action-movie pleasures at the expense of damn near everything else.
  99. Wish Upon
    The real shame is that Joey King got yanked into this cut-rate crap.
  100. Broken Bridges
    Country Music Television's answer to "Elizabethtown."
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