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. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In a timid comic world, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie feels genuinely dangerous and transgressive: it makes a virtue of going way too far because other comedies don't go far enough.
  2. 3 Days to Kill
    Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.
  3. Welcome To Marwen
    It’s the weirdest film of his (Zemeckis) career. One of the worst, too.
  4. Wicker Park
    Instead of building toward a grand romantic climax, it just gets sillier before exploding into a torrent of unintended laughs.
  5. Paris 36
    The overstuffed film lumbers across clichés of the heart and of history until it reaches a big, tune-filled climax that isn't worth the wait.
  6. Good
    It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.
  7. The Last Word
    Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.
  8. Remember Me
    The major problem with Pattinson’s ascendancy to the Dean throne: His soulfulness is a pose, an effect achieved more by hair and makeup (and yes, genetics) than the scenes where he’s required to emote at high volume.
  9. Phantom
    Though pitched as a thriller, Robinson’s woefully underbudgeted film plays instead like a chamber drama, so simple and unadorned that it could just as easily be staged as an off-off-Broadway play without anyone telling the difference. And that isn’t entirely to the film’s detriment, either: With a cast choked with great character actors like Ed Harris, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, less is sometimes more.
  10. Fantastic Four
    A garish mediocrity.
  11. Deliver Us From Evil
    The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.
  12. The Comedian
    The uncomfortable yet not unwelcome spectacle of De Niro attempting zingers makes this movie an essential subject for future study of the actor’s comic side. Unfortunately, it is essential in no other way.
  13. Salinger
    When Salinger succeeds, it’s in spite of Salerno’s heavy hand and because of the implicit intrigue of J.D. Salinger’s life story. For a director who clearly reveres his subject’s work, he doesn’t grasp how the flashy, eardrum-busting pomp and circumstance of his film is exactly the kind of thing Salinger abhorred.
  14. Sleepwalking
    Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.
  15. Alexander
    Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages.
  16. Scary Movie 4
    The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.
  17. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.
  18. Mango Yellow
    It's a lot to suffer through for a film that has nothing to say, but insists on saying it anyway. Repeatedly.
  19. Bulletproof Monk
    Sadly, it's yet another intercultural mishmash that hopes for its iconic star's charisma to overcome a dire script, cardboard characters, indifferently directed action scenes, and an atrocious villain buried under layers of unconvincing old-man makeup.
  20. Clockstoppers
    Botches what could be the most mischievous power since Scott Baio's telekinesis in the 1982 comedy "Zapped!": a wristwatch that speeds up time for the user until the rest of the world seems to be standing still.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Fire Down Below
    Like most Seagal movies, the violence is poorly choreographed, the clothes are bad, and you weren't going to see it anyway, were you?
  22. The Twin
    Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.
  23. National Treasure
    It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.
  24. Shrink
    Shrink is exactly like virtually all his (Spacey) post-"American Beauty" vehicles: flashy, phony, nakedly melodramatic, and full of big actorly moments disconnected from real life.
  25. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.
  26. The Sisters
    The Sisters is still somewhat compelling thanks to Bello, whose unguarded, provocative work continually resuscitates this corpse of a melodrama whenever it lays fallow.
  27. Domino
    Domino is, for large stretches, just ludicrous—and atypically boring. It’s a sad sight to see from a filmmaker who, once upon a time, excelled at drawing a viewer into the thrill of seeing a sequence come together, with all the pieces falling into place. In Domino, one finds only the pieces.
  28. Aloha
    Perhaps the energy Crowe could have expended on shaping believable characters went instead to the cultural context.
  29. Insidious: Chapter 2
    The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.
  30. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    While it’s not necessarily a good thing to aim this kind of weaponized marketing at kids, it’s also silly and colorful enough to nearly work as a live-action cartoon. It might rot brains, but perhaps not while regarding them with utter contempt.
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