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. Oxygono
    At the center of the movie, Tsimitselis makes for a disappointing blank, a pretty poster boy who leaves a long trail of emotional wreckage in his wake.
  2. Private
    For all its documentary-style urgency, Private often feels forced.
  3. In the Mix
    All Usher fans really seem to want out of a movie like this is an opportunity to ogle their idol for an hour and a half. And that's all this movie affords them.
  4. Rent
    Yes, Rent is the movie about AIDS, heroin addiction, homosexuality, strippers, marijuana, cross-dressing, and bisexuality audiences can take their grandparents to go see safe in the knowledge that any lingering trace of danger or authenticity has been carefully removed by director/co-writer Chris Columbus.
  5. The Boys of Baraka
    Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.
  6. Transamerica
    Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.
  7. The Kid & I
    Shamelessly manipulating his audience, wallowing in his highly questionable premise, and above all mocking himself, Arnold bulls ahead enthusiastically and without reservation, and in the process, he brings something like dignity to one of the least dignified movies in recent history.
  8. Fun with Dick and Jane
    So how can a project that began with such promise end up such a slick, pandering misfire? The answer, unsurprisingly, has a lot to do with Jim Carrey.
  9. Casanova
    At best, it's a light, boisterous little confection, but hasn't Hugh Grant already starred in this film a few times?
  10. Rumor Has It...
    Like the film itself, Ruffalo and Aniston exacerbate a bad, unfeasible idea with clumsy execution, exerting a whole lot of energy and effort for very little payoff.
  11. Hostel
    Roth gets the notes right while missing the music: He studiously replicates Miike's unblinking depiction of torture, but without much reflection or wit. It's merely unpleasant and more than a little dumb.
  12. Glory Road
    Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.
  13. A Good Woman
    The trick to staging Wilde is to hint at the gravity beneath the witticisms. A Good Woman barely even gets the witticisms out, though it does contain Wilde's line about people being either tedious or charming.
  14. Firewall
    Everything here is a known quantity except one question that could have been inspired by a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: How many twists does it take to finally, at long last, get to the predictable ending?
  15. London
    London has a distinct Off-Off-Broadway feel. There's a stagebound quality to its handful of claustrophobic locations, its endless assault of intense coke talk, and its third-rate invocation of David Mamet, David Rabe, and Neil LaBute.
  16. Through the Fire
    Through The Fire posits Telfair's good fortune as the belated fulfillment of Jamal's dreams and his family's desire to leave the projects, but it rarely gives a thought to the many thousands of gifted inner-city ballers who devote their lives to a goal that never materializes.
  17. Freedomland
    Only Edie Falco, appearing as a bereft mother leading a citizen's group that searches for missing children, suggests the great film that Freedomland might have been.
  18. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    The filmmakers don't seem to realize that if a movie with a mythology this groan-inducingly convoluted doesn't have a sense of humor about itself, the laughs are going to come anyway. They just won't be of the intentional variety.
  19. Tsotsi
    In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."
  20. Madea's Family Reunion
    Madea's Family Reunion represents an advance on Diary, if only because it dials down Madea's shtick (she no longer waves a gun around) and irons out some of those awkward tonal transitions. The chance that Perry's followers will leave disappointed is approximately 0 percent.
  21. Running Scared
    The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."
  22. 16 Blocks
    Richard Wenk's familiar screenplay laboriously establishes Willis as an exhausted, limping shell of a man rotting internally from decades of alcoholism and self-hatred. Yet whenever the film requires it, Willis magically morphs into a super-cop with the lightning-fast reflexes of an 18-year-old Navy SEAL.
  23. Don't Come Knocking
    It's a beautiful mess, but it's a mess all the same.
  24. Iluzija
    Ristovski wants the plight of a bullied moppet to serve as a sweeping metaphor for Macedonian struggle, but his miserablist excesses have the effect of converting realism into a graphic cartoon.
  25. Lonesome Jim
    It finds some fine comedic moments when it stops focusing on Affleck's never-ending angst and starts exploring small-town oddness.
  26. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    It's more like watching a typical animated-shorts collection - a few highlights, a lot of clinkers - than like watching an actual movie.
  27. Take the Lead
    Corny and uncool. Initially, it doesn't matter. Banderas is so winning in the lead that the film's early scenes are almost as persuasive as one of his lectures.
  28. Scary Movie 4
    The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.
  29. 4
    In spite of a handful of striking images--4 never resolves into anything special.
  30. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    For all its gender-bending, La Mujer De Mi Hermano's primary appeal is Mori's stunning beauty.
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