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. A Little Bit of Heaven
    Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.
  2. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Murro doesn’t so much direct as frame and stage, placing the characters against digital desktop-wallpaper skies and constructing each battle scene as a showcase for the characters’ prowess and toughness.
  3. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Fischer at least has personal and romantic reasons to be involved with this film, but audiences are unencumbered by such obligations, and should heed the title's warning sign and opt out of Kirk, Fischer, and Messina's fruitless little circle of pain.
  4. The Broken Tower
    It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.
  5. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Stiff, episodic, and disjointed, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D replicates its source material all too faithfully.
  6. The Paperboy
    So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
  7. Stand Up Guys
    The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.
  8. Pain & Gain
    Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.
  9. Smiley
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
  10. Olympus Has Fallen
    Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.
  11. 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.
  12. The Last Exorcism Part II
    An abysmal sequel that abandons the found-footage concept, along with the pockets of wit and originality that made its predecessor salvageable.
  13. The Brass Teapot
    Its comedic side never bites, and its moral side is painfully one-dimensional. A little to the left and The Brass Teapot might’ve been mean-spirited fun; a little to the right and it could play on The Hallmark Channel. For a movie with such an outlandish premise, it’s remarkably dull.
  14. Baggage Claim
    Without a coherent lead performance, all Baggage Claim has left are its generic rom-com plot — which has flight-attendant Patton jetting around the country to meet the perfect man in time for her younger sister’s wedding — and profoundly shoddy production values.
  15. Reincarnated
    Part of Snoop’s protean quality comes from the fact that his rhymes only cut so far: He can pivot freely because he’s never dug in too deep.
  16. Would You Rather
    Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in "Re-Animator."
  17. Black Nativity
    Black Nativity is a cut-rate musical melodrama that grafts overreaching references to black culture onto a facile family-values narrative.
  18. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
    Superman IV lacks the wonder and awe of Superman, that giddy sense of boundless possibilities. Superman had gotten old and familiar and the message-movie trappings feel tacked-on and desperate.
  19. Tomorrow You're Gone
    A dismal erotic thriller that was originally called "Boot Tracks."
  20. No One Lives
    How bad is No One Lives, the new bottom-feeding schlock-fest from WWE Studios? Simply put: It’s bad enough to make some of the studio’s other offerings, like the Steve Austin deathmatch movie "The Condemned" and the Kane-starring slasher flick "See No Evil," look like genre gems.
  21. Austenland
    In Austenland, her directorial debut, Hess adapts a 2007 beach book into another broad comedy of caricature. It’s a truly half-assed satire, one whose senseless sensibility seems less informed by the best of English literature than the worst of Saturday Night Live.
  22. The Legend of Hercules
    While The Legend Of Hercules offers plenty for viewers who’ve acquired a taste for the fake and incompetent (not the least of which is the dialogue, which finds characters saying each other’s names at the end of every other sentence), it’s unlikely to please anyone who wants entertainment in the conventional sense.
  23. Stranded
    Stranded is unmistakably bad, but somewhat enjoyable, especially for viewers who have a soft spot for the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" favorite "Space Mutiny."
  24. The Angry Birds Movie
    Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.
  25. American Mary
    Nonsensical and all-around third-rate, American Mary offers up Human Centipede-style surgical horror, except this time with endless absurd eroticism.
  26. 3 Days to Kill
    Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.
  27. Hatchet III
    A film that plays like a long, tedious inside joke for fanboys.
  28. The Time Being
    After all the ponderous heavy breathing, it has nothing more profound to say than “artists should not neglect their families in pursuit of excellence.” Which might not ring so false if Bentley didn’t constantly look on the brink of devouring his family alive.
  29. Paradise
    Destined to please only "Rock Of Ages" fans who wished Hough and Brand had more screen time together, Paradise boasts the broadest, most saccharine tendencies of its writer and first-time director. In Cody terms, it’s a doodle that can’t be undid.
  30. And While We Were Here
    A committed Bosworth gives herself over to the role. Yet, there’s ultimately no real role for her to play.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Vampire Academy
    Vampire Academy is toothless in both substance and style.
  32. Broadway Idiot
    This documentary by rookie director Doug Hamilton plays more like a featurette on an American Idiot DVD than a stand-alone film.
