The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. Safety Not Guaranteed
    It's a tribute to Plaza and Duplass that they're able to make such slight material resonate at all, let alone with the poignancy they occasionally find.
  2. Lola Versus
    Take Lola Versus, a Greta Gerwig vehicle that feels like a pilot awaiting pick-up from a network that doesn't exist.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    Olsen, so good in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," is stuck playing a judgmental scold, while Wolff waves a video camera around and insists he wants to be Werner Herzog.
  4. Dark Horse
    The scenes between Gelber and Blair are the strongest in Dark Horse, because they form a bond not out of shared interests or passion, but a weary kind of compromise.
  5. Bel Ami
    This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    Credit Baumbach, credit the filmmakers, credit no one giving a damn anymore - for what's yet another hyperactive talking-animal children's movie, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted is uncommonly rewarding, and a potential future stoner's delight.
  7. Prometheus
    Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.
  8. Piranha 3DD
    For the much-cheaper-looking sequel, Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager mostly seems to be trying to see how much he can degrade the old "Jaws" formula and still have it interpreted as parody rather than apathy.
  9. Sexual Chronicles of a French Family
    It's a celebration of libertine sexuality - nothing more, nothing less - and almost remarkably untroubled by any of the dramatic issues it raises. Much of its 79 minutes is spent marveling over how skillfully the actors simulate the real thing.
  10. Wish Me Away
    While it's fascinating to observe the workings of the mammoth apparatus grafted onto an intensely personal decision, the movie's heart is the moments that take place in private (meaning, in this case, in front of only one camera).
  11. A Cat in Paris
    It's stylish, pretty fun, but not the kind of ambitious effort that should make the world sit up and take notice.
  12. Snow White and the Huntsman
    There are complicated elements at work here, with threads of curdled vengeance, victim entitlement, and insanity bound together in ways it would take a much smarter film to unravel. Snow White And The Huntsman doesn't try, and the film just keeps getting dumber as it goes along.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    5 Broken Cameras
    That intertwining of Burnat's home life and his political one make 5 Broken Cameras an unusual, moving work about a much-explored topic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    Horowitz has Michael Moore's smug tendencies without his schlubby everyman charm, which makes his attempts at goading humor out of uncomfortable interviews come off as unpleasant.
  15. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.
  16. High School
    Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.
  17. For Greater Glory
    With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."
  18. Virginia
    Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.
  19. Chernobyl Diaries
    It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.
  20. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.
  21. The Intouchables
    Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.
  22. Oslo, August 31st
    Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.
  23. Men in Black III
    The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.
  24. The Samaritan
    It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely Molly
    Lovely Molly is a portrait of either spiraling madness or a haunting, and it deftly handles the slow erosion of its title character's consciousness. Landing somewhere between "Repulsion" and "Paranormal Activity," it keeps the jump scares to a minimum and allows its formidable lead performance to be its best special effect.
  26. Polisse
    The best moments of Maïwenn's Polisse, about the dedicated members of a Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, have the same quality, a fly-on-the-wall docu-realism that feels eerily like the real thing.
  27. American Animal
    Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Beyond The Black Rainbow is more surface than substance, but those surfaces are gleamingly polished enough to make for a hypnotic experiment that goes beyond genre pastiche or art-school wankery to seem formally daring.
  29. Mansome
    If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.
  30. Elena
    It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.
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