The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. À cause d'un garçon
    Though its milieu is often ugly and its story fairly soft, You'll Get Over It gets by thanks to its cast. The French film industry has a knack for finding attractive, expressive young actors, and this movie is no exception.
  2. Around the World in 80 Days
    Finds a winning formula: Chan provides the action, various exotic lands serve up props begging to be employed in Chan-style combat, Coogan brings the dry wit, a minor constellation of surprise guest stars provides razzle-dazzle, and a steady stream of mild chuckles helps the whole fandango fly by painlessly.
  3. My Sister Maria
    Deeply personal and deeply silly.
  4. Word Wars
    Ultimately as fascinating as it is frustrating.
  5. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.
  6. The Chronicles of Riddick
    As bloated and ponderous as its predecessor was lean and focused, Chronicles ups the stakes along with the budget while jettisoning just about everything that made "Pitch Black" stand out from other thrillers about weary humans battling nefarious space beasties.
  7. The Stepford Wives
    Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.
  8. Garfield
    The popularity of Davis' strip represents the ultimate triumph of mediocrity, but even the cartoonist's competent hackwork deserves better than this.
  9. Napoleon Dynamite
    Sure, it quickly turns into a one-note exercise in laughing at the yokels, but at least it has a vision.
  10. Imelda
    For the fascinating character study Imelda, Ramona S. Diaz was given a month's access to the former first lady, who supplies so many bizarre equivocations that it's hard to tell whether her actions were malicious or merely delusional.
  11. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The family's few lines of dialogue are so integral to advancing the story that they may well have been scripted, but it's not that important whether The Story Of The Weeping Camel is more fiction than objective ethnography. If anything, the contrast between what's real and what may have been faked only adds to the tension between the natural world and encroaching modernism.
  12. The Corporation
    Without a unifying authorial voice to tie it together, the film often feels shapeless and rambling, brought together by little more than free-ranging contempt for capitalism's excesses.
  13. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    With shades of Carrie, Harry's magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy.
  14. I'll Sing for You
    Director Jacques Sarasin lazily relies on a talking-heads/archival-footage approach to tell Traoré's story, doing little to put it in context and assuming a lot more knowledge of Malian history than most viewers possess.
  15. Firedancer
    For the most part, Fire Dancer presents an energetic mosaic of a displaced culture.
  16. Bukowski: Born into This
    Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.
  17. Soul Plane
    In the midst of this comic black hole, only Snoop Dogg and Method Man emerge unscathed, as even material this bad can't mask their languid, long-limbed charisma.
  18. Saved!
    If director Brian Dannelly were interested in taking his film into the realm of camp, the gag might have worked, but as is, it simply gives the impression that he doesn't quite know what he's talking about.
  19. The Mother
    Harsh, unsparing, unsentimental, and uniformly well-acted, The Mother bravely and intelligently tackles subject matter widely ignored in cinema--the sexuality of a plain-looking woman edging toward the twilight of a life of quiet desperation.
  20. Baadasssss!
    A vibrant, funny, fully realized slice of oft-overlooked cultural, show-business, and black history. It's better than the film whose genesis it chronicles, though inherently doomed to be nowhere near as important.
  21. The Day After Tomorrow
    Emmerich now directs entirely in watered-down Spielbergisms, and his storytelling skills, never strong, have gone slack. His talent for stretching a concept that can be described in 10 seconds into a feature-length movie, on the other hand, remains impressive.
  22. Wake
    The situation plays out in a haze of shouting and debauchery so excessive that it becomes silly. The movie looks great and sounds great--apart from what the people in it do and say.
  23. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    A vanity project about a vanity project.
  24. The Five Obstructions
    The film is also valuable for raising awareness about Leth, whose work hasn't been as widely recognized as that of his European contemporaries, but who now makes an impressive case for his skills, five times over.
  25. Raising Helen
    The strange thing about Raising Helen is that nothing out of the ordinary ever really happens.
  26. My Mother Likes Women
    Zips along on smooth formula plotting and some energetic performances, but its farcical elements have the tepid rhythm of a bad situation comedy, with silly misunderstandings and embarrassing moments that could have easily been avoided.
  27. Stateside
    A mess.
  28. Love Me If You Dare
    The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.
  29. Control Room
    Remarkable and timely film.
  30. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    A harrowing, unblinking look at the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime that by some accounts killed off more than a quarter of Cambodia's population between 1975 and 1979.
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