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. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  2. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    A film this slipshod needs much more star-power than it's able to muster.
  3. Sahara
    McConaughey is usually a welcome presence, but here, he looks like making the movie was getting in the way of his exciting African adventure.
  4. I Still Believe
    In attempting to tell the story of this young woman’s death — not her life, no time for that either — I Still Believe cheapens it.
  5. The Limits of Control
    Too much of The Limits Of Control feels canned and airless, so stifled by Jarmusch's obsessions that it loses all sense of surprise.
  6. Nowhere Man
    Cheap and ugly in every sense--morally, cinematically, creatively--Nowhere Man accomplishes the seemingly impossible by dragging the seedy revenge genre to a horrific new nadir.
  7. Crank: High Voltage
    It'd be silly to call Crank: High Voltage over the top: The top is so far below that it isn't even visible. But at this mostly unexplored altitude--only 2007's inferior "Shoot 'Em Up" comes close.
  8. The Hebrew Hammer
    Ultimately more interested in exploiting clichés than subverting or commenting on them, and Coyote and Dunn's grotesque caricatures are embarrassing.
  9. Supergirl
    Slater not only makes for a dull Supergirl, but she's stuck in a clumsy, silly film that tries for the light touch of Richard Lester's Superman II and fails decisively.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Eight Seven
    Jackson's performance is impressive: He effectively conveys every nervous and belligerent nuance, but his character eventually disappears beneath a morass of gimmicks, clichés, and political cynicism.
  11. Passengers
    The effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent, and to turn one of the most likable actors in Hollywood into a total fucking creep. A date movie, this is not.
  12. The Woman in Cabin 10
    This is Hitchcock lite, with a great leading lady and a story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It may not be the kind of film that lingers after it’s done, but for a good trip, rather than a long trip, it’s worth climbing aboard.
  13. The Salton Sea
    A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    5 Star Day is a middling indie, but it offers evidence of how far a synthetic setup can get just by allowing characters to react and reflect.
  15. Monster Trucks
    Monster Trucks, in all its stupid, misguided, laughable anti-glory, is difficult to hate. Its stupidity is, at times, vaguely likable, and if not redeemed by strong craft, not harmed by technical deficiencies.
  16. House Party
    To its credit, and this isn’t damning with faint praise, the new House Party is frequently very funny. (The R-rated language and creative insults are a great asset, even if they might restrict the potential teen audience.) What it has in humor, though, it lacks in pace.
  17. Running Scared
    The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."
  18. Sabotage
    David Ayer’s latest, Sabotage, is a sloppy DEA whodunit, distinguished by its scatological humor and gore.
  19. G-Force
    Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    Gilliam captures the chaotic visions of debauchery with his trademark aplomb, bringing to life the already trippy patterns of hotel carpets and populating the dark bars of Vegas with genuinely reptilian lounge lizards.
  21. Miss Bala
    It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.
  22. Before I Go to Sleep
    Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Chumscrubber
    The resulting film is an example of how a film with camera and acting skills in its corner can still fall flat on its face.
  24. Four Christmases
    The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.
  25. Super Troopers 2
    Its very existence is a testament to lowered expectations. That said, it seems like a real missed opportunity for Broken Lizard, which has only seen diminishing returns since the original.
  26. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  27. The Grudge
    Overall, though, the director and co-writer’s merciless style is muffled by The Grudge’s over-reliance on clichéd jump scares; more damningly, only some of these are effective, even in terms of cheap thrills. This becomes especially true in the film’s second half, when the ghosts become at once more human and less creepy.
  28. Shelby Oaks
    Unfortunately, even taking into consideration the fact that this is a first time filmmaker, the result is a mass of half-baked ideas and poorly executed tonal shifts, squandering the promise of its early premise and devolving into a middling mess.
  29. A Girl and a Gun
    Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it can’t maintain its muddled thesis for even that brief period.
  30. Staten Island Summer
    Frustratingly, the movie is plenty likable when it’s not trying to show off its wistfulness.
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