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 Catcher Was a Spy
    Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."
  2. Little
    Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2
    Chapter 2 delivers the same type of creaky but not uncharming Western melodrama as the first installment, but talks and walks like a film that doesn’t understand what’s at stake.
  4. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.
  5. Tristan and Isolde
    Moves so sluggishly that someone must have been dosing the cast and crew with Nyquil.
  6. V/H/S/2
    In nearly every respect, V/H/S/2 improves on its predecessor. Free of poky mumble-horror filler, it offers four fruitful variations on the original’s best chapter.
  7. Spirit Untamed
    Though it’s nominally liberated from its TV backstory, Spirit Untamed could still have benefited from a little more freedom.
  8. Insidious: The Last Key
    A clumsy and internally confused sequel to Insidious: Chapter 3 (which was, uh, a prequel to the first film) that offers strictly mechanical jolts.
  9. Reminders of Him
    While the plot isn’t realistic, it’s deeply felt, which is what these kinds of melodramas are supposed to offer. It’s a leaps and bounds improvement over Regretting You, and though Reminders Of Him has fewer grace notes than It Ends With Us, it’s got a more cohesive, meaningful message.
  10. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    It's all good-natured enough. It just isn't actually good.
  11. Stuck in Love
    As writer-director Josh Boone introduces these characters, he superimposes words on the screen to suggest how they channel their thoughts and conversations into their work. But that’s the extent of the film’s interest in writing, which serves strictly as a “classy” backdrop for a series of painfully contrived amorous meltdowns among a family who might as well run a dry-cleaning business.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    When Comedy Went to School
    Not all styles of humor stand the test of time, and the documentary When Comedy Went To School, about the Borscht Belt stand-ups who worked the Catskills during the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, helplessly drives the point home.
  13. I Think I Love My Wife
    Though hampered at times by Rock's limitations as an actor and a director, I Think I Love My Wife stays faithful to the spirit of Rohmer's original, grappling honestly with the uncertainties of settling down and the temptations that lurk outside even the most stable marriages.
  14. Riddick
    In an era of high-falutin’ tentpole sci-fi, there’s something to be said for a filmmaker still devoted to crafting plain old genre pleasures.
  15. Cooties
    Before Cooties is a zombie movie, it is an earnest-young-teacher movie that diligently subscribes to every cliché of the form.
  16. Slumber Party Massacre II
    Surreal, silly, and blessed with decent rock songs by Go-Go’s-esque girl-group Wednesday Week, SPM II doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s memorable.
  17. Spenser Confidential
    While the partnership between Wahlberg and actor-turned-director Peter Berg has produced a few duds since the success of Lone Survivor, none have been as generically mediocre. At the very least, one can appreciate it for being environmentally friendly.
  18. Men in Black II
    None of it sticks, but with the door left open for a third Men In Black movie, the one advantage of forgetting everything is not knowing exactly what's coming two summers from now.
  19. Around the World in 80 Days
    Finds a winning formula: Chan provides the action, various exotic lands serve up props begging to be employed in Chan-style combat, Coogan brings the dry wit, a minor constellation of surprise guest stars provides razzle-dazzle, and a steady stream of mild chuckles helps the whole fandango fly by painlessly.
  20. The Flying Scotsman
    There's real triumph to Obree's story, and real adversity, too, but the film contents itself with the pretend versions of both.
  21. Everybody Has a Plan
    Apart from the novelty of seeing Mortensen act in Spanish, there’s virtually nothing of interest, and even he does little more than confirm that a performance can be monosyllabic in any language.
  22. The Black Dahlia
    Hartnett and co-star Scarlett Johansson--that most fatale of current filmic femmes--are naturals for this kind of noir-hued material, but the pairing of Ellroy and De Palma proves a marriage made in hardboiled heaven.
  23. Welcome to the Punch
    Writer-director Eran Creevy demonstrates little facility for kineticism — one of the movie’s best scenes gets flat-out ruined when he abruptly shifts to hackneyed slo-mo — and his cynical plot gets so convoluted that one of the bad guys has to break it down for the audience in a climactic monologue-at-gunpoint.
  24. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Unfortunately, Felt’s actions, while historically important, don’t exactly make for riveting drama, especially compared to a classic about two dogged reporters. Nor does the film succeed in making Felt himself particularly interesting, except perhaps as a proxy—purely by coincidence, one assumes, given any movie’s lengthy gestation period—for another, recently terminated FBI honcho.
  25. An Unfinished Life
    It's corny, but the film might have worked anyway, had anyone brought a lick of conviction to the business. But Lopez--once such a promising actress--now does little but pose, and everyone else seems to have figured out that the film wasn't going anywhere before the cameras started rolling.
  26. How to Make a Killing
    At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.
  27. Imagine Me & You
    The film nearly works in spite of its adherence to formula, thanks to clever one-liners and appealing, sharply drawn supporting performances.
  28. Hatchet II
    Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.
  29. Blood Done Sign My Name
    Draws attention to a little-known chapter in the history of the civil-rights movement, but it doesn’t do much to pull that moment into the present, or to pull the audience into the past.
  30. Stalingrad
    The film calms down a bit in its second half, leaving more room for Bondarchuk’s striking wartime tableaux, making occasional use of its native 3-D cinematography. (The movie, a massive success in Russia last year, will screen primarily in IMAX 3D venues in the U.S.)
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