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. They Remain
    Beyond the performances, They Remain is uneven. The film uses a series of innovative, old-school visual tricks to create a surreal and hallucinatory vibe, and when something works, it’s powerful and discomfiting.
  2. Soul Men
    For all its crudeness and desperation, Soul Men can't scare up a single laugh.
  3. Silent House
    There's probably a graduate thesis to be drawn from this, about what audiences want from horror films, and ways to make viewers uncomfortable with their own voyeuristic desires, but that doesn't make the thrills any less sour, or the end any less exploitative. (Or worse, dull.)
  4. The Best of Enemies
    Bissell’s fudging of the facts (which includes completely making up the reasons behind the charrette) doesn’t create a story that’s more insightful or dramatically cohesive than the real thing; the only thing it reveals, if indirectly, is liberalism’s longstanding discomfort with the relationship between civil rights and labor movements.
  5. Hart's War
    In its amalgam of classic Hollywood war movies and courtroom dramas, Hart's War takes the audience to a place that never existed in order to teach it a lesson it already knows.
  6. The Emperor's Club
    The film is an old-fashioned morality play writ extra-large, applying a heavy, austere tone to a sequence of events that can't bear the load. The burden falls mostly on Kevin Kline, who trades in his lithe, expressive comedic gifts for a dramatic role that fits him like a straitjacket and a pair of lead shoes.
  7. The Mechanic
    Couple that with actual acting-Statham is the most winning action hero around, and Foster brings some nuance that the script probably doesn't deserve-and it's bloody fun.
  8. Firebird
    Prior and Zagorodnii have a fair amount of chemistry, although both are so Fashion Week gorgeous that it edges Firebird near soft-core territory.
  9. Gold
    Gold is fitfully entertaining, but for a movie that gives itself license to go bigger and weirder than real life, its imagination for excess runs out whenever it isn’t focused intently on its star.
  10. Army of Thieves
    The idea of a group of decidedly minor-league cons trying to make it into the major leagues, maybe with a Now You See Me standard of realism, is not unappealing. But the promise of a brainless good time proves false once the actual thieving begins.
  11. Son of a Gun
    Unfortunately, this promising material turns out to be merely the setup for a thoroughly generic action flick in which a gang of thieves without much honor attempt to pull off one last big heist. In the long, dispiriting slide to mediocrity thereafter, McGregor largely relapses into cute-rascal mode.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Griff the Invisible
    The little glimpses of everyday magic on offer here are lovely, from a "universe suit" to a porous apartment door, but they're not enough to hang a film or a life on.
  13. 7 Days in Entebbe
    Lacking both the exploitation-movie claustrophobic urgency of Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt" and the Irwin Allen-disaster-film factor of the Irvin Kershner-directed NBC version, "Raid On Entebbe," 7 Days instead goes for businesslike professionalism.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Front Room
    It simply isn’t very scary.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    There is solid filmmaking to enjoy. It’s just hard to know what it’s all for.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rio 2
    Like the first film, Rio 2 is almost oppressively bright, bombarding the screen with flashes of saturated rainforest colors and even a bird version of soccer (timed a bit too perfectly to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil).
  17. 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.
  18. Live by Night
    The smoothness of the movie’s individual sequences bumps up against narrative raggedness, as Affleck labors to compress a sprawling, novel-ready narrative.
  19. Scary Movie 3
    Sneaks in the occasional child-molestation or bestiality joke, but otherwise seems content to cannibalize the broad slapstick of Zucker's halcyon days with Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams.
  20. Oldboy
    For better and worse, Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair.
  21. Inkheart
    The story itself is so charmingly dense, fractious, and complicated that it frequently leaves the obvious good-guy-fights-bad-guy groove, and noses toward Terry Gilliam-esque randomness and ebullience.
  22. Return to Never Land
    The film crawls to a halt, its pace further marred by anemic, time-wasting pop songs. Even at 72 minutes, Never Land feels padded, while the animators make Never Land so unmagical that war-torn London seems preferable by comparison.
  23. Scotland, Pa.
    Shakespeare hasn't had it this rough since Lemmy from Motörhead performed the opening soliloquy in "Tromeo And Juliet."
  24. Rosenstrasse
    Von Trotta lingers for so long on the backstory and framing story that the movie's heart never comes to the fore.
  25. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    Like "Art & Copy," Ten9Eight is blindingly slick, with a glossy visual aesthetic more rooted in music videos and commercials than cinéma vérité.
  26. Pop Star on Ice
    Perhaps television will prove a better medium to explore Weir’s idiosyncrasies than this engaging yet superficial documentary.
  27. Devil's Pass
    Here’s the trouble: Devil’s Pass isn’t actually about the Dyatlov Pass Incident. It’s about five blandly good-looking American kids who decide to make a documentary about the Dyatlov Pass Incident but subsequently disappear in the same area, leaving behind — sigh — their camera equipment.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cake
    Director Daniel Barnz, who also made the unbearably earnest "Won’t Back Down," never wavers in his more-is-more conviction. Perhaps with a better script and in surer hands, Cake could have been salvaged.
  29. The Instigators
    Besides the cast, the best thing The Instigators has going for it is Liman’s pacing. Maybe in some earlier, irreversibly bygone era it would seem like less of a virtue, but there’s something to be said for a modern director who still has the skills necessary to move from one thing to another with a minimum of wasted time.
  30. Angel-A
    At heart, it's just the latest from one-man industry Luc Besson, so even though it looks like art, it plays like schlock.
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