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. The Death of Stalin
    The Death Of Stalin isn’t quite as pointed or rat-a-tat funny as In The Loop (or Veep at its best), but its application of [Iannucci's] signature barbed comic voice to such grim history (executions are a constant source of gallows humor) packs its own punch.
  2. Police Story (1985)
    Action geeks who rented Police Story on VHS back in the early ’90s could tell when the good parts were going to start, because that’s when the tracking would get fuzzy, from all the previous renters rewinding and re-watching the same scenes, over and over.
  3. RED
    Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.
  4. Down Terrace
    When Down Terrace gets in a good groove, Wheatley and Hill's dialogue is both funny and pointed.
  5. Jackass 3-D
    It's easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn't criticism so much as high praise.
  6. Carlos
    Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.
  7. Samson and Delilah
    Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.
  8. Gerrymandering
    At the start of Gerrymandering, Reichert quotes Thomas Pynchon, writing, "Nothing will produce bad history more directly nor brutally than drawing a line." The same could be said of documentaries.
  9. The Two Escobars
    Finds connections deeply embedded in a soccer culture fueled by the country's thieving cocaine trade.
  10. Secretariat
    The film ultimately feels like a well-trod journey to a familiar destination with not enough wonder along the way.
  11. I Spit on Your Grave
    Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.
  12. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    Galifianakis' magnetic performance suggests murky psychological depths the film doesn't have the substance to plumb.
  13. Life as We Know It
    Pity any poor kid stuck in a house like that. Pity, too, anyone who has to stop by for a visit.
  14. Nowhere Boy
    It's a tender, but sometimes untended, portrait of the artist as a young man-and occasionally as a young asshole-that's handsome, dutiful, and finally, a little dull.
  15. My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
  16. Inside Job
    From an emotional standpoint, it's enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson "nail" some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.
  17. Marwencol
    Jeff Malmberg's documentary Marwencol is at its best when it focuses on Hogancamp's little world, and lets the artist walk the viewer through his town's increasingly dense mythology.
  18. Case 39
    Zellweger has come an awful long way since Matthew McConaughey terrorized her in "Texas Chainsaw Masscare": The Next Generation, but not quite as far as she might like to imagine.
  19. The Social Network
    Zuckerberg's story ends up feeling bigger than his own life.
  20. Let Me In
    Let Me In is a beautiful redundancy.
  21. Freakonomics
    Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.
  22. Barry Munday
    This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.
  23. Douchebag
    At 70 minutes, Douchebag feels both rushed and way too slack, but the bigger problem is that the kind of characters and humor this movie traffics in can be found in a more compact, amusing package on the average FX show.
  24. Hatchet II
    Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.
  25. Ip Man
    As a slice of history, Ip Man is disappointingly simplistic. Yip, Wong, and Yen never develop any real tension between Ip's true story and the exaggerated myth-making of a martial-arts movie. But as an exaggerated, myth-making martial-arts movie, Ip Man is often thrilling.
  26. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The first time around, Wall Street felt like a warning about the perils of excess just as excess started to exact its toll. This one's little more than a reminder that we all got, and remain, screwed. Noted.
  27. You Again
    Even the best performers can only do so much to elevate mediocre material. In the long run, good or bad, the material always wins.
  28. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.
  29. Buried
    Buried is as much about dropped calls, getting sent to voicemail, and being openly lied to by our institutions as it about being buried alive by terrorists.
  30. Howl
    The trouble with the film is that it often feels too respectable for its own good, preserving the facts of yesterday's rebellion while leaving it firmly in the past. Happily, Ginsberg's words still cut recklessly through the years.
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