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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    • 33 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    After Earth
    Shyamalan’s sensibility may not be enough to turn After Earth into a great (or even very good) film, but it does yield interesting — and at times strikingly realized — results.
  2. Norman
    Chances are, Norman would have seemed like a retread whenever it came out, but it does the movie no favors to release it in the shadow of "Terri" and "Submarine," both far more compelling portraits of high-school loners, and both released to DVD in the last few weeks.
  3. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Here and there, some of this starts to feel a little less like homework and more like fun. Though part one used up many of the good monsters—like Medusa and the hydra—part two is a fleeter entertainment, free of origin-story requirements.
  4. The Great Gatsby
    Like Romeo + Juliet (1996), Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby emerges as a half-reverent, half-travestying adaptation that’s campy but not a betrayal, offering a lively take on a familiar work while sacrificing such niceties as structure, character, and nuance.
  5. Young Goethe in Love
    Whatever its basis in fact, there's nothing to Young Goethe In Love's story that dozens of other films haven't done before, and better. But Fehling keeps his Goethe just on the right side of obnoxious, and Stein invests a lot of character and gawky charm into what easily could have been just "the girl."
  6. Broken City
    In spite of some punchy scenes, crackling dialogue, and fine performances, Broken City is hopelessly overmatched. It has Academy Award dreams, but a detective-show heart.
  7. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Assault
    Brisk and technically efficient, The Assault is a dull film based on a real event that certainly wasn't.
  9. Norwegian Wood
    Tran's visual precision is betrayed by his jumbled script, which fails to impose a cinematic structure on the source material.
  10. The Flowers of War
    Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."
  11. Hyde Park on Hudson
    Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.
  12. Black Butterflies
    At least Black Butterflies gets the tortured-soul part right.
  13. Detention
    Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.
  14. Brake
    Ridiculousness aside, though, Brake is reasonably impressive both as a performance piece and as an exercise in staging.
  15. Bombay Beach
    This aestheticizing of troubled lives proves problematic over the long haul.
  16. Windfall
    Windfall is undeniably persuasive - and is likely advocating on the right side of the wind-farm issue - but the movie's case relies more on emotional appeals and frightening images of giant machines than on real, objective number-crunching.
  17. Your Sister's Sister
    This time out, Shelton seems to be playing the part of someone who doesn't know how to finish what she started.
  18. Good for Nothing
    Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    Even in an old T-shirt and scruff of beard, Hall seems too canny and calculated a presence to entirely inhabit this man-child role, which lends a compelling edge to an otherwise scattershot story of urban misadventure and coming of age.
  20. The FP
    The FP feels like a junky, disposable lark, created for a midnight audience to swallow, belch, and forget about the next morning.
  21. Identity Thief
    Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
  22. Touchback
    Entering the minor canon of movies named after sports regulations - move over, "Offside!" - Don Handfield's Touchback takes a handoff from "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "It's A Wonderful Life" and runs it up the middle for a modest gain.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard offers glimpses of the ragged heyday of grunge that are so compelling, it's a shame the film didn't stay with them instead of continuing along a standard story of a rock 'n' roll downfall by way of drug addiction followed by a slow recovery.
  24. The Intouchables
    Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    360
    Fittingly for its occasional ring imagery, 360 is hollow in the middle.
  26. End of Watch
    Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.
  27. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.
  28. People Like Us
    Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.
  29. Womb
    It's a fascinating film to think about, but far too cool to touch.
  30. How to Grow a Band
    Thile has the charisma, presence, and emotional transparency of a great documentary subject, but How To Grow A Band maintains a respectable distance from its subject that ultimately doesn't work in its favor.
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