  33. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot is an inert exercise, visually and dramatically on par with "Drew Peterson: Untouchable."
  34. The Green Inferno
    Enjoying this rancid slab of red meat depends not just on an appetite for slop, but also a taste for sloppy leftovers.
  35. The Network
    The result is an uncritical, drama-free documentary that comes uncomfortably close to resembling a business-magazine puff piece.
  36. Argento's Dracula 3D
    No amount of intentional stabs at humor can offset the hilarious awfulness of Dario Argento’s Dracula.
  37. 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.
  38. Cold Comes the Night
    The Breaking Bad star — who looks here not unlike the Heisenberg of last season — can’t buoy material so thin that it would’ve barely supported an episode of "The Killing."
  39. The Wedding Ringer
    The Wedding Ringer has so many gay jokes that some of them apparently didn’t even make the final cut.
  40. Visitors
    What’s hypnotic for five minutes at the Whitney Museum does not necessarily carry over to an 80-minute movie, and Visitors might conceivably run half that length without the slow motion. Reggio’s film premiered in Toronto with live musical accompaniment, a gimmick that probably enhanced the experiential aspect of what’s otherwise a glorified installation piece.
  41. The Cobbler
    Maudlin when it’s not being offensive, The Cobbler belongs to that special class of comedy that seems to get worse with every new (mis)step it takes.
  42. A Walk in the Woods
    Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.
  43. The Bag Man
    The Bag Man plays like a film from the years right after "Pulp Fiction," when the indie market was suddenly flooded with quips, guns, and hollow affectation.
  44. Drive Hard
    There was a time when the very presence of someone like John Cusack could enliven otherwise normal movies, and lift worthier ones onto a higher plane. But films like Drive Hard are too slapdash to even allow for coherent performances, let alone movie-saving heroics.
  45. Entourage
    Though Entourage is set just months after the events of the HBO finale, its actors are (noticeably) several years older, and there’s something kind of sad, even desperate about seeing these characters behave like the same horny frat boys they basically were at the start of the series.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Formidable as the cast list looks on paper, the voice acting reeks of cash grabs, and the performances are way off.
  47. Dark House
    Director Victor Salva tries very hard to make this seem creepy, but there’s just nothing about chatting with central heating that’s gonna prompt gooseflesh.
  48. Third Person
    As schematic as Third Person is on a whole, it’s downright risible on a moment-to-moment basis.
  49. Lullaby
    Lullaby is a small movie, but it slows down enough to accommodate plenty of self-indulgence.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sinister 2
    Not a moment of Sinister 2 is convincing or frightening.
  51. Miss Meadows
    What makes Miss Meadows egregiously awful is that it has no perspective whatsoever on vigilante justice. As an ostensible work of satire, it lacks bite, never truly questioning or complicating its heroine’s actions; the film isn’t even outrageous enough to be appalling (which paradoxically makes it appalling).
  52. Reach Me
    There are great L.A. ensembles, like "Short Cuts" "Magnolia," or "Jackie Brown," but writer-director John Herzfeld is an expert in the bad kind, having made "2 Days In The Valley."
  53. Jem and the Holograms
    Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.
  54. Panic 5 Bravo
    The only thing worse than useless trash is useless trash with delusions of grandeur.
  55. Little Boy
    A colossal miscalculation in audience uplift.
  56. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.
  57. Kill Me Three Times
    Director Kriv Stenders seems to think he’s spun a twisty, delightfully amoral genre riff. Instead, he’s made a brightly colored smirk noir.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Veronika Decides to Die
    It’s hard to pick only one representatively ridiculous moment in this campy brew.
  59. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Clearly aiming for “cult classic,” Wyrmwood is too basic to be anything more than a forgettable bro-pocalypse.
  61. 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.
  62. Do You Believe?
    A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.
  63. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Here, the monsters are entirely incidental to the story. Instead we are forced to sit through 119 punishing minutes of what plays like a dorm-room answer to modern war films, complete with the constant profanity and masculine hysterics that pass for impact in an immature script.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Survivor
    Fans of Jovovich’s Resident Evil series know the pleasures inherent in watching her sprint hither and yon. That’s about the only thrill provided by Survivor.
  65. 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.
