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. Camp
    Camp offers plenty of reasons to bristle at its cheery shamelessness, but it's too high-spirited and charming to resist.
  2. Street Kings
    After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
  3. Union Square
    There isn't much to Union Square, but the movie does understand how people want to love their families on their own terms, forgetting that their families may be the only ones who really know who they are.
  4. Money Monster
    Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.
  5. Yesterday
    Yesterday, Boyle’s new Beatles-centric dramedy, comes closer than he’s ever dared before — which makes this likable, hummable movie particularly disappointing when it fails to ignite the pop fireworks of his best work.
  6. Ambulance
    Ambulance is boilerplate Michael Bay, a thrill ride full of muscle and testosterone and style.
  7. The Purge: Election Year
    For all its flaws, Election Year has those baseline pleasures associated with violent American B-movies of the 1970s and ’80s — that mix of simplicity and scuzzy, juicy execution.
  8. Seven Years in Tibet
    Annaud has given Seven Years In Tibet an epic scope, packed with beautiful scenery, lush costumes, and elaborate sets. Which would all be well and good if they didn't often seem like the reason the movie exists.
  9. The Boogeyman
    These are jump scares done right, where the struggle to see what’s there is much more effective than any cheap lurch into frame.
  10. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
    It’s a watchably low-key family adventure, but that’s a low bar to clear for Nancy Drew, so well-suited to function as a gateway text—to Sherlock Holmes, Veronica Mars, Philip Marlowe, Brick, House, Encyclopedia Brown fanfic... almost anything involving advanced noticing.
    • 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.
  12. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    It may not have been what the producers had in mind, but they asked for a Paul Schrader movie, and that's exactly what he delivered.
  13. Wendy
    It suggests that Zeitlin, throwing more handfuls of fairy dust over an impoverished American South, is something of a lost boy himself. Like Pan and his posse, he stubbornly refuses to grow.
  14. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    As Ouimet, the always-terrific Shia LeBeouf is an oasis of depth in a film that otherwise can't pass up a sports-film cliché.
  15. Hellion
    Occasionally, the viewer gets the sense that the camera’s jittery swaying is meant to draw attention from the film’s clunkiness. Fragrance is a poor substitute for depth.
  16. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    With Bad, Perry is savvy enough to let riveting musical numbers by ringers like Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige--along with Henson’s deeply empathetic performance--carry the film’s feverish emotions more than his characteristically ham-fisted screenplay.
  17. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.
  18. Jackie & Ryan
    The cross-cutting duet it builds to, with two people singing the same song separated by hundreds of miles, is a nice musical moment, but just that: a moment. Ideally, even a low-key romantic drama should have more than one.
  19. The Truth About Charlie
    Though indisputably a thriller, Charlie abandons itself to little cinematic rhapsodies, self-reflexive asides, and montages of Paris locations cued to a soundtrack of cool French pop, all of which often seems more vital than the main order of business.
  20. P.S.
    While not dwelling on plot eventually gets P.S. in trouble during the slack finale, it gives Linney and Grace plenty of room to maneuver.
  21. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    I wish the film had made its points a little more artfully and implicitly, rather than simply sticking them in McDonald and McKinney’s mouths, but Brain Candy has an overarching satirical vision that makes it much more than just an assemblage of mostly funny running gags and stand-alone bits.
  22. 2 Guns
    As in "Contraband," Kormákur offers a hint of a political statement, in this case about the inherent potential for corruption whenever competing government agencies are operating in international territory. But it doesn’t quite make it. On almost every level, 2 Guns is content to be as flavorless and forgettable as its title.
  23. Legend
    When the two Krays are in the same room, circling each other with a mix of fraternal affection and deep loathing, Legend is as heady and unforgettable as it means to be. The rest of the time, it’s a movie with a lot of good points, but no connecting line.
  24. Don't Come Knocking
    It's a beautiful mess, but it's a mess all the same.
  25. About Time
    The movie is written and directed by the British filmmaker Richard Curtis, who specializes in fantasies — the dozen intersecting rom-coms of "Love Actually" the fairy-tale courtship of "Notting Hill", the endless receptions of "Four Weddings And A Funeral." At a glance, About Time appears to be of a piece with those crowd-pleasers.
  26. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Plays like an old-fashioned romantic comedy with updated hardware.
  27. 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.
  28. Safe
    The character-building is proffered in bad faith, like every scene in Safe that doesn't involve bloodshed. Statham can sell a punch, but not his own vulnerability.
  29. The Visit
    A refreshing (and memorably strange) genre piece, premised almost entirely on a child’s willingness to accept grown-up weirdness as long as it ensures stability.
  30. Nim's Island
    Directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin deliver some eye-catching fantasy sequences in the early scenes, but the film grows more mundane and the tone more uneven as it goes on.
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