The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,440 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: 5,581 out of 10440
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10440
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10440
10440 movie reviews
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  1. Roger Dodger
    Flags as it heads toward a moralistic ending, complete with a couple of contrived (albeit charged) sexual encounters, but it's heartening that it soars as long as it does.
  2. All the Real Girls
    Deschanel and Schneider--who both give rich, funny performances--and everyone around them have inner lives that don't always translate into words. When they speak, it's usually in dialogue halfway between poetry and inarticulate fumbling.
  3. American Wedding
    Combining raunchiness and sweetness in a slapdash but generally effective manner.
  4. Cellular
    The film works by putting the accelerator to the floor and never looking in the rear-view mirror.
  5. The Cooler
    Hokey and convoluted, but as a sticky-hearted fable of redemption, it's surprisingly seductive.
  6. The Hours
    That makes it hard to watch "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry's adaptation without thinking of the one Almodóvar might have made -- which surely would have been warmer, less self-consciously tony, and less relentlessly arid than the one that did get made.
  7. Road to Perdition
    Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.
  8. Songs from the Second Floor
    Though the laughs in Songs From The Second Floor tend to stick in the throat, they're also cathartic and oddly comforting, because the world outside the movie theater is bound to look cheerier than the one on the screen.
  9. The Brown Bunny
    If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.
  10. Starsky & Hutch
    A textbook example of how a remade '70s show can feel like an enjoyable lark rather than cultural recycling run amok.
  11. Notting Hill
    It may boil down to little more than a minor variation on Four Weddings' formula, but it's an interesting and entertaining one.
  12. Silent Water
    Converts relevant contemporary history into intimate personal drama.
  13. Undertow
    Undertow may prove the least immediately satisfying of Green's films, but it remains an achievement, emotionally rich and rife with biblical and mythic undertones.
  14. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    When it steers away from campaign-ad testimonials and considers Kerry's moral awakening in Vietnam and beyond, Going Upriver features some tremendously powerful scenes.
  15. Fade to Black
    Beyond offering a valuable look at Jay-Z's creative process, the behind-the-scenes material complements the concert footage, showing the work that allows Jay-Z to entertain tens of thousands of fans live.
  16. Equilibrium
    A terrific cast, stylish direction, and elegantly choreographed mayhem help make it far better than it might have been -- Though ultimately silly, Equilibrium's shopworn but stylish synthesis of ammo and ideas is surprisingly engrossing.
  17. Open Range
    Mostly it's just a good yarn, with attractive picture-postcard vistas and an agreeable strain of light humor.
  18. Antz
    The story is well-told, but so familiar that it renders the surrounding film a bright, shiny, dispensible bauble, an amusing diversion but not much more.
  19. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is a universal story, one that captures the thrill of discovering culture, sex, and politics, and the painful twinge of learning that those worlds aren't enough.
  20. Moolaadé
    Though Moolaadé doesn't shy away from the task of educating its viewers about the brutality of "purification," it works equally well as a tribute to righteous defiance wherever it surfaces.
  21. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.
  22. Japan
    A dense, challenging work by any measure, Japón snakes toward a justly celebrated final shot that's technically astonishing and immensely powerful, cementing the arrival of a promising new talent.
  23. Lilya 4-Ever
    What it became is essentially one long free-fall from destitution to despair.
  24. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    It IS a little obvious, but that's the way it goes with spiritual enlightenment. The film's lessons are plain--spoken aloud, even--and deal with the close relationship between what can be shed in this life and what binds people to the world in spite of their best efforts to purify.
  25. Gods and Monsters
    While McKellen's sharp performance provides the main attraction, the film wouldn't work without both Fraser, who brings something extra to a character who could easily have been a mere lunk, and director Bill Condon's careful integration of larger themes.
  26. Alias Betty
    A lot goes on, and it doesn't always make sense. But the cast embodies Rendell's ability to incorporate shrewd observations on human behavior into the framework of a crime story, and Miller has a great eye for the places on the Paris outskirts where the lives of haves and have-nots intersect.
  27. Strayed
    Strayed moves forward with an absorbing ruthlessness, yet without sacrificing those tiny incidental details that lend it singularity and power.
  28. Jeepers Creepers II
    Jeepers Creepers aimed for the archetypal primal spookiness of a scary campfire tale, and halfway succeeded. Here, Salva makes it work virtually every step of the way.
  29. Something's Gotta Give
    Mostly, it's just a pleasure to watch Keaton and Nicholson learning new steps in an old dance, stumbling to grab at happiness before it's too late.
  30. The Count of Monte Cristo
    While fleeting moments from Pearce and Luis Guzmán (as Caviezel's loyal servant) suggest the film might have been even more fun had they been allowed to loosen up a bit, the finished product still offers little cause for complaint.
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