The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. Passenger
    When in doubt, screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess so awkwardly rush back to genre conventions that it feels like Passenger failing a series of trust falls before our eyes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mirror Has Two Faces
    The problem with The Mirror Has Two Faces isn't Streisand's well-documented ego, or the movie's indirect, probably unintentional message that beauty makes all the difference when it comes to who loves you and why. It's that, at 130 minutes, it's long and plodding, with far too many cliches—the age-old spit-take scene, and so on—and inexplicable plot points.
  3. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    In Columbus’ hands, it once again all breaks down into a series of rushed, breathless special-effects setpieces, in a thrill ride that isn’t headed anywhere new.
  4. The Spy Next Door
    Chan’s anything-goes affability keeps the film from scraping bottom.
  5. Leap Year
    There isn’t a spontaneous or unpredictable moment in this loving, perversely reverent homage to rom-com, road-movie, and mismatched-romance conventions.
  6. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Sure enough, director Betty Thomas delivers pretty much the bare minimum: peppy, brightly colored, tune-filled nonsense sure to meet the low, low standards of its pre-kindergarten core audience.
  7. Surrogates
    Relentlessly plods from one dour moment to the next, coming to life only in a late-film car chase that takes the possibilities of a world filled with robots to an absurd extreme.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    In spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center.
  9. Gamer
    The trouble with Gamer is that it’s weird, but not weird enough for the long haul.
  10. New York, I Love You
    The segments don’t form anything like a coherent whole, but they aren’t distinctive enough to clash meaningfully with each other, either.
  11. The Time Traveler's Wife
    The story is still mostly fabulous, and its novelty helps carry the film, but this still comes across like a poor high-school stage version: sincere and kind of sweet, but endlessly clumsy.
  12. Armored
    It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.
  13. Everybody's Fine
    Follows a dispiritingly predictable arc.
  14. The Fourth Kind
    Terminally awkward in the way it meshes fake real footage with faker fake footage. It isn’t required to be convincing as fact, but it doesn’t convince as fiction, either.
  15. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    At least in the last half-hour, Bay's incredibly sloppy continuity and overeager rush to action pays off.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Twilight
    While the movie attempts to find an compelling middle ground between gothic supernaturalism and teenage romance, it usually winds up stumbling into the inane territory implied by both descriptions.
  17. Taken
    Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.
  18. Astro Boy
    Older viewers are more likely to see a muddled film full of one-dimensional characters and insultingly strident politics.
  19. Knowing
    Knowing frequently feels one Revelation quote away from turning into a chiding, fundamentalist-friendly end-of-the-world movie in the "Left Behind" mold.
  20. Saw VI
    Because Saw does nothing to alter the look, tone, and engineered gimmickry from one movie to the next, it keeps going deeper into backstory and character arcs than horror series past, as if this ugly, cheap-looking schlock were somehow "The Lord Of The Rings."
  21. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Tucker Max’s only real strengths are his outrageousness and his uncompromising self-confidence, but neither comes into play in this punch-pulling, frankly boring film.
  22. Departures
    Here's a great way to start savoring life: Don't waste it on pat manipulations like this.
  23. My Sister's Keeper
    It would take a heart of stone not to be affected by My Sister’s Keeper, but the film’s unceasing manipulation has a Medusa effect on the organ.
  24. Pirate Radio
    Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you.
  25. Summer Storm
    It just grows darker and broodier as Stadlober grapples with coming out. That's not an easy thing, but someone should tell the poor guy that being gay doesn't have to mean being this lame.
  26. Last Holiday
    For a film ostensibly about how life means nothing without adventure and unpredictability, Last Holiday all feels as preordained as the film-ending Emeril cameo.
  27. Tristan and Isolde
    Moves so sluggishly that someone must have been dosing the cast and crew with Nyquil.
  28. Underworld: Evolution
    There's a ton of backstory behind Underworld: Evolution, which gets slightly denser and rowdier than its predecessor, but it's ultimately all in the service of a nigh-endless series of numbing, mechanical battles in which snarling protagonists and CGI monsters shoot, claw, and bloodily eviscerate each other. In other words, it's "Underworld," but more of it.
  29. Pizza
    Christopher delivers cutesy jabber and one-note characters, as oily and devoid of substance as... well, you know.
  30. Annapolis
    At a time when movies, even from Hollywood, are finally turning their eyes to conflicts abroad, Annapolis seems conspicuously myopic and reactionary in its denial of the world outside campus, though a movie this formulaic wouldn't pass muster during peacetime, either.
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