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. Trash
    But while once upon a time Daldry made a very good movie like "Billy Elliot", here he lets what should’ve been an efficient little thriller get stymied by an excess of style, and the weight of self-importance.
  2. After the Wedding
    Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Whatever emotional heft the pic may aim to harness is lost amid glib jokes, overly complicated mythic lore, and ultimately, pat platitudes about embracing who you were always meant to be.
  4. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    Fur is that rare movie that's TOO understated, so quiet and deliberate that it effectively buries consuming passions.
  5. Champions
    Harrelson is enjoyable as always, and the rest of the cast delivers, but the film is too warm, fuzzy, predictable, and by the numbers to be anything more than a pleasant diversion that will vanish from your mind by the time you leave the multiplex.
  6. The Campaign
    Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.
  7. My Policeman
    Instead of a classic tragic romance, it ends up being a turgid, airless concoction. Styles’ fans might find something to admire since they’ll get to gaze at their idol. But the rest of us should avoid looking.
  8. Ticket to Paradise
    It’s as if everyone made this movie about the joy of being on vacation—while also taking one.
  9. Storytelling
    It would be tempting to call Storytelling a narrow and simplistic examination of the creative process, if only Solondz weren't so quick to agree.
  10. Garage Days
    Proyas is a veteran music-video director, and for its first half the film feels like one long video, albeit in a good way. He initially lets music and images tell his story rather than words, but in its second half, Garage Days succumbs to its overreaching, convoluted plot.
  11. Letters to Juliet
    If well done, a film like Letters To Juliet should need no surprises. But it does need more than the postcard-ready vistas against which director Gary Winick (13 Going On 30) frames much of the action.
  12. 3 from Hell
    In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.
  13. The Island
    An overblown science-fiction epic in which ostensibly unthinking, unfeeling stem-cell-like entities not only think and feel, but look and act like glamorous movie stars.
  14. Lottery Ticket
    Lottery Ticket gets far on the strength of its star's charisma and a likeable tone.
  15. The Ten
    The early, explosively funny skits and a loose, engagingly adventurous spirit are enough to ensure this uneven but often delightful project the cult fame that accompanies pretty much everything associated with Stella mainstay Wain.
  16. Look
    Aside from a smattering of irony and a resolution for one of the storylines, the security cameras aren't really threaded into Look's essential purpose. If the idea is that we're always being watched, why does it seem that in this movie, no one's really paying attention?
  17. You People
    For the first half-hour, Netflix has a high-concept hit on its hands. Pause it there, and imagine the rest—you won’t do any worse than Barris and Hill’s script at conceiving an ending.
  18. Blast from the Past
    The first 20 minutes of Blast From The Past, in which the film actually does something with its central concept, aren't that bad.
  19. Child of God
    As a McCarthy adaptation, it’s an abject failure; as a piece of art - damaged trash, it occasionally delivers the requisite squirms. Visually and thematically, it has less in common with "No Country For Old Men" or "The Counselor" than with ’90s shot-on-VHS gonzo efforts like "Red Spirit Lake."
  20. My Super Ex-Girlfriend
    Confusing gender issues like the ones dredged up in Ex-Girlfriend call to mind another Reitman dud, the pregnant-Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy "Junior," and the sophistication level has only slightly improved since then.
  21. Step Up 2: The Streets
    The central romance is terminally bland, while Evigan's woozy family melodrama seems borrowed from countless superior dance movies.
  22. Welcome to the Rileys
    The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.
  23. As I Lay Dying
    Like Franco’s other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation—interesting, but only in context.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely Molly
    Lovely Molly is a portrait of either spiraling madness or a haunting, and it deftly handles the slow erosion of its title character's consciousness. Landing somewhere between "Repulsion" and "Paranormal Activity," it keeps the jump scares to a minimum and allows its formidable lead performance to be its best special effect.
  25. Home on the Range
    A sweet, raucously funny, comic Western that corrects a glaring historical injustice by finally surveying the Old West through the eyes of cows rather than cowboys.
  26. Straight-Jacket
    Loses its sass too quickly.
  27. The Case for Christ
    The Case For Christ is pretty slow going, tedious rather than offensive, with Strobel repeatedly whiteboarding out the evidence as callback voice-overs add up all the pieces until he’s convinced. “All right, God,” he finally says. “You win.”
  28. Poseidon
    "Titanic" without the metaphors, the class-consciousness, the love story, or anything resembling a theme, Poseidon invests so little in its screenplay that it might as well be an episode of "The Love Boat" gone horribly awry.
  29. Now You See Me
    Now You See Me, which is essentially an "Ocean’s" movie recast with illusionists, demands a kind of childlike fascination with swindles, and a willingness to be hoodwinked along with the characters. Walk in with those expectations and it won’t be hard to see the appeal of this ludicrous but spirited caper, which has nearly as many rug-pulls as game movie stars.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Wide Awake
    The interest-generating theme of a boy coping with loss is made top-heavy with cuteness, causing it to collapse a quarter of the way through Wide Awake, never to recover.
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