The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,411 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: 5,570 out of 10411
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10411
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10411
10411 movie reviews
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  1. Suddenly
    Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.
  2. My Boss's Daughter
    An abysmal screwball comedy that relies heavily on idiocy from both sides of the screen.
  3. The Medallion
    Though haphazardly put together, The Medallion stays fairly entertaining until it kills Chan off and resurrects him as an immortal being.
  4. Babí léto
    A mud bath of sentiment, strained speechifying, and gloppy music.
  5. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    An absorbing and meticulous piece of reportage.
  6. Rana's Wedding
    Agreeably soft at heart, a fun and progressive entertainment that above all wants to give love a wide berth, no matter what imposing obstacles have to be cleared from the aisle first.
  7. Don't Tempt Me
    This must all make sense to Yanes, somehow, but the film plays like a private joke with no punchline.
  8. Venus Boyz
    Becomes hard going the longer Baur stretches out the parade of narcissists, all spouting received wisdom, cultural clichés, and bad poetry.
  9. Marci X
    The makers of “Bringing Down The House” should thank the gods of cinema for Marci X, which has relieved the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah hit of its status as the year's most misguided culture-clash comedy.
  10. Dog Days
    Working with non-professional actors, Seidl emphasizes their ordinariness to the point of cartoonish ridicule, putting them in scenarios either banal, perverse, or both at the same time.
  11. Thirteen
    Though thirteen too often mistakes hard realism for overheated spectacle, the heightened drama brings out the best in Wood and Hunter, who turn their climactic scene into an actors' workshop, charged with raw emotion. As the film barrels toward the outrageously histrionic, they nearly pull it back from the brink.
  12. Catching Out
    Catching Out could stand to be half an hour longer, which speaks to both its scruffy charm and its frustrating inability to dig beneath the surface.
  13. Uptown Girls
    Uptown Girls refuses to make Fanning likable, which speaks to a certain misplaced integrity, and tends to throw a wrench in the film's halfhearted attempts at formula.
  14. Passionada
    Milos and Rossum are like Iberian "Gilmore Girls," only with an ocean view and without the clever dialogue.
  15. Freddy vs. Jason
    Aside from a promising scene involving a cornfield rave and the pyrotechnic potential for grain alcohol, it drags along, taking a small eternity to set up a final showdown that plays more like a bloody pro-wrestling event than the stuff of nightmares.
  16. American Splendor
    With a lovably cantankerous sense of humor and an honest strain of hard realism and pathos, the film thrives on the tension that comes from an artist who devotes himself to the truth, but watches his image get away from him.
  17. Shaolin Soccer
    The ridiculously entertaining Shaolin Soccer pulls out all the stops to make sure viewers stay happy.
  18. Open Range
    Mostly it's just a good yarn, with attractive picture-postcard vistas and an agreeable strain of light humor.
  19. Grind
    First-time director Casey La Scala and some talented stunt doubles squeeze in a fair amount of impressive skating footage, but the film around it will gleam the cube only of viewers with an unusually high tolerance for porta-toilet and Dutch-oven gags.
  20. OT: Our Town
    It's the most obvious point that actually rings truest: that Wilder's sketchy vision of life, love, and death is as funny and moving as it ever was.
  21. Le divorce
    One minor element in Le Divorce, the sale of a disputed and possibly valuable painting that once belonged to Watts' family, welcomes scene-stealing bits by Bebe Neuwirth and Stephen Fry as appraisers with clashing motives.
  22. Step Into Liquid
    The astonishing visual poetry of Step Into Liquid's best surfing footage nearly compensates for the mindless boosterism of Brown's constant narration and the often comically banal observations of the film's largely homogeneous master surfers.
  23. S.W.A.T.
    As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.
  24. Seaside
    The writer-director's overthinking on the matter is part of what's wrong with her debut film, which is sensitively shot, deeply felt, and dry as dirt.
  25. Freaky Friday
    Freaky Friday mines a lot of laughs from common misapprehensions adults have about adolescent life, with fun bits of observation about schoolwork, dating, and other practices where kids have to bend the rules in order to survive.
  26. Zero Day
    Though comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project" are inevitable, the impeccable first-person camera technique not only makes sense dramatically, but also facilitates a complex and queasily ambiguous relationship between the conspirators and the audience.
  27. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    It works for a little while, but an Irons-narrated slideshow of the region would have worked just as well.
  28. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    With Scott playing the perfect foil to Leary's exasperated sage, the fantasy sequences are hilariously caustic, but as they accumulate more rapidly, the distinction between real and imagined situations becomes disturbingly vague.
  29. The Magdalene Sisters
    The film might have been more powerful, not to mention fair, if the nuns believed they were doing right; only on movie night, when McEwan sees herself in Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells Of St. Mary's," does Mullan grant her so much as the delusion of rectitude.
  30. American Wedding
    Combining raunchiness and sweetness in a slapdash but generally effective manner.
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