The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,411 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: 5,570 out of 10411
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10411
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10411
10411 movie reviews
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  1. Mortal Kombat II
    It’s because Mortal Kombat II is neither campy enough to revel in its violent bad taste, nor earnest enough to pull off its sprawling ambitions that it most resembles a late-stage Marvel entry.
  2. Desert Warrior
    The movie’s basic appeal––that of rebels rising up against evil empires––still works to some extent, but Desert Warrior does little to make it memorable beyond its historic production.
  3. Balls Up
    Farrelly’s film wanders aimlessly without being driven by anything absurd or outrageous enough to conjure a Hangover-like reaction, nor anything with enough humanity to justify the occasional heart-to-heart conversations between Brad and Elijah.
  4. Outcome
    The life lessons Reef learns aren’t meaningful, and the movie’s message about making amends is patronizing. In the end, it’s the audience that deserves an apology.
  5. Scream 7
    The resulting film is empty fan service, content with simply evoking appreciation for the characters that Williamson created 30 years ago instead of doing anything exciting with them.
  6. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    This silly, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, but the irony of its banality is more recoiling than provocative.
  7. The Wrecking Crew
    The Wrecking Crew casts about between genres like driftwood caught by the tide; for two hours, the script cycles between family trauma drama, goofy Hawaiian noir, meathead romp, and wham-bang slugfest. The indecision at least showcases some consistency, though, in that each approach is equally dissatisfying.
  8. Return to Silent Hill
    Somewhere between a reboot and a remake, Return To Silent Hill is the worst film of the franchise so far, and a reminder that you can’t go home again—even if your home is the haunted hamlet of Silent Hill.
  9. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    The film is even less than the sum of its genre trappings.
  10. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    Its entire third act is just expectation for a third movie that hopefully never comes. It is a bare minimum branding experiment, a dumb thing designed to be recognized with the hope that enjoyment will simply follow.
  11. Oh. What. Fun.
    Beyond its desperate gestures towards better movies and its countless regifted plot points, Oh. What. Fun. does end up looking a lot like a familiar Christmas fixture: a garbage bag full of torn wrapping paper.
  12. Rental Family
    Fraser walks through this aggressively sappy drama with the aura of simple goodness that has served him well. But such concentrated radiance starts to feel like a denial of the painful reality Rental Family ignores. The movie wants to give you a hug, but you may be tempted to slap it across the face.
  13. Playdate
    When people complain about the death of mainstream comedies, it’s bottomfeeding films like Playdate that are the genre’s executioner. No energy, no wit, just a tasteless and tacky sequence of events that barely manages to clear the bar for what’s still considered a movie.
  14. The Twits
    The Twits is exactly what one might imagine a Netflix Dahl adaptation to be: Diluted, simplistic animation, as cloying and feckless and smoothed over as anything from the last decade of Illumination films.
  15. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    The Conjuring: Last Rites solidifies The Conjuring franchise as the Fast & Furious of horror movies: A conservative, Christian, family-oriented, spin-off and sequel-laden series of adventures that lose the plot and reinvest in the audience’s affection for its familiar beats and cornball leads.
  16. Pretty Thing
    Even when compared to the recent underwhelming crop of erotic thrillers, topped by the enjoyably escalating silliness of Deep Water, Pretty Thing is especially chaste, abstaining from both sexual titillation and the campy fallout that results from making a series of decisions driven solely by libido.
  17. Bride Hard
    Bride Hard aims for the goofy joy of a drunken bachelorette party, but is more like the morning-after hangover.
  18. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.
  19. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t merely fall flat dramatically, but dashes any opportunity for visual intrigue in terms of cinematography, costume design, and, most vitally, its on-screen carnage.
  20. Lilo & Stitch
    If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.
  21. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fight or Flight
    Hartnett is the one element that makes the whole thing bearable. Yet he still isn’t enough to make it enjoyable, at least in any sustained way.
  23. Until Dawn
    The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.
  24. The Accountant 2
    The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.
  25. Gunslingers
    Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.
  26. A Working Man
    The beats become terribly repetitive even when the fight choreography is at times satisfying, and the R-rating at least allows for some CGI blood spurts. But in spite of the dreary tedium, there are moments of genuine levity that shine through the gloom, be they intentional or not.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Magazine Dreams
    Bynum scaffolds the film with a narrative about failure, not one about the challenges of navigating life on the spectrum. Killian’s cognitive differences are there to be exacerbated by the many problems the script piles on his shoulders, as if Bynum has a torture fetish and means to exercises it on his lead.
