The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. Reasonable Doubt
    A courtroom thriller that becomes sillier and more generic as it zips along. It moves fast (a rare quality for a contemporary thriller), but doesn’t end up going anywhere interesting.
  2. The Legend of Hercules
    While The Legend Of Hercules offers plenty for viewers who’ve acquired a taste for the fake and incompetent (not the least of which is the dialogue, which finds characters saying each other’s names at the end of every other sentence), it’s unlikely to please anyone who wants entertainment in the conventional sense.
  3. The Truth About Emanuel
    Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.
  4. Raze
    Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.
  5. In Bloom
    Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.
  6. Cold Comes the Night
    The Breaking Bad star — who looks here not unlike the Heisenberg of last season — can’t buoy material so thin that it would’ve barely supported an episode of "The Killing."
  7. The Banshee Chapter
    Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."
  8. The Best Offer
    Rush has a lot of fun with Oldman’s gradual thaw, and the questions the movie raises about authenticity and deception, while not remotely in the same heady league as those in "Certified Copy," nonetheless allow it to conclude on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.
  9. Beyond Outrage
    Of all the great actor/directors, Kitano has probably come the closest to creating a style that parallels his approach to acting.
  10. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.
  11. 47 Ronin
    A multi-colored downer fantasy which combines bursts of imagination with a bleak worldview, resulting in something that rarely feels mainstream.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    All the boilerplate aphorisms and blatant attempts at image rehabilitation make Bieber seem like a kind of mega-church preacher leading a long-converted congregation, another huckster dancing around in a white suit.
  13. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.
  14. The Invisible Woman
    Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens.
  15. Lone Survivor
    For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.
  16. August: Osage County
    It’s not so much a mangled movie as it is an unfulfilled, forgettable one: unnecessary for anyone who’s seen the play, yet sufficiently watered-down that newcomers won’t be able to tell what all the fuss was about.
  17. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Abandoning its more original elements, the movie opts for a banal carpe diem conceit that turns Mitty into a globetrotting bystander.
  18. Grudge Match
    A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.
  19. Wrong Cops
    Wrong Cops does what underground movies used to do: It gives the viewer the sense that what they’re watching is thoroughly wrong in terms of both behavior and style. What’s missing is the transgressive kick, the sense that a real boundary has been crossed.
  20. The Selfish Giant
    That The Selfish Giant feels familiar rather than groundbreaking makes it seem to some degree a step back for its talented director, but she’s avoided the sophomore jinx with aplomb.
  21. The Past
    The result demonstrates that Farhadi, who is cinema’s heir to the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, is so deft at ingenious narrative construction and intricate character development that he can make first-rate dramas in any country and/or language he likes.
  22. All the Light in the Sky
    Large-scale anxieties about the future of the environment mingle with the characters’ small-scale anxieties about the present. The effect of this interplay will probably vary from viewer to viewer. As with Swanberg’s production methods, a lot depends on what you bring to the movie.
  23. Walking with Dinosaurs
    Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.
  24. Her
    Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.
  25. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    All of McKay’s movies improve on repeat viewings, as they become familiar and meme worthy. If Anchorman 2 seems hit-and-miss now, there’s a significant chance that it will get funnier over the long haul.
  26. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    By the standards of Tyler Perry’s Madea series, A Madea Christmas is better than average.
  27. The Crash Reel
    The film also applies a deft touch as it addresses the morality of violent sports, like snowboarding and football, that entertain the many who watch while endangering the few who play. Rather than cast the athletes as pure victims, Walker acknowledges their agency, depicting them as prideful competitors who choose to risk their well-being — or even insist on doing so, as Pearce does.
  28. Caught in the Web
    Since making an ill-fated attempt at Hollywood with 2002’s "Killing Me Softly," Chen Kaige has slipped further and further out of relevance. Now even his elegant sense of style — the one thing keeping later efforts like "Forever Enthralled" afloat — seems to be slipping away. Case in point: Chen’s new film, Caught In The Web.
  29. Hours
    Though a screenwriter by profession, Heisserer proves to be more economical with style than storytelling. Like a few too many contemporary genre films, Hours suffers from flashbackitis, a chronic condition that leads filmmakers to believe that a tragic backstory will add gravitas.
  30. The Unknown Known
    Tackling another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in The Unknown Known, Morris has finally met his match. The film is illuminating only in its utter lack of illumination — for looking deep into the eyes of someone incapable of letting his guard down and finding, predictably, nothing whatsoever.
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