The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. The Producers
    The result is largely a giddy, goofy delight.
  2. Hoodwinked!
    There's no getting around the fact that it all looks like a cutscene from a kiddie video game. It's a great showreel. Now someone give these folks a real budget so they can make a movie that looks as good as it sounds.
  3. King Kong
    After a start heavy on exposition, the film strings one action setpiece after another, each realized with the breathless excitement of an adventure pulp cover. It's as if Jackson set out to bring to life every fantasy of the last moment before earth gave way to space as the site of the final frontier.
  4. The Grace Lee Project
    She acts amazed by her own work, in hopes that we'll be too. To help the matter along, Lee underscores the action with a Mickey Mouse score, cutesy animation, and a relentlessly chipper tone. Her technique is pretty much everything that's wrong with documentary filmmaking today.
  5. Brokeback Mountain
    It allows Lee to draw out a theme that's been present in his films from the start: the notion that repressed passion does no one any good. In Brokeback Mountain, it turns vibrant men ghostly.
  6. Memoirs of a Geisha
    The film comes to life whenever the cartoonishly vindictive Gong throws a tantrum, but she played virtually the same role in Zhang Yimou's "Shanghai Triad," which presented a far more compelling rationale for her star fits. Without her, this expensive piece of backlot pageantry turns vivid history into an ossified tchotchke.
  7. Mrs Henderson Presents
    Poking fun at uptight British civility has long been a monocle-shattering comedic staple, and Mrs. Henderson Presents gets by for a while on its genial naughtiness.
  8. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    Generations of readers have found The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to be a gripping adventure that reaches well beyond its religious underpinnings, and this robust version respects both aspects and finds the same winning balance of excitement and meaning.
  9. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    Unlike the elliptical, often explanation-free "The Grudge," Marebito is wordy to the extreme. Konaka's near-constant narration underlines every point the movie is trying to make, ruminating bluntly on the meaning of fear, and how we suck on media violence like, yep, vampires.
  10. The World's Fastest Indian
    Hopkins delivers such a warm, winning performance that it's hard not to be won over by his loopy charm and monomaniacal passion. The film is about a man whose need for speed takes on an existential and spiritual dimension, but it's precisely its rambling, meandering, unhurried affability that makes it such a low-key pleasure.
  11. Transamerica
    Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.
  12. First Descent
    Entertainingly captures the camaraderie and spirit of competition among the affable boarders as they battle nature in the form of imposing mountains, regular avalanches, and jagged rock formations.
  13. The Kid & I
    Shamelessly manipulating his audience, wallowing in his highly questionable premise, and above all mocking himself, Arnold bulls ahead enthusiastically and without reservation, and in the process, he brings something like dignity to one of the least dignified movies in recent history.
  14. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Brown's respectful film offers the usual music-doc mix of archival footage, song clips, and talking heads, but with a figure as enigmatic and underreported as Van Zandt, the safe course works well.
  15. The Boys of Baraka
    Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.
  16. The Ice Harvest
    Ramis is at his best when dealing with men facing a soul-defining crisis, and he finds plenty to work with in Russo and Benton's script, which offers Russo's trademark blend of colorful characters and slow-building dilemmas. The Ice Harvest finds them all operating in top form in as dark a territory as they've ever explored.
  17. In the Mix
    All Usher fans really seem to want out of a movie like this is an opportunity to ogle their idol for an hour and a half. And that's all this movie affords them.
  18. Just Friends
    The tantalizing promise of 90 heavenly minutes of Ryan Reynolds in a roly-poly fatsuit and unconvincing tubby make-up (which make him look like a younger version of Martin Short's Jiminy Glick) proves a case of the old bait-and-switch.
  19. Rent
    Yes, Rent is the movie about AIDS, heroin addiction, homosexuality, strippers, marijuana, cross-dressing, and bisexuality audiences can take their grandparents to go see safe in the knowledge that any lingering trace of danger or authenticity has been carefully removed by director/co-writer Chris Columbus.
  20. Yours, Mine and Ours
    Pretty painless by kiddie movie standards.
  21. The Libertine
    Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.
  22. Syriana
    Gaghan brings in many more players, but edits the film into the lean, propulsive shape of a thriller. That ends up being something of a problem; some sub-plots never fully untangle and characters get lost as Gaghan rushes toward a conclusion that, taken on its own, is the stuff of a slightly hysterical leftie pamphlet.
  23. 39 Pounds of Love
    As documentary drama, 39 Pounds Of Love is as ungainly, blunt, and icky as its title.
  24. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Whenever it hits its stride, it's a well-acted, vividly executed, full-speed-ahead special-effects extravaganza that puts as much bang as possible into every remaining scene.
  25. Walk the Line
    Ends up being another one of those life-of-an-entertainer films that reduces an artist to his most embarrassing moments.
  26. Oxygono
    At the center of the movie, Tsimitselis makes for a disappointing blank, a pretty poster boy who leaves a long trail of emotional wreckage in his wake.
  27. Private
    For all its documentary-style urgency, Private often feels forced.
  28. Zizek!
    It's a straightforward, relatively style-free piece, primarily of interest to those who want to hear Zizek's pronouncements. But what distinguishes the film is Zizek's peculiar self-awareness, which borders on paranoia
  29. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    There's enough mystery and agony here for an engaging documentary, but Rossier fails to produce one, largely because he doesn't approach the material in the spirit of true inquiry.
  30. Breakfast on Pluto
    Though he (Jordan) directs with admirable skill, his usual touches don't drive the film--which occasionally threatens to lose its shape.
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