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. Trapped
    A tone of lurid idiocy permeates Trapped, a Z-grade woman-in-peril thriller starring scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon.
  2. Underworld
    Not since "Battlefield Earth" pitted overacting, nine-foot-tall Psychlos against puny man-animals has there been an interspecies match-up this perversely uninteresting.
  3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Solidly mindless, breathless summer fun.
  4. Strangerland
    Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.
  5. Clown
    While Watts deserves some credit for treating a totally ridiculous premise with a straight face, his grisly first feature plays very much like what it is: a 90-second joke stretched uncomfortably to full length.
  6. Madea's Witness Protection
    There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)
  7. Lost River
    Lost River displays almost no distinctive personality of its own. The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he’s a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.
  8. Breaking In
    The film’s sense of time lacks precision and urgency, and just having characters periodically point out that the clock is ticking doesn’t cut it.
  9. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot is an inert exercise, visually and dramatically on par with "Drew Peterson: Untouchable."
  10. The Haunting
    You can buy the special effects, but if that's all you have to offer, it won't amount to much.
  11. The Perfect Game
    Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.
  12. Endings, Beginnings
    A complete dud.
  13. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    It’s a busier and less coherent film, too, with a baffling master plot and a crowded pileup of special effects in search of something to do.
  14. Aliens in the Attic
    Like those mild old Disney comedies of the ’60s and ’70s, it seems perfectly content with being a harmless distraction.
  15. Good People
    Good People might have been better titled "Dumb People", or at least "People Who Have Never Seen A Movie In Their Entire Lives."
  16. 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.
  17. Orphan
    If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) set out to make a parody of horror-film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly.
  18. The Last House on the Left
    It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.
  19. Persuasion
    Despite these modern constraints, Cracknell’s adaptation crackles with life. Especially with an effervescent actress and hunky actor delivering compelling performances—in Johnson’s case, sometimes directly to the camera—this funny, poignant and enrapturing film gives ingenious new power to some of the Jane Austen’s greatest hits.
  20. Next
    Next bears some resemblance to another Dick adaptation, "Minority Report," about "pre-cogs" who can anticipate murders before they happen, but it doesn't really bother exploring the moral or emotional implications of Cage's power.
  21. High Tension
    Though staged with technical skill and unflinching brutality, it's an awfully familiar-looking slaughter filled with moments on loan from other movies.
  22. The House That Jack Built
    The film lands somewhere between self-flagellation and apologia; however hard von Trier is on himself, he’s not above mounting defenses, and he spares plenty of punishment for us, too.
  23. A Little White Lie
    The execution of the simultaneous mistaken identity and fish-out-of-water shenanigans that ensue is oddly muted; you keep waiting for Maren to amp up the comic energy and narrative complications, but it isn’t until the satisfyingly madcap climax that he really does.
  24. 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.
  25. Bel Ami
    This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.
  26. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    Although marginally more woke than other Madea installments (the fam has an unexpected response when one of them publicly comes out), Homecoming is just more of the same. The characters are one-note, and the actors portray them that way.
  27. The Boy
    At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Heavyweights
    The lovable losers get one over the pretty people, making incremental improvements to their lives without fundamentally changing what makes them unique—a hallmark of Apatow films to come that’s a decent fit for a family movie.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    Tennant and Macdonald are appealing performers, but they aren't given scenes that convey they even like each other, much less that they're irresistibly drawn to each other, circumstances be damned.
  30. Night Teeth
    First-time screenwriter Brent Dillon’s script excels at the little details of social structure, human and vampire, that distinguish Night Teeth from other politically minded genre picks.
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