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. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.
  2. Resident Evil: Retribution
    At this point, the Resident Evil movie franchise has become a personal playground for husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich; every few years, they find another excuse to pit Jovovich's videogame-inspired dark superhero, Alice, against zombies and other gruesome monsters.
  3. Hunter Killer
    The problem with this sort of Hungry-Man dinner theater is that it needs a true believer or at least a testosterone junkie behind the camera to rise above the lowest-common-denominator appeal of watching men yell at and rescue each other. Donovan Marsh is neither; his direction is perfunctory, unable to evoke even something as basic as the claustrophobia of a submarine’s interior. Perhaps he’s just following orders.
  4. Good Deeds
    As Wesley Deeds - get it? - Perry is stripped of Madea's fat suit and fright wig, but his performance is so muted, he might as well be swaddled in cloth.
  5. Despicable Me 2
    What’s missing — and this was the crucial component of part one — is a little sour to undercut the sweet. Like its protagonist, a bad guy gone boringly good, Despicable Me 2 has no edge. It’s fatally nice and insufficiently naughty.
  6. Halloween
    Halloween isn’t explicitly a horror-comedy, but it does have the destructive habit of undercutting its scares with broad laughs, Green and McBride deflating the tension at every turn with goofball asides.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Etc.
    It's too bad the wanness of the majority of those storylines makes it seem more like a fling than a relationship with any chance of going the distance.
  8. R.I.P.D.
    Nothing short of wiping their memories with a real-life neuralizer is going to convince moviegoers that the supernatural buddy-cop comedy R.I.P.D. is anything more than a thinly disguised "Men In Black" ripoff.
  9. Seventh Son
    Seventh Son is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself.
  10. Epic
    Epic is heavy on celebrity voices and light on imagination.
  11. The Watch
    In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tanner Hall
    The result isn't bad, it just lacks momentum and a strong reason for existing.
  13. Outrage
    Outrage is compelling to watch until it becomes exhausting.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bunraku
    Bunraku comes up frustratingly empty, and just as many of its elements simply bloat an overlong run time. (Demi Moore shows up seemingly to give the film more than one female speaking part.) It looks good, but Bunraku feels like a Frankenstein's monster of references that someone failed to animate.
  15. The Lucky One
    As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.
  16. The Woman in the Fifth
    In spite of his considerable intelligence and cinematic gifts, Pawlikowski isn't Roman Polanski, so the delusions and psychosis of his put-upon lead character doesn't have the right intensity. Fifth feels like a literary bauble, chipped by imperfections.
  17. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    In spite of a promising start, an unconventional setup, attractive photography, and game lead performances from Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing quickly turns into exactly the sort of wet cardboard box of a movie its title suggests.
  18. I, Frankenstein
    If the film is made with the understanding that campiness needs to be straight-faced to be funny, then are its “unintentional” laughs really that unintentional?
  19. Taken 2
    None of it is particularly novel or exciting.
  20. Warm Bodies
    For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.
  21. The Other F Word
    The film's juxtaposition of punk-rock fashion and cozy domesticity proves neither comic nor revelatory. It is, however, adorable, though not adorable enough to compensate for the film's damnable lack of focus.
  22. Angels Crest
    Angels Crest has weaknesses that are tough to overcome. It relies too much on two particularly played-out indie clichés: a spare, plunky soundtrack, and a narrative structure that teases out characters' backstory far longer than necessary.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Roadie
    Aside from the entertaining specificity about its setting and its protagonist's profession, Roadie is as disappointingly rote as its standard setup suggests.
  24. Sparkle
    The film spends so little time developing its characters, apart from all that expository dialogue, that it's like asking audiences to care for paper dolls. And Sparkle never delivers on the promise of its most famous song by giving viewers something they can feel.
  25. It's About You
    It's About You's sound is relatively clean and dynamic, but there's nothing remotely resembling a narrative here.
  26. Frankenweenie
    While Frankenweenie is pleasant enough as a curated tour through horror's past, it doesn't add much to its present.
  27. Escape from Planet Earth
    It’s unchallenging fun for a younger crowd, but adults might feel like they’re staring down a colorful 24-piece board puzzle, trying to figure out how such a simple activity could be drawn out over 90 minutes.
  28. We Have a Pope
    It's a shame that a movie about the pope as a man shows such scant fascination with the actual papacy - or with humanity, for that matter.
  29. The Swell Season
    It's too focused on capturing a bygone moment and portraying it as the present, while the band and the couple have inevitably moved on, to a new album, a high-profile suicide at one of their concerts, a band hiatus, and well beyond.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    Olsen, so good in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," is stuck playing a judgmental scold, while Wolff waves a video camera around and insists he wants to be Werner Herzog.
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