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 Great Buck Howard
    Buck Howard has a nice feel for its tacky, second-rate show-business milieu--a rinky-dink world of telethons, small towns starved for entertainment, and entertainers whose careers have been in freefall since Hollywood Squares went off the air.
  2. 12 Rounds
    There's something strangely charming about films that are all artifice, explosions, and naked calculation. 12 Rounds is at least honest trash: It never pretends to be anything other than manic schlock.
  3. Fast & Furious
    The action scenes don't always get the balance between flash and danger right, but the movie remains agreeably dopey--presenting street-racing culture as a hotbed of colorful stereotypes and lipstick lesbianism--until a climax that just isn't there.
  4. American Violet
    It’s hard not to get swept up by the film's progressive zeal, but Disney doesn’t allow for much grey area.
  5. Management
    Like its protagonist, Management is dopey and impractical, but strangely winning all the same.
  6. What Goes Up
    What Goes Up has a one-of-a-kind character in Coogan, a cynic with a savior complex, who lies partly out of convenience, and partly because he knows--as Glatzer and Lawson know--that even a messy story can still inspire.
  7. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    The series kept it going for one more entry, but throws its commitment to the era away with movie number three, a ploy sure to anger Ice Age purists everywhere.
  8. The Girl from Monaco
    Isn't slow-paced. It’s slick and audience-friendly.
  9. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    Listening to Berg's characters talk so naturally, honestly, and colorfully about the small, surmountable problems of their daily life is so engaging that whenever Kempner cuts away to another dry historian or fervent fan, it's doubly aggravating.
  10. Adam
    Dancy’s character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.
  11. Taking Woodstock
    Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions.
  12. Amreeka
    Amreeka lacks the sense of humor that set "Aliens In America" apart--and frankly, it’s rarely as insightful about the biases and strengths either of Arab émigrés or of sheltered Midwesterners.
  13. Capitalism: A Love Story
    The tone is so smart-ass that it’s bound to put a lot of viewers into a default defensive posture.
  14. More Than a Game
    Belman doesn’t look into the bigger problems of James’ team jet-setting across the country during the school year, or the spectacle allowed to build up around him. He cares most about what happens on the court, which is diverting and fun as far as it goes, but not close to the whole story.
  15. The Wedding Song
    It takes more than just the ominous tread of Nazi boots to infuse gravitas into this well-intentioned but dreary look at the female mind and body during wartime.
  16. The Karate Kid
    That the film works as well as it does--as an attractive, rousing time-passer for children--speaks more to the endurance of a good formula than its revitalization.
  17. Frozen
    While the actors are game, their characters are awfully generic.
  18. The Crazies
    The crazies themselves could be a lot more terrifying. Without the rotting ickiness of proper zombies, they just seem like methed-out Iowans looking for a fix. That’s scary, but not scary enough.
  19. Alice in Wonderland
    The best adaptations have found ways to put a personal stamp on the familiar stories. Others have simply reproduced an Alice facsimile in the image of their own era. Surprisingly, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland belongs to the latter camp. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, just another frustratingly impersonal one from a director who once had trouble compacting his personality down to movie size.
  20. Brooklyn's Finest
    To quote Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.
  21. Repo Men
    It’s a time-waster with brains, but ultimately not enough brains, and one that wastes too much time.
  22. Hot Tub Time Machine
    Engaging enough, but its characters’ path to redemption would be more satisfying if it weren’t greased with authentically ’80s-style casual sexism, gay panic, and frat-comedy clichés.
  23. Chloe
    It all goes awry in the end, but for a good stretch, Chloe neatly fixes Egoyan’s career-long obsessions with identity and communication to the familiar framework of the erotic thriller.
  24. Lethal Weapon 3
    The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.
  25. North Face
    The historical backdrop is fascinating and an important part of this story, but there’s a pervasive sense that director Philipp Stölzl and his screenwriters soft-pedal it as much as possible in order to exalt their heroes.
  26. 24 City
    Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
  27. Eat Pray Love
    Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.
  28. Survival of the Dead
    Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn't provide enough reason for them to be.
  29. MacGruber
    It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.
  30. Robin Hood
    Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.
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