The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,427 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 2.6 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: 5,576 out of 10427
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10427
  3. Negative: 1,110 out of 10427
10427 movie reviews
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  1. Takers
    Rapper, producer, and mogul Tip "T.I." Harris was recently named "global creative consultant" for Rémy Martin cognac. Coincidentally or not, he's also the star and producer of Takers, a heist thriller that feels suspiciously like a feature-length commercial for expensive liquor.
  2. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.
  3. The Last Exorcism
    Aided by strong performances from Bell and Fabian, Stamm deftly plays with the boundary of fact and fiction, though his game might have worked better with a little more grounding in verisimilitude.
  4. Centurion
    Centurion offers little beyond viscera for its own sake, without anything like the bold abstraction of "Valhalla Rising."
  5. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Thompson's cast is too large for her to make the best use of her ingenious story-structure.
  6. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk Of Sorrow is lousy with allegory, and is often too heavy for its own good.
  7. Piranha 3-D
    Piranha 3D realizes its guilty-pleasure camp potential for about a minute and a half, proving yet again that there's no concept so foolproof filmmakers can't screw it up.
  8. Lottery Ticket
    Lottery Ticket gets far on the strength of its star's charisma and a likeable tone.
  9. Mao's Last Dancer
    It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.
  10. Nanny McPhee Returns
    On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.
  11. The Switch
    Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.
  12. The Tillman Story
    In the propaganda-filled realms of politics, sports, and the military, that kind of no-bullsh-- -allowed truth feels cathartic. No wonder the Tillman family has spent much of the last 10 years fighting for it.
  13. Soul Kitchen
    Soul Kitchen plays everything big and loud-and sometimes too doggedly conventional-but it's the rare example of a crowd-pleaser made without cynicism or calculation.
  14. A Film Unfinished
    A Film Unfinished is affecting as a rare document of a terrible place and time, and those who lived there.
  15. Vampires Suck
    The boys similarly deserve very minor props for choosing a satirical target that lends itself to satire: the glum, self-important Twilight novels and movies. Sadly, that's where the filmmakers' mild accomplishments end and the groaningly predictable hackwork begins.
  16. 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.
  17. The Expendables
    Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.
  18. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    So why, given its moment-to-moment surplus of visual imagination, does the film feel so hollow and unsatisfying?
  19. Animal Kingdom
    Animal Kingdom joins in the tradition of brutally unsentimental Australian crime dramas like "The Boys," in which the stakes are low, except to the people staring down the barrel of a gun.
  20. Peepli Live
    Peepli Live has a lot in common with Billy Wilder's black comedy Ace In The Hole, in that it explores the cynicism of modern life with wit and honesty.
  21. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    It's disheartening that a story with roots in autobiography, no matter how tentative, should end up as such an impersonal genre rehash.
  22. 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.
  23. Step Up 3-D
    The advanced 3-D technology of today meets the mothballed clichés of yesteryear in Step Up 3D.
  24. The Other Guys
    Great casting takes The Other Guys most of the way: Ferrell draws a wealth of good material from his character's oddball ineffectuality, and he partners perfectly with Wahlberg, who's always best at his most incredulous.
  25. Cairo Time
    It's a postcard-lovely movie that, in spite of its best intentions, ends up feeling a little touristy.
  26. Flipped
    This results in a film that spells everything out visually, then further elaborates through groaningly obvious dialogue, then drives every point home for slow-witted audiences via shameless narration.
  27. Middle Men
    Like Ribisi and Macht's miniature porn empire, Gallo's mildly diverting but overstuffed, underdeveloped opus could use the cinematic equivalent of a fix-it man like Wilson's character to transform its frenetic jumble of subplots and sleazy characters into a cohesive, satisfying whole.
  28. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    A clever little contraption, even though it runs into the problem that a lot of twist-heavy suspense movies have: Once it's spooned out all its surprises about two-thirds of the way through, it loses a lot of its entertainment value.
  29. The Wildest Dream
    Given the subject matter, the answer to "Why watch this doc?" should be "Because it is fantastic." But Geffen, like Everest, will have to settle for "Because it is there."
  30. Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
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