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. Every Day
    At the movie's center, Schreiber approaches the role with a seriousness that lacks joy or any other colorful inflection.
  2. Prom
    It's the sort of film Robert Altman might have made if he cut his teeth working for The Disney Channel.
  3. Friends with Kids
    Westfeldt has a tendency to go over the top, and Friends With Kids in particular has a shrill, smug edge that kills the comedy and the drama alike.
  4. Something Borrowed
    Yes, perhaps the audience will like its favored couple more, but all the engineering that goes into making them sympathetic results in a film that feels agonizingly synthetic and alien.
  5. Kung Fu Panda 2
    The sequel remains visually beautiful and strikingly designed, but otherwise, it's a surprise in all the wrong ways.
  6. Certifiably Jonathan
    An unabashed valentine to Winters, but like an unfortunate number of valentines, it proves a little embarrassing to the giver and recipient alike.
  7. In Her Skin
    Rather than peering into the heart of darkness, North just slaps a coat of Art atop her true-crime subject, and the upshot is akin to an especially pretentious episode of "Law & Order."
  8. I Am
    Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.
  9. Take Me Home Tonight
    Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.
  10. Red Riding Hood
    The main difference is that while the "Twilight" films strive for straight-faced grimness, Red Riding Hood often verges on outright florid hilarity. It isn't laughing at itself, but that needn't stop the audience.
  11. The Conspirator
    The Conspirator should skip theaters altogether and become the first film released straight to middle-school history classes, where the standards for what can generously be deemed entertainment are much lower.
  12. Cars 2
    Cars 2 looks fantastic, but the studio has never given audiences - especially audiences over the age of 10 - less reason to be emotionally invested in the beautiful shiny things flying across the screen.
  13. Zookeeper
    As a study in insanity, Zookeeper is mildly interesting. But as a kiddie comedy, it's something to watch only once the little ones have worn out their "Dr. Doolittle" DVD.
  14. Final Destination 5
    While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.
  15. The Thing
    For a film that takes place in such a cold locale, it all feels awfully warmed-over.
  16. The Three Musketeers
    Beyond being unable to decide what kind of Musketeers movie it wants to be, Anderson's adaptation seems determined to underachieve as both heavy spectacle and light adventure. It's two mediocrities for the price of one.
  17. Dream House
    The film's ambitions are woefully small and familiar.
  18. Abduction
    Singleton once radiated ambition and vision. These days, he seems to be aiming for mediocrity at best. Even by those extraordinarily lenient standards, the inessential, perfunctory Abduction falls short
  19. The Big Year
    In The Big Year co-stars Owen Wilson and Jack Black appear on the verge of succumbing to the same terminal blandness that's gripped Martin for so long.
  20. Project X
    It's crude in every sense: The film looks like shit, the characters are boors, and it's as sloppily put-together as the home movie it pretends to be. Project X's commitment to its crudity almost redeems it, though.
  21. Ceremony
    Trouble is, it feels like a film going through the motions, never finding mooring in believable human feelings.
  22. Snow White and the Huntsman
    There are complicated elements at work here, with threads of curdled vengeance, victim entitlement, and insanity bound together in ways it would take a much smarter film to unravel. Snow White And The Huntsman doesn't try, and the film just keeps getting dumber as it goes along.
  23. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    It raises the question of who the movie is for in the first place: Kids have seen much better animation in other films, and it's hard to imagine too many grown-ups ready to smile and nod at yet more smirking takes on famous moments from "Scarface" and "The Silence Of The Lambs."
  24. Battleship
    Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.
  25. Ouija
    It’s professionally produced but completely uninspired.
  26. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.
  27. Jack the Giant Slayer
    The extra shading is nice, but it doesn’t change the degree to which Jack The Giant Slayer feels like a paint-by-numbers story.
  28. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    The training montage where Lincoln learns to twirl his axe around his body like a baton for no apparent purpose is neither the movie's first laughable sequence nor its last, but it sums up the movie's aesthetic: The filmmakers mistakenly think nothing is silly if it's done with a grim enough facial expression.
  29. Total Recall (2012)
    Wiseman's Total Recall isn't intellectualized like "Blade Runner," or even that much more sophisticated than his "Underworld" movies.
  30. Bellflower
    It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted.
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