The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Best of Me
    The Best Of Me is neither the best Sparks adaptation, nor the worst; it’s merely the most recent.
  2. Batman & Robin
    Clooney fails to make much of an impression as The Batman, but to make an impression amongst all the garish theatrics, he would pretty much have to shout his dialogue in rhyming verse, backwards.
  3. Anatomy of Hell
    Even without the difficult imagery, Breillat's grim observations on men, women, and sexual orientation, are tough to take.
  4. The Aryan Couple
    An oafish bore.
  5. You Again
    Even the best performers can only do so much to elevate mediocre material. In the long run, good or bad, the material always wins.
  6. The Crash
    The Crash fumbles between bad diatribe and bad domestic drama, complete with subplots about absent parents and childhood cancer.
  7. AfrAId
    For all that its baffling narrative may be explained by deleted scenes, there is no excuse for how tediously non-threatening AfrAId is as a horror movie. Almost entirely bloodless and with half a handful of kills, there just isn’t enough visceral terror to make up for the disparate, thematically muddied nonsense that’s been cobbled together into the shape of a movie.
  8. 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.
  9. Infinite
    What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.
  10. The Other Sister
    Contrived, clueless, reprehensible.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bunraku
    Bunraku comes up frustratingly empty, and just as many of its elements simply bloat an overlong run time. (Demi Moore shows up seemingly to give the film more than one female speaking part.) It looks good, but Bunraku feels like a Frankenstein's monster of references that someone failed to animate.
  12. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Until now, the sequels have gotten away with the cynical franchising of John McClane, but A Good Day To Die Hard, the worst entry in the series by far, exposes the hollowness and stupidity of McClane 2.0.
  13. Ghost Ship
    Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.
  14. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    In any case, what remains of John F. Donovan is a barely coherent mess, and so eager for your approval that it’s hard to feel anything but sorry for it.
  15. Nobel Son
    Nobel Son sadistically resurrects the Tarantino knockoff--an unloved, foul-mouthed little bastard of a subgenre that should now go away forever.
  16. Howard the Duck
    Howard The Duck has several jokes, really, they're all just desperately unfunny.
  17. 47 Ronin
    A multi-colored downer fantasy which combines bursts of imagination with a bleak worldview, resulting in something that rarely feels mainstream.
  18. London Has Fallen
    Perhaps the movie’s politics—which range from tone deaf to irredeemable—would be more of an issue if it weren’t so inept.
  19. Adored
    Adored stands at the crossroads where Telemundo and beefcake magazines collide, but for strangers to that intersection, the film's camp value is exceeded only by its tedium.
  20. Just Married
    Director Shawn Levy brings a yeoman-like joylessness to the project, spoiling whatever fun might have been had. Kutcher and Murphy seem game enough, and it's a testament to their charisma that they're the hardest element of the film to hate.
  21. The Amityville Horror
    In happier times, director Stuart Rosenberg confidently helmed Cool Hand Luke. Here, he resorts to one spookhouse cliché after another, and even the original touches are more puzzling than startling.
  22. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Every scrap of footage here has been done better somewhere else.
  23. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.
  24. CHIPS
    Given the alternative between the big-screen CHIPS and an antiquated, low-stakes episode of the original TV series, we’d pick the latter in a heartbeat.
  25. Kalamity
    A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.
  26. Maladies
    All of the actors, including Franco, do excellent work, given the limitations imposed upon them by a scenario that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Were he a struggling up-and-comer rather than a movie star, the perception of an ambitious misfire like this one would probably be quite different. It’s not a good movie, but it deserves better than mockery.
  27. Winchester
    The real problem is that all that speculative fun has been shaped into a rather clunky, derivative bit of supernatural claptrap: a haunted house movie curiously low on mystery or honest scares.
  28. Midnight Madness
    Midnight Madness' comedic tone can accurately be described as a sort of cross between Eight Is Enough and early-period Troma, a blend best epitomized by a scene involving conflicting interpretations of the phrase, "between a large pair of melons." And, in case you're wondering, yes, at one point fat snobs do get thrown in the pool. What is not to love?
  29. The Divide
    Better performances might have sold The Divide, but aside from Arquette's fine work as a single mother driven to self-degradation, the cast amplifies the impression of a canned, one-act theater piece.
