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. Halloween II (2009)
    Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.
  2. Centurion
    Centurion offers little beyond viscera for its own sake, without anything like the bold abstraction of "Valhalla Rising."
  3. Secretariat
    The film ultimately feels like a well-trod journey to a familiar destination with not enough wonder along the way.
  4. Student Bodies
    What Student Bodies lacks in incisiveness—and laughs, frankly—it makes up in gusto. The advantage of having a creative team drawn from middle-aged pros with decades of industry experience is that they knew how to put together a picture teeming with ideas and shot through with energy.
  5. Machete
    It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.
  6. Conviction
    Conviction is like "Erin Brockovich" meets "Rudy."
  7. Faster
    Faster starts to lay on a heavy-handed message about the importance of forgiveness. That isn't what anyone showed up to see.
  8. The Green Hornet
    It's a strange, shapeless, rarely satisfying, but generally amiable movie in which everyone appears to be faking it as they go along, and almost-almost-getting away with it.
  9. Neshoba
    For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.
  10. Hideaway (Le refuge)
    Hideaway bottles up stormy feelings of grief, guilt, and desire so tightly that register only in a few sharp, impetuous bursts. The rest of the time, it's dull and inscrutable-a film of almost vaporous subtlety.
  11. Kings of Pastry
    In a pressure-cooker environment, Pennebaker and Hegedus' moderately engaging but ultimately unsatisfying documentary feels disappointingly lukewarm.
  12. Made in Dagenham
    Make no mistake. In spite of its worthy subject matter and good intentions, Made In Dagenham remains mediocre to the core.
  13. The Next Three Days
    Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.
  14. Douchebag
    At 70 minutes, Douchebag feels both rushed and way too slack, but the bigger problem is that the kind of characters and humor this movie traffics in can be found in a more compact, amusing package on the average FX show.
  15. 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?
  16. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    It's rarely tedious, but it's also rarely insightful or propulsive, and since there's nothing new to discover about the characters or their world, much of the film feels like a protracted, contrived pause, as everyone waits for Rapace to finally get back into the game.
  17. Gnomeo and Juliet
    Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.
  18. Nénette
    As with all of Philibert's work, Nénette is impeccably composed and admirably disciplined, but his patient observation can't unlock the mysteries of an animal that's grown more introspective and likely less expressive over time.
  19. Jumping the Broom
    While Broom largely isn't a broad comedy, it still rarely goes for restraint in anything but tone.
  20. Hanna
    Superficially exciting and handled with great aplomb. But the film is running to go nowhere.
  21. Soul Surfer
    Unique as an inspirational personal-achievement film in the way it focuses on the protagonist not merely as a bastion of strength, but as part of a supportive community and family.
  22. The Other Woman
    The book may have been too unwieldy for Roos to wrangle. There's a lot of story (and backstory) here, which Roos tries to squeeze in every which way.
  23. Vanishing on 7th Street
    Vanishing On 7th Street does work well as a kind of mood-piece, observing all the ways we surround ourselves with the illusion of warmth and security, before the shadows creep in.
  24. One for the Money
    During a dinner with Stephanie's colorfully ethnic family, including a squandered Debbie Reynolds, the reaction shots arrive with bludgeoning regularity, and the soundtrack's burbling organ serves as an incessant reminder not to take anything seriously. Fortunately, there's no danger of that.
  25. Of Gods and Men
    Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.
  26. Colombiana
    It uses a story about family as a vehicle for glorifying gangsterism. In other words, it's empty, amoral, and - in the style of other Besson productions - surprisingly easy to digest.
  27. Puss in Boots
    As a sheer visual experience, Puss In Boots makes a great theme-park ride, a thrill-a-minute feast for the eyes and the semicircular canals.
  28. Brighton Rock
    Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    London Boulevard
    The directorial debut of William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Departed," London Boulevard collapses under the weight of its own ideas and the amount of talent it has to burn.
  30. The Raven
    Poe was a flawed figure, but his greatest strength was in avoiding convention, or reinterpreting it to create something new. The Raven aspires to both, but abandons those ambitions to lie limply on the floor - only this, and nothing more.
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