The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Perhaps because Lando was less explored than Han in the original films, Glover manages the tricky task of both paying homage to role originator Billy Dee Williams while adding his own spin to the character. Like Ehrenreich, his version goes comic without tipping into outright spoofery.
  2. Burning
    Burning simmers. For nearly two-and-a-half perfectly measured hours, it turns up the heat without boiling over: a drama becoming a thriller in slow motion, intensifying little by little minute by minute, until finally it reaches a shocking, powerful crescendo.
  3. Cold War
    Pawlikowski, who doesn’t waste a shot (nor compose one that isn’t a work of art on its lonesome), creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.
  4. Under the Silver Lake
    The pervasive but almost offhand menace is supplied by Mitchell’s impeccable, widescreen mise-en-scène; the ordinary dread he locates in an unglamorous, mundane L.A.; and the way even the film’s comedy seems perched on the edge of unease.
  5. The House That Jack Built
    The film lands somewhere between self-flagellation and apologia; however hard von Trier is on himself, he’s not above mounting defenses, and he spares plenty of punishment for us, too.
  6. Dark Crimes
    Here, a few words should be said about Carrey’s performance: It may be the worst dramatic acting of his career, a charmless cartoon of self-repression.
  7. BlacKkKlansman
    Although he’s made his most narratively entertaining movie in years, the filmmaker often still privileges polemical discourse over drama, grinding things to a halt for minutes-long speeches—he’s not so different from Godard in that way—and sometimes getting rather on-the-nose with the already exceptionally apparent contemporary echoes.
  8. On Chesil Beach
    On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.
  9. Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    The film’s appeal, predicated on its rare close-up look at a working Bishop Of Rome, will be limited primarily to the faithful; those hoping for a candid portrait of the man beneath the cassock will be sorely disappointed.
  10. Deadpool 2
    Though bringing in a bona fide action-cheese aesthete like David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) to direct counts as a minor coup, Deadpool 2’s attempts to fight superhero fatigue with self-awareness and meta shock value can become exhausting. Indulgent and uneven, but in spots gruesomely funny, the new film badly lacks the basic momentum of the original’s formulaic plot.
  11. Book Club
    The script is so lazy and outdated in its humor, it condescends to the same audience it purports to empower.
  12. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.
  13. 3 Faces
    Panahi has frequently blurred the line between cinema and reality; here, he builds the search for that line into the work itself, even flirting, playfully, with a self-critique.
  14. Arctic
    As a showcase for Mikkelsen’s commitment, it’s sometimes gripping...Mads gets to show an intense vulnerability for once. That’s worth seeing, though one wishes Arctic complicated its life-and-death ordeal a little more, or at least varied its obstacles. At a certain point, even raw, screaming endurance isn’t quite