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. God Loves Uganda
    An eye-opening, often-infuriating new documentary.
  2. Zero Charisma
    That it never quite sinks into caricature is thanks to the imposing presence in the lead. Refusing to fish for sympathy, even as his character circles the drain, Eidson delivers a complex, bravely off-putting performance.
  3. Broadway Idiot
    This documentary by rookie director Doug Hamilton plays more like a featurette on an American Idiot DVD than a stand-alone film.
  4. Romeo & Juliet
    Romeo & Juliet looks chintzy. The Capulets’ masked balls is designed in Pier 1 Imports colors and texture, the lovers’ secret marriage is performed in front of a green screen, and when Romeo goes up to Juliet’s balcony, he climbs a plastic vine with cloth leaves.
  5. CBGB
    Punk may not be dead, but this picture is D.O.A.
  6. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Even if Mandy Lane had been released in a timely fashion, it’s unlikely that it would have found much of an audience. For all its good intentions, it’s ultimately too half-assed and lethargic to work as a conventional horror film, and not nearly thoughtful or incisive enough to subsist on thwarted expectations alone.
  7. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.
  8. As I Lay Dying
    Like Franco’s other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation—interesting, but only in context.
  9. Escape from Tomorrow
    The more outlandish the film becomes, especially in its off-the-rails second half, the less crucial its unique setting seems.
  10. Machete Kills
    Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them.
  11. Captain Phillips
    More often that not, however, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios.
  12. Runner Runner
    In different hands, Runner Runner might have worked as sleazy tropical noir, but director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) never quite embraces the tawdriness of his material.
  13. Concussion
    The viewer is presented with a series of caustic, vignette-like scenes which tease bigger themes but end before they can tackle them, as though the film had accidentally started a conversation it didn’t want to have — an impression underscored by the tidy, arbitrary ending.
  14. The Summit
    The proceedings somewhat sidestep the issues of risk and responsibility—including the raised, but never fully tackled, question of whether others should have gone back to try to save their fellow, trapped compatriots—that seem most in need of investigation.
  15. I Used to Be Darker
    Drenched in the evening glow of its urban and suburban backdrops, Darker comes alive in the dark, when its characters are drowning their sorrows in song, the sauce, or conversation.
  16. Bad Milo!
    :ike a lot of intentionally shoddy or derivative movies, Bad Milo! can’t overcome what it’s trying to be. It’s neither focused enough to work as straight parody, nor outrageous enough to be appreciated for its excess; it’s a movie about butt monsters where butts are never shown.
  17. All Is Bright
    Directed by Phil Morrison (Junebug) from a lackluster script by Melissa James Gibson, All Is Bright coasts entirely on the formidable talent of its cast, though Giamatti merely offers another variation on the irascible persona he’s been cultivating since Sideways, while Rudd is ultimately defeated by his character’s shapelessness.
  18. A Touch of Sin
    The bloodshed is fast and brutal — the flash of a knife, a splash of crimson in a backseat, an opening robbery gone horrifically awry. There’s even a little Tarantino in the staging, as when a blood-splattered wallflower unleashes her Kill Bill-style vengeance straight into the camera lens.
  19. Argento's Dracula 3D
    No amount of intentional stabs at humor can offset the hilarious awfulness of Dario Argento’s Dracula.
  20. A.C.O.D.
    Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.
  21. Parkland
    As vicarious, you-are-there re-creations of historical events go, it’s creditably workmanlike; whether that’s the best use of the dream factory is another matter.
  22. Gravity
    If nothing else, Gravity makes the case for throwing immense resources at true visionaries; the blockbuster craftsman as adventurer, Cuarón expertly blends the epic with the intimate. For every stunning 3-D setpiece involving a dangerous hailstorm of metallic debris, there’s a moment of small tenderness.
  23. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    What a pity, then, that almost no imagination has been expended on the narrative.
  24. Baggage Claim
    Without a coherent lead performance, all Baggage Claim has left are its generic rom-com plot — which has flight-attendant Patton jetting around the country to meet the perfect man in time for her younger sister’s wedding — and profoundly shoddy production values.
  25. Metallica: Through the Never
    This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.
  26. Don Jon
    To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.
  27. Inequality for All
    As a primer on its topic, Inequality For All is informative, plainly argued, and — in some of its more poignant anecdotes — suitably enraging.
  28. We Are What We Are
    It plays less like a contemporary horror film than an increasingly gruesome drama, building to a climax — completely original to this version — where the movie’s core themes are expressed through grotesque imagery.
  29. Muscle Shoals
    Although the intriguingly named first-time director Greg “Freddy” Camalier makes the twice-told tales of the film’s second hour watchable, they end up paling in comparison to its essayistic first half.
  30. On the Job
    It’s a provocative premise, and one that manages to go beyond the usual themes of the crime genre. Too bad, then, it’s forced to share screen time with a humdrum and occasionally heavy-handed police procedural.
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