  28. O'Dessa
    Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.
  29. The Electric State
    The Electric State isn’t playful and colorful, it isn’t soberly thoughtful, it isn’t bleak yet emotional. It’s just a slog.
  30. Old Guy
    Old Guy, as is, is just a film about an old guy, free of complexity or nuance, coasting towards its formulaic conclusion.
  31. You're Cordially Invited
    You’re Cordially Invited is a rigorously unoriginal and uncreative film, in compliance with the flat mundanity of content that the streaming giants want their audiences to bask in.
  32. That Christmas
    Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.
  33. Dear Santa
    If Christmas movies can’t be good, they can usually at least be pleasant distractions. Dear Santa is neither. It’s a regrettable film, one that wasn’t ever worth the wordplay that started it.
  34. Elevation
    None of the actors do much with the uninspired material, but perhaps Baccarin is the most enjoyable to watch as she grumbles in monotone about how she wants to kill herself and handily espouses monster factoids from her diligent research as a former Caltech professor.
  35. IF
    IF feels markedly strung together, the consequence of its few creative ideas with no coherent visual language to bind them.
  36. We Live in Time
    We Live In Time’s worst sin is making its thin characters so damn boring. They’re so likable and sweet, even their flaws are forgivable.
  37. Salem's Lot
    Salem’s Lot isn’t a disaster (far worse horror films have made plenty of money at the box office), but a bloodless and frail version of the story drained of its vitality.
  38. Uglies
    All of Uglies feels like a rush job where its creators had the instruction manual but lost the proper parts.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Front Room
    It simply isn’t very scary.
  40. The Deliverance
    The Deliverance is alternatingly dull and totally nuts. It is never scary, and only sometimes holds your attention.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Reagan
    For a movie about a man who puts himself at the center of a world apparently on the brink of annihilation, Reagan lacks any drama at all.
  42. AfrAId
    For all that its baffling narrative may be explained by deleted scenes, there is no excuse for how tediously non-threatening AfrAId is as a horror movie. Almost entirely bloodless and with half a handful of kills, there just isn’t enough visceral terror to make up for the disparate, thematically muddied nonsense that’s been cobbled together into the shape of a movie.
  43. The Crow
    Rupert Sanders’ The Crow emerges from its 15-year development hell not as the version of this reboot that finally clicked, but as a film that seems to have once been nine films, all hastily cobbled into something resembling a story, all of its edges smoothed off until it’s flat, flimsy, and dull.
  44. Borderlands
    ny movie with this Manic Pixie Ellen Ripley in it can’t be all bad, though Borderlands sure as shootin’ aims for it.
  45. My Spy: The Eternal City
    My Spy The Eternal City is so unconcerned with its obligations as an action-comedy that it fails to either thrill or amuse, making it a chore to actively pay attention to.
  46. Despicable Me 4
    Good Enough is a few bland chuckles uttered in a vacuous 90 minutes you struggle to remember even as the credits start to roll. Good Enough is a black hole, of which Despicable Me 4 is the singularity.
  47. A Family Affair
    Directed by Richard LaGravenese, every moment in A Family Affair sits there as lifelessly as Gerard Butler’s character in LaGravenese’s most successful movie, P.S. I Love You. And that’s not just the fault of the expressionless romantic leads, regrettably cast opposite each other in a way that makes the whole film feel like Joey King’s vacation to the uncanny valley.
  48. Atlas
    Without a visionary director at the helm to make better use of its simplistic concept and with no infusion of camp to match its zanier facets, Atlas is a shrug.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Back to Black
    No film is “too soon” if it can excavate deeper truths or find a fresh angle on a familiar story. But Back To Black does neither.
  50. Mother of the Bride
    Mark Waters’ Mother Of The Bride, a Thailand-set romp featuring Brooke Shields as the mother in question, is not so much a misfire as a blatant example of how a formula deployed with little to no charm ends up feeling bland—lifeless, even.
  51. Poolman
    If you’re a Chris Pine super-fan looking to live inside the actor’s head for a little while, Poolman just might be for you. But if you’re pretty much anyone else—even someone looking for some so-bad-it’s-good fun—take a lesson from the walkouts and stay out of the splash zone.
