The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Role Models
    In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane first half, Role Models suggests "School Of Rock" with Tourette's, or the original "Bad News Bears" without the baseball.
  2. JCVD
    A canny piece of autobiography that looks at the man behind the legend and the legend behind the man.
  3. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.
  4. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    When it comes to time-wasting memory games, crossword puzzles are more fun than this movie.
  5. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Overly conventional as a documentary, but it's inspiring as a rebuttal to the declining state of the world at large. It's encouraging to know that the endurance of institutions like marriage and family could hold the key to keeping civilization intact.
  6. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    Piles on the glam-rock spectacle and coal-black comedy at such a brusque pace that it often seems in danger of rattling off the rails entirely.
  7. Soul Men
    For all its crudeness and desperation, Soul Men can't scare up a single laugh.
  8. The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    It's a horror film better suited for skittish cats than humans.
  9. Splinter
    There's potential for a lot more excitement in Splinter, but Wilkins seems content just to bring it across the finish line.
  10. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The film is clumsily unfunny at times--particularly when Smith makes tone-deaf efforts at gay-and black-themed comedy--and it's occasionally gross just for the sake of being gross.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    It's a sweetly queasy film that suggests the spirit that sustains us, the demons we hide from the world, and the monsters that prey upon us in the dark might all be variations on the same beast.
  12. Synecdoche, New York
    For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.
  13. Changeling
    Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along.
  14. I've Loved You So Long
    The film deftly sketches a sibling relationship complicated by obligation, guilt, mistrust, and, not least, an abiding love.
  15. Saw V
    Devotes so much time and energy to flashbacks and recycling footage from its predecessors that it threatens to implode.
  16. Pride and Glory
    Norton is infamous for rewriting scripts and acting as a de facto director on his movies yet he seems lost and defeated here.
  17. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    Efron is the epitome of sexless Disney heartthrobs, but he's an electrifying song-and-dance man, so much so that his castmates (Bleu excepted) look like they have concrete shoes by comparison.
  18. The Universe of Keith Haring
    Universe deals extensively with Haring's personal life--his open homosexuality, his regular visits with his family, etc.--but it doesn't penetrate too far below the surface.
  19. Fear(s) of the Dark
    These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.
  20. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Arijon's choice to film the survivors returning to the Andes with their children pays huge dividends, leading to an ending that puts the real meaning of their ordeal in moving terms.
  21. W.
    Stone paddles down the giant river of Bush's life without exploring any of the tributaries; he passes by two or three dozen better movies along the way.
  22. Filth and Wisdom
    Madonna presents the three leads as flawed but essentially decent and redeemable, but they're bound up in a story that's meant to affirm a vague set of values. If she needs to justify the "Sex" book by charting her own contrived path from filth to heavenly wisdom, that's fine. But she should do it on her own time.
  23. Max Payne
    In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.
  24. The Secret Life of Bees
    It's pleasant and often touching, and the well-chosen cast sells what little drama they get, but there's no depth and little affect, and every would-be conflict peters out noncommittally.
  25. Sex Drive
    Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.
  26. Frontrunners
    What makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns.
  27. Body of Lies
    It's not like the screens are so flooded with decent movies that we couldn't use another, particularly a timely, clear-eyed thriller about the Middle East and the role of the U.S. therein.
  28. City of Ember
    Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.
  29. The Express
    Long on inspiration, short on specifics.
  30. Good Dick
    Mainly, Good Dick just proves that TV actors like Ritter make good indie-film hires, because they'll go along with whatever ridiculous nonsense a novice filmmaker concocts.
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