The A.V. Club's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 5,575 out of 10425
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10425
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10425
10425 movie reviews
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  1. Wonderful World
    Broderick’s tendency to hang all his problems on corporate greed and heartless bureaucracy leads to some strange missteps.
  2. Creation
    What begins as a multilayered tale of scientific discovery and cultural history gets reduced to a single maudlin idea: that even Charles Darwin had to evolve.
  3. The Yellow Handkerchief
    It’s nice to see a film unafraid to be quiet and sensitive, but one good gust of coastal breeze would blow this one away.
  4. The Runaways
    They're now the first major all-girl punk band to inspire a bleary, excessive, and altogether mediocre big-screen biography.
  5. Clash of the Titans
    Modestly entertaining by the low standards of spring blockbusters. As with "Transporter 2" and "The Incredible Hulk," Leterrier aims no higher than competence and achieves just that.
  6. Around the Bend
    There are good ideas in Around The Bend, but they're presented in outline form, as the bare, dry bones of what could have been a living body.
  7. Die Another Day
    The many shots of characters operating devices with remote controls will do little to quiet the complaints that the films have started to resemble video games, and the same can be said of the proliferating digital effects.
  8. Mule Skinner Blues
    Comes uncomfortably close to mocking these unlikely filmmakers, raising questions about its director's intentions and his respect for the subjects' humanity.
  9. Slap Her... She's French
    Mayron tries for a junior-league "All About Eve," but that backfires horribly, not least because her diabolical Eve (Perabo) is more charismatic and imaginative than her heroine.
  10. Ordinary Sinner
    In spite of a little bit of sex and a lot of strong profanity, Ordinary Sinner is pretty reminiscent of an old Afterschool Special.
  11. Painted Fire
    In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The School of Flesh
    Unfortunately, contrary to the provocative title, the results are not terribly interesting. While the acting is excellent and the filmmaking exquisite, The School Of Flesh itself is yet another dry example of l'amour fou.
  13. Onmyoji: The Yin Yang Master
    The film de-emphasizes plot and action in favor of lyricism and outbursts of magic-doing, but the results are more dull than enchanting, no matter how many people fly across the room.
  14. Crop Circles: Quest for Truth
    The film remains frustratingly focused on uncontextualized individual events rather than the phenomenon as a whole, and as such, it rapidly becomes redundant in its grainy, washed-out digital-video images of excited people poking at bent plants, or studying and manipulating computer-generated images.
  15. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie's heart is clearly in the right place -- but the Thornberry family's grotesquely huge heads, jutting teeth, stick limbs, and mismatched bodies look even more improbable and unpleasant on the big screen than they do on their TV show.
  16. Suddenly
    Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.
  17. DysFunktional Family
    If its star were more consistently funny, it might have worked, but the film opens with a string of dreadful Sept. 11 gags and takes a while to recover.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Voice
    Though it's got some funny one-liners, sight gags, and Blethyn's over-the-top histrionics, Little Voice is often painfully dramatic, right down to its final mother-daughter confrontation.
  19. Ha-Hesder
    Ultimately, writer-director Joseph Cedar has created a film that resembles a subtitled very special episode of "JAG."
  20. Escaflowne: The Movie
    The film's life-affirming fable offers a richer metaphorical subtext than Vision's intricate coming-of-age soap opera. Unfortunately, clumsy dialogue, characterization, and exposition interfere with that subtext.
  21. Returning Mickey Stern
    Sports broad, sitcom-ish performances and a surprising amount of sweetness and wisdom.
  22. The Triumph of Love
    Shaw and Kingsley both create crisp, comic performances, but Sorvino remains a problem throughout. Her physical transformation falls short of the "Boys Don't Cry" standard, to put it mildly.
  23. Food of Love
    A reserved coming-of-age story that overcomes flat acting and one-dimensional scene-building thanks to its lively plot.
  24. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.
  25. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    On the whole, the filmmakers hold too much to the text, and too often employ the smugly knowing, self-righteous tone typical of British telejournalism.
  26. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    Where the too-rarefied style and the too-simple substance meet, a compromise is reached, and something uniquely haunting is formed.
  27. Maelstrom
    For a movie about identity to have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the bloody talking fishes.
  28. Lucky Break
    The big musical setpiece, rife with possibilities for humor and uplift, needed to be funnier and more energetic than the half-hearted lyrics and choreography bother to muster.
  29. Bad Company
    Company almost seems like the product of a post-Sept. 11 world. Like a cartoon version of a real threat, the villains are terrorists of a non-specific nationality with an ill-defined anti-American agenda and a tendency to spout complaints too clichéd to take seriously.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    20 Dates
    Fact or fiction, it's still fun, if never really compelling.
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