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. Dorian Blues
    Dorian Blues covers extremely familiar territory, but does so with low-key wit and ingratiating charm.
  2. The City of Your Final Destination
    It’s a frustratingly oblique film where few events connect, and fewer moments matter.
  3. Remember
    Egoyan will not be getting an Oscar nomination for this picture. But after a long creative slump, he may have found a new calling.
  4. Fay Grim
    Sadly, there's a thin line between goofing irreverently on the maddeningly convoluted nature of spy thrillers and actually being a muddled mess, and Fay Grim crosses it constantly during its deadly second hour.
  5. The Mothman Prophecies
    Nonetheless, the film never amounts to more than the sum of a few good moments, and it leaves the aftertaste of a second-tier X-Files episode.
  6. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    In the wake of T"he Passion Of The Christ," the three-hour chore takes on some positive qualities it wouldn't have had otherwise.
  7. Greendale
    There's no forgiving the home-movie slackness of Greendale for its numbing dearth of imagination.
  8. Blade II
    Everything "Blade" should have been but wasn't: stylish, fast-paced, and comfortable with its own ridiculousness.
  9. Wolf
    What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.
  10. Coming 2 America
    Coming 2 America—with its endless callbacks and Easter eggs—seems all too ready to rely on nostalgia. It’s clearly meant to function as a celebration of the original film’s enduring legacy. Fans should just watch that movie again instead.
  11. Insidious: Chapter 3
    The motif of grief runs throughout Insidious: Chapter 3, which is surprisingly thematically rich for the third installment of a horror franchise. This emotional undercurrent informs the fright scenes, which otherwise lean rather heavily on jump scares.
  12. Who Do You Love
    Works best when it isn’t about freezing time and explaining moments in pop-music history, but is instead about guys playing music together.
  13. 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.
  14. Citizen Koch
    What ultimately helps Citizen Koch rise above the dozens of other movies like it is a focus not just on recent developments in American politics, but also on the bedrock of what has made this country such an enduringly great, astoundingly troubled experiment: one person, one vote.
  15. Kill Your Idols
    One of the film's oddest aspects is the way the 2002 footage appears more dated than the scenes from 1978.
  16. Cuban Fury
    Only one scene — the very one that Pegg shows up in — demonstrates any real creativity, and even that mostly amounts to a couple of goofy dudes attempting to intimidate each other with terrible dance moves.
  17. Gridiron Gang
    None of their stories are particularly resonant, but the film is really about a grand social experiment gone right, and it succeeds well enough on that front, even while it isn't that convincing in the particulars.
  18. Pusher (2012)
    Luis Prieto's remake capably mimics the original's breakneck energy without adding a single thing. It seems to exist mostly to stuff more violence into Britain's insatiable maw for crime pictures.
  19. The Lodgers
    It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.
  20. Boulevard
    It doesn’t help that Boulevard is a movie that feels at least a decade past its sell-by date, if not two.
  21. The Lake House
    Elegantly scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn, The Lake House never establishes any clear rules about how and when these strands of time can intertwine, but it succeeds at forging a bond between people who only know each other on the page.
  22. Deadfall
    The best parts of Deadfall are absorbed into a scenario that frequently ditches the cat-and-mouse routine and tries instead to be about three dysfunctional families working toward reconciliation.
  23. Trap
    On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.
  24. Death on the Nile
    Death On The Nile feels chintzier in every respect, with a much lower-wattage cast of potential murderers and a digitally summoned exotic locale about as immersive as a screensaver. If a viewer didn’t know better, they might assume they were seeing the fourth or fifth entry in a sputtering franchise, not the direct follow-up to a global box-office hit.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bean
    When Atkinson tries to stretch familiar Beanisms into 80 minutes, the results are mostly unsatisfying.
  26. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    It's handsomely mounted, and its heart seems in the right place, but that's not reason enough to put on a show.
  27. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    The remake features riveting tension, assured performances, and hallmarks of an exciting new director’s narrative fascinations, all while the politics of its central dynamic continue to cry out for examination.
  28. Eternals
    Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat?
  29. 47 Meters Down
    47 Meters Down never remotely approaches greatness, but for an hour or so, its unfussy, workmanlike portrait of ordinary people in crisis (plus killer sharks) gets the job done.
  30. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Day, who’s very good, moves through it with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is as much a star in the green room as she is onstage, faced with applause or the harsh bathroom-mirror reflection of abuse and addiction. But many of the other characters might as well be reading off of cue cards.
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