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. Faster
    Faster starts to lay on a heavy-handed message about the importance of forgiveness. That isn't what anyone showed up to see.
  2. Heartless
    Heartless gets progressively better as it goes along, and benefits from a poignant late cameo from Timothy Spall as Sturgess' beloved father, but it never recovers from a dull first hour.
  3. Tiny Furniture
    Tiny Furniture offers a 21st-century, East Coast spin on "The Graduate," but with comedy-writer-ish dialogue and a mannered style that never fully gels.
  4. The King's Speech
    The King's Speech is admirably free of easy answers and simple, happy endings; it's a skewed, awards-ready version of history, but one polished to a fine, satisfying shine.
  5. And Everything Is Going Fine
    It does justice to a subject who made his life and death works of art.
  6. Tangled
    The story should be a standard mismatched-couple-falls-in-love tale, but the script and the sprightly directing give the story plenty of snap and humor, and the animation is so luminously beautiful that even a falling-in-love sequence cribbed in part from The Little Mermaid is overwhelmingly magical.
  7. Burlesque
    Burlesque is a terrible film that will delight nearly everyone who sees it, whether they're 12-year-old Christina Aguilera fans or bad-movie buffs angling for a guilty pleasure.
  8. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    The film isn't erotic or profound. It is occasionally comic, though-like reading the finalists for one of those Bad Sex In Fiction awards.
  9. The Tempest
    The best thing about Taymor's Tempest is also the worst: It's not stunning but it is sturdy, a handsome-enough showcase of a film that never really comes to life. It plays like a challenge politely declined.
  10. The Company Men
    The cast doesn't treat The Company Men like a slideshow. They take something overly schematic and imbue it with real anxiety, shame, and humility.
  11. The Fighter
    Bale's live-wire performance typifies the many major and minor elements that elevate The Fighter from the deeply conventional sports movie it might have been into the endearingly offbeat sports movie it turns out to be.
  12. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    They essentially replace the book's blank spaces with gaping plot holes and laughable clichés.
  13. The Tourist
    von Donnersmarck's meat-and-potatoes direction makes The Tourist astonishingly lifeless and awkward, reducing two of the world's biggest movie stars to something akin to shy, pimply teenagers on their first date.
  14. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    Most of the content of this film is wheel-spinning or conscious setup for the final installment, and that feels apparent at every melodramatic moment.
  15. Night Catches Us
    For Washington, the wounds of the past are just beneath the surface, as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper.
  16. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    Slight but fun.
  17. All Good Things
    Here's a story about a man who befriended and eventually killed a Texan while going incognito as an exceptionally frumpy woman, then was eventually nabbed shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich while carrying more than $500 in his pocket. Why underplay that?
  18. I Love You Phillip Morris
    Ficarra and Requa are more comfortable being bad: The nastier the film gets, the better it is.
  19. Black Swan
    A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.
  20. Kawasaki's Rose
    The problem with Kawasaki's Rose is that the theme is far more compelling than the movie.
  21. The Nutcracker
    Nutcracker In 3D doesn't just compound past errors in re-imagining the story. Thanks to a big budget, huge staging, massive overacting, and the non-wonders of post-production 3-D conversion, it adds a wide bevy of new errors.
  22. Today's Special
    So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.
  23. Made in Dagenham
    Make no mistake. In spite of its worthy subject matter and good intentions, Made In Dagenham remains mediocre to the core.
  24. The Next Three Days
    Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.
  25. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Offers a concise summary of Burroughs' life and works. Maybe too concise. At a mere 88 minutes, it feels a bit glancing. But as an introduction or refresher course, it gets the job done.
  26. Skyline
    It isn't clever. It isn't original. It isn't scary. At best, Skyline is a proficient, forgettable programmer that only occasionally lapses into irredeemably silliness.
  27. Morning Glory
    Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.
  28. Red Hill
    The problem is that Hughes fails to imbue this homage with anything personal. Aside from splicing together a policier and a Western, there's no spin here, just a checklist of clichés.
  29. Four Lions
    Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.
  30. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    The film rescues the story from tabloid hell, and asks for a saner assessment of a deeply flawed man.
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