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. Nostalgia for the Light
    It's also poetic and meditative in a way that never feels pretentious.
  2. The Music Never Stopped
    The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.
  3. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.
  4. Win Win
    Win Win is less quirky than "The Station Agent" and less soulful (and political) than "The Visitor," but it still does little to buck the trend.
  5. Paul
    Paul is a little sloppy and a little sappy, but the filmmakers' passion for their subject matter carries it over the occasional rough spot.
  6. Cracks
    Cracks stumbles down the stretch, when the melodrama finally washes in and the behavior becomes more extreme.
  7. Bill Cunningham New York
    It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.
  8. Limitless
    It's a small victory for flash in its eternal war with substance, but in this case, the flash is enough.
  9. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.
  10. Red Riding Hood
    The main difference is that while the "Twilight" films strive for straight-faced grimness, Red Riding Hood often verges on outright florid hilarity. It isn't laughing at itself, but that needn't stop the audience.
  11. I Am
    Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.
  12. Elektra Luxx
    As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.
  13. Black Death
    Black Death bears some similarities to a zombie movie in the way the plague inevitably overtakes the populace, and it also has one foot in the "creepy community" genre, alongside films like "The Wicker Man" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!"
  14. Jane Eyre
    Wasikowska doesn't seem much changed from her "Alice" role, and she trips through Jane's adulthood as though it were a fantasia instead of a moody suspense story.
  15. Certified Copy
    Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).
  16. Mars Needs Moms
    Any satirical points about contemporary gender roles get lost in a mad rush through the matriarchy's beautifully realized, Death Star-like gray fortress. It's a fun rush, though, and an intense one, too.
  17. Battle: Los Angeles
    It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
  18. Happythankyoumoreplease
    HappyThankYouMorePlease has a different vibe than "Garden State" or "HIMYM." It's more like a late-'80s/early-'90s Woody Allen film, after Allen stopped separating his comedy and drama.
  19. I Saw the Devil
    A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.
  20. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.
  21. Take Me Home Tonight
    Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.
  22. The Adjustment Bureau
    It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.
  23. Rango
    Ignoring the weak storyline entirely, Rango is a joyously weird experience.
  24. Beastly
    In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.
  25. Drive Angry 3D
    Drive Angry feels like a five-minute Comic Con show reel that's been expanded beyond its limits. It's agonizingly cool.
  26. Of Gods and Men
    Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.
  27. Heartbeats
    Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.
  28. Hall Pass
    Though the film never balances the grown-up stuff with the gross-out gags, it suggests the Farrellys might be able to do mature after all.
  29. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    Star Martin Lawrence, now the sole remaining element from the original "Big Momma's House" 11 years ago, looks pretty tired both in and out of makeup here.
  30. Zero Bridge
    Zero Bridge is a rigorous piece of filmmaking, but it's played at too minor a key, honoring the neo-realist tradition so slavishly that it lacks an identity of its own.
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