The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,427 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: 5,576 out of 10427
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10427
  3. Negative: 1,110 out of 10427
10427 movie reviews
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  1. Les Miserables
    The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.
  2. Barbara
    Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.
  3. Not Fade Away
    Chase deals with the mundane reality that squashes those dreams, but he doesn't downplay the dreams themselves, which he keeps honoring throughout Not Fade Away, right up to an audaciously abstract final scene that rivals the end of "The Sopranos" for sheer nerve.
  4. On the Road
    Since there's no plot, just a series of anecdotes, much of the meaning in the movie version of On The Road is meta-textual, relying on the viewers' knowledge of who Kerouac was, and how the novel's vision of America differed from how most of the rest of popular culture documented the '50s.
  5. The Impossible
    Like "The Orphanage," The Impossible confirms that Bayona is a major talent, with a skill for constructing sequences that build tension as masterfully as Steven Spielberg did in his '70s heyday.
  6. Jack Reacher
    Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.
  7. This Is 40
    A few broadly comic moments aside, This Is 40 also captures the rhythms and concerns of real life in ways that slicker Hollywood comedies don't.
  8. 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.
  9. Amour
    A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.
  10. Zero Dark Thirty
    Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.
  11. Consuming Spirits
    The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.
  12. Any Day Now
    Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.
  13. 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.
  14. Save the Date
    Save The Date's achievements are modest - it could be funnier and more affecting, and it ends with a shrug - but the film is wise about sibling relationships, the uncertainty of youth, and smaller matters, like the way people relate to each other after a break-up.
  15. 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.
  16. The Rabbi's Cat
    While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.
  17. Hyde Park on Hudson
    Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.
  18. Deadfall
    The best parts of Deadfall are absorbed into a scenario that frequently ditches the cat-and-mouse routine and tries instead to be about three dysfunctional families working toward reconciliation.
  19. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.
  20. In Our Nature
    Brian Savelson's small-scaled domestic drama In Our Nature evokes a specific, fairly common experience: when two young lovers expose a still-blossoming relationship to their relatives' stifling attention.
  21. Lay the Favorite
    At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Only the Young
    Not much of real significance happens, which makes Only The Young feel a bit slight, even at a mere 70 minutes. At the same time, though, every hint of direct conflict threatens to break the spell, in part because the film's secret subject is adolescent self-consciousness.
  23. Tchoupitoulas
    A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wagner & Me
    Fry is Jewish, and his wrestling with what it means to venerate the music of someone who wrote of his revulsion for Jews adds a fascinating personal angle to this otherwise dry film.
  25. California Solo
    California Solo doesn't have much story. All of the details above are established in the first five minutes, then the movie becomes a character sketch, carried by its wealth of detail and a fantastic Carlyle performance.
  26. The Collection
    It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.
  27. Addicted to Fame
    Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Kelly
    King Kelly is a broad indictment of the emptier side of self-documentation and a more nuanced one of the Internet as a source of affirmation.
  29. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Beware Of Mr. Baker is the life story of a man who's led one hell of a fascinating life.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Dragon
    Yen's strengths have never been in his expressiveness, and Dragon plods when it centers on dramatic struggles, then leaps exhilaratingly to life whenever the fighting begins.
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