The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,423 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 10423
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10423
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10423
10423 movie reviews
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  1. Sand Castle
    It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."
  2. Sleeping Dogs
    Crowe is quite capable of being compelling even when doing banal stuff—the highlight here is a variation on the “falling off the wagon” trope, as he captures the sheer delight of a guy who has literally forgotten how much he loves whiskey. The end point, like the movie’s, feels inevitable, but the journey there contains small joys.
  3. Angel Has Fallen
    Given the awfulness of its predecessor, which was this publication’s pick for the worst film of 2016, a sequel that’s merely pedestrian represents a dramatic improvement.
  4. The Mother
    It’s decent but a tad too restrained for its own good.
  5. Country Strong
    When she's (Paltrow) singing, she can pass for someone who's been listening to Tammy Wynette since the cradle; when the music stops, she looks like a tourist.
  6. Seance
    When it comes to shock and delight, Seance doesn’t quite live up to Barrett’s work with other directors. It’s tough being a legacy.
  7. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  8. The Expendables
    Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.
  9. S.W.A.T.
    As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.
  10. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    As her character resorts to increasingly cruel and devious pranks, Hudson only seems funnier and more endearing.
  11. She's Funny That Way
    Plotted as a round robin of dalliances and coincidences, it’s relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.
  12. About Alex
    About Alex benefits from a uniformly strong cast that does its best to find moments of truth in the banal, derivative scenario they’ve been handed.
  13. Uncertainty
    The leads are immensely appealing, but the sum of their experiences equals nothing more profound than two earnest people wrestling with a tough decision.
  14. The Dogwalker
    While there are moments throughout when the film looks primed to break out of the indie arthouse ghetto, it never quite pulls it off.
  15. Chasing Mavericks
    It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.
  16. The Scorpion King
    Prototypical summer-movie fare, designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten all at once.
  17. Levity
    Solomon handles their crises of conscience with a studied compassion that hangs over scenes like a lead weight, though the actors (particularly Dunst) do their best to bring more range to his gray palette.
  18. Insidious: The Red Door
    Insidious: The Red Door is not a broken movie by any means. It’s a comprehensible experience, though perhaps less so if viewed as a standalone feature instead of the presumably final chapter of a continuing narrative. But Wilson was tasked with telling a pretty dull story, both in terms of its visceral horrors and its thematic ambitions.
  19. All Cheerleaders Die
    In other words, what starts as a glorified "Pretty Little Liars" episode eventually evolves (devolves?) into a flippant hybrid of "The Craft" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer."
  20. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.
  21. Off Label
    Hypocrisy aside, Off Label’s biggest problem is that, for a movie that features a lot of people talking about a lot of things, it doesn’t have a lot to say; its scatterbrained, switching-between-browser-tabs structure guarantees that no idea gets developed very far.
  22. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
    The incredible silliness doesn’t quite erase the bad taste of this kid’s movie featuring an implied dozen civilian casualties, but it helps.
  23. Willy's Wonderland
    Willy’s Wonderland is a jokey elevator pitch in search of a movie. It’s the kind of genre junk—a low-rent, one-gag cartoon slasher—whose supposed gonzo appeal begins and ends with a description of its premise.
  24. Cherry
    This is a film with nothing new to say about love, war, trauma, addiction, crime, or America. It blows through these topics on a bender of hyper-stylization, indifferently twisting its true story into the shape of other, better movies.
  25. Rails & Ties
    Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience.
  26. Wild Horses
    What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.
  27. Frontier(s)
    There's no depth, surprises, or wit to the screenplay, which seems motivated by the sole desire to generate the vilest, most disgusting people and images imaginable.
  28. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Raises the question of whether Krasinski made this movie because he really loves Wallace’s work, or because just he wanted to show Hollywood that the loveable doof from The Office can actually act.
  29. Miracles from Heaven
    Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.
  30. School for Scoundrels
    As usual, Thornton remains fully committed to the performance. Viewers could make a game of scanning his face for even the slightest hint of warmth. By the end of the film, that may be the surest source of entertainment.
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