The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,447 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: 5,587 out of 10447
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10447
  3. Negative: 1,114 out of 10447
10447 movie reviews
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  1. Southbound
    Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.
  2. Shrek the Third
    Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.
  3. The Finest Hours
    As charming as the early scenes are, The Finest Hours doesn’t really come together as a love story, either, and Affleck’s scenes on the tanker are too abbreviated to really sink in as great survival drama.
  4. The Trust
    When it comes to the disposable VOD fare that Cage and Travolta have made a side career out of indiscriminately embracing, minor pleasures are a major improvement.
  5. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    The new English track is predictably clumsy, but the story and images overcome it.
  6. The Tree
    Yes, the idea that the tree/father is literally tearing this family apart is way too blunt, but Gainsbourg and Davies sell it by playing the scenes naturally, with minimal histrionics.
  7. The Seagull
    He’s (Mayer) assembled a terrific cast and mostly stayed out of their way, but the result still feels frustratingly arm’s-length, lacking the odd electricity of Louis Malle’s semi-staged "Vanya On 42nd Street."
  8. City of Ember
    Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.
  9. The Night Before
    The Night Before isn’t Rogen’s funniest movie. Minute for minute, it doesn’t have as many laughs as "Superbad," "Neighbors," or "This Is The End," among others. But it does contain one of Rogen’s funniest performances, as Isaac navigates a very long and very bad drug trip, a responsibility-free Christmas gift from his wife.
  10. Hotel Artemis
    We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.
  11. Undisputed
    A triumph of craft and narrative economy, the darkly funny Undisputed is as lean, mean, and skillful as its competing heavyweights.
  12. May
    May represents something rare and unfashionable-–a smart, twisted little slasher comedy that doesn't skimp on the gore.
  13. Ocean's Twelve
    What it retains is a playful sense of style, that combines with an anything-goes spirit.
  14. Our Man in Tehran
    The story can’t help but work — even when its directors are beating viewers over the head with the message.
  15. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.
  16. Freakonomics
    Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.
  17. Away We Go
    Though Away We Go lacks the screwball unpredictability of something like "Flirting With Disaster," it compensates with a unexpected depth of feeling, a novelist’s (or memoirist’s) sense of detail, and a panoramic view of what home means.
  18. 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.
  19. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is not an entirely coherent film. It is, for the right and wrong reasons, a distinctive and memorable one.
  20. Escape from Tomorrow
    The more outlandish the film becomes, especially in its off-the-rails second half, the less crucial its unique setting seems.
  21. The Greasy Strangler
    It’s not an attractive comparison, but The Greasy Strangler in some ways recalls "The Human Centipede III," in that it raises questions about a filmmaker’s relationship with the viewer. This is a far better and less offensive film than Tom Six’s, but it also comes custom-built to discomfit the majority of its audience.
  22. Glory Road
    Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.
  23. Gemma Bovery
    It’s minor, clever, and essential in the specialized field of Gemma Arterton studies.
  24. 9 to 5
    The movie is surprisingly smart about the politics of the glass ceiling, which keeps Tomlin in a pink-collar supervisor position while every man she trains gets promoted past her. The way Coleman asserts his masculinity with phrases like "cut the balls off the competition," and the way our heroic trio works together to sculpt a worker's paradise—complete with flex-time and day-care facilities—serves as an effective summary of the era's hot-button issues.
  25. We Bought a Zoo
    It's an odd, unsatisfying combination that moves from mopey drama one moment to a reaction shot of a monkey smacking his forehead in exasperation the next. By the end of the film, viewers might understand the monkey's feelings all too well.
  26. No Place on Earth
    This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.
  27. Low Down
    Low Down keeps the histrionics to a minimum, but the inertia of a good man failing to be a good father isn’t enough to sustain nearly two hours of reflection, especially when Preiss consistently suggests that telling Amy’s story from Joe’s perspective would have made for a much better film.
  28. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    One of the better aspects of Search is that with Spock out of the action, the rest of the crew gets a chance to fill up the vacuum of his absence, and we get a much stronger sense of Kirk, Uhura, Chekov, McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu as a family unit, and not just a bunch of people who work together.
  29. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    It's a classic B-movie move of making much out of little, and while Let's Scare Jessica To Death isn't quite a top-rank B-movie classic, it at least offers further proof that all the teen-idol stars and CGI effects—or a logical plot, for that matter—mean nothing if they don't make you scared to turn out the lights.
  30. Everything Is Illuminated
    But the parts of Foer's lively novel that didn't get cut in the script stage have died on the way to the screen. To be fair, it's not an easy novel to adapt.
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