The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    The overall mood of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is curdled and sour. It leaves the feeling that the next chapter can't come soon enough.
  2. Bad Teacher
    Teacher underutilizes a smartly cast-against-type Timberlake and the perpetually winning Segel, but Diaz ultimately earns a rooting interest in the unlikely redemption of her scheming opportunist.
  3. Cars 2
    Cars 2 looks fantastic, but the studio has never given audiences - especially audiences over the age of 10 - less reason to be emotionally invested in the beautiful shiny things flying across the screen.
  4. Kidnapped
    What's missing from Kidnapped is a grander context - or richer subtext - to all the terror.
  5. Buck
    Perhaps Brannaman's art is too subtle and instinctive to be captured on camera, but it's a shame Meehl doesn't do a better job of capturing exactly what makes him, by all accounts, a miraculously successful trainer.
  6. Battle for Brooklyn
    Most viewers should find the documentary Battle For Brooklyn gripping and provocative, no matter their opinions about eminent domain, historic preservation, or public dollars going to support private development.
  7. The Art of Getting By
    By the end, the most charming thing about The Art Of Getting By is that while its adults cut Highmore far too much slack, they aren't Hughes-movie oblivious idiots, and they eventually draw a few firm lines. Unfortunately, the movie isn't daring enough to follow suit.
  8. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Rossi never gets around to exploring his opening question: What would the world be without The New York Times? Perhaps, as with a lot of his subjects here, the answer is just too painful to consider, no matter the economic realities.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    Mr. Popper's Penguins reins in its rubber-faced star, leaving most of the rote physical comedy (and overabundance of fart jokes) to his nonhuman counterparts, comprised of a combination of CGI and real penguins.
  10. Green Lantern
    A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.
  11. Trollhunter
    The trolls are the best part of Troll Hunter; they're funny and creepy.
  12. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    A fine enough piece of work, but it's a shame Werner Herzog didn't get to Gunther Hauk first.
  13. Bride Flight
    The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    One Lucky Elephant
    One Lucky Elephant would make an affecting pairing with James Marsh's upcoming "Project Nim," another film about an animal treated like a human until its essential wildness made that impossible.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Viva Riva!
    Frenetic, sleazy, and entertaining as all hell, Viva Riva! is a stylish and (save for the NC-17 it'd certainly earn) multiplex-worthy crime drama from, of all unexpected places, the Democratic Republic Of The Congo.
  16. Just Like Us
    The key mistake was Ahmed's choice to direct it himself; it's promotional when it might be revealing of impasses (and commonalities) between cultures and the complex tactics comedians use to address it.
  17. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    Not that anything in Judy Moody is meant to be taken seriously - or could be, even if it was meant to - but even for sugary neon fluff, it's awfully lightweight.
  18. The Trip
    Make no mistake: The Trip is a fine, funny movie. But there's no reason why it couldn't have been even finer and funnier.
  19. Road to Nowhere
    The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.
  20. Super 8
    Its pleasures are borrowed, but durable.
  21. Rejoice and Shout
    The smartest move that McGlynn makes in Rejoice And Shout is to let those old performances run on at length.
  22. Mr. Nice
    The result is a film that's long and choppy, with little narrative momentum. And yet at times, Mr. Nice is frustratingly close to brilliant.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Love, Wedding, Marriage
    The "romantic" half of Love, Wedding, Marriage's romantic comedy doesn't work, but that isn't nearly as problematic as the film's profound unfunniness.
  24. The Last Mountain
    There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.
  25. Submarine
    Submarine is the film "Youth In Revolt" should have been, an achingly sad yet ribald account of a hyper-verbal oddball's ascent/descent into manhood.
  26. Beautiful Boy
    Like its fellow crowd-depressor "Blue Valentine," Beautiful Boy offers the antithesis of escapism: a claustrophobic, punishingly intense, beautifully measured exploration of the depths of human despair.
  27. Beginners
    Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.
  28. 13 Assassins
    The great Kôji Yakusho stars as a revered samurai who decides that enough is enough, and sets about assembling the assassins of the title like a men-on-a-mission movie.
  29. X-Men: First Class
    Another crowd-pleasing comic-book film designed to bring in new fans while gratifying the old ones.
  30. Tuesday, After Christmas
    More about well-observed moments of everyday life than it is about heightened melodrama.
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