The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Superman Returns
    Singer's reverence for the 1978 version edges perilously close to mimicry, as if he has no new ideas to bring to the table, but he succeeds in drawing out the Superman myth with simple power and a refreshing absence of irony.
  2. The Motel
    Like the best independent films, The Motel realizes that life is made up of minor pleasures and tiny epiphanies, not sweeping character arcs or big dramatic moments.
  3. Strangers with Candy
    Lives and dies on the strength of individual gags, most of which are clever, but none of which quite make up for the absence of a strong narrative drive. Sometimes being funny isn't enough.
  4. Who Killed the Electric Car?
    Above all, the film is an extended love letter to the EV1, a sleek GM electric marvel that, by Paine's reckoning, marks the single greatest innovation in human technology since the wheel.
  5. Wassup Rockers
    It may be truer to the lives of his amateur cast to watch them engage in mumbly, inarticulate conversations between rounds of failed skate tricks, but it isn't especially cinematic.
  6. Click
    Charlie Kaufman could have made a great movie out of Click, a soupy existential comedy about a "universal remote" that lets a man magically rewind, fast-forward, and pause his life.
  7. Waist Deep
    Like the forgotten blaxploitation schlock it often resembles, the film aspires to nothing but cheap thrills, but while it's plenty cheap, it's far from thrilling.
  8. The Hidden Blade
    Builds slowly--maybe too slowly--to a mano-a-mano standoff, just like "The Twilight Samurai," and just like the earlier film, the new one presents its climactic swordfight matter-of-factly, with no superheroics and a lot of hesitation.
  9. The Road to Guantanamo
    They never come up with a sufficient reason for crossing into Afghanistan. Their motives for heading straight into a war zone sound like something out of a stoner comedy: They went in search of "really big naan."
  10. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
    Director Lian Lunson keeps the tone reverent, making I'm Your Man the cinematic equivalent of a testimonial dinner. But there's a place for that kind of film, particularly for subjects who've earned it.
  11. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    The racing sequences are the series' meat and potatoes, but in terms of story, Tokyo Drift barely offers a stalk of asparagus.
  12. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties
    Two Kitties marks a considerable improvement over its predecessor. It's faster paced and the filmmakers wisely shift the focus away from bland owner Breckin Meyer and onto a menagerie of chattering animals.
  13. The Lake House
    Elegantly scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn, The Lake House never establishes any clear rules about how and when these strands of time can intertwine, but it succeeds at forging a bond between people who only know each other on the page.
  14. Nacho Libre
    How can any comedy with Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler not be gut-bustingly hilarious? Nacho Libre provides an all-too-convincing answer.
  15. Loverboy
    Though he labors endlessly to account for her behavior, which is explained away by flashbacks to her decadent parents and a glamorous mother-figure played under Vaseline lens by an uncredited Sandra Bullock, Bacon fails to make her seem human.
  16. Lower City
    Whatever its pretensions of social relevance, Sérgio Machado's Lower City is essentially an exploitation movie, and not a half-bad one at that.
  17. Only Human
    For a film that pads out such broad slapstick with toilet humor, obnoxious-child antics, and even cute-animal business, Only Human is surprisingly enjoyable, thanks to the filmmakers' relatively low-key, Pedro Almodóvar-style approach.
  18. Wordplay
    The film's subjects are almost uniformly likable, self-deprecating, funny, and hyper-verbal, and their peculiar passion for crosswords and the sense of genial camaraderie among buffs proves surprisingly infectious.
  19. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Perhaps it was inevitable that a movie about the ultimate stoner would be undone by fuzzy execution and lack of ambition.
  20. Cars
    Cars is a fine example of the formula, with pleasant chemistry, the patented Pixar cleverness, and the usual sweetly melancholy nostalgia courtesy of songwriter Randy Newman.
  21. A Prairie Home Companion
    Altman and Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion is fittingly both a celebration and a winning example of the joys of collaboration.
  22. Agnes and His Brothers
    Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.
  23. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    Hacke is in almost every shot, taking in the performances and sometimes singing and dancing along, inviting the audience to share in the joy of discovery.
  24. The Heart of the Game
    The entertaining new documentary The Heart Of The Game at least acknowledges many of the same conflicts that arose in Hoop Dreams, even though it's really more about two outsized personalities and their infectious passion for the sport.
  25. Autumn
    The one bit of artsy business that McGee pulls off well is the recurring image of snapshots, serving as a kind of map to who these people were and who they're becoming.
  26. The Omen
    Pretty much everyone in the cast is wildly overqualified, including Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis in key supporting roles.
  27. The Break-Up
    A lot of The Break-Up doesn't work. Actually, apart from some funny moments between old Swingers sparring partners Favreau and Vaughn, and a nice scene with Jason Bateman as the couple's realtor, virtually none of it works.
  28. District B13
    Morel tries to keep the energy up for 85 minutes straight, but the film never manages to top itself, and in spite of the political overtones, it doesn't provide much thematic sustenance.
  29. The War Tapes
    The War Tapes falls just short of greatness, because its scope is too limited.
  30. Typhoon
    This may be the biggest production in Korean-film history, but viewers should search elsewhere for a better sampling of what the country has to offer.
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