The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Parental Guidance
    Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.
  2. Seeking Justice
    To paraphrase a famous Mae West wisecrack, when Cage is good, he's very good, and when he's bad, he's better. Here, however, he's just plain lousy, and like the film he so passively carries, that's no fun at all.
  3. The Magic of Belle Isle
    For a movie that spends so much time extolling the virtues of the imagination to show so little of its own is more than ironic - it's offensive.
  4. Grown Ups 2
    Largely free of Sandler’s usual schmaltz and lame romance, it’s pure plotless, grotesque high jinks, bizarre and inept in a way that’s fascinating without ever being all that funny.
  5. The Words
    The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.
  6. The Tortured
    There's an opportunity here for screenwriter Marek Posival and director Robert Lieberman to play up the squeamishness of upper-middle-class torturers who don't fit the profile, but they're too busy tending to horror-thriller clichés.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Assassin's Bullet
    This is the third feature Portnoy has conceived and starred in, and while her initiative and ability to find funding for these films is admirable, Assassin's Bullet feels like a shameless, dismal vanity project.
  8. Last Vegas
    The high point of Last Vegas is also arguably the low point of Robert De Niro’s career.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Evidence
    There have been a lot of shoddy found-footage flicks over the past few years, but maybe none quite so shoddy as this.
  10. Filth
    Like all of the very worst dark comedies, Jon S. Baird’s insipid and self-satisfied Filth isn’t content to merely tap into viewers’ most odious desires. It also insist that it’s revealing them.
  11. Dealin' with Idiots
    Jeff Garlin’s second directorial feature, Dealin’ With Idiots, is a largely improvised ensemble piece about a comedian who decides that his son’s Little League team would make an interesting subject for a movie. It doesn’t.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Scenic Route
    Digital projection has made it easier than ever to get no-budget movies onto theater screens. That might sound wonderfully egalitarian, but it mostly just leads to more shoulda-gone-straight-to-DVD clunkers like Scenic Route.
  13. God's Not Dead
    Even by the rather lax standards of the Christian film industry, God’s Not Dead is a disaster.
  14. Left Behind
    This Left Behind may be worse than the last Left Behind, but it’s much less boring, thanks in part to the commitment of its star, who plays the often ludicrous material with the straightest of faces. The Cage works in mysterious ways.
  15. Septic Man
    As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.
  16. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
    Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.
  17. Home Sweet Hell
    Katherine Heigl has exactly one funny moment in the dire black comedy Home Sweet Hell, which is still one more than anybody else has.
  18. Faith of Our Fathers
    It’s obnoxious, to say the least, to use the Vietnam War as an excuse to affirm the importance of telling all and sundry about Jesus at all times (i.e., “testifying”), under all circumstances.
  19. Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser
    At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.
  20. Expend4bles
    For a property that not only held unlimited potential for sequels galore, but also spin-offs (an all-female Expendables was briefly bandied about), it’s disheartening to see it face such creative bankruptcy. That’s not to say that, in the future, the right marriage of innovative directors and screenwriters can’t revive this flailing corpse and return it to its former glory. Unfortunately, recruiting those miracle workers seems more difficult than any mission any Expendable ever faced.
  21. Exposed
    If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.
  22. The Bye Bye Man
    On top of the general hoariness, this is also an uncommonly, at times unbelievably inept movie; from its acting to its script to most of its technical aspects, it feels barely fit for the big screen.
  23. Mother's Day
    Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.
  24. Slamma Jamma
    It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.
  25. Thinner
    Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.
  26. Dark Crimes
    Here, a few words should be said about Carrey’s performance: It may be the worst dramatic acting of his career, a charmless cartoon of self-repression.
  27. Replicas
    Reeves is the most human presence on screen, trying and nobly failing to wrestle some emotional truth from every preposterous new plot twist. His labor is the one proof that you’re watching a real movie, and not just being plugged into the low-grade imitation of one in a poorly coded Matrix.
  28. My Favorite Martian
    With its mixture of whimsy and special-effects-driven humor, My Favorite Martian aims to blend E.T. and Men In Black, but in its sad, mercenary shamelessness, it ends up recalling Mac And Me instead.
  29. King Kong Lives
    King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.
  30. Hellraiser: Hellworld
    As far as the Hellraiser elements go, this is the laziest yet.
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