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. A Single Man
    It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.
  2. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether My Son is a terrible, terrible movie or an uncompromising Herzog experiment in reality-bending. Here’s a suggestion: consider the track record.
  3. Up in the Air
    What Up In The Air lacks in surprises--apart from an elusive final scene--it compensates for by conveying the pleasures of living from landing to landing, and the terror of floating away.
  4. The Last Station
    Little more than a gilded trifle, though it offers its share of light enjoyments.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Transylmania
    Transylmania is so inept that it even fails as an adolescent breast-delivery device.
  6. Brothers
    The intrinsically powerful material occasionally pierces through.
  7. Armored
    It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.
  8. Everybody's Fine
    Follows a dispiritingly predictable arc.
  9. Serious Moonlight
    The bitter comedy Serious Moonlight is meant to be both funny and painful, but manages only the latter.
  10. Loot
    Undoubtedly, everything documentarian Darius Marder shows in his debut film Loot actually happened, but Marder’s approach to this “truth is stranger than fiction” story is so forced that the movie FEELS phony.
  11. Le jour avant le lendemain
    As the movie’s title implies, everything is about to change for these two. These are the last happy days before destructive modernity encroaches.
  12. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    For a movie about the unpredictability of life, Pippa Lee plays it awfully safe.
  13. The Road
    Aas grim as The Road gets, Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness.
  14. The Princess and the Frog
    Disney’s triumphant return to hand-drawn 2-D animation still holds an awful lot of familiar, comfort-food charm.
  15. Old Dogs
    Adults should steer clear. Kids should be sent to it only if they’ve been extraordinarily naughty.
  16. Ninja Assassin
    How is an action movie that aims for kinetic thrills supposed to develop any forward momentum when it spends so much time looking back?
  17. Me and Orson Welles
    Efron has yet to learn that smiling pretty is merely a component of acting, not its entirety. He makes for a supremely passive lead whose chemistry with Danes is nonexistent.
  18. The Blind Side
    Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.
  19. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    It’s not always easy to sort out the legitimately inspired touches from the merely campy ones, but the film has a deranged, go-for-broke spirit that makes such distinctions irrelevant.
  20. Broken Embraces
    Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    In spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center.
  22. Planet 51
    Largely, it’s a jellybean of a movie: bright, colorful, sugary, and with no real content.
  23. The Sun
    The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.
  24. Mammoth
    While Mammoth is frequently poignant and beautifully acted--especially by Williams, who’s so lost and lonely that she becomes casually cruel--the movie lacks the personal touch that’s distinguished even Moodysson’s “difficult” films.
  25. The Missing Person
    Shannon’s performance takes The Missing Person as far as it goes, but when a real-world tragedy commandeers the story, Buschel’s thin pastiche falls to pieces.
  26. Red Cliff
    The film is both traditional and modern: austere in its engagement with history, and insistent in its showy action beats.
  27. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.
  28. 2012
    2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.
  29. The Messenger
    Foster and Harrelson always stick to the Army's orders about what to say and how to behave. After a while, The Messenger starts to feel equally dogged about following a pat script.
  30. Pirate Radio
    Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you.
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