The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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: 5,578 out of 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. Viola
    It’s a pleasant, negligible wisp of a movie, notable mostly for what it suggests of its director’s potential.
  2. Computer Chess
    What’s more, it’s fun, generating pleasure not from canned jokes or clichéd plot twists but simply from a sense of unhindered freedom.
  3. Dealin' with Idiots
    Jeff Garlin’s second directorial feature, Dealin’ With Idiots, is a largely improvised ensemble piece about a comedian who decides that his son’s Little League team would make an interesting subject for a movie. It doesn’t.
  4. 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.
  5. Grown Ups 2
    Largely free of Sandler’s usual schmaltz and lame romance, it’s pure plotless, grotesque high jinks, bizarre and inept in a way that’s fascinating without ever being all that funny.
  6. Killing Season
    With casting this unconvincing, no one is watching to get a lesson in the horrors of war.
  7. Fruitvale Station
    Putting a human face on a public tragedy that already had a human face, Fruitvale Station plays like an uncomplicated eulogy, with little more to say on its subject than “what a shame this bad thing happened.”
  8. The Hunt
    None of the complexity of that initial interaction between teacher and lovestruck little girl carries over into the town’s reaction, which closely resembles that of the villagers in "Frankenstein." It’s like watching a deer run from shotguns for two hours — it evokes some sympathy, but that’s about all.
  9. V/H/S/2
    In nearly every respect, V/H/S/2 improves on its predecessor. Free of poky mumble-horror filler, it offers four fruitful variations on the original’s best chapter.
  10. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.
  11. Still Mine
    Cromwell delivers his defiantly gruff dialogue with amusing relish, while still grounding his protagonist’s actions in desperation and desolation. And his nostalgic conversations with Bujold while the two lay in bed have a naturalness that almost overshadows the creakiness of the surrounding material.
  12. The Hot Flashes
    Early in The Hot Flashes, Brooke Shields is seen reading Menopause For Dummies, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s precisely what you’re watching.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    Terms And Conditions may not be a particularly well-made documentary, but it provides a much-needed wake-up call.
  14. Pacific Rim
    Yet for all its expensive grandeur, almost too epic even for the vast canvases of IMAX, Pacific Rim is unmistakably a Del Toro creation.
  15. Israel: A Home Movie
    Israel’s most interesting — and revealing — footage tends to be the most candid: beach-goers in the ’30s, scenes from family gatherings and celebrations, a coke-fueled celebrity wedding in the ’70s. The commentary gimmick justifies itself in these stretches.
  16. Sweetgrass
    The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.
  17. A Girl and a Gun
    Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it can’t maintain its muddled thesis for even that brief period.
  18. Absence
    There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.
  19. Stuck in Love
    As writer-director Josh Boone introduces these characters, he superimposes words on the screen to suggest how they channel their thoughts and conversations into their work. But that’s the extent of the film’s interest in writing, which serves strictly as a “classy” backdrop for a series of painfully contrived amorous meltdowns among a family who might as well run a dry-cleaning business.
  20. The Look of Love
    The movie is a character study in search of a character.
  21. The Way, Way Back
    Just about everyone and everything in The Way, Way Back feels programmed, as though the film were written using Mad Libs.
  22. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    Let Me Explain finds Hart at the peak of his powers, so the film’s long coronation feels justified, if gaudy. Strip away the preamble and just give him a mic, and he’d earn it all the same.
  23. Despicable Me 2
    What’s missing — and this was the crucial component of part one — is a little sour to undercut the sweet. Like its protagonist, a bad guy gone boringly good, Despicable Me 2 has no edge. It’s fatally nice and insufficiently naughty.
  24. 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.
  25. Museum Hours
    Essentially an essay film, Museum Hours is less interested in plot than in using its characters as a way to give ideas shape and voice; however, because their performances are natural and improvisatory, the movie never seems didactic.
  26. A Band Called Death
    The film springs to life in its second half, when the members’ grown kids, who are also working musicians, discover that their dads/uncles were in a forgotten, innovative band that the family had never once mentioned.
  27. Redemption
    When Redemption works, it’s as a series of writerly miniatures fleshed out by Statham’s street-tough charisma and Chris Menges’ neon-soaked nighttime camerawork.
  28. Laurence Anyways
    For once in a Dolan film, an actor upstages the camera moves. That’s a promising precedent, as well as a hint that artistic adulthood won’t spoil this hotdogging prodigy.
  29. 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.
  30. Some Girl(s)
    The title’s parenthetical plural sums up the problem with Some Girl(s): Five slow-cook dialogues that reveal the nice-guy protagonist as a super-tool is four too many.
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