  52. Knox Goes Away
    Unfortunately, with limp, elongated scenes rendering them unexciting, the whole plot unfolds like a long afterthought the filmmakers had after the audience lost all interest.
  53. Kung Fu Panda 4
    Instead of finding the perfect balance of humor as the other films did, jokes outweigh and occasionally undercut the few resounding sentiments on personal evolution.
  54. Madame Web
    The film is often so hurried or so preoccupied with what’s to come that it ignores what’s happening in the moment.
  55. Bob Marley: One Love
    Unfortunately director Reinaldo Marcus Green, along with his co-screenwriters Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, waste this opportunity and Marley’s legacy with a rather limp story full of cliches and perplexing choices.
  56. I.S.S.
    It stretches credulity, as well as our patience.
  57. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper feels stale and rather one-note.
  58. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    While Snyder may do his best to invent a dark, gripping universe to engross viewers, Rebel Moon is a limp, soulless regurgitation of tropes stolen from much more formidable films.
  59. The Exorcist: Believer
    An exorcism movie may not need to be compelled by the power of Christ, but something about it still needs to be compelling, and slapping the name The Exorcist on a screenplay that reads like a brainstorming session is just not enough.
  60. Expend4bles
    For a property that not only held unlimited potential for sequels galore, but also spin-offs (an all-female Expendables was briefly bandied about), it’s disheartening to see it face such creative bankruptcy. That’s not to say that, in the future, the right marriage of innovative directors and screenwriters can’t revive this flailing corpse and return it to its former glory. Unfortunately, recruiting those miracle workers seems more difficult than any mission any Expendable ever faced.
  61. The Nun II
    At least the jump scares are effective, especially in IMAX theaters where the headrests rumble every time Valak makes a sudden move. That, and a couple of decent makeup tricks are pretty much all The Nun II has. The character deserves better, and so do you really.
  62. God Is a Bullet
    Cut God Is A Bullet down to a tight 90 minutes, and it might at least consistently deliver the cheap thrills and nihilistic kick it only occasionally achieves.
  63. Love Again
    This is after all a romantic comedy, not a romantic tragedy, though you might not realize it since it’s almost devoid of humor.
  64. Ghosted
    There’s a funny notion in Chris Evans effectively playing a damsel in distress, but like everything else in Ghosted, the filmmakers have no idea how to play it.
  65. A Good Person
    Asking the question “what makes a good person” might have been an intriguing idea. However, in trying to come up with an answer, A Good Person ends up presenting an overwrought narrative that’s full of cliches that do not resonate.
  66. Children of the Corn
    There’s no reason a movie with this premise couldn’t be better. Just not in these folks’ hands.
  67. Devil's Peak
    The cast is solid, the film’s pedigree is good, there’s a sense of direction and competence laced through it all, but the whole is lesser than its parts. It’s hard to watch not just because it fails, but because you see all the ways it might have succeeded.
  68. The Mean One
    For a film with such a promising premise, it turns out to be a plodding example of how to squander potential.
  69. Mindcage
    The end result is a movie whose chief entertainment value may come from taking an inventory of the different ways its various characters pronounce the name of its imprisoned, assistive madman.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Son
    Despite the shallow handling of truly important and nuanced subject matter, Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and a scene-stealing Vanessa Kirby go deep with their performances in ways that almost make The Son’s manipulative and predictable story worth sitting through—almost.
  71. Disenchanted
    Its lack of legitimate wit, cleverness, and focus makes a promising concept feel like a wasted wish, conjuring little of the magic that made its predecessor feel so memorable.
  72. Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend
    This is anonymous filmmaking of the highest order—it could be about anyone. There’s no insight into Ferruccio Lamborghini or what made his pursuits special. It could also be directed by anyone—Moresco’s indistinct filmmaking is neither enthralling nor involving.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The People We Hate at the Wedding
    This slog of a film will have you checking your watch, wishing for an open bar, and begging for the sparkler sendoff.
  74. Prey for the Devil
    The most frustrating thing about Prey For The Devil is that there seems to be a good movie somewhere in this patchwork of themes and pastiches.
  75. Ticket to Paradise
    It’s as if everyone made this movie about the joy of being on vacation—while also taking one.
  76. The Curse of Bridge Hollow
    Watching it feels like attending a Halloween party and never striking up a conversation with anyone; you can only look at the decorations for so long before getting bored.
  77. Meet Cute
    There aren’t any clever moments, just a parade of clichés you’ve seen in many other indie romances.
