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. Wrong Turn
    Lacks the creepiness and craft of the films that inspired it.
  2. Capturing the Friedmans
    First-time director Jarecki, better known as the co-founder of MovieFone, skillfully integrates the home-movie footage with his own thorough inquiry, weaving past and present into a patient, deeply engrossing piece of storytelling that's rich in ambiguities.
  3. Finding Nemo
    What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code.
  4. The In-Laws
    Perhaps the oddest thing about The In-Laws is that it's aimed at an audience old enough to remember not only the original, but also how much funnier it seemed at the time.
  5. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    Schnack's sprightly, engaging documentary Gigantic takes a leisurely stroll through TMBG's career, mixing energetic live performances with smartly chosen clips, a few quirky detours, and compelling interviews with the likes of Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, and Ira Glass.
  6. Grazia's Island
    The film's generous spirit, disarming mixture of beauty and brutality, and gentle, insistent sweep make it easy to surrender to it anyway.
  7. Bruce Almighty
    Even the most narcissistic jerk, like the one played by Jim Carrey in the loathsome comedy Bruce Almighty, would be expected to dream up untold pleasures for himself, acting as a self-serving genie with infinite wishes.
  8. Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.
  9. The Sea
    The acidic Shakespearean family drama The Sea can't be faulted for lack of ambition. It can, however, be faulted for a fatal lack of heart.
  10. Cinemania
    A voyeuristic look at voyeurs, Cinemania never seems sure whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. Instead, the film just seems intent on depicting its subjects as lovable kooks, a reductive portrayal that does little to acknowledge the desperation and loneliness that permeates every frame.
  11. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Not since Lukas Moodysson's "Together" has communal living been depicted with such warmth and feeling for the entire ensemble.
  12. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    The lack of a splashy style puts the tales of the rescued and their rescuers properly at the center, but whether viewers connect will depend in part on how saturated they are with Holocaust lore.
  13. Pokémon Heroes
    Doesn't have much to offer viewers who aren't still eagerly awaiting their first adult tooth.
  14. Sweet Sixteen
    With startling clarity and dreadful logic, Loach and Laverty make sense of every bad choice Compston makes until he runs out of options, locked into a destiny that he can't escape, mainly because his good intentions are clouded by tragic naivete.
  15. The Matrix Reloaded
    In making The Matrix's leaden answer to "The Phantom Menace," the Wachowski brothers seem to be afflicted with George Lucas Syndrome: They're so enthralled by the convoluted mythology of their own private universe that they've lost touch with its human core.
  16. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    An inspired, original, and gracefully integrated collaboration of theater and cinema that complements not only both forms, but also the seductive, dreamlike qualities of the source material.
  17. Only the Strong Survive
    But while Only The Strong Survive is essential viewing for soul fans, as a documentary it never makes the needed connections among the artists, their music, and the lives they lead.
  18. The Trip
    It doesn't help that Sullivan has twice as much screen time and half as much charisma as Braun.
  19. Man on the Train
    Though an assured and diverting piece of filmmaking, Man On The Train sags from complacency, rarely breaking its neat construction to animate the friendship with any real warmth and life.
  20. Daddy Day Care
    A big-screen sitcom so sleepy and juvenile it might as well come with its own nap break.
  21. The Shape of Things
    Carries a potent statement about the superficialities of appearance, and how they're more meaningful to people than anyone likes to acknowledge. But when the players themselves are conceived this superficially, LaBute winds up invalidating his own point.
  22. Down with Love
    May register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present.
  23. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    For a comedian who thrives on spontaneity, the heart of Reno's act seems conspicuously canned.
  24. X2: X-Men United
    Directed with depth, efficiency, and wit by Bryan Singer, the film suffered only from a tendency to seem like a setup for an even bigger movie...Fortunately, bigger usually equals better here, and when it doesn't, it equals just as good.
  25. The Dancer Upstairs
    Though he never quite rescues the film, Bardem continually suggests the tensions bubbling under the surface that Dancer itself never penetrates.
  26. Owning Mahowny
    Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.
  27. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    As it goes with the TV show, so it goes with the movie, which benefits from being shot largely in Rome and suffers from trying to stretch its sitcom antics to feature length.
  28. New Suit
    The sturdy premise delivers little in the way of actual laughs.
  29. Spellbound
    Can't help but be deeply engrossing, as it taps into a highly charged atmosphere that one parent dubs "a different form of child abuse."
  30. Marooned in Iraq
    Ends with horrific revelations that are made all the more powerful by the lightness that precedes them. Simultaneously sad and hopeful, Ghobadi suggests the resiliency of a culture in which war is part of the fabric of everyday life.
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