  30. Pandorum
    Throw out the presence of Dennis Quaid, and the new science-fiction/horror snoozer Pandorum could easily pass for a Roger Corman cheapie.
  31. The Big Wedding
    It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.
  32. The Hitcher
    Somehow, music-video veteran David Meyers fails to hurtle this project into the pantheon of great horror movies.
  33. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    It's like a cross between "Heathers" and "Waiting For Guffman," had those movies been made by morons, for morons, and the cinematic equivalent of cow-tipping, only less graceful.
  34. Happily N'Ever After
    Even Eddie Murphy's endless hyper "Shrek" vamping is more entertaining.
  35. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    While 90 Minutes In Heaven has a professional sheen miles above the clunky products peddled by PureFlix (God’s Not Dead) and their ilk, that just makes it duller.
  36. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    Stylistically, Once Upon A Time In Venice is mostly indistinguishable from a middling TV pilot that never made it to series.
  37. The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    It's a horror film better suited for skittish cats than humans.
  38. Fireproof
    Cameron acts like a childish jerk, even in the reconciliation phase, and the underlying reason is that he--and the movie--hates women.
  39. Man Down
    The low-wattage, high-concept psychological drama Man Down is too misbegotten to be rescued by Shia LaBeouf’s Method lead performance; in fact, the most interesting thing about it is his masochistic commitment to the film.
  40. 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.
  41. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.
  42. 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.
  43. Season of the Witch
    The film looks dispiritingly cheap and, as if in response, most of his cast seems half-committed at best, as if they're counting the moments until they can move on to a bigger picture.
  44. When the Bough Breaks
    When The Bough Breaks resembles nothing more than a cheap fast-food burger served on fine china: Tasty, sure, and quite enjoyable in the moment. But once the credits roll and the primal centers of the brain stimulated by guilty pleasures like this one return to normal, all you’ll remember is that it looked prettier than usual.
  45. 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.
  46. Fifty Shades of Black
    When Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick.
  47. The Ugly Truth
    The sort of rom-com apparatus that no relationship can overcome.
  48. Deck the Halls
    A rancid new Yuletide comedy.
  49. Gentlemen Broncos
    Crammed with so much deliberate tackiness that it borders on exhausting self-parody.
  50. Rage
    Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.
    • 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.
  52. Arctic Dogs
    There’s really not much to recommend about this film: the animation lacks texture, the score is overwrought, the plotting is scattershot, and the character design is uninspired.
  53. 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.
  54. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    By the standards of Tyler Perry’s Madea series, A Madea Christmas is better than average.
  55. Pixels
    Even on its own silly terms, Pixels is not a very good movie; it’s painted up like a Ghostbusters-style fantasy-comedy but plays like so many slapdash Happy Madison productions before it.
  56. Pokémon Heroes
    Doesn't have much to offer viewers who aren't still eagerly awaiting their first adult tooth.
  57. 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."
  58. The Perfect Man
    Where Locklear's careful, clipped delivery confirms that she's better suited for TV stardom than the movies, every time Duff opens her mouth, she confirms that her natural home is in magazines. Or voicing animated squirrels. Either one would work.
  59. Last Knights
    There’s no reason for a film with a plot this simple to drag on to the two-hour mark. In a movie filled with public executions, that running time qualifies as truly cruel and unusual punishment.
  60. Garfield
    The popularity of Davis' strip represents the ultimate triumph of mediocrity, but even the cartoonist's competent hackwork deserves better than this.
  61. Mortdecai
    It’s exactly the sort of oddball trifle, like Hudson Hawk, that tends to attract the ire of baffled audiences and grumpy critics. It’s also the sort of oddball trifle that, like Hudson Hawk, will put certain aficionados of silliness in a pretty good mood.
  62. Nina
    Nina has been so thoroughly misconceived, on virtually every level, that the only less interesting portrait imaginable would be one that takes place entirely when Nina Simone was in utero.
  63. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    The Bonfire Of The Vanities gets a lot of things right but they're largely negated by the colossal things it gets wrong.
  64. The Happytime Murders
    It’d be an intriguing premise — if, again, it weren’t so nearly identical to "Roger Rabbit," right down to the inevitable frame job. Also, if The Happytime Murders had taken a few more cues from that film and focused less on the rote whodunit and more on the funhouse-mirror L.A. where it takes place.
  65. I Spit on Your Grave
    Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.
