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. The International
    Ultimately feel so empty and forgettable.
  2. Fanboys
    Fanboys has a lot of talent in its margins, including Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and other usual suspects.
  3. Memorial Day
    Most of the last hour of Memorial Day feels like a retread at least, and horribly exploitative at worst.
  4. Taken
    Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.
  5. The Uninvited
    The result is a middling Frankenstein-like hybrid of spectral mayhem and murder mystery, constructed entirely out of borrowed parts.
  6. New in Town
    New In Town grinds its plucky protagonist through a predictable arc from dispassionate big-city ice queen to redeemed small-town tenderheart.
  7. Service (Serbis)
    At its best, Serbis is a vibrant slice of life that establishes this theater as a living organism, nurturing a society of outcasts; it's like "Ship Of Fools" with blowjobs and boil-lancings.
  8. Shadows
    A respectable enough little ghost story, but it loses a lot of sparkle by being similar to such other guy-talks-to-the-dead thrillers as "The Sixth Sense" and "Ghost Town."
  9. The Lodger
    It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.
  10. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
    Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.
  11. Donkey Punch
    The film goes off the rails in the final third, sacrificing subtle character work at the altar of blood-and-guts survival horror. As mood-killers go, it's like a jab to the back of the neck.
  12. Inkheart
    The story itself is so charmingly dense, fractious, and complicated that it frequently leaves the obvious good-guy-fights-bad-guy groove, and noses toward Terry Gilliam-esque randomness and ebullience.
  13. Outlander
    Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.
  14. Of Time and the City
    A caustic, witty, regretful elegy for a place so transformed that it's virtually unrecognizable.
  15. Chandni Chowk to China
    A more accurate way to describe it would be "conceptual nightmare"--crass, schizophrenic, culturally insensitive, horribly paced, and shameless in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.
  16. Cherry Blossoms
    There's something a little shallow about contrasting ungrateful German kids with their respectful Japanese counterparts and presuming the cultural differences are so cut-and-dried.
  17. Hotel for Dogs
    What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.
  18. My Bloody Valentine
    But save for a giddily gratuitous sequence involving full-frontal nudity, a little person, and a French bulldog, the film is strictly by-the-numbers slasher boilerplate. It won't endure past the weekend.
  19. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.
  21. Bride Wars
    There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."
  22. Not Easily Broken
    For a film shamelessly trumpeting the importance of staying together through the hard times, Broken makes a disconcertingly convincing case for divorce.
  23. The Unborn
    What darkness the movie achieves comes solely from the lighting.
  24. Yonkers Joe
    Yonkers Joe is largely concerned with the delicate balance between a crook's business life and his personal life--a balance the movie itself has trouble managing effectively.
  25. Just Another Love Story
    Enjoyably moody in the early going, and it develops into a decent Hitchcockian thriller at times.
  26. Silent Light
    At bottom, Silent Light is less about faith than matters of the heart, and in Reygadas' hands, the ache is bone-deep.
  27. Defiance
    There are lots of movies about Jews suffering, dying, and surviving in Europe during World War II, but precious few about Jews fighting back. So why does everything in Defiance feel so doggedly familiar?
  28. Good
    It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.
  29. Revolutionary Road
    Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection.
  30. Waltz with Bashir
    The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.
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