The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Parts of Get Rich Or Die Tryin' crackle with energy, vitality, and texture, like the prison-shower fight that descends into a weird sort of slapstick farce. But 50's leaden turn drags the film down. Scenes celebrating his personal and professional triumph ring hollow, since Rich never really gets under his skin.
  2. Firewall
    Everything here is a known quantity except one question that could have been inspired by a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: How many twists does it take to finally, at long last, get to the predictable ending?
  3. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe feels like a homemade quilt: It's warm and comforting, but visually busy, with a repeating pattern that some will find stuffy and overwhelming.
  4. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights In Maine’s grieving has a short-story quality, and many movies would do well to follow that model.
  5. Mr. Brooks
    Sadly, only Hurt seems to recognize that the only way to make this material work is to play it with lunatic enthusiasm instead of grave seriousness.
  6. Madea's Big Happy Family
    Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.
  7. The Deep End of the Ocean
    It's not the implausibility of its plot, the shallowness of its characters, its funereal pace, its tenuous understanding of teenage behavior, its commercial-ready TV-movie-style direction, or the fact that Pfeiffer and Williams may be the most implausible Italian-Americans since James Caan -- the film is most undone by its near-complete lack of genuine drama.
  8. Maid in Manhattan
    Wang loses himself in an old-fashioned script that tries to recall the classic screwball ensembles of Golden Age Hollywood, but lacks the cascading wit to pull it off.
  9. Latter Days
    Stranding an able supporting cast in mostly disposable roles--including Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Kay Place, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Amber Benson--Cox writes himself into several corners, then plots honking contrivances to get out of them.
  10. Love Me If You Dare
    The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.
  11. Evergreen
    Evergreen suffers from creeping indie-itis, epitomized by the low-light digital video and droning electric-guitar soundtrack, but its biggest weakness lies in Zentelis' apparent fear of surprise.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    The roughness of Happy Life's production values and the inconsistency of its amateur actors would be forgivable if it showed any heart, but this low-budget ramble about techno's glory days instead inspires relief that things have moved on.
  13. Valiant
    It was made fast and cheap, which shows in every none-too-slick frame.
  14. American Dreamz
    Weitz has a winning way with a one-liner, and he's recruited a stellar cast that gets the most out of his material.
  15. The Possession
    The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.
  16. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    Apart from Cruz, who throws herself lustily into her tough-seductress role, the actors give negligible performances, with McShane, Rush, and Keith Richards in a repeat cameo all playing nigh-identical smug glowerers.
  17. By the Sea
    Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
  18. Damien: Omen II
    The film could be subtitled A Portrait Of The Anti-Christ As A Young Man. The emphasis has been shifted from parental anxiety to the frustration of a boy struggling to identify—and then reconcile—his demonic birthright.
  19. A Minecraft Movie
    A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.
  20. 23 Blast
    It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.
  21. The Paperboy
    So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
  22. Unforgettable
    Which brings us to the fatal flaw in Unforgettable: With its formulaic story and hackneyed dialogue, all there is to do in between moments of self-aware outrageousness is admire the decor, like an Anthropologie catalog punctuated with the occasional knife wound.
  23. The Marine
    While The Marine proves a poor showcase for the charisma-impaired Cena, it's a terrific vehicle for world-class heavy Patrick, who is clearly enjoying himself as the kind of deranged lunatic who interrupts a long string of felonies to confirm the details of his new cable package.
  24. Digging Up the Marrow
    More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.
  25. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
  26. Click
    Charlie Kaufman could have made a great movie out of Click, a soupy existential comedy about a "universal remote" that lets a man magically rewind, fast-forward, and pause his life.
  27. Blindness
    There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
  28. The Leisure Seeker
    This particular film is a collection of cutesy “going in style” clichés — old lady on a motorcycle? Check. Senior-citizen oral sex joke? Check. — compiled into a road movie with shades of "About Schmidt" and "Little Miss Sunshine," and a morbid streak that comes in to cut the quirkiness just a little bit too late.
  29. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.
  30. Pride and Glory
    Norton is infamous for rewriting scripts and acting as a de facto director on his movies yet he seems lost and defeated here.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »