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. Only God Forgives
    The results are sometimes striking, in pure visual terms, but rarely engaging; even as a brutish saga of underworld retribution, the film fails to get the heart pounding.
  2. Pieta
    Too bad both actors are stuck in a hollow provocation. Pietà may be all about the burden of debt—financial, spiritual, or otherwise — but it’s the audience that really pays a price.
  3. Arthur Newman
    Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it’s all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path.
  4. Passion
    Passion, De Palma’s latest film, will irritate the faithful for about an hour, then thrill them as the master abruptly springs to life and starts carving up screen space with his usual reckless precision.
  5. Thérèse
    A second-act forest fire proves a handy metaphor for Tautou’s slowly burning rage at confinement. Yet while it seems thematically apt, it’s also wholly out of place in this static, emotionless saga, which is defined less by zealous feeling than by a dull, decorous air of respectability.
  6. Dracula Untold
    More sad dad and noble martyr than creature of the night, Evans’ dashing Prince Of Darkness inspires less fear than just about any incarnation of the famous character, save perhaps the one played by Leslie Nielsen.
  7. Heaven Is for Real
    Unfortunately, Heaven Is For Real isn’t really a movie about religion so much as an attempt to appeal to the broadest possible audience of conservative evangelicals.
  8. And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
    Had this moronic part been given to almost anybody else — including folks as talented as, say, Robin Williams or Jim Carrey — the result would very likely have been an unmitigated disaster. Greenwood, however, commits to it wholeheartedly, much the way that Naomi Watts’ struggling actress character treated her hackneyed soap-opera dialogue in Mulholland Drive.
  9. The Guillotines
    The Guillotines expends most of its energy in its first 30 minutes, leaving the audience with roughly 90 minutes of soapy Qing Dynasty fan fiction.
  10. Redemption
    When Redemption works, it’s as a series of writerly miniatures fleshed out by Statham’s street-tough charisma and Chris Menges’ neon-soaked nighttime camerawork.
  11. The Congress
    It’s a folly of the first order, but one that many people will nonetheless want to see, if only because it’s so out there.
  12. Diana
    There’s a germ of a smart biopic in Diana; the problem is that it’s tucked away behind a clunky structure and even clunkier dialogue.
  13. A Field in England
    It’s the period itself that’s front and center here — not in the usual sense of historical accuracy, but as a sort of theater of the bizarre that allows Wheatley and his wife, screenwriter Amy Jump, to indulge in dementia.
  14. A Girl and a Gun
    Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it can’t maintain its muddled thesis for even that brief period.
  15. 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.
  16. Jimmy P.
    Casting two great actors as doctor and patient helps a little.
  17. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is kind of infuriating, mostly because it tries to so hard to be innocuous.
  18. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.
  19. Adore
    The setup promises more intrigue than the film ultimately delivers.
  20. Afternoon Delight
    Alas, the film, which had at worst seemed unfocused (not a cardinal sin for a comedy), takes a bizarrely reactionary turn in the homestretch, undermining all of the goodwill Hahn had accumulated up to that point and turning her character into detestable yuppie scum.
  21. Mood Indigo
    No amount of imaginative trickery can fill the void of feeling at the movie’s center. Whimsy for whimsy’s sake is just too much to take.
  22. The Canyons
    In The Canyons, there’s no pleasure — only power struggles disguised as sex.
  23. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    Coupled with a failure to comprehensively detail tactical patterns or the processes of transporting or fencing stolen goods, Smash & Grab’s inability to truly get underneath the surface of its subjects renders it merely a compelling true-life tale in need of better telling.
  24. Belle
    This effectively turns a story about race into a story about rank.
  25. Haunter
    It’s likely too dark to please the girls who might otherwise relate to its story and star, and probably too simple and pitch-positive for genre fans.
  26. Million Dollar Arm
    Million Dollar Arm is the kind of sports movie that crams everything subject-specific into quick-cut montages to make room for maudlin drama and fish-out-of-water comedy — a baseball flick where no one is actually shown playing baseball.
  27. Chappie
    Like "Elysium," this rusty A.I. story is basically just "District 9" with a new coat of paint; it’s distinguished only by the jabbering, irritating personality of its title character.
  28. Concussion
    The viewer is presented with a series of caustic, vignette-like scenes which tease bigger themes but end before they can tackle them, as though the film had accidentally started a conversation it didn’t want to have — an impression underscored by the tidy, arbitrary ending.
  29. Moebius
    A viewer familiar with the filmmaker’s latter-day schtick can’t help but wonder: How can an artist be so persistent in his use of symbols, and yet never manage to develop them beyond a rudimentary metaphorical framework?
  30. Palo Alto
    In distancing itself from its disaffected characters, Palo Alto evokes only more emptiness — and emptiness has a habit of being dull.
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