The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.
  2. Gimme Shelter
    There’s nothing wrong with social-cause filmmaking, and the movie’s chief problem is less its political talking points than the corny way it tries to impart them.
  3. I, Frankenstein
    If the film is made with the understanding that campiness needs to be straight-faced to be funny, then are its “unintentional” laughs really that unintentional?
  4. Stranger by the Lake
    As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.
  5. Gloria
    Movies about middle-aged women are so rare that it’s tempting to praise them on that basis alone. Thankfully, the Chilean drama Gloria, which won Paulina García the Best Actress prize at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, doesn’t require much critical mitigation.
  6. Run & Jump
    Forte’s strength in playing awkward characters works to his advantage.
  7. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer finds Hyams senior and his screenwriters, Eric and James Bromberg, channeling Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series "Twin Peaks," mixing bizarro characterizations and woodland intrigue with wholesome national imagery.
  8. 24 Exposures
    Like countless Swanberg films (the prolific director has completed 17 features in less than a decade), 24 Exposures is populated by characters who are defined not by their actions, but by their unwillingness to act. The difference here is the presence of an exterior force—the murders—that makes Swanberg’s naturalistic style seem affected.
  9. Visitors
    What’s hypnotic for five minutes at the Whitney Museum does not necessarily carry over to an 80-minute movie, and Visitors might conceivably run half that length without the slow motion. Reggio’s film premiered in Toronto with live musical accompaniment, a gimmick that probably enhanced the experiential aspect of what’s otherwise a glorified installation piece.
  10. Devil's Due
    While it’s generally above-average for this sorry genre, it’s so derivative, in both style and narrative, that there’s still an overwhelming sense of plodding inevitability to the whole affair.
  11. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    The movie eventually evokes the sense that Branagh is better at directing in front of the camera than from behind it; its best moments are typically the ones that feature Branagh’s Viktor Cherevin on-screen.
  12. Generation War
    By conveniently exempting its protagonists from ideology or culpability, Generation War feels less like a reckoning than a dodge: Yes, your grandparents may have been Nazis—but they could have been these nice people, too.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Nut Job
    The most egregious problem with The Nut Job is how shamelessly it fills in the gaps left by expanding Lepeniotis’ short with generic and tedious rogue-to-hero cliché.
  14. Big Bad Wolves
    Believe it or not, some of this mayhem—muscularly orchestrated by directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, who made 2010’s "Rabies" — does provoke laughter.
  15. Ride Along
    Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.
  16. Like Father, Like Son
    Like Father, Like Son has the overall depth and tenor of a Lifetime movie. Kore-Eda can do much better.
  17. Reasonable Doubt
    A courtroom thriller that becomes sillier and more generic as it zips along. It moves fast (a rare quality for a contemporary thriller), but doesn’t end up going anywhere interesting.
  18. The Legend of Hercules
    While The Legend Of Hercules offers plenty for viewers who’ve acquired a taste for the fake and incompetent (not the least of which is the dialogue, which finds characters saying each other’s names at the end of every other sentence), it’s unlikely to please anyone who wants entertainment in the conventional sense.
  19. The Truth About Emanuel
    Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.
  20. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  21. In Bloom
    Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.
  22. Cold Comes the Night
    The Breaking Bad star — who looks here not unlike the Heisenberg of last season — can’t buoy material so thin that it would’ve barely supported an episode of "The Killing."
  23. The Banshee Chapter
    Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."
  24. The Best Offer
    Rush has a lot of fun with Oldman’s gradual thaw, and the questions the movie raises about authenticity and deception, while not remotely in the same heady league as those in "Certified Copy," nonetheless allow it to conclude on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.
  25. Beyond Outrage
    Of all the great actor/directors, Kitano has probably come the closest to creating a style that parallels his approach to acting.
  26. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.
  27. 47 Ronin
    A multi-colored downer fantasy which combines bursts of imagination with a bleak worldview, resulting in something that rarely feels mainstream.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    All the boilerplate aphorisms and blatant attempts at image rehabilitation make Bieber seem like a kind of mega-church preacher leading a long-converted congregation, another huckster dancing around in a white suit.
  29. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.
  30. The Invisible Woman
    Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »