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. Killers
    Killers isn’t an entertainment, it’s a high-speed spat.
  2. Marmaduke
    Marmaduke saves its farts for the beginning and end, but the stink carries through the whole movie.
  3. Cropsey
    Cropsey is compelling as a meditation on how we use stories to explain the inconceivable, and how if no story is handy, we take the available clues and make one up.
  4. Finding Bliss
    It's a big-hearted, well-intentioned disaster.
  5. Double Take
    Any 15-minute stretch of Double Take proves as enlightening as any other--more like a museum installation than a movie.
  6. Micmacs
    At its best, Micmacs is a robust, enjoyably lunatic game. It's social commentary by way of a good Looney Tune.
  7. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Spinning a handsome Disney adventure out of a videogame is a testament to Bruckheimer’s commercial savvy. The fact that it still isn’t particularly good seems beside the point.
  8. Survival of the Dead
    Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn't provide enough reason for them to be.
  9. Father of My Children
    It’s refreshing not to be led along or handled by a filmmaker, but given the almost-novelistic structure of The Father Of My Children--which juggles half a dozen or so major characters and follows their reaction to a crisis in obsessive detail--the movie could stand to be a little more dynamic.
  10. Agora
    Weisz makes for a vivid, charismatic Hypatia, but the script lets her down.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sex and the City 2
    Sex And The City 2 panders to that audience to the point of self-destruction, squandering whatever goodwill the franchise had left after the first so-so movie by plopping its beloved characters into a series of garish vignettes that throw their shallowness into sharp relief.
  12. Shrek Forever After
    That’s no huge surprise, given the last two Shrek films, but it’s still dispiriting watching a once-promising series make ever-greater commitments to apathy.
  13. MacGruber
    It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.
  14. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    There’s a great story to be told here, but After The Cup feels more like an outline than a finished draft
  15. Holy Rollers
    Director Kevin Asch takes protagonist Jesse Eisenberg on a dour, depressingly straightforward trip from naïveté to spiritual exhaustion.
  16. John Rabe
    In spite of a subtle performance by Ulrich Tukur in the eponymous role, Gallenberger’s film feels labored and emotionally disengaged, an autumn-hued history lesson that’s as studiously reserved as its steel-spined subject.
  17. Kites
    The results are too often ridiculously excessive--Kites generally reads like the Jerry Bruckheimer version of "Slumdog Millionaire"--but to anyone versed in Bollywood conventions, it’s a natural outgrowth of the genre, and a comically overwrought but still generally fun time.
  18. Solitary Man
    The second movie nestled within Solitary Man--the one that doesn’t show up often enough--is about a man of rare eloquence and honesty, sharing his views on salesmanship and sex with anyone who’ll listen.
  19. Robin Hood
    Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.
  20. Letters to Juliet
    If well done, a film like Letters To Juliet should need no surprises. But it does need more than the postcard-ready vistas against which director Gary Winick (13 Going On 30) frames much of the action.
  21. Just Wright
    With her (Latifah), Just Wright feels hampered by arbitrary contrivances; without her, it wouldn't be enough movie to exist at all.
  22. The Living Wake
    The Living Wake is cursed with a permanent smirk of smug self-satisfaction: It’s so delighted with itself that it leaves audiences out of the equation.
  23. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    More essay than documentary—and by no means a monster movie--Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo takes a closer look at the Japanese obsession with insect-collecting, and considers it as a partial explanation of the country’s national character.
  24. Princess Kaiulani
    While Princess Kaiulani makes do with what story it has, the film feels stretched and straining, full of sleepy scenes and pregnant pauses.
  25. Looking for Eric
    Loach becomes his own pale imitator with Looking For Eric, a wispy little comedy that uses fantasy to gloss over even the darkest and most intractable problems.
  26. Iron Man 2
    The primary challenge for all blockbuster franchises is to be big yet fleet. Iron Man is as good as model as any, thanks largely to Robert Downey Jr.’s flamboyantly narcissistic Tony Stark and filmmakers that valued pacing and character as much as superhero hardware.
  27. Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    Gibney has enough material for a dozen movies here, but his attempt at an overview, however unwieldy, paints one hell of a nauseating picture.
  28. Mother and Child
    Garcia shoots Mother And Child with minimal flare, an approach that keeps the focus squarely on the cast, whose moving work helps pave over some of the narrative’s lumpier patches.
  29. Multiple Sarcasms
    Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
  30. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    None of this is particularly sophisticated humor; again, it's Austin Powers goofery by way of Mel Brooks, though with a cooler, dryer tone and a much straighter face, embodied by Dujardin's vapidly winning grin, which admits no embarrassment or self-awareness.
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