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. Manufactured Landscapes
    What's left off the table is a meaningful examination of environmental artists' responsibility to the environment they depict, and the question of whether all truly great art leaves behind a little toxic waste of its own.
  2. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    Purists will balk at a pointless--and boring--revamp of a major villain, but that's the least of the film's worries. Only a few isolated shots of the group striding together as a team make Surfer feel like a Fantastic Four movie.
  3. Nancy Drew
    Once the rote mystery elements take over, the film devolves into a second-rate whodunit for kids, but even then, Roberts' irrepressible cheeriness and curiosity in the face of danger proves too adorable to resist.
  4. Eagle vs Shark
    Might feel like a colorful little train-wreck drama, but given the recent popularity of such films, it comes across more like a nerdcore clip show, a sort of straight-faced "Epic Movie" for fans of discomfort comedy.
  5. Beyond Hatred
    It's so rare these days to see a documentary that aspires to be cinematic that Beyond Hatred may seem at first to be slightly better than it is.
  6. Macbeth
    It's Macbeth by way of “The Covenant,” all brooding pretty-boys with emo eyes and hipster hair, standing around in gauzily decorated rich-kid boudoirs in the dead of night, and at times, it's too overblown to take seriously.
  7. Lights in the Dusk
    Without Kaurismäki to introduce these lonely, forgotten souls to audiences, who's going to be his friend?
  8. Ocean's Thirteen
    The pleasure here, as before, comes from watching skilled professionals team up for a job well done.
  9. Hostel: Part II
    It's also, in its sick, sick way, a real crowd-pleaser.
  10. Surf's Up
    Mostly, it just stands out in a crowded field of tacky also-rans by being a reasonably acceptable, more or less non-obnoxious way to spend an hour and a half.
  11. La Vie en Rose
    For all its florid pretensions and epic length, the film's overwrought take on its subject's not-so-rosy life leaves behind no lasting insight.
  12. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    Porumboiu starts off making a mordant slice of life, but he gradually entwines the personal and the historical, then ends on a poignant note. The story and situation are slight, but in the best possible way.
  13. Knocked Up
    No one writes for ensembles better than Apatow, and his players are all skilled at giving his work a loose, improvisational feel.
  14. Gracie
    There's a reason the underdog sports formula is followed over and over: When it's executed as skillfully as it is here, the damned thing works every time.
  15. Mr. Brooks
    Sadly, only Hurt seems to recognize that the only way to make this material work is to play it with lunatic enthusiasm instead of grave seriousness.
  16. Crazy Love
    There's plenty of black comedy in their twisted affair, but a more substantial documentary wouldn't leave you smiling.
  17. Day Watch
    Like the dream it so closely resembles, it's fairly distracting while it's going on, but it fades into forgettable nonsense by the light of day.
  18. Ten Canoes
    Like a lot of folk tales, Ten Canoes peters out into something more prosaic than profound, but it flows like water, and has a deceptively gentle pull that proves hard to escape.
  19. Pierrepoint
    Pierrepoint is handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.
  20. Radiant City
    The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off. If anything, the movie's observations about the corrupting social influence of cluttered mall spaces get undercut by the fact that Burns and Brown feel the need to INVENT characters to prove their truth.
  21. Bug
    Friedkin's latest rivals his Druid horror flick "The Guardian" for sheer lunacy--Bug remains disconcerting, real, and raw. It poignantly suggests that some lost souls would rather be crazy and doomed than alone.
  22. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry.
  23. Angel-A
    At heart, it's just the latest from one-man industry Luc Besson, so even though it looks like art, it plays like schlock.
  24. Paprika
    A film so joyfully insane that it feels like Kon is overcompensating.
  25. Amu
    The flat, pat talk is symptomatic of Amu's overriding problem: It has no sense of personal style.
  26. Steel City
    For the most part, they live life convincingly, in a refreshingly inward-looking, well-made film that's smart enough to stay small, and leave the car crashes to the big summer action movies.
  27. The Boss of It All
    The Boss Of It All, though clever as a piece of genre deconstruction, isn't terribly funny.
  28. Shrek the Third
    Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.
  29. Flanders
    Once again, Dumont cycles through the pet themes of films like "L'Humanité" and "Twentynine Palms," but their repetition is beginning to seem like shtick.
  30. Severance
    Severance still seems a few rewrites away from living up to its potential, but it's remarkable how much just a modicum of wit can spice up the standard backwoods slice-and-dice. Scaring people with a horror film is easy; entertaining them takes a little skill.
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