The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,441 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: 5,582 out of 10441
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10441
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10441
10441 movie reviews
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  1. The Perfect Host
    It's best enjoyed as a crackling performance piece.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Like Crazy
    By the film's latter half, we're left not hoping its lovers will find a way to be together, but longing for them to get over each other and move on.
  3. Life in a Day
    If nothing else, Life In A Day serves as a fine time capsule, recording some of what life was like on Earth in 2010.
  4. L'amour fou
    Like a well-crafted garment, it's seamless. There's plenty of amour, but not enough fou.
  5. True Legend
    True Legend's heart is in the right place. It's just the body that's weary.
  6. Janie Jones
    Contrivances aside, though, Janie Jones is one of the more realistic depictions of what the rock 'n' roll lifestyle is really like.
  7. ParaNorman
    It plays with comedy and drama, but keeps failing to commit to one or the other.
  8. 3
    All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.
  9. Gone
    The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.
  10. Mr. Nice
    The result is a film that's long and choppy, with little narrative momentum. And yet at times, Mr. Nice is frustratingly close to brilliant.
  11. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    One amusing disadvantage of the crystal-clear, you-are-there 3-D cinematography, and the focus on the audience experience is that in practically every shot, it's easy to pick out off-message concertgoers who are bored, tired, or otherwise disengaged.
  12. The Guilt Trip
    Though intermittently bathed in a halo of golden light and desired by at least one handsome, distinguished older man with a thing for mature women with healthy appetites, Streisand in The Guilt Trip is largely devoid of her famous vanity and narcissism.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Hello Lonesome
    Though it can occasionally seem like an indie-dramedy answer to "The Grudge," structured to pack in the maximum moments of whimsical connection instead of supernatural kills, the film does find something deeper in its treatment of Smith and Lloyd.
  14. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.
  15. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This Hobbit is, in other words, a much more eventful affair than its year-old predecessor. And yet for all the fine spectacle Jackson crams into his lengthy sequel-within-a-prequel, it’s still hard not to mourn the single, self-contained movie that could have been.
  16. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    A fine enough piece of work, but it's a shame Werner Herzog didn't get to Gunther Hauk first.
  17. The Lone Ranger
    Hammer’s performance — always game, never mugging — certainly helps; his likable but buffoonish Lone Ranger is an essential part of the movie’s irreverent tone.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Savages
    Like "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" and "W.," Savages feels like Stone softballing something he should be skewering - in this case, SoCal entitlement and faux-progressive hypocrisy.
  19. Bully
    There are many appalling moments witnessed and described in Lee Hirsch's documentary Bully: children beaten and humiliated, ostracized by their peers and misunderstood by their parents, left to face an apparently heartless world without a soul to turn to.
  20. Thor: The Dark World
    Forget the fairy-tale romance between Jane and her hammer-wielding hunk. The real emotional center of the Thor series is this sibling rivalry, more compelling than any climactic battle royale or winking teaser for the next chapter.
  21. The Tree
    Yes, the idea that the tree/father is literally tearing this family apart is way too blunt, but Gainsbourg and Davies sell it by playing the scenes naturally, with minimal histrionics.
  22. Point Blank
    The actors' charisma is a draw, but mostly, the movie relies on Pavlovian reaction to the genre: The audience has its designated place as surely as any element in Cavayé's relentless machine.
  23. Sleeping Beauty
    Emily Browning gives a game performance as the unconscious sex object, but Leigh doesn't provide her with a lot to work with in terms of motivation, dimension, or any kind of rich interior life.
  24. Another Happy Day
    Levinson stuffs the movie with so many emotional cross-currents and minor revelations that it's hard to keep them all straight, but the movie works the audience's nerves with enough determination to get under the skin and stay there, a sensation that comes awfully close to an earned emotional response.
  25. Carnage
    By the time everyone in Carnage has revealed themselves, we're left not with flawed human beings, but with monsters of banality whose company represents a brutal form of punishment in itself.
  26. Turbo
    For all its chronic familiarity, the movie has its minor pleasures, many of them visual. Though at this point it's basically a given that a new studio-animated movie will look good, Turbo often looks downright exceptional.
  27. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    There aren’t just more dragons, but more characters, more plot, more everything. The trade-off is that the charm of the original gets a little lost, a casualty of rapid-franchise expansion.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Good Neighbors
    That slow reveal is Good Neighbors' finest quality: It finds tension in stilted hallway interactions, unwanted dinner parties, and complaints about the wanderings of pets.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    There's something admirable to this austerity and the way it insists viewers start by engaging with Kiefer's large-scale constructions, wordless explorations of which bookend the film.
  30. The Way
    Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.
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