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. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    The movie’s like an old sofa, overstuffed and misshapen, but so familiar that it gives comfort all the same.
  2. After.Life
    Caught in a pretentious no-man’s land between horror and melodrama.
  3. When You're Strange
    Director Tom DiCillo does his damnedest to make his documentary about The Doors unwatchable, but the subject matter is too compelling--and the vintage footage too electrifying--to be completely worthless.
  4. Furry Vengeance
    While Fraser’s presence doesn’t necessarily elevate Furry Vengeance into something better than the dumb, lowbrow timewaster it aspires to be, Fraser does make it a little easier to digest.
  5. The Good Heart
    Cox’s character is a living, hissing embodiment of the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. As an actor stuck in a movie that wastes his talents, Cox can surely relate.
  6. Multiple Sarcasms
    Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
  7. The Living Wake
    The Living Wake is cursed with a permanent smirk of smug self-satisfaction: It’s so delighted with itself that it leaves audiences out of the equation.
  8. Holy Rollers
    Director Kevin Asch takes protagonist Jesse Eisenberg on a dour, depressingly straightforward trip from naïveté to spiritual exhaustion.
  9. Princess Kaiulani
    While Princess Kaiulani makes do with what story it has, the film feels stretched and straining, full of sleepy scenes and pregnant pauses.
  10. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    While both actors have been hammier and more hilarious, and neither one overdoes things enough to be notable, they at least seem to be having loads of flailing fun as they conjure up CGI scenery to chew on. And when Apprentice limits itself to their battle, it's generally fitful dumb fun.
  11. The Adjustment Bureau
    It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.
  12. Agora
    Weisz makes for a vivid, charismatic Hypatia, but the script lets her down.
  13. Love Ranch
    So with two great, ideally cast actors and such potentially fascinating subject matter, why does Love Ranch feel like a clumsy TV movie?
  14. Spoken Word
    Apart from its title, there's very little poetic about Spoken Word.
  15. The Switch
    Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.
  16. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    Like the worst of late-period Allen, the film recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence. They're left stranded, seven characters in search of an author.
  17. Life as We Know It
    Pity any poor kid stuck in a house like that. Pity, too, anyone who has to stop by for a visit.
  18. Welcome to the Rileys
    The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.
  19. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    They essentially replace the book's blank spaces with gaping plot holes and laughable clichés.
  20. Kalamity
    A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.
  21. For Colored Girls
    There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.
  22. The Tourist
    von Donnersmarck's meat-and-potatoes direction makes The Tourist astonishingly lifeless and awkward, reducing two of the world's biggest movie stars to something akin to shy, pimply teenagers on their first date.
  23. How Do You Know
    That's How Do You Know in a nutshell: preposterous characters lurching through painfully contrived scenarios.
  24. 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.
  25. Gerrymandering
    At the start of Gerrymandering, Reichert quotes Thomas Pynchon, writing, "Nothing will produce bad history more directly nor brutally than drawing a line." The same could be said of documentaries.
  26. The Kids Grow Up
    By experiencing Block's films, we aren't merely witnessing his neurosis, we're abetting and validating it.
  27. Biutiful
    In spite of fine work from Bardem and Álvarez, Biutiful is an irritating, oppressive 150-minute dirge, not the step forward Iñárritu's dissolved partnership with Arriaga seemed to promise.
  28. From Prada to Nada
    Simply put, From Prada To Nada is "Sense And Sensibility For Dummies."
  29. The Rite
    Kudos to The Rite for thinking outside the usual goat/pentagram/black-candles box for its satanic imagery, but is a mule really the best it could manage?
  30. I Am Number Four
    Frey didn't really need a ghostwriter for this story, he just needed an archivist with a Xerox machine and a mercenary streak.
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