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. Elegy
    As an acting showcase that builds to some unexpectedly moving moments, Elegy has much to recommend it. Had Coixet found better ways to connect those moments, she might have REALLY had something to rival what Roth does on the page.
  2. Shepard & Dark
    [The] aesthetic structure creates a haunting sense of the simultaneously wonderful and sad feelings both men have about lives and loves now gone, never to be recaptured.
  3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort, even though it already looks sadly out of touch with the times.
  4. October Country
    In digging deeper into the stories behind the junk--many of which involve the drug problems, legal problems, custody battles, cycles of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorders of Mosher’s own family--October Country veers awfully close to exploitation.
  5. In Fear
    In Fear takes place almost entirely inside a moving car, severely limiting both the cast’s isolation (a big factor in Blair Witch’s strategy) and the extent to which they could wander off in an unexpected direction. Instead, the film simply goes in circles.
  6. Carancho
    If anyone's likely to have trouble with Carancho, it's fans of Trapero's previous films, who won't be able to help noticing the sizeable step he's taken toward conventionality.
  7. The Hip Hop Project
    Project provides an unmistakably one-sided view of rap as God's gift to the poor, angry, black, and young, but given the beating rap has taken in the press lately (please Oprah, don't hurt 'em!), the film's pro-rap cheerleading couldn't be more timely or necessary.
  8. SherryBaby
    Theirs is a well-worn story that may not need to be told, but they do tell it well.
  9. Landline
    Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.
  10. Stardust
    The film's merry, enthusiastic tone--set largely by Robert De Niro, playing a giddy transvestite sky-pirate to the hilt--is hard to beat.
  11. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    When the crazy comes, it's pretty good crazy. Ferrell is in full-on brazen redneck mode, doing a variation on his "Saturday Night Live" George W. Bush impression.
  12. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Between their bickering, Grønkjær's offscreen prompting, and the sappy, ubiquitous soundtrack, The Monastery is like the opposite of "Into Great Silence."
  13. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    A superb portrait of a band and an industry in flux.
  14. Tattoo
    Unlike so many "Seven" followers, it makes its missteps memorably, and offers a variety of stylistic rewards by way of compensation.
  15. Margarita Happy Hour
    The trouble is that while Chaiken's community is nuanced, it's not exactly a warm, inviting place to spend time. It's dingy and dismal, and though not exactly humorless, Margarita Happy Hour misses many chances to be funny, at times when a laugh or two would open the picture up.
  16. Wedding Doll
    In spite of all Wedding Doll’s strengths, its scenario comes to seem a little unseemly: Giladi establishes Hagit’s hopes and dreams mostly just to show the terrible ways that they’re dashed.
  17. The Reagan Show
    It’s an approach that works well when the audience enjoys the company of this person who’s become a permanent fixture on their TV. But it’s also one that enrages opposing voters, who can only ever see the maddening fakery.
  18. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    Cheech And Chong’s Next Movie was Cheech and Chong’s next movie, their dogged lack of imagination seldom as amusing as in the self-reflexive title. Already they had begun to lose steam, recycling a joke in which one character tricks another into railing a line of powdered laundry soap.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Valley Girl
    the wooden acting and threadbare plot of the 1983 Romeo And Juliet-meets-The Graduate-meets-MTV love story Valley Girl is almost entirely redeemed by the stung cockiness of Nicolas Cage.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  21. Snoopy Come Home
    Rarely has a movie made for kids been so devastatingly honest about how relationships can sour over time.
  22. Dandelion
    While Dandelion begins on a promising note and intermittently strikes the right chords, this cinematic symphony sours during its crescendo when it should be intensifying, bringing its stirring sentiments together in resounding harmony.
  23. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    In Curran's hands, what might have seemed like a "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" redux gets cut into avant-garde pieces, with experimental inserts, sound effects, and wrinkles in time that add to an uneasy mood.
  24. Pieces of a Woman
    The result is a clichéd maelstrom of psychological turmoil and empty outpourings of feeling. The film is uninterested in the inner world it claims to investigate; it also cheapens a woman’s trauma by rendering her pain into a confused dramatic spectacle.
  25. Strange Days
    A film that's prescient and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived in roughly equal measures...Strange Days is the cinematic equivalent of trip-hop, a shadowy realm of atmosphere, mood and suggestion with a decidedly drugged-up, post-apocalyptic feel. But the many things Strange Days gets right are negated by the things it gets wrong.
  26. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker defangs herself with The Sky Is Everywhere, which seems to aim for putting something broadly positive in the world but lands on inconsequential.
  27. American Teen
    Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.
  28. Byzantium
    With her piercing baby blues that never seem to settle on a subject, even when she’s locked in conversation with it, Ronan seems just… off enough to play a vampiric vixen.
  29. Slack Bay
    In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.
  30. The Edge
    Tamahori’s workmanlike production doesn’t match the elemental power of Mamet’s script, and it fails to evoke the harsh physical conditions that turn ordinary, civilized men into resourceful survivalists and predators.
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