  78. Clerks III
    Ultimately, the absence of any meaningful sentiment about grief or personal growth (or anything else) makes the story’s maddening, rote familiarity feel especially lazy—which is why Clerks III lives up to the legacy of its uninspired characters in all of the wrong ways.
  79. Medieval
    Jákl’s film is precisely as generic as its title would suggest, and what little there is to recommend is buried under a mountain of tedium
  80. Get Away If You Can
    One hopes the entire process made for great couples therapy, because watching it certainly doesn’t.
  81. Secret Headquarters
    Between all the cool gadgets—a vintage VW van serving as The Guard’s G-Mobile being the best of them—a devoted cast and a well-meaning spirit, you desperately want Secret Headquarters to be a fun and swift adventure like the one Joost and Schulman clearly conceived on paper. But that imaginary film is unfortunately trapped somewhere inside this clumsy wreck, waiting for its superpowers to be restored.
  82. Luck
    The movie’s slipshod reasoning and grating rhythms suggest strongly that Lasseter’s ignominious professional defenestration (he was driven from his perch in 2017-18 amidst allegations of sexual misconduct) has impacted his storytelling judgment, the expertise and skill level of people who wish to work with him, or both
  83. Easter Sunday
    Easter Sunday, for all its faults, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland of unfocused potential.
  84. Bullet Train
    Leitch’s talky, violent hit man movie, with Brad Pitt at the center of an over-cranked ensemble cast, reminds us why Hollywood has all but abandoned attempts to copy the successes of Tarantino and Ritchie. This film is not just bloated, tedious, dim-witted, and glib, it’s also redundant.
  85. Purple Hearts
    Purple Hearts would be a lot more interesting if it interrogated the specific moments of weakness that attract Cassie to Luke, but that’s far too complex an idea to explore in this kiddie pool of sentimentality.
  86. Sharp Stick
    Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.
  87. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    Reckless cultural insensitivities aside, Stone and Hopper’s writing is simply not smart or funny. Poop and fart jokes comprise the core of their repertoire, and if you’re curious how reliant the film is on this material, Paramount is literally handing out whoopee cushions to promote the film.
  88. Code Name Banshee
    In the end, Code Name Banshee doesn’t have interesting ideas about who its characters are, or even wish to be. It’s a cliché-driven, rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets, nothing more.
  89. The Princess
    A yawningly simplistic and roundly inconsequential action movie, The Princess lacks, on a narrative level, the certitude and clarity of purpose of its title character.
  90. The Man from Toronto
    For a character-driven “mistaken identity” comedy that lives or dies based on the humorous interactions between two A-list leads, its lousy script barely constitutes life support.
  91. The Lost Girls
    After watching, you may well wish that Peter Pan could be re-copyrighted to be kept out of the hands of anyone inclined to make this much of a mess of it.
  92. Unhuman
    If you’re a fan of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, scribes of the later Saw sequels and the Feast trilogy, you know what to expect from them: gore, vomit, red filters, and maybe a half-clever plot twist. If you’re not a fan, it’s best to stay as far away as possible from Unhuman, a cheap-looking, awkwardly calibrated horror-comedy which only the team’s truest devotees could love.
  93. Jurassic World Dominion
    There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.
  94. I'm Charlie Walker
    It is a bewildering misfire which roundly illustrates the differences between a historically under-told story which arguably should be amplified and a movie that actually does a good job of accomplishing that task.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Firestarter
    The best thing that can be said about this new iteration of Firestarter is that it at least gave us a new score by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. The rest feels like a waste of a talented cast and crew that somehow, against all odds, makes the 1984 film seem like a staggering achievement in the realm of King adaptations.
  96. Monstrous
    Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a more stillborn finished product, an exercise in tedium which checks the barest boxes of “completed movie” and possibly delivers unknown benefits for some of those executive producers, but otherwise offers nothing that might engage an audience.
  97. Homebound
    A film that leans on withheld information to drive a mystery but lacks anything for viewers to latch onto emotionally.
  98. The Ravine
    The Ravine spends more than an hour telegraphing that this is a story about the perplexing feelings that arise from a close friend’s dark and sudden turn. Then it swiftly brushes aside those layers in favor of a mystically clean explanation, and the result is narratively dull, emotionally ungratifying, and intellectually insulting.
  99. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.
  100. Blacklight
    Blacklight cuts corners everywhere.
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