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. Man of the Year
    If there's anything sadder than a satire without teeth, it's a thriller without thrills. Even sadder is the rare movie that fails at both genres simultaneously. That, and that alone, makes Man Of The Year exceptional.
  2. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
    There must be some solid marketing reason for putting out a Christmas movie before the jack o'lanterns have begun to rot, but if so, it's elusive. Couldn't this lump of coal have waited another month?
  3. 3 Needles
    Give Fitzgerald credit for ambition and good intentions, but for all its truth-to-power saber-rattling, 3 Needles is distressingly dim.
  4. Dreamgirls
    It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.
  5. Home of the Brave
    Whatever its model, the film is assembled from much poorer material, leftover parts of Lifetime movies and well-meaning indie films seen only on opening nights at some forgotten festival in Tampa.
  6. Night at the Museum
    Stiller's continued efforts to court the broadest possible audience has taken the edge off his comedy. Whenever he shares screen time with Williams, it looks like the grim future he's mapping out for himself.
  7. Primeval
    If there were a shred of sincerity to its straight-faced exposé of African strife, the film would be easier to forgive, but since it's really just a cheap horror-thriller about an ancient predator, the austere tone does it no favors.
  8. The Situation
    It's a rare moment when the STORY makes the point, not the speeches.
  9. Fired!
    At one point, David Cross tells Gurwitch to enjoy being unemployed, because "When you're fired, you're interesting." But as Fired! proves, that ain't necessarily so.
  10. Ghost Rider
    Cage has some fun with the role, making Blaze a kind of Zen Elvis with a strange fixation on Carpenters songs, but the film's priorities lie with the digital effects and not the story, and even the effects aren't that hot.
  11. First Snow
    Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.
  12. Redline
    A PG-13 celebration of hot chicks, fast cars, and deplorable behavior is like diet Mountain Dew, near-beer, or an expletive-free version of Straight Outta Compton--a tame, watered-down version of the real thing.
  13. The Wedding Weekend
    At least when they're singing, they aren't sniping and griping at each other. That original title really would have worked a lot better.
  14. Radiant City
    The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off. If anything, the movie's observations about the corrupting social influence of cluttered mall spaces get undercut by the fact that Burns and Brown feel the need to INVENT characters to prove their truth.
  15. License to Wed
    Krasinski knows how to play off Williams--his pained looks are all too appropriate in the face of Williams' desperate shtick--but it's disillusioning to see him here, because he seems too smart for this film.
  16. Mr. Woodcock
    Thornton is one of America's finest actors, but after this, "Bad News Bears," and "School For Scoundrels," his run of loveably irascible authority-figure roles should probably come to a close. He's kicked around one child too many.
  17. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Final score: Book 1, Movie 0.
  18. Bella
    The emotions at play in Bella are no doubt heartfelt--and must have resonated with a few hundred people, anyway--but they're so cut-and-dried that the mawkish script virtually writes itself.
  19. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.
  20. Sleuth
    No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.
  21. Slipstream
    The result is either one of the most self-indulgent vanity projects in the history of the Hollywood star system, or a rare revealing look at a distinguished actor who usually keeps his real self out of the spotlight.
  22. August Rush
    Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.
  23. Hitman
    By the time Olyphant leaves an enemy in the most ridiculous deathtrap since the '60s "Batman," just because it looks kinda neat, the whole project has started to feel like "Ultraviolet 2: The Further Stupidening."
  24. Awake
    Only the so-bad-it's-good crowd need apply.
  25. The Perfect Holiday
    It's a measure of the film's lack of imagination that Morris Chestnut, as an aspiring songwriter logging time as a mall Santa, can't even think of a good fake occupation.
  26. Flakes
    The characters Lehmann and company use as generational mouthpieces bear no relation to any people who have ever existed, and they barely work as parody.
  27. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    West is heavy on Vaughn, at least initially, but woefully short on comedy.
  28. Meet the Browns
    Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."
  29. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.
  30. The Happening
    Shyamalan still has an abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.
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