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. Big Daddy
    Sandler's best movie, a surprisingly touching and consistent comedy that finds him reaching out to new audiences without abandoning the transgressive meanness that has enlivened his best work.
  2. Jem and the Holograms
    Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.
  3. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.
  4. The Star
    The director, Tim Reckart, is better known for his puppet-based stop-motion (he worked on Anomalisa and was Oscar-nominated for a short film) and seems to be out of his element here.
  5. Trash Fire
    While it doesn’t include any literal blazing piles of garbage, Trash Fire is spiteful and unpleasant from beginning to end, using every technique at its disposal — from stinging dialogue to grotesque prosthetics to morbid black comedy — to make the audience uncomfortable.
  6. Deadfall
    Compared to Deadfall, films The Wicker Man, Face/Off, and even Vampire’s Kiss look like Merchant-Ivory productions. It may be a crowded field at the top of Cage’s most entertaining performances, but this one deserves to stand above the fold, if for no other reason than that its general lack of public awareness means a retroactive popular appreciation is long overdue.
  7. The Replacement Killers
    Chow has a future in a America if given better material with which to work; here, he's wasted in a movie that's forgotten 20 minutes after the credits roll.
  8. Halloween Kills
    The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.
  9. Barnyard
    It shouldn't be surprising that writer-director Steve Oedekerk, the man responsible for "Kung Pow! Enter The Fist" and the second "Ace Ventura" movie, considers single-celled organisms as he shoots for the lowest common denominator.
  10. Arthur Newman
    Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it’s all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path.
  11. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    Rourke's hammy, eyeliner-enhanced acting alone almost makes Alex Rider worth a look.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The People We Hate at the Wedding
    This slog of a film will have you checking your watch, wishing for an open bar, and begging for the sparkler sendoff.
  13. Suburbicon
    The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.
  14. Courageous
    Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.
  15. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.
  16. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    The franchise-hungry tentpole-itis of the present studio model has produced oh-so-many dumb rehashes of classic myths and fairy tales, but this is the first that is always funny on purpose.
  17. 6 Underground
    Between the movie’s subtext and its new-digital-world distributor, Bay seems to be communicating the frustration of constraint, but why? What has he been barred from doing?
  18. 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.
  19. Knowing
    Knowing frequently feels one Revelation quote away from turning into a chiding, fundamentalist-friendly end-of-the-world movie in the "Left Behind" mold.
  20. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.
  21. Beverly Hills Chihuahua
    This is not a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing. It's paced for little minds with short attention spans.
  22. Larry Crowne
    The story feels half-considered, the relationships thin, and the direction visually indifferent.
  23. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t merely fall flat dramatically, but dashes any opportunity for visual intrigue in terms of cinematography, costume design, and, most vitally, its on-screen carnage.
  24. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    The middling new Milwaukee, Minnesota, on the other hand, qualifies as 100 percent faux-noir. It recycles much from classic thrillers but has little to add.
  25. Memory
    It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.
  26. John Tucker Must Die
    Revenge movies often end with the message that vengeance is empty and futile, but it's never encouraging when revenge seems pointless from the start.
  27. Mad Money
    As a comedy, it relies on Keaton and Latifah playing the same characters they always play, and Holmes overcompensating by switching into bug-eyed manic-comedienne mode. Her performance is part Lucille Ball, part overcaffeinated chicken, and it deserves some credit for daring, but none for execution.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    The use of a real war to give added emotional heft to this already potentially manipulative story make this film an act of callous calculation behind the beautiful shots of the French countryside.
  29. Desert Warrior
    The movie’s basic appeal––that of rebels rising up against evil empires––still works to some extent, but Desert Warrior does little to make it memorable beyond its historic production.
  30. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »