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. The Dark Knight Rises
    The miracle of Nolan's Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    The true magnitude of this band no longer existing is felt most strongly in these moments, when Shut Up is at its most uplifting and danceable. It's a party Shut Up And Play The Hits decides to leave far too often.
  3. Family Portrait in Black and White
    There's no organizing principle in Ivanova's documentary, which unfolds in a ragged, seat-of-the-pants style that mirrors its subject's day-to-day life all too closely. Nenya's flock proves too big for the film to wrangle.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    With its slim runtime, the film feels like it should have gone broader or closed in and been just a portrait of the talented, goofy Sano.
  5. Union Square
    There isn't much to Union Square, but the movie does understand how people want to love their families on their own terms, forgetting that their families may be the only ones who really know who they are.
  6. Farewell, My Queen
    Working from Chantal Thomas' novel, Jacquot doesn't entirely scrape the gloss off this love triangle, which plays neither as a florid bodice-ripper nor as emotionally complex as it might have been. It stays on the surface, but at least that surface is gorgeous.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Trishna
    Trishna is in love with India without romanticizing it.
  8. Red Lights
    Red Lights' setup is silly but fun, with a fair degree of self-awareness that the film's entire "super-scientists vs. celebrity spiritualists" premise is a hoot.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Alps
    Lanthimos' skill at orchestrating these tense, creepy, shockingly funny setpieces is just as evident here as it was in "Dogtooth," but too much of Alps is left vague.
  10. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that's already been settled. Jokes are recycled so frequently, it's as if comedy writing was eating a hole in the ozone layer.
  11. The Imposter
    The Imposter strings the audience along, to get them to understand first-hand how easy it is to buy into a well-told story, even when there's no evidence to support it.
  12. The Queen of Versailles
    To an extent, Greenfield tries to have it both ways with her film: she allows us to enjoy the fantasy of being rich, while also letting us see the bastards suffer a little.
  13. The Pact
    More horror movies set in the 21st century ought to integrate technology into their scares as well as Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact.
  14. The Magic of Belle Isle
    For a movie that spends so much time extolling the virtues of the imagination to show so little of its own is more than ironic - it's offensive.
  15. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Its insights are modest, but modesty is a virtue for a low-key comedy this doggedly unpretentious.
  16. Crazy Eyes
    Sherman's feature turns out to be enamored of the kind of reality that gets left out of movies not because it's provocative or controversial, but because it isn't particularly interesting.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Part Of Me's hybrid format ultimately proves an uneasy marriage, and does a disservice to Perry as both a performer and a human being by never reconciling what happens in the space between those two lives.
    • 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. The Amazing Spider-Man
    The Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by "(500) Days Of Summer" director Marc Webb, doesn't put its own stamp on the material, which feels warmed-over in ways that don't help.
  20. Madea's Witness Protection
    There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)
  21. Neil Young Journeys
    The heart of any concert movie is the concert itself, and in the case of Neil Young Journeys, it's a great one.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Last Ride
    In spite of that sense of knowing where the film is headed long before it gets there, Last Ride finds poetry in its gorgeous backdrop and its portrait of a complicated character attempting, hopelessly, to set things right after upending the world.
  23. Ted
    Ted is never stronger than when Wahlberg and MacFarlane's Ted hang out, riff, and luxuriate in an easy friendship, but as it lurches to a conclusion, Ted unwisely devotes far too much of its time to a plot it would be better off ignoring.
  24. Take This Waltz
    Take This Waltz is simultaneously a coming-of-age film, a love story, a breakup story, and an indie quirkfest, and it tries to do so many things at once that it can't hit many of its marks cleanly. But at least it's never boring, and rarely predictable.
  25. People Like Us
    Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.
  26. Magic Mike
    Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.
  27. Unforgivable
    That seems to be one of the main theses of Unforgivable: that nothing is as dramatic as it appears, and presuming otherwise means risking unnecessary trouble and pain.
  28. Gypsy
    This isn't a film about abstract social ills, it's about specific people in a specific place, and how they get disturbingly comfortable with theft and violence as a way of life.
  29. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    It's undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
  30. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.
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