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. TRON: Legacy
    Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.
  2. Barry Munday
    This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.
  3. My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
  4. Casino Jack
    Spacey has made a career out of projecting the smarmy elitism of the powerful, but Casino Jack is so painfully clunky that he gets dragged down along with it.
  5. Red Dawn
    Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    The film's premise-that Bieber achieved his superstardom through years of hard work overcoming towering obstacles-is so ludicrously flawed that everything built upon it borders on self-parody.
  7. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    The film isn't erotic or profound. It is occasionally comic, though-like reading the finalists for one of those Bad Sex In Fiction awards.
  8. Priest
    Bettany's performance consists entirely of a purposeful frown paired with a menacing glare: He goes about his godly business with solemn, no-frills intensity. The film follows suit.
  9. Battle: Los Angeles
    It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
  10. Hop
    Candy-coated or otherwise, crap's still crap.
  11. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.
  12. Madea's Big Happy Family
    Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.
  13. The Help
    The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.
  14. Green Lantern
    A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.
  15. The Smurfs
    Actual kids may find this fun, but for adults, watching The Smurfs may feel a little too much like trying to wrangle an overcrowded kiddie birthday party.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    Mr. Popper's Penguins reins in its rubber-faced star, leaving most of the rote physical comedy (and overabundance of fart jokes) to his nonhuman counterparts, comprised of a combination of CGI and real penguins.
  17. Monte Carlo
    Monte Carlo finally resolves itself in a farcical climax that at least shows a little energy, but it isn't enough to overcome the discomfiting tensions and indifferent formula filmmaking that plagues nearly every scene.
  18. The Change-Up
    David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.
  19. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.
  20. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.
  21. 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.
  22. Anonymous
    It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.
  23. Butter
    A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.
  24. New Year's Eve
    It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    There Be Dragons
    Certainly looks lavish, from the battle scenes to the beautiful period costuming, but it's so stilted and humorless that it's almost campy.
  26. Courageous
    Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.
  27. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The charismatic Idris Elba debuts in a key role as an alcoholic priest who recruits Cage's unique services. Yet instead of elevating the franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance ends up squandering even more potential.
  28. Henry's Crime
    A grating muddle.
  29. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Peter Stormare has fun engaging in some Walken-level scenery-chewing-almost literally-as the patriarch of a werewolf clan. Good for him. That means at least one person has found something to like about this tedious collection of wisecracks and hand-me-down monsters.
  30. Rock of Ages
    This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.
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