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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    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    Horowitz has Michael Moore's smug tendencies without his schlubby everyman charm, which makes his attempts at goading humor out of uncomfortable interviews come off as unpleasant.
  2. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.
  3. High School
    Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.
  4. For Greater Glory
    With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."
  5. Virginia
    Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.
  6. Chernobyl Diaries
    It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.
  7. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.
  8. The Intouchables
    Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.
  9. Oslo, August 31st
    Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.
  10. Men in Black III
    The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.
  11. The Samaritan
    It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely Molly
    Lovely Molly is a portrait of either spiraling madness or a haunting, and it deftly handles the slow erosion of its title character's consciousness. Landing somewhere between "Repulsion" and "Paranormal Activity," it keeps the jump scares to a minimum and allows its formidable lead performance to be its best special effect.
  13. Polisse
    The best moments of Maïwenn's Polisse, about the dedicated members of a Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, have the same quality, a fly-on-the-wall docu-realism that feels eerily like the real thing.
  14. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Beyond The Black Rainbow is more surface than substance, but those surfaces are gleamingly polished enough to make for a hypnotic experiment that goes beyond genre pastiche or art-school wankery to seem formally daring.
  16. Mansome
    If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.
  17. Elena
    It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.
  18. Battleship
    Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.
  19. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.
  20. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The rigors of identifying and training companion dogs are fascinating, but they would fit more comfortably in a non-fiction format, where nobody has to play pretend. As it stands, the dog is the only creature who acts naturally.
  21. The Dictator
    The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate.
  22. Girl in Progress
    Girl In Progress is ultimately less interested in subverting the clichés of the genre than in recycling them. It wants audiences to know it's in on the joke though it's not always apparent that there even is a joke in the first place.
  23. Where Do We Go Now?
    What the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances.
  24. God Bless America
    The key point about God Bless America is that it's extreme but not exaggerated, a dark comedy that indulges - and questions - a violent, misanthropic fantasy about laying waste to the cultural landscape while staying grounded in a recognizable reality.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Tonight You're Mine
    Musicians, according to Tonight You're Mine, are a callous, narcissistic lot - fortunately, the music they make gets a pass.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sleepless Night
    Given how much it's in motion, Sleepless Night doesn't have much time for character development, but Sisley is a memorable antihero whose toughness barely masks his growing desperation and exhaustion, as his bleeding knife wound serves as the film's version of a countdown clock.
  27. The Road
    Moving fluidly between gory sight gags and implied, insinuating terror, The Road is a movie made to be seen after midnight, preferably in a mildly dilapidated theater with a full house.
  28. Portrait of Wally
    Portrait Of Wally tells a gripping story, but the filmmakers should have been more forthright about their own part in it.
  29. Patience (After Sebald)
    Patience reveals through images and tone as well as through the interviews how Sebald yearned for restorative meaning in the places he toured, only to end up lost in thought.
  30. A Bag of Hammers
    The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.
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