The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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 2.5 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Birth of the Dragon
    The aura of cheap-o emptiness is overwhelming: Scenes tend to be visually featureless, composed against strangely empty walls or Vancouver street corners. Even the occasionally decent fight choreography looks unappealing.
  2. Rumor Has It...
    Like the film itself, Ruffalo and Aniston exacerbate a bad, unfeasible idea with clumsy execution, exerting a whole lot of energy and effort for very little payoff.
  3. Argylle
    In trying to do both—in trying to play it straight and yet show the very absurd mechanics of what it means to do so—Argylle lands in a kind of exhausting limbo, forever stretching its premise to its breaking point only to snap it back up again.
  4. Salvation Boulevard
    Salvation Boulevard doesn't seem to have any higher aspiration than illustrating how religious people can be hypocrites. (Gosh, who knew?)
  5. The Hustle
    While The Hustle is more overt when it comes to discussing gender, including a monologue about why women are better suited to “the con” than men, it doesn’t really have all that much to say. Not about gender, not about con artistry, and definitely not about how to craft a satisfying studio comedy.
  6. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    At least in the last half-hour, Bay's incredibly sloppy continuity and overeager rush to action pays off.
  7. Bollywood/Hollywood
    It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.
  8. Scooby-Doo
    A work of Battlefield Earth-level miscalculation.
  9. Hide and Seek
    Like far too many junky post-"Sixth Sense" thrillers, Hide And Seek essentially exists for the sake of its third-act plot twist, but the climactic revelation merely pushes it from bad to worse.
  10. Very Good Girls
    The casting isn’t all together unconvincing: Olsen and Fanning’s collective ability to project intelligence beyond their years works both ways, allowing them to play both precocious youths and youthful adults. But Very Good Girls catches them in between those stages, and the effect isn’t evocative so much as muddled.
  11. Stardust
    As played by actor-musician Johnny Flynn, the Halloween-costume Bowie we meet in Stardust is a miserable, charmless wannabe. Which is to say that the film fails where a single photo of this most chameleonic of music legends would succeed: It makes Bowie boring.
  12. A Walk to Remember
    Basically a prim, desexualized "Carrie," told from the prom date's perspective and featuring Peter Coyote in the Piper Laurie role.
  13. Drift
    The mediocre ones, like the new Australian drama Drift, squeeze surfing scenes into conventional narratives, presuming that, because surfing looks exciting, any story related to surfing is inherently interesting.
  14. Marguerite & Julien
    It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.
  15. The Host
    The Host is a step up from the endless metaphorical lectures and gaping plot holes of Niccol’s last film, In Time, but its muffled emotions, delivered with Twilight-esque blank-eyed calm, put it in the same category of a creative idea hamstrung in execution.
  16. Halloween II (2009)
    Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Event Horizon
    The movie looks great at first, with interesting spaceship designs and genuinely creepy abandoned interiors, and the initial idea had plenty of potential. But by the time the story gets rolling, the filmmakers are trying unsuccessfully to scare the audience with sudden loud noises and gallon upon gallon of fake blood.
  18. Mansome
    If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.
  19. The Kitchen
    While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.
  20. Post Grad
    When a film whose cast includes Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Fred Armisen, Craig Robinson, Demetri Martin, and the now rarely seen Carol Burnett can’t scare up more than a smattering of laughs, the patient was never meant to live in the first place.
  21. Van Helsing
    A work of staggering stupidity.
  22. Multiple Sarcasms
    Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
  23. Certifiably Jonathan
    An unabashed valentine to Winters, but like an unfortunate number of valentines, it proves a little embarrassing to the giver and recipient alike.
  24. Super Mario Bros.
    Super Mario Bros. devotes half its run time to lumbering exposition, yet still makes no f.cking sense. Seldom has a film done such heavy lifting to such meager effect.
  25. Identity Thief
    Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
  26. Man of the House
    Jones' role, on the other hand, only requires him to look embarrassed at all times, which shouldn't have been too hard to pull off, considering the circumstances. Is that what they call "method" acting?
  27. 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Watching TV With The Red Chinese is based on a Luke Whisnant young-adult novel that co-writer/director Shimon Dotan (Diamond Dogs) seems to have fed into a blender.
  29. Deal
    To think that a semi-major studio financed a production this low-rent and listless is amazing: Since when did MGM start making student films?
  30. Morbius
    Director Daniel Espinoza stacks vampire cliches with horror classic visuals in a lackluster, but hardly disastrous, Spider-Man spinoff.
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