The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,443 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: 5,584 out of 10443
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10443
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10443
10443 movie reviews
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  1. The Rehearsal
    The Rehearsal, director Alison Maclean’s first feature since the 1999 Denis Johnson adaptation Jesus’ Son, is such a hodgepodge of arthouse references, arch distancing effects, and emotionally vacant wide-screen compositions that one could easily mistake it for an awkward debut film.
  2. Extract
    Nobody is better at capturing the crushing banality of everyday life than Judge.
  3. Abominable
    The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.
  4. Role Models
    In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane first half, Role Models suggests "School Of Rock" with Tourette's, or the original "Bad News Bears" without the baseball.
  5. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    Lian Lunson’s camera allows the music to take center stage via straightforward, graceful compositions—close-ups and medium shots dominate, and edits are kept to a relative minimum—that allow for long, unbroken views of the artists at forceful, mournful work.
  6. Hunter Hunter
    It’s a jarring journey, filled with twists that snap and sting like bear traps, and an endurance test, too, especially for the squeamish.
  7. The Kite Runner
    It's okay to be manipulated, so long as you don't feel the strings being pulled. Here the tug is constant, and constantly distracting.
  8. Criminal
    Without any glimmers of depth or subtext.
  9. Haute Cuisine
    Narrowness of focus keeps the movie from becoming bloated with self-importance, but it also leaves it feeling a little inconsequential.
  10. Red
    Red's dialogue is a bit blunt, its characters are too broadly outlined, and the situation verges on the ludicrous at times, especially in the way these dumb kids keep committing terrible crimes without leaving any evidence. But the movie isn't meant to be an exercise in realism.
  11. The Jane Austen Book Club
    There's no subtext to The Jane Austen Book Club, just a skim across the books' surface that winds up re-shelving a great author into the self-help section.
  12. 17 Girls
    The insights into girlhood in the opening are coming from the viewpoint of adults, while in a story this strange-but-true, it'd be more helpful to see these kids as they see themselves.
  13. Evil
    It's more about giving rich bullies the same comeuppance afforded to sneering wardens with bullwhips, and on those superficial grounds, it's reasonably gripping.
  14. Caniba
    Certainly, viewers may feel a kind of seasickness, their stomachs doing somersaults during this supremely discomfiting movie.
  15. The Incredible Hulk
    The Hulk himself looks more steroidal than superheroic, as if the expressive beast from the first film had been replaced by a WWE star.
  16. The Front Runner
    It’s a feature-length whine of frustrated entitlement. A movie less suited to its cultural moment would be hard to imagine.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    For Ellen
    The kind of film that rises or falls on the strength of its lead performance, given that its protagonist is in every scene, often alone. It's built around a strong turn by Dano, but one that feels studied and sometimes at odds with the naturalism the film aims for with its grubby settings, loose camerawork, and tendency toward inquisitive close-ups.
  18. Nuremberg
    Vanderbilt’s film slowly, confidently morphs into something beyond a cautionary tale and more like a klaxon blaring through the cinema.
  19. Slice
    The acting is hammy, but intentionally so, as is the crude, greasepaint-and-baby powder makeup on the ghosts. Clearly, Vesely has pushed the stylization of the piece as far as it can go in order to compensate for Slice’s low budget.
  20. Fighting
    Fighting doesn’t break new ground so much as animate B-movie types, but New York movies this gritty and flavorful don't come along very often.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Blue Beetle
    It’s the cohesiveness among the cast members playing Jaime’s family that lends their performances both authenticity and relatability.
  22. Metallica: Through the Never
    This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.
  23. Enduring Love
    Enduring Love's plot inevitably drifts into “Fatal Attraction” territory, but its wholesale immersion in Craig's deteriorating condition render it a wrenching, uncompromising study of the human mind in freefall.
  24. King Kong
    I’m still deeply fond of De Laurentiis’ King Kong now, no doubt in part because we’ll never see its likes again. Whatever the failings of its ape effects, they have a tangible quality that even Jackson’s great CGI work couldn’t fake.
  25. Carnage
    By the time everyone in Carnage has revealed themselves, we're left not with flawed human beings, but with monsters of banality whose company represents a brutal form of punishment in itself.
  26. Trance
    Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.
  27. These Final Hours
    Incoherent and pointless as it is, These Final Hours moves with commendable swiftness.
  28. Lust, Caution
    Conceptually, Lust, Caution has been thoroughly thought-through, down to every lipstick stain Wei leaves on her teacups.
  29. Transformers
    Turns the franchise into a terrible '80s comedy.
  30. Beyond the Sea
    The stories Pérez-Rey's subjects tell are shocking, even moving. But they're also narrow, limited, and staid, and so is the film that contains them.
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