The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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 2.5 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Freaky Friday
    Freaky Friday mines a lot of laughs from common misapprehensions adults have about adolescent life, with fun bits of observation about schoolwork, dating, and other practices where kids have to bend the rules in order to survive.
  2. Zero Day
    Though comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project" are inevitable, the impeccable first-person camera technique not only makes sense dramatically, but also facilitates a complex and queasily ambiguous relationship between the conspirators and the audience.
  3. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    It works for a little while, but an Irons-narrated slideshow of the region would have worked just as well.
  4. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    With Scott playing the perfect foil to Leary's exasperated sage, the fantasy sequences are hilariously caustic, but as they accumulate more rapidly, the distinction between real and imagined situations becomes disturbingly vague.
  5. The Magdalene Sisters
    The film might have been more powerful, not to mention fair, if the nuns believed they were doing right; only on movie night, when McEwan sees herself in Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells Of St. Mary's," does Mullan grant her so much as the delusion of rectitude.
  6. American Wedding
    Combining raunchiness and sweetness in a slapdash but generally effective manner.
  7. Gigli
    Writer-director Martin Brest lends the film a professional sheen, and his stars (who some rumors suggest may have become romantically involved) have charisma to spare, but the film has all the charge and momentum of a Paxil ad.
  8. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    Offers plenty of eye candy, if little else. Ultimately, the film is clearly superior to its predecessor, but that's mostly because the first Tomb Raider left so much room for improvement.
  9. Mondays in the Sun
    Fortunately, no one seems to have clued Bardem in on the game plan, and the fierceness and complexity he brings to his role nearly saves Mondays In The Sun.
  10. Buffalo Soldiers
    Tightly plotted and well-acted, the film litters its brisk run time with darkly funny and haunting setpieces.
  11. Hotel
    Until he finds a style to better communicate ideas or emotions, Figgis' plans to reinvent cinema will have to go back to the drawing board.
  12. Seabiscuit
    Though the results are a matter of record, the uplift is nevertheless intoxicating, even enough to compensate for a film that routinely substitutes corny iconography for real imagination and vision.
  13. Lucía, Lucía
    Has its moments, but by the time it reaches its anticlimax, Roth won't be the only one irritated at getting jerked around for no discernible reason.
  14. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    Filled with video-game in-jokes, Spy Kids 3 comes roaring to life in action scenes based on different gaming genres, each of which takes full advantage of the 3-D effects.
  15. Camp
    Camp offers plenty of reasons to bristle at its cheery shamelessness, but it's too high-spirited and charming to resist.
  16. Masked and Anonymous
    Dylan's performance doesn't offer any clues. He's an icon and he delivers an icon's performance, literally: He could easily have been replaced by piece of wood with his face painted on it. That distance also means he remains more or less untouched by the embarrassment going on around him, even though it's largely his own creation.
  17. Cuban Rafters
    Balseros doesn't fully measure up to Michael Apted's work because of the dingy quality of its video-to-film transfer, as well as flaws inherent to a project that started as one type of documentary and ended up as another--namely, that the filmmakers didn't ask enough of the right questions in the first two installments to make the third fully connect.
  18. This Thing of Ours
    A shamelessly derivative mob movie.
  19. Johnny English
    Johnny English's international popularity may or may not translate here, but in a sequel-glutted summer, even a mildly amusing time-waster can't help but stand out.
  20. The Embalmer
    Both the actor and the character deserve a better movie, one that might have channeled the latter's desires into more than just a few rote genre thrills.
  21. How to Deal
    There's a surprising intelligence and gravity working beneath its bubbly surface, informed by an unusual degree of empathy for its adolescent audience and a rare willingness to confront the darker regions of youth experience.
  22. The Sea Is Watching
    Though the episodic, low-key action bears a resemblance to Kurosawa's Madadayo -- his little-seen, underrated final film -- neither the characters nor the plot lend it even a hint of dynamism.
  23. Dirty Pretty Things
    Frears has directed a surprisingly sturdy hybrid of thriller and social melodrama, even if the thrills turn ludicrous and the social critique grows a little pat.
  24. Bad Boys II
    Bad Boys II is the rare case in which escapism involves leaving the theater.
  25. September 11
    Until filmmakers get a little distance, maybe they'd be better off ignoring such projects.
  26. Garage Days
    Proyas is a veteran music-video director, and for its first half the film feels like one long video, albeit in a good way. He initially lets music and images tell his story rather than words, but in its second half, Garage Days succumbs to its overreaching, convoluted plot.
  27. A Housekeeper
    Berri's work never really rises above the gradual or the mild, and it eventually settles gently into one of those elliptical conclusions that mark mainstream French cinema at its most tasteful and staid, but the film's fully realized performances and sharply observed moments make it a pleasure, albeit a minor one.
  28. Km. 0 - Kilometer Zero
    It's hard to fathom what they intended for this forgettable group of lonelyhearts, other than to choreograph a whopping 14 happy endings at once--all of them forced, none of them earned.
  29. Northfork
    With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie.
  30. The Cuckoo
    Though it gets far too cute, The Cuckoo settles into the snappy rhythms of a promising sitcom pilot, at least until Rogozhkin decides to get serious.
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