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. Run, Fatboy, Run
    Fatboy nearly succeeds in spite of itself, thanks to Pegg, who makes a character who does some detestable things seem strangely likeable.
  2. Superhero Movie
    Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need look no further.
  3. Young@Heart
    There's a wealth of great material here, especially a shattering performance of Coldplay's "Fix You" by a soulful mountain of a man named Fred Knittle.
  4. Street Kings
    After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
  5. Baby Mama
    It's not without laughs--Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange "reward" for a job well done--but there's a lot of arid space between them.
  6. Son of Rambow
    The shooting of the movie-within-a-movie offers the brightest moments in Son Of Rambow, a testament to the innocence of the boys' creative impulse and the sheer unlikely pleasure of their friendship.
  7. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    Like its early predecessors, it's a nominally fun trip, but it's tissue-thin and instantly forgettable.
  8. Brick Lane
    Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.
  9. Bottle Shock
    Trouble is, it's too rambling and digressive to feel focused, yet too calculating to feel as observational and natural as a good Altman flick.
  10. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Video veteran Sanaa Hamri directs with smooth competence, and the leads all go pleasantly through their paces, but there are no surprises.
  11. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    With its simple-goal-driven plot, its wordy, cutscene-like interludes, and its stiffly modeled characters, it wouldn't even make for a particularly high-end videogame.
  12. The Rocker
    Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.
  13. Death Race
    It's the perfect end-of-summer film, and a sign that summer needs to end soon.
  14. The Longshots
    A sports movie like every other, but the excellent, lived-in performances of Cube and Palmer make it a mildly affecting.
  15. W.
    Stone paddles down the giant river of Bush's life without exploring any of the tributaries; he passes by two or three dozen better movies along the way.
  16. The Family That Preys
    Perry deserves due respect for exploiting an untapped niche.
  17. Sex Drive
    Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.
  18. Blindness
    There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
  19. Quarantine
    Dowdle manages a few nice shocks and some neat moments of pitch-black gallows humor, but Quarantine nevertheless feels awfully familiar, and it grows less convincing with each passing moment. At its worst, it abandons realism entirely and flirts with gory kitsch.
  20. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    Efron is the epitome of sexless Disney heartthrobs, but he's an electrifying song-and-dance man, so much so that his castmates (Bleu excepted) look like they have concrete shoes by comparison.
  21. Splinter
    There's potential for a lot more excitement in Splinter, but Wilkins seems content just to bring it across the finish line.
  22. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Like the big shiny sphere at its center, the film is fairly pretty, but there's no real sense that there's anything inside it.
  23. Seven Pounds
    It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner.
  24. Hotel for Dogs
    What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.
  25. My Bloody Valentine
    But save for a giddily gratuitous sequence involving full-frontal nudity, a little person, and a French bulldog, the film is strictly by-the-numbers slasher boilerplate. It won't endure past the weekend.
  26. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  27. Donkey Punch
    The film goes off the rails in the final third, sacrificing subtle character work at the altar of blood-and-guts survival horror. As mood-killers go, it's like a jab to the back of the neck.
  28. Confessions of a Shopaholic
    The degree to which Shopaholic actually works is a testament to the looks, charm, and comedic chops of Fisher, who stole "Wedding Crashers" and has a gift for slapstick that places her somewhere between Téa Leoni and Lucille Ball in the pantheon of foxy redheaded physical comediennes.
  29. The International
    Ultimately feel so empty and forgettable.
  30. Madea Goes to Jail
    Madea's physical comedy is loud enough to wake the dead, but its drama is just as excessive. In a neat bit of economy, Perry stages a wedding that doubles as a breakup, and triples as the villain's crowd-pleasing comeuppance. Now that is some serious multitasking.
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