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. Pushing Tin
    A mess, but for the most part it's a fascinating mess. It helps that it boasts great acting all around--not just from Cusack, Thornton, and Jolie, but also from Cate Blanchett
  2. Lost & Found
    Spade proves that he's entirely capable of making unwatchable dreck all by himself.
  3. eXistenZ
    Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker.
  4. Election
    Witherspoon's broad, obsessive comic performance is bound to get the most attention, but Broderick does the best work of his career, finding an affecting spot between the all-purpose defiance of Ferris Bueller and the put-upon foil of his recent work.
  5. Life
    Sluggish, laugh-free comedy (or is it an ineffectual drama?).
  6. Shuang long hui
    Twin Dragons is still a Chan film, albeit not a great one. As fans have figured out by now, that goes a long way.
  7. Go
    Escapism of the worst sort, a manipulative exercise in style that preys on the passivity of its characters and its audience. In the end, Go offers little more than the sour, impermanent rush of a pixie stick.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cookie's Fortune
    Cookie's Fortune, for all its faults, is a welcome respite. In the uneven hands of Altman, you're better off with a flawed bit of fluff than an outright atrocity.
  9. The Out-of-Towners
    Director Sam Weisman's pushy, subtlety-free direction certainly doesn't help. Martin is still capable of making a decent film, but The Out-Of-Towners isn't it.
  10. 10 Things I Hate About You
    Immensely likable.
  11. The Matrix
    The Wachowskis do it so playfully well, keeping The Matrix's potentially confusing plot intelligible, intelligent, and suspenseful, that it doesn't matter.
  12. The Mod Squad
    Bound to wind up as one of 1999's worst films.
  13. Forces of Nature
    Only succeeds sporadically, even if it's never quite the unwatchable monstrosity it so clearly could have been.
  14. The King and I
    It's hard to imagine a more ill-advised choice of source material.
  15. True Crime
    As disappointing-but-worthwhile films go, you could do a lot worse.
  16. Wing Commander: Space Will Never Be the Same
    Either a thoroughly incomprehensible movie or a daring exercise in the cinema of disorientation, and a painful viewing experience either way.
  17. The Deep End of the Ocean
    It's not the implausibility of its plot, the shallowness of its characters, its funereal pace, its tenuous understanding of teenage behavior, its commercial-ready TV-movie-style direction, or the fact that Pfeiffer and Williams may be the most implausible Italian-Americans since James Caan -- the film is most undone by its near-complete lack of genuine drama.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trekkies
    It's always nice to see real people, however eccentric, enjoying their lives; if Star Trek has anything to do with that, more power to them.
  19. The Rage: Carrie 2
    Better than an opportunistic sequel has any right to be, but still pretty flawed.
  20. Baby Geniuses
    A horrible, horrible film that wears out its welcome before its opening credits.
  21. With Friends Like These...
    Not even amusing cameos from Bill Murray as a freeloading producer and Michael McKean as a proctologist can keep With Friends Like These... from being as minor as the film careers of its two-bit protagonists.
  22. Analyze This
    A funny, tightly plotted, well-conceived comedy that transcends both Crystal's '90s curse and its horrible title.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The acting, mostly by a bunch of unknowns, is equally fresh and funny, and Ritchie keeps the movie moving faster than you can say, "bludgeoned to death by a 15-inch black rubber dildo."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The School of Flesh
    Unfortunately, contrary to the provocative title, the results are not terribly interesting. While the acting is excellent and the filmmaking exquisite, The School Of Flesh itself is yet another dry example of l'amour fou.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    20 Dates
    Fact or fiction, it's still fun, if never really compelling.
  26. 200 Cigarettes
    More of a throwback to a period in the '70s when big-screen comedies like "FM" and "Thank God It's Friday" seemed to take all their cues from bad sitcoms, putting rice-paper-flat characters into vibrant settings and giving them nothing to do but exchange faux witty dialogue without the much-needed cues of a laugh track.
  27. The Other Sister
    Contrived, clueless, reprehensible.
  28. 8MM
    That 8MM fails miserably as a psychological thriller is forgivable. The fact that it is nearly as creepy, sleazy, and manipulative as the pornographic films it so cluelessly and hypocritically condemns is not.
  29. October Sky
    Offers a strange mix of sentimentality and social criticism, sometimes mixing the two to awkward effect.
  30. Jawbreaker
    A nasty black comedy whose relentlessly glossy exterior recalls both Araki and John Waters without the wit or smarts of either...As a black comedy, Jawbreaker has one major flaw: It's not funny.
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