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 Water Diviner
    His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.
  2. Final Destination 5
    While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.
  3. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    As with the previous films, there are as many ludicrous plot holes as there are genuinely surprising twists, and little of what happens in the story would hold up to any kind of scrutiny. (Why are these stage magicians so well-trained in hand-to-hand combat?) But that’s part of the fun too.
  4. The Marvels
    Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.
  5. No Strings Attached
    No Strings Attached isn't a BAD piece of formulaic product.
  6. Swiri
    An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.
  7. A Bag of Hammers
    The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.
  8. Closed Circuit
    Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.
  9. A.C.O.D.
    Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.
  10. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    The fundamental problem is that Tricked is more mildly amusing than funny, and most of said amusement comes from the pacing, which is one uninterrupted sprint.
  11. Holidays
    Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.
  12. Roustabout
    Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.
  13. Bloodline
    Director Henry Jacobson’s gory thriller is initially quite effective when it complements the lies families tell each other with arcs of jugular blood.
  14. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.
  15. For Colored Girls
    There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.
  16. They Will Kill You
    After so many smirky bloodfests, They Will Kill You scarcely needs believable human relationships to earn some goodwill. All it really needs is Beetz convincingly going through hell.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    Not much reason to see this one, because in 1961 Disney made an animated version called 101 Dalmatians, which is better.
  18. Spare Parts
    In its mad hurry, the movie denies itself its own genre pleasures—chiefly, the ways assembling a ragtag robotics team and an equally ragtag robot might add a little bit of Mission: Impossible or MacGyver dynamics into a sports-style narrative.
  19. Armored
    It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.
  20. Red State
    Red State is gloriously unencumbered by fidelity to genre conventions, which lends it a thrilling element of unpredictability even when the action frequently grows shrill and heavy-handed.
  21. Hit and Run
    There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.
  22. Freeheld
    Nowhere the film goes is unexpected... but the plainspoken Freeheld charts a mostly admirable course there.
  23. Eat Pray Love
    Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.
  24. Brothers
    Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.
  25. Elektra Luxx
    As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.
  26. Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.
  27. The Rules of Attraction
    Propelled by a fine Tomandandy score and a savvy assortment of seductive new-wave hits, Attraction is top-notch trash, a guilty pleasure designed for the decadent 14-year-old in everyone.
  28. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    There are multiple reasons why Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is such an entertaining movie even now, but the biggest is that Matheson, Solomon, and director Stephen Herek found the perfect Bill and Ted in Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, two young actors with just the right boyish energy.
  29. Constantine
    Reeves rigid delivery makes Constantine's occult backstory sound pretentious and silly, and converts Constantine himself into a repressed cipher. The film's biggest revision isn't in not making him blonde, or not making him British. It's in not making him human.
  30. A Good Person
    Asking the question “what makes a good person” might have been an intriguing idea. However, in trying to come up with an answer, A Good Person ends up presenting an overwrought narrative that’s full of cliches that do not resonate.
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