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. 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.
  2. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. The Campaign
    Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  11. The Babymakers
    It's raunchy/sweet in the "American Pie"/"40-Year-Old Virgin" tradition, and as dynamic as a glob of lazy sperm.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Total Recall (2012)
    Wiseman's Total Recall isn't intellectualized like "Blade Runner," or even that much more sophisticated than his "Underworld" movies.
  18. Compliance
    The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.
  19. Searching for Sugar Man
    Though unabashedly manipulative in its storytelling and structure, Searching For Sugar Man ultimately earns its happy ending and buzzy, crowd-pleasing populist appeal by alchemizing trembling inner-city pain into transcendent international beauty.
  20. Sacrifice
    Chen can't seem to decide whether he's making a fable or something more down-to-earth, but Sacrifice works either way, if not both at once.
  21. Rites of Spring
    Rites Of Spring does have a real "no idea what's going to happen next" quality, which is rare. Then again, that's because the movie feels haphazard and unfinished: more weed than plant.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    Courageous performances from the leads, who have to bear a lot, both emotionally and physically, still can't transform their characters into more than just symbols for contemporary urban loneliness.
  23. Klown
    Whenever Klown hits, it's hysterical.
  24. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.
  25. Killer Joe
    This is not some nostalgia-soaked throwback to the noir of old, but a rude, shit-kicking thriller that co-opts - and merrily defiles - a classic like "Double Indemnity." Whatever its shortcomings, at least they're never failures of nerve.
  26. Step Up Revolution
    Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.
  27. The Watch
    In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Planet of Snail
    With little story to speak of, Planet Of Snail is more of an experiential piece, closing in on the pleasure and wonder with which Young-chan takes in details like rain falling outside the window and the bark of a tree.
  29. Ruby Sparks
    The setup is rote, almost insulting, but it's smarter than it looks: Once the pieces are in place, Kazan's script reveals a deeper game.
  30. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Arriving on the heels of "13 Assassins," Miike's gloriously irreverent take on the samurai action genre, Hara-Kiri seems conventional by his standards, especially in a long middle section that occasionally dips into sentimentality.
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