  66. The Sea of Trees
    As it turns out, there is something worse than Nicholas Sparks, the king of morbid romantic kitsch, and that’s a Nicholas Sparks pretender with highfalutin pretensions.
  67. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.
  68. War Room
    Much of what follows is turgid and, for non-believers, ridiculous.
  69. Norm of the North
    Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.
  70. Scoob!
    You can’t even get mad at the script for its half-hearted gestures towards self-aware commentary; writers must keep themselves entertained, after all, when churning out one of the many drafts a film like Scoob! goes through before production begins.
  71. Leatherface
    To turn Leatherface into a tragic figure, twisted by traumatic upbringing into a monster, is to forget that he’s scariest as a force of nature, which tend to be tough to diagnose. Remember, no one cares what the shark from Jaws was like as a tortured guppy.
  72. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    Even as a star text, it’s shoddy.
  73. The Space Between Us
    Chelsom applies the middle-school-dance sentimentality with a ladle, leaning heavily on the tinkle of an overbearing score and a soundtrack of generic, cost-efficient pop cues.
  74. God's Not Dead 2
    The first film pandered to a heavy persecution complex; this installment’s relatively subtler, but there are dog whistles aplenty.
  75. Diablo
    Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
  76. Cabin Fever
    Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.
  77. Yoga Hosers
    Trouble is, Yoga Hosers isn’t really a movie. It’s a quarter-to-1:00 a.m. SNL sketch, nightmarishly distended into oblivion. It’s a corny Canuck joke, told for 88 surreally unfunny minutes. It has a target demographic of one: He wears hockey jerseys and, again, loves his daughter.
  78. 31
    Zombie’s new movie, 31, is all attitude. It’s also the worst thing he’s ever made—interminable, incoherent, and devoid of suspense.
  79. The Snowman
    The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.
  80. The Emoji Movie
    There was probably never going to be a version of this film that would prove even remotely plausible as a movie someone felt passionately about making for artistic reasons; as far as expanding on smartphone-related IP, this is an even weaker starting point than Sony Animation’s recent The Angry Birds Movie.
  81. Term Life
    Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.
  82. The Perfect Match
    Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.
  83. Miracles from Heaven
    Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.
  84. Nine Lives
    Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.
  85. Collateral Beauty
    Collateral Beauty is one of those cloying movies about learning to take the good with the bad that feels like it was made by aliens with little grasp of human life.
  86. I Am Wrath
    If the film’s casual racism—the villains are almost all some shade of not-white—feels more perfunctory than malicious, it’s because it’s just another secondhand element in the collection of bad clichés passing for a script.
  87. 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.
  88. American Pastoral
    This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.
  89. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    The sets are either claustrophobically limited or anonymously empty; the period detail is nonexistent; and the special effects are on par with a Syfy original.
  90. The Last Face
    But that’s nothing compared to the sustained tone-deaf fiasco that is Penn’s latest feature, The Last Face — a movie so monumentally miscalculated, right from its opening explanatory text, that the audience at Cannes, where it (inexplicably) premiered in Competition last year, started laughing at it within the first 30 seconds. All one can really do is gape in wonder and puzzlement.
  91. 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.
  92. For the Plasma
    Three cheers, then, for Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, whose joint first effort, For The Plasma, ranks among the year’s most singular movies, even as it also ranks among the year’s most painful movies to endure.
  93. Ace the Case
    The film is too violent and dark for kids but too juvenile and bland for grown-ups.
  94. In Dubious Battle
    This one even comes with a freebie: It’s got “dubious” right there in the title. But instead of being sloppily miscalculated (the “Franco touch”), this attempt at a Depression-era labor drama in the vein of John Sayles just bores its way through almost two hours of screen time, never rising above anonymity.
  95. Passage to Mars
    If nothing else, Jean-Christophe Jeauffre’s insipid Passage To Mars instills a greater appreciation for the classic movies that clearly inspired it.
  96. 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
  97. Officer Downe
    Officer Downe isn’t overly concerned about viewers exercising many brain cells.
  98. Life on the Line
    The slumming stars actually make the situation worse for everyone; Life On The Line plays like an ego trip without any accompanying fun.
  99. 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.
  100. Friend Request
    There’s nothing remotely clever about this web-based fright flick, visually or conceptually. It’s flimsy genre junk of the most generic variety, just with a really groan-worthy Facebook spin.
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