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. Autumn
    The one bit of artsy business that McGee pulls off well is the recurring image of snapshots, serving as a kind of map to who these people were and who they're becoming.
  2. The Dilemma
    It never coheres as well as it should, but the film makes a fine mess.
  3. Wrong Turn
    Although its many complications quickly devolve into absurdity, Wrong Turn does deserve some credit for the boldness with which it deviates from its franchise inspiration. This is no paint-by-numbers remake. And although it’s just got way too much going on, the gore is gnarly, the paranoia is palpable, and the characters, while sometimes annoying, have motivations and arcs that make sense.
  4. Gringo
    Solid chunks of the screwball humor land like bricks, and the characters — most of them idiots, a**holes, or suckers — are colorfully over-the-top but not especially memorable.
  5. Wonder Wheel
    Wonder Wheel is uncomfortably revealing, its real-life parallels too blatant to be anything but intentional. But to what end?
  6. Typhoon
    This may be the biggest production in Korean-film history, but viewers should search elsewhere for a better sampling of what the country has to offer.
  7. Now You See Me 2
    Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.
  8. Dr. Dolittle
    Isn't as sharp or consistent as Murphy's "The Nutty Professor," but it's an amusing, lightweight diversion.
  9. Payback
    Consider that in “Point Blank,” Lee Marvin walks through the film with the look of a man who's lost his soul. You can see it in his eyes. Look in Gibson's eyes in this one and you'll see soullessness, but it doesn't seem to come from anywhere within his character.
  10. The Little Death
    The Little Death never feels remotely of a piece, and is likely to find its proper audience months from now when the individual sketches show up on YouTube.
  11. Jellyfish
    Jellyfish takes the kitchen-sink approach, piling on external inequities and indignities on its protagonist.
  12. Red Tails
    The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.
  13. Burke and Hare
    The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.
  14. Desert Wind
    The problem with Desert Wind is that Kohler takes everything at face value. Wouldn't it have been more useful to make this trip the centerpiece of a longer documentary that follows the men before Tunisia and, more importantly, after?
  15. Medieval
    Jákl’s film is precisely as generic as its title would suggest, and what little there is to recommend is buried under a mountain of tedium
  16. In the Tall Grass
    The movie is a mixed bag, well shot and well acted enough to mostly keep the viewer’s attention, but meandering enough to frustrate at the same time. It’s bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.
  17. Mercy
    With Glenn offscreen for huge sections of the film, Mercy devolves into yet another navel-gazing drama about a glib cad redeemed by the love of a good woman.
  18. The Broken Tower
    It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.
  19. Agnes and His Brothers
    Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.
  20. The Flowers of War
    Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."
  21. Ballad of a Small Player
    Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt.
  22. Breakthrough
    Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clay Pigeons
    Perhaps this will seem fresh and interesting years down the road, when the self-aware-thriller genre has long played out, but for now, it's a tired horse that should have been put down in the pitch meeting.
  24. Deliver Us from Eva
    Hardwick switches gears from wacky comedy to romantic drama about halfway through Deliver Us, but it's too late, and what follows is far too dull to make any difference.
  25. Foreign Sister
    The particulars of her situation are well-imagined, but Wolman's characters remain little more than mouthpieces.
  26. The Nanny Diaries
    The film belongs to Linney, whose caustic putdowns and status-seeking veneer barely hides her genuine hurt over her husband's philandering and her distant relationship to her own child. No doubt her diaries would be more compelling than the nanny's.
  27. Reservation Road
    It's a relentlessly downbeat, well-acted melodrama that's easy to admire, but intentionally impossible to enjoy.
  28. Picture Perfect
    Though "extremely mediocre" may seem like an oxymoron, no phrase better defines Picture Perfect. Aside from wearing, with visual discomfort, a series of absurdly revealing dresses, Aniston does little to distance herself from her "Friends" persona with this slightly less likable character.
  29. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The handful of songs are catchy, and the whole film feels pleasantly airy. But this is a dark story with a heavy message, and it's been transformed into a harmless, pretty confection. In defanging it for comic effect, the filmmakers have done Seuss as much of a disrespectful disservice as if they'd laid on the fart gags.
  30. My Spy
    The action material in My Spy undermines its would-be cuteness, while remaining questionable on a level of cheap thrills.
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