The A.V. Club's Scores

For 10,425 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:
10425 movie reviews
  1. The story is still mostly fabulous, and its novelty helps carry the film, but this still comes across like a poor high-school stage version: sincere and kind of sweet, but endlessly clumsy.
  2. Throughout its first two acts, Bandslam is charming, sweet, and funny enough to merit inclusion in the upper echelon of teen comedies. Then comes a third act weighed down with arbitrary romantic conflicts, leaden melodrama, and a tiresome subplot.
  3. About Piven: When did it go wrong? When did the caustic character actor guaranteed to liven up even the dullest movie turn into a walking black hole of smarm from which no joy can escape?
  4. Nearly a quarter of the way through Earth Days, the movie seems on-track to being just another tongue-clucking “Isn’t it a pity” doc, painted in broad strokes.
  5. The resulting jam session ought to be a music geek’s wet dream, but there isn’t enough common ground to produce more than a few flashes of inspiration.
  6. Frequently funny, for those who can stomach it.
  7. Neither pro- nor anti-war; it’s a somber study of perpetually unsettled lives.
  8. Even if you know what’s coming, it’s a neat bit of meta-thriller filmmaking, as much about the mechanics of storytelling as a reasonably satisfying example of it.
  9. Two movies in one. That’s one more movie than it needs to be.
  10. The premise seems profound, but the claustrophobically inert execution lacks reach or imagination.
  11. The Rise Of Cobra holds to a thrill-ride sensibility that’s unchallenging and more than a little goofy, but exciting and consistently well-managed.
  12. Bujalski’s funny, diverting character piece has a lived-in quality that’s no small achievement.
  13. The movie goes out on a high, but until then, it plays almost like the pilot for a TV series. But it would be a GOOD TV series.
  14. This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.
  15. It's refreshingly unformulaic, but a rambling mess. It's also tremendously funny.
  16. The Cove's ultimate message gets muddled, especially since Psihoyos limits all counter-arguments to a few inarticulate or thuggish boobs.
  17. Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.
  18. Like those mild old Disney comedies of the ’60s and ’70s, it seems perfectly content with being a harmless distraction.
  19. For his directorial debut, The Collector, Dunstan streamlines the "Saw" concept slightly by silencing the killer and focusing more intently on a house that’s been converted into a jury-rigged deathtrap.
  20. Lorna's Silence feels like a refinement, even a repetition, of earlier themes. But the brothers are repeating themselves at such a high level that the redundancies are more than welcome.
  21. Think of Not Quite Hollywood as a vividly illustrated catalogue of astonishing smut.
  22. One of the most expensive Danish movies ever made, and at times, it's glossy to a fault.
  23. Dancy’s character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.
  24. You, The Living, if only by virtue of a more intimate scale than Songs, benefits from a lightness of touch and even a thin sliver of optimism in some sequences.
  25. In The Loop floats above its chaotic world on wave after wave of beautifully profane dialogue.
  26. If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) set out to make a parody of horror-film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly.
  27. The sort of rom-com apparatus that no relationship can overcome.
  28. Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film.
  29. Unoriginality is the greatest and most flagrant of its many sins.
  30. Shrink is exactly like virtually all his (Spacey) post-"American Beauty" vehicles: flashy, phony, nakedly melodramatic, and full of big actorly moments disconnected from real life.

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