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. The Next Three Days
    Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.
  2. The Weird World of Blowfly
    The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.
  3. G20
    If G20 barely registers as original, its star remains commanding. Even when Davis dutifully goes through the motions as stern government official Amanda Waller in the recent DC films, she seems incapable of phoning in a role or winking to the audience.
  4. Maggie
    The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.
  5. VHYes
    Unfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    This comedy from writer-director Philippe Le Guay is really a testament to how much more charming things sound in French, given how much its setup parallels that of James L. Brooks' clunkier 2004 "Spanglish," complete with a blonde harpy of a spouse.
  7. Bomb the System
    Has an exhilarating edge. It's only when they open their mouths that the movie gets into trouble.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    London Boulevard
    The directorial debut of William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Departed," London Boulevard collapses under the weight of its own ideas and the amount of talent it has to burn.
  9. The Hills Have Eyes
    Thanks to assured direction and a fine cast, Hills isn't terrible, only terribly unnecessary.
  10. Murder on the Orient Express
    Suspense remains a foreign concept for actor-director Kenneth Branagh. His erratic direction — more interested in cut glass and overhead shots than in suspicions and uncertainties — bungles both the perfect puzzle logic of the crime and its devious solution.
  11. Nanny McPhee Returns
    On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.
  12. Eleanor the Great
    This tonally tricky comedy-drama tackles aging, loss, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and the difficulty of determining the truth in a fake-news world. But Johansson’s well-meaning film couldn’t be more aggravating, and its biggest problem is its insistence that we find Eleanor so damn endearing, no matter what.
  13. [Rec] 2
    What Balagueró and Plaza lose in novelty, they partially gain back by sheer relentlessness: The film is a slab of raw meat for horror addicts, impeccably crafted mayhem that clocks in at under 90 minutes. Just don’t give it too much thought.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Putin's Kiss maintains a wry distance that unnecessarily trivializes the shocking act that finalizes Drokova's parting of ways with Nashi, but the melancholy of her disillusionment remains. Underneath all this heated discussion of democracy in Russia, it becomes clear, there may not be much actual democracy at work.
  15. Electric Dreams
    For all the liberties it takes with what the computers of that era could really do, Electric Dreams offers a portrait of our relationship to technology that’s fairly prescient—while still being silly in that early-’80s Radio Shack kind of way, of course.
  16. Three Amigos!
    Martin’s script—co-written with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and songwriter Randy Newman—is full of inspired bits of comic business, such as Martin making a “lookuphere!” bird call to get his chums’ attention, Chase pouring water all over his face while his mates’ canteens are dry, and the Amigos summoning an invisible swordsman whom Chase accidentally shoots.
  17. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.
  18. House of Fools
    Never finds any forward momentum, but Vysotskaya's sweet performance and the unsubtle but effective use of the war-torn asylum as a stand-in for the former USSR keep it compelling.
  19. Ghost River
    La Vie Promise's style is too slick for the subject matter.
  20. Possession
    For a film that depends so much on the interaction between words and passion -- and the drama of how each shapes the other -- the shortage of both leaves Possession looking like nothing more than an "Indiana Jones" in which card catalogs stand in for treasure maps, and footnotes for bullwhips.
  21. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    The story is thrown together in the most perfunctory way possible, and director Steve Miner's ("Friday The 13th Part 3: 3D," "My Father The Hero") idea of a scary moment is having things spookily jump out of the blue.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Know What You Did Last Summer
    The characters are never really more than stereotypes (the brain, the beauty, the dreamer, the jock), but as the body count begins to mount, you feel their terror build.
  23. Loot
    Undoubtedly, everything documentarian Darius Marder shows in his debut film Loot actually happened, but Marder’s approach to this “truth is stranger than fiction” story is so forced that the movie FEELS phony.
  24. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
  25. Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
  26. The Amateur
    It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
  27. Greed
    Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure.
  28. SuperFly
    When the new SuperFly does show flashes of street-smart wit...its energy is infectious. Mostly, though, it needs to take its hero’s advice and take things up a notch.
  29. Winter in the Blood
    Cursed with a vague, rambling script and an equally indistinct lead performance, the film is a scattershot series of vignettes about self-definition that, ultimately, never coheres into a lucid whole.
  30. Gracie
    There's a reason the underdog sports formula is followed over and over: When it's executed as skillfully as it is here, the damned thing works every time.
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