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. King Kong Lives
    King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.
  2. Love Again
    This is after all a romantic comedy, not a romantic tragedy, though you might not realize it since it’s almost devoid of humor.
  3. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  4. The Secret Lives of Dorks
    It’s arguable that the jocks and cheerleaders are this movie’s true heroes, without whom those pathetic dorks would never be able to find one another.
  5. 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.
  6. Brightest Star
    So terminally bland is Brightest Star’s protagonist (played by Chris Lowell) that screenwriters Maggie Kiley (who also directed) and Matthew Mullen couldn’t be tasked to provide him with a name — the closing credits refer to him simply as The Boy.
  7. The Middle of the World
    When they (the family) arrive at their destination, the story arrives at an ending that's neither obvious nor interesting, kind of like the film leading up to it.
  8. The Transporter Refueled
    Refueled isn’t a good movie by most metrics, but it is consistently committed to mainlining the basest action-movie pleasures at the expense of damn near everything else.
  9. Wish Upon
    The real shame is that Joey King got yanked into this cut-rate crap.
  10. Broken Bridges
    Country Music Television's answer to "Elizabethtown."
  11. Saint John of Las Vegas
    Predictably, the best moments belong to Buscemi, whose performance is a model of understatement in a field of grotesques.
  12. Broken Horses
    Very loosely inspired by Chopra’s 1989 feature "Parinda," this wan crime drama plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate. Everything feels rudimentary and slightly awkward, though it’s possible to discern how the material might once have been powerful.
  13. Untraceable
    Not only does Untraceable unmask its initially hidden killer with little ceremony, it's the sort of film that telegraphs every new development.
  14. Farmland
    A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.
  15. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    So what was Tyler Perry going for here? Based on the sanctimonious streak that runs throughout his work, one might posit that he was trying to wrap a gleefully outrageous thriller around a lesson on marriage, like a slice of bacon around a particularly bitter pill. Except, at some point, the bacon got hopelessly overcooked.
  16. Showtime
    De Niro and Murphy are visibly uncomfortable with each other. Their improvisation seems chaotic and mismanaged, and the movie follows in kind.
  17. Games People Play: New York
    Sets a new nadir in the reality genre's race to the bottom. The price of sacrificing dignity for the amusement of the general public gets lower every day.
  18. Unfinished Business
    A once-energetic comic talent (and underrated serious actor) slows down to a pace he must feel matches his audience these days.
  19. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    What the set pieces have in common with everything else in this dunderheaded, insultingly mechanical franchise hopeful is the overwhelming feeling that everyone involved said “good enough” at every turn. It’s savvy only in the way it lowers the standards for this kind of thing, assuring that any future sequels that give half an ass instead of barely a quarter of one will prompt more enthusiasm, or at least relief.
  20. Chernobyl Diaries
    It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.
  21. Repo Men
    It’s a time-waster with brains, but ultimately not enough brains, and one that wastes too much time.
  22. Boogeyman
    Mostly Boogeyman remains content to be a film about a boogeyman who hides in closets and under beds and gobbles people up. And for that, it deserves a certain amount of respect. On the other hand, the film could hardly be any sillier.
  23. Fired Up!
    On the off chance that anyone out there would want to spend time with guys like this—and would appreciate a bonus plug for Staples' recycled paper products, too--this movie has been made just for them.
  24. Don't Tempt Me
    This must all make sense to Yanes, somehow, but the film plays like a private joke with no punchline.
  25. Dying of the Light
    Not to say that the movie is a mess. Instead, it plays out as a more or less conventional direct-to-video-style thriller, distinguished by a handful of subtexts and images that might have been developed in a different version, but here register as mere quirks.
  26. Max Payne
    In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.
  27. Charlie Countryman
    In a film this hapless, it’s hardly a surprise that no one can keep Bucharest and Budapest straight.
  28. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    Partway through the film, a viewer may begin to yearn for Perry’s usual schizoid shtick, the cacophony of screeches and sobs.
  29. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces caters to its intended viewers’ least savory biases, making sure all student activists shown fit into particular categories—overweight, gay, or simply “angry and black”—that stoke the resentment of the target demographic.
  30. The King's Daughter
    If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.
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