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. The Expendables 2
    The Expendables 2 makes a franchise out of a novelty item, and the nostalgic kick is gone: It's a reminder that most of those '80s actioners were xenophobic and dumb, that many of its stars had more muscle mass than charisma, and that the sight of these old fossils referring to themselves as old fossils is more pathetic than cheekily self-referential.
  2. Sparkle
    The film spends so little time developing its characters, apart from all that expository dialogue, that it's like asking audiences to care for paper dolls. And Sparkle never delivers on the promise of its most famous song by giving viewers something they can feel.
  3. Cosmopolis
    As Pattinson nears the bottom - both of his fortune, and to all appearances, his sanity - Cronenberg has to take the film somewhere, emptying out into a confrontation between Pattinson and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti) that never fully ties together all that's come before.
  4. True Wolf
    Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beloved
    Honoré's combination of contemporary romantic hijinks and the stylization inherent in the musical genre aren't juxtaposed ironically: Beloved is a tenderly sincere musical that celebrates love even as it acknowledges the ways in which it can sometimes lead to tragedy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Awakening
    The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.
  7. Why Stop Now
    Slips into the no-man's land between screwball and melodrama, squandering both the comic opportunities of an irrational search for drugs and the raw desperation of a piano prodigy who's held captive by his mother's dysfunction.
  8. ParaNorman
    It plays with comedy and drama, but keeps failing to commit to one or the other.
  9. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    The Odd Life Of Timothy Green attempts to stage a modern fairy tale in Middle America. But in spite of an abundance of earnestness, the pixie dust needed to create magic remains out of the film's reach.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lawless
    A thoroughly familiar-but flavorful and rousing-shoot-'em-up set among Prohibition bootleggers.
  11. Sleepwalk with Me
    As charming as it is winningly modest, but it's so incredibly slight a stiff wind would knock it into a different hemisphere.
  12. Robot and Frank
    Schreier elicits warm performances from Langella and Susan Sarandon, and even from his robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard).
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    This Time
    Not only does the film lack focus in its chosen spectrum of likeable performers, it also feels short of any kind of structure or arc, leaving its subjects to toil along in place for an overlong runtime with no end in sight.
  14. Supercapitalist
    With its minimal settings and focus on the abstract lingo of market transactions, "Margin Call" stands as the new model for how to do Wall Street on a budget, embedding its moral themes in language and complex characters. By comparison, $upercapitalist seems naïve about both the market and the humans who operate in it.
  15. Red Hook Summer
    The film's 121-minute running time is similarly cause for concern. Lee can be tight and focused as a gun-for-hire, but he's always viewed personal projects as irresistible invitations to self-indulgence and overreaching. Red Hook Summer is no exception.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goats
    It's a strange stunt of a role for Duchovny, who even when playing characters indulging in sex, drugs, or conspiracy theories, has the air of a savvy urbanite, a quality he can't submerge while trying to act as a perpetually high mystic.
  17. Craigslist Joe
    Craigslist Joe takes Garner on a 21st-century hitchhiking trip that not only didn't end in his gruesome murder, but in a month to remember fondly. It's an inspiring experience. For him.
  18. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.
  19. The Campaign
    Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.
  20. The Bourne Legacy
    Gilroy does the unforgivable by turning out a lean thriller at a fatty 135 minutes, mainly by making the conspiracy plot far more complicated than it needs to be.
  21. Meet the Fokkens
    Ultimately, Meet The Fokkens isn't a documentary about elderly hookers; it's about two women forced into a hard life by circumstance, who tried to make the best of their situation, and are trying still.
  22. Hope Springs
    Taylor and Frankel go too broad when they try for comic relief - and the on-the-nose soundtrack is borderline criminal - but Hope Springs handles marriage and advanced-age sexuality with a refreshing, down-to-earth candor. In today's Hollywood, that counts as radical.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    360
    Fittingly for its occasional ring imagery, 360 is hollow in the middle.
  24. The Babymakers
    It's raunchy/sweet in the "American Pie"/"40-Year-Old Virgin" tradition, and as dynamic as a glob of lazy sperm.
  25. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    If nothing else, the shaggy romantic comedy Celeste And Jesse Forever establishes that Parks And Recreation's Rashida Jones is a movie star.
  26. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    Genial and pleasant to a fault, the film could benefit from a little more personality.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Assassin's Bullet
    This is the third feature Portnoy has conceived and starred in, and while her initiative and ability to find funding for these films is admirable, Assassin's Bullet feels like a shameless, dismal vanity project.
  28. You've Been Trumped
    Aside from the corny title, Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped is a fine, powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, using old-fashioned vérité techniques - and more than a little audience manipulation - to show how political influence and media savvy help the wealthy exert their will.
  29. Sushi: The Global Catch
    The documentary Sushi: The Global Catch tries to be two things at once: an international survey of the way sushi is marketed, prepared, and consumed, and an argument for sustainability, particularly with regard to the bluefin tuna population. These threads are related, but one nonetheless takes away from the other.
  30. Total Recall (2012)
    Wiseman's Total Recall isn't intellectualized like "Blade Runner," or even that much more sophisticated than his "Underworld" movies.
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