The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,427 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: 5,576 out of 10427
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10427
  3. Negative: 1,110 out of 10427
10427 movie reviews
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    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Losing Control
    As onscreen professions go, it'd be a nice change of pace, were Miranda Kent not the least credible scientist since Denise Richards donned short shorts to play Dr. Christmas Jones.
  2. The Island President
    The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.
  3. Intruders
    Feels tentative and weak whenever it isn't simply baldly derivative. It's old-fashioned to the point of ossification.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Goon
    Where George Roy Hill's "Slap Shot," the former reigning champ of the narrow hockey-film canon, descends into anticlimactic late-game zaniness, Goon fully commits to its theme of violence for violence's sake. It's "Paper Lion" by way of Sam Peckinpah.
  5. The Deep Blue Sea
    There's a suffocating air to The Deep Blue Sea that makes it harder to access than other period romances of its kind, but Davies aligns himself wholly with Hester.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    October Baby
    This is no mere tale of redemption or reaffirming of faith; this is a film with an extreme agenda.
  7. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    The improvised dialogue takes hairpin turns, some less fruitful than others, holding onto just enough traces of structure to sustain the film's brief length.
  8. Brake
    Ridiculousness aside, though, Brake is reasonably impressive both as a performance piece and as an exercise in staging.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    Even in an old T-shirt and scruff of beard, Hall seems too canny and calculated a presence to entirely inhabit this man-child role, which lends a compelling edge to an otherwise scattershot story of urban misadventure and coming of age.
  10. Musical Chairs
    Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.
  11. The Raid: Redemption
    Gareth Evans' Indonesian martial-arts throwback The Raid: Redemption has a look and feel that resembles the best of '80s cult action movies: half John Carpenter, half John Woo.
  12. The Hunger Games
    When the goal is simply to be as faithful as possible to the material - as if a movie were a marriage, and a rights contract the vow - the best result is a skillful abridgment, one that hits all the important marks without losing anything egregious. And as abridgments go, they don't get much more skillful than this one.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Free Men
    It's an uplifting tale, if one that gets to a slow start and muddles through scenes of exposition for longer than seems necessary before finally getting to its sequences of action and suspense.
  14. The Kid with a Bike
    The second half of The Kid With A Bike diverges so much from the first that they seem like two different movies - the first a drama about an orphan's search for home, the second a moral thriller about the terrible things all people, no matter their social station, are willing to do in the interest of self-preservation. Both sections are riveting in their own way, and punctuated by startling shocks and bursts of emotion.
  15. 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Natural Selection
    A generous, unguarded performance from Rachael Harris cuts through the cuteness of a quirky premise in Natural Selection.
  17. The FP
    The FP feels like a junky, disposable lark, created for a midnight audience to swallow, belch, and forget about the next morning.
  18. Detachment
    For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
  19. Delicacy
    The movie is caught between the poignancy of the everyday and the exaggerations of fiction.
  20. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    Jeff begins with its protagonist discussing a Hollywood movie and ends by embracing the worst excesses of commercial American filmmaking, but there are enough moments of magic and wonder in the interim to make it worthwhile.
  21. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Just as a document of the sheer physical labor that goes into covering a giant canvas with color, Gerhard Richter Painting is never less than absorbing.
  22. Casa de mi Padre
    As with "Black Dynamite," many of Casa De Mi Padre's sharpest, most inspired gags riff on the source material's ingratiatingly amateurish production values and exuberantly incompetent stylistic choices.
  23. 21 Jump Street
    It's more consistently amusing and inspired than an adaptation of an '80s TV show has any right to be.
  24. A Thousand Words
    While the ending is wretchedly fakey and predictable, Murphy in subdued mode gives it a little authentic sweetness.
  25. Good for Nothing
    Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction.
  26. Sound of Noise
    What binds the entertaining crime movie to its YouTube-ready musical interludes is the unspoken yearning of its two leads: he for the world of silence in which he'd rather live, and she for all the sounds that slip by every second, uncontrolled and unappreciated.
  27. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    David Gelb's documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi shows what a meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro is like: each morsel prepared simply and perfectly, then replaced by another as soon as the previous piece is consumed, with no repetition of courses. Once an item is gone, it doesn't come back. That's why each one has to be memorable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Footnote
    The love, jealousy, and stubborn pride of the relationship between Ashkenazi and Bar-Aba is the heart of the film, and that makes the deliberately uncertain note of the ending particularly frustrating.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    Tennant and Macdonald are appealing performers, but they aren't given scenes that convey they even like each other, much less that they're irresistibly drawn to each other, circumstances be damned.
  30. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Genesis And Lady Jaye accurately portrays a restless artist with a kitchen-sink aesthetic, and offers up a film to match.
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