  66. Are We There Yet?
    All too effectively conveys the claustrophobic horror of being shackled in a small space with two whiny, hateful children.
  67. Flatliners
    Flatliners 2017 is the same dumb movie as Flatliners 1990, minus most of the surface charisma.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sex and the City 2
    Sex And The City 2 panders to that audience to the point of self-destruction, squandering whatever goodwill the franchise had left after the first so-so movie by plopping its beloved characters into a series of garish vignettes that throw their shallowness into sharp relief.
  69. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant's pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he's making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking.
  70. Crossroads
    Spears is filmed and costumed in such a harsh, unflattering manner that it looks like Christina Aguilera bribed the crew to make her rival look as hideous as possible. Spears' ubiquity has spawned an inevitable backlash, but the awful Crossroads ought to do more harm to her career than even the most powerful Britney-basher.
  71. A Guy Thing
    Perhaps Lee took a look at the script -- saw all the jokes about diarrhea, pubic lice, drunk old ladies, and drugged gravy, and thought, "Why bother?" Looking at the final results, it's hard to feel any other way.
  72. Catwoman
    The film could have turned out worse, but only via the addition of a Tom Green cameo, or an accident in which the actors caught on fire.
  73. Blacklight
    Blacklight cuts corners everywhere.
  74. Gamer
    The trouble with Gamer is that it’s weird, but not weird enough for the long haul.
  75. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2
    This is cinema at its most punk rock—a raucous, unpolished, cheap, sacred-cow shredding middle finger to the mainstream with just enough raw talent inside to keep it from being dismissable.
  76. Wild Hogs
    Abysmal.
  77. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The more striking moments of The Last Knight—this is an ostentatious Michael Bay movie, after all—speak just as loudly to its director’s indifference to both source material and visual scale.
  78. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    The Heart Is Deceitful has a daring that's hard to dismiss, even when it only amounts to Argento shamelessly getting off on human rot.
  79. The Spy Next Door
    Chan’s anything-goes affability keeps the film from scraping bottom.
  80. The Darkness
    It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.
  81. The Women
    The original was a tart dipped in acid; this one's a biscuit sprinkled in Splenda.
  82. When a Stranger Calls
    The original should have been a short film; the new version shouldn't exist at all.
  83. Playing for Keeps
    The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage.
  84. The Fog
    It's virtually indiscernible from any other contemporary horror film except for, well, the fog.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Let's Go to Prison
    Prison makes its 84-minute running time feel like a five-year sentence with no chance for parole.
  86. Taxi
    Feels stitched together from bits and pieces of lame '80s buddy-cop movies.
  87. Dead Man on Campus
    It's all handled so poorly that it comes off as more ghoulish than anything else, although those who find the word "bong" instantly entertaining and are easily distracted by the presence of flickering images may be amused.
  88. Norbit
    There's enough material here to add another hour to Spike Lee's "reel of shame" in "Bamboozled," but hideously offensive black stereotypes are merely the tip of the iceberg.
  89. Simply Irresistible
    Somehow both formulaic and bat-shit insane. It's sort of a given that films in this genre won't be rigorous cerebral exercises, but Simply Irresistible is almost hypnotic in its unyielding stupidity.
  90. View from the Top
    Over in a breeze, padded out by a generous collection of outtakes, and filled with characters who disappear virtually unnoticed, View is an inoffensive comedy that feels like the victim of too much fiddling.
  91. Songbird
    It becomes clear early on that, despite its cheap thriller trappings, the film is headed only in the blandest direction, basically a love story of the kind traditionally told in commercials for tech companies and phones.
  92. Little Fockers
    When the conclusion leaves the door open for still another sequel, it feels like an invitation to a living wake.
  93. Fantastic Four
    It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.
  94. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
    Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.
  95. Twisted
    Twisted marks a bottoming-out for pretty much everyone involved, particularly Judd and director Philip Kaufman, who should know better. The film is the creative equivalent of waking up naked in a puddle of cheap wine and vomit.
  96. 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.
  97. Because I Said So
    Any relationship between the world of Because I Said So and actual human behavior is purely coincidental.
  98. War Room
    Much of what follows is turgid and, for non-believers, ridiculous.
  99. A Thousand Words
    While the ending is wretchedly fakey and predictable, Murphy in subdued mode gives it a little authentic sweetness.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »