The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. How to Live Forever
    Wexler breaks the cardinal rule of first-person documentaries: Don't make yourself the subject unless you're worth paying attention to.
  2. The Expendables 2
    The Expendables 2 makes a franchise out of a novelty item, and the nostalgic kick is gone: It's a reminder that most of those '80s actioners were xenophobic and dumb, that many of its stars had more muscle mass than charisma, and that the sight of these old fossils referring to themselves as old fossils is more pathetic than cheekily self-referential.
  3. Chimpanzee
    It isn't easy to insult the intelligence of preschoolers, but Chimpanzee's insistence on turning the two gangs into the Sharks and the Jets does the job long before Allen lapses into his Home Improvement grunting.
  4. Cost of a Soul
    It's a lousy movie, but it has spunk.
  5. The Art of Getting By
    By the end, the most charming thing about The Art Of Getting By is that while its adults cut Highmore far too much slack, they aren't Hughes-movie oblivious idiots, and they eventually draw a few firm lines. Unfortunately, the movie isn't daring enough to follow suit.
  6. Just Like Us
    The key mistake was Ahmed's choice to direct it himself; it's promotional when it might be revealing of impasses (and commonalities) between cultures and the complex tactics comedians use to address it.
  7. The Last Mountain
    There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Free Birds
    The best moments are jokes that feel grafted onto a film that was probably close to completion before anyone involved realized they were portraying a fight between turkeys and English settlers as the largest conflict in the European colonization of North America.
  9. Amityville: The Awakening
    The script is just as lazy as the acting, leaning on a fitfully applied, Scream-esque meta subplot to justify why the hell we’re all here in the first place.
  10. Flypaper
    Everything and everyone acts as cogs in a relentless plot machine that keeps twisting and twisting like an annoying little gizmo on Christmas morning.
  11. Programming the Nation?
    It's tough to keep track of everything Jeff Warrick's subliminal-advertising documentary Programming The Nation? does wrong.
  12. The Mighty Macs
    There must have been a reason why the real-life Rush could do so much with seemingly so little, but The Mighty Macs never captures it. It lets canned inspiration provide the uplift, instead of something more tangible.
  13. The Iron Lady
    Strangely, this Thatcher biopic might have been far more worthwhile if it wasn't about Thatcher: The aged, dotty stranger hanging out with her dead husband is a more compelling subject.
  14. The Ward
    Nothing about The Ward's script or direction has much snap. The dialogue is never witty, the characters are indistinct, the story is set in 1966 for no relevant reason, and the scares are strictly of the "thing jumps loudly out of the shadows" variety.
  15. The Son of No One
    A few individual performances survive - Liotta finds a little of his old edge, and Pacino briefly revisits Serpico territory - but they're smothered in the slow-burning absurdity.
  16. Red Tails
    The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.
  17. Walking with Dinosaurs
    Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.
  18. Damn!
    Damn! would be a more insightful condemnation of the exploitation process if it didn't reek so strongly of exploitation itself.
  19. The Double
    Roughly 99 percent of the time, if a movie that seems like it should be a big deal appears almost out of the blue, it's because it's lousy. The Double doesn't exactly buck that trend.
  20. The Lady
    This is an inspiring and important story, but worthiness doesn't automatically equal quality. Had Besson looked for unexpected ways into Suu Kyi's life, or even had he indulged his old impulses and made a slick, surface-y Luc Besson movie, then The Lady might've been more memorable.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Three Stooges
    The Three Stooges isn't very funny, but it is, like last year's far superior "The Muppets," a sincere act of fandom on an epic scale.
  22. Step Up Revolution
    Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.
  23. The Divide
    Better performances might have sold The Divide, but aside from Arquette's fine work as a single mother driven to self-degradation, the cast amplifies the impression of a canned, one-act theater piece.
  24. Killing Bono
    There's a difference between "funny" and "comedy," and the movie adaptation of Killing Bono tries way too hard to be nutty, at the expense of just getting across what McCormick knows.
  25. Pixels
    Even on its own silly terms, Pixels is not a very good movie; it’s painted up like a Ghostbusters-style fantasy-comedy but plays like so many slapdash Happy Madison productions before it.
  26. Don't Go in the Woods
    Give Don't Go In The Woods credit for not being a wholly conventional horror movie. Debit it for not caring about horror in the first place.
  27. Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    Growing up, Smith relates, he thought Halston - born Ray Halston Fenwick in Des Moines, Iowa - "was the coolest," which sets the tone for the movie's googly-eyed viewpoint.
  28. Won't Back Down
    The film's clumsy sloganeering, however, largely defeats the leads' fine efforts.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Tonight You're Mine
    Musicians, according to Tonight You're Mine, are a callous, narcissistic lot - fortunately, the music they make gets a pass.
  30. Silent House
    There's probably a graduate thesis to be drawn from this, about what audiences want from horror films, and ways to make viewers uncomfortable with their own voyeuristic desires, but that doesn't make the thrills any less sour, or the end any less exploitative. (Or worse, dull.)
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »