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. 7 Chinese Brothers
    Bob Byington’s 7 Chinese Brothers is no "Listen Up Philip," but it’s an amiable enough slacker comedy, boosted by its star.
  2. Diary of a Chambermaid
    In spurts, it resembles an homage to classic French cinema and an overheated, Tinto Brass-esque Euro skin flick, but still finds plenty of room for stultifying, upstairs-downstairs costume drama.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Citizen Gangster
    It feels like Morlando is juggling two movies at a time. And only one of them works really well-the one about a disaffected workaday vet avenging himself on the banality of his daily grind.
  4. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  5. The Last Vermeer
    There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been good hokey pseudo-historical fun along the lines of, say, The Imitation Game. (Let’s just ignore that some folks perceived that film as Oscar-worthy.) All it required was putting the exceptional character front and center throughout, rather than shrouding his gift in pointlessly vague mystery.
  6. The Funhouse
    Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.
  7. It's What's Inside
    While the film’s social commentary isn’t radically incisive, it does manage to capture the nature of a true party game: excitement initially abounds, but you can’t play along forever.
  8. Concussion
    The viewer is presented with a series of caustic, vignette-like scenes which tease bigger themes but end before they can tackle them, as though the film had accidentally started a conversation it didn’t want to have — an impression underscored by the tidy, arbitrary ending.
  9. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.
  10. Game 6
    Hoffman makes impressive use of his low budget, thanks to a talented cast, an atmospheric soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, and the general feeling of confidence that a veteran director can bring to a project. But too much of Game 6 is designed to seem deeper than it really is.
  11. Adrift
    Given the sweetly dull-witted relationship at its center, Adrift threatens to bog itself down with the endless intercutting back and forth in time. But the movie has a little more up its sleeves, narratively speaking, than first appears, and Kormákur converges the two timelines effectively.
  12. Fever Pitch
    Barrymore has rarely been so bright and effortlessly charming, but it's all lost on Fallon, who often resembles one of those unfortunate SNL guests who freeze up on live TV, completely out of their element. If Fallon wants a life after SNL, he might want to try another medium.
  13. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.
  14. Monster
    There’s plenty of complexity to be mined from a scenario in which perception carries more weight than the truth, but director Anthony Mandler, a music video and commercial veteran making his feature debut, takes a broad-strokes approach to Steve’s plight.
  15. Winter Passing
    Winter Passing is full of nice dramatic turns, including one from relative-unknown Amelia Warner as Harris' former student-turned-nanny (and possible lover). What Winter Passing lacks, however, is a reason to exist other than as a dramatic exercise.
  16. Tag
    There’s something mildly depressing about viewing petty gamesmanship as the engine that fuels and sustains male friendship. But funny is funny, and Tag gets by, appropriately enough, on the personalities of its stars.
  17. 13 Ghosts
    What Castle’s films lack in originality, they make up for in carnival energy and an eagerness to please.
  18. Across the Universe
    It's all very clever and thought-through, but all the allusions don't much bolster the bland central romance or the paper-thin treatment of '60s social issues.
  19. Harsh Times
    Ayer gets lost in a maze of ironies, and has to bulldoze his way to an exit. For a while, Harsh Times is thrillingly hard to predict. By the end, it becomes all too easy.
  20. Jackass 3-D
    It's easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn't criticism so much as high praise.
  21. Human Nature
    Nature lacks a little of Malkovich's freshness, but that's just about all it lacks.
  22. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    A glossy, attractive, ultimately empty soap opera that -- despite being based on a true story -- never seems remotely plausible.
  23. A Dirty Shame
    Embracing ugliness, lousy production values, and borderline hysteria as virtues, A Dirty Shame is one for the cultists, a proud retreat back into the sandbox of sexual juvenilia, a potty-mouthed manifesto from an elder statesman of shock.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Return to Paradise
    Although Vaughn and Heche do a decent job in standard roles, the movie bogs itself down with enough silly plot twists and subplots to effectively dilute the viewers' interest.
  25. Capital
    The imagery is cliché, and therefore ineffective; the characters don’t seem to operate in the world of finance, but in the world of financial thrillers.
  26. a-ha: the Movie
    It’s a compelling tale of three perfectionists who consider music to be their bond, but don’t work together very well unless they have to.
  27. Transporter 2
    Chucks the laws of logic and physics out the passenger's-side window, and it's all the better for it.
  28. Million Dollar Arm
    Million Dollar Arm is the kind of sports movie that crams everything subject-specific into quick-cut montages to make room for maudlin drama and fish-out-of-water comedy — a baseball flick where no one is actually shown playing baseball.
  29. Mimic
    The latter half, set in the less visited parts of New York's subway system, bogs down considerably, abandoning its hybrid approach and becoming content to simply clone Aliens.
  30. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s a film that is functioning on a very specific artistic wavelength that requires one to buy into it completely in order to fully appreciate its delights. Whether that specific frequency is too obtuse for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts for ’70s sci-fi is up for debate, but the curious would best be served to experience this strange new world for themselves.
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