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. Night Catches Us
    For Washington, the wounds of the past are just beneath the surface, as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper.
  2. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    Slight but fun.
  3. All Good Things
    Here's a story about a man who befriended and eventually killed a Texan while going incognito as an exceptionally frumpy woman, then was eventually nabbed shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich while carrying more than $500 in his pocket. Why underplay that?
  4. I Love You Phillip Morris
    Ficarra and Requa are more comfortable being bad: The nastier the film gets, the better it is.
  5. Black Swan
    A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.
  6. Kawasaki's Rose
    The problem with Kawasaki's Rose is that the theme is far more compelling than the movie.
  7. The Nutcracker
    Nutcracker In 3D doesn't just compound past errors in re-imagining the story. Thanks to a big budget, huge staging, massive overacting, and the non-wonders of post-production 3-D conversion, it adds a wide bevy of new errors.
  8. Today's Special
    So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.
  9. Made in Dagenham
    Make no mistake. In spite of its worthy subject matter and good intentions, Made In Dagenham remains mediocre to the core.
  10. The Next Three Days
    Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.
  11. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Offers a concise summary of Burroughs' life and works. Maybe too concise. At a mere 88 minutes, it feels a bit glancing. But as an introduction or refresher course, it gets the job done.
  12. Skyline
    It isn't clever. It isn't original. It isn't scary. At best, Skyline is a proficient, forgettable programmer that only occasionally lapses into irredeemably silliness.
  13. Morning Glory
    Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.
  14. Red Hill
    The problem is that Hughes fails to imbue this homage with anything personal. Aside from splicing together a policier and a Western, there's no spin here, just a checklist of clichés.
  15. Four Lions
    Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.
  16. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    The film rescues the story from tabloid hell, and asks for a saner assessment of a deeply flawed man.
  17. For Colored Girls
    There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.
  18. Fair Game
    It's ultimately a tale of heroism in the face of fearsome, powerful opposition, but as stubborn pride masquerading as ideological purity proves Wilson's Achilles heel, the film's heroes reveal themselves as flawed to an almost fatal extent, and messily, fascinatingly human.
  19. 127 Hours
    Worse still, all that introspection adds up to a disappointingly shallow accumulation of regrets and life lessons, none of them surprising. After the adrenaline rush, 127 Hours turns to vapor.
  20. The Kids Grow Up
    By experiencing Block's films, we aren't merely witnessing his neurosis, we're abetting and validating it.
  21. Waste Land
    Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.
  22. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    Most fan-docs are fairly remedial, but Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields is more sophisticated than the norm, in keeping with its subject.
  23. Welcome to the Rileys
    The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.
  24. Monsters
    Gareth Edwards' low-budget science-fiction film Monsters is both a testament to what the latest technologies allow filmmakers to do, and-on the downside-a testament to the enduring importance of a good script.
  25. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    It's rarely tedious, but it's also rarely insightful or propulsive, and since there's nothing new to discover about the characters or their world, much of the film feels like a protracted, contrived pause, as everyone waits for Rapace to finally get back into the game.
  26. Paranormal Activity 2
    What was scary once is scary twice, like a carnival funhouse remodeled with a few new mirrors and spring-loaded spooks.
  27. The Taqwacores
    Deepens as it plays out, and rewards viewers who stick with it through the clumsier passages. The film is moving and thought-provoking.
  28. Boxing Gym
    Viewers' interest in Boxing Gym will likely wax and wane, depending on their interest in martial arts.
  29. Inhale
    It's neither remotely convincing as true-to-life drama or lurid and propulsive enough to work as exploitation. It's just bad.
  30. Kalamity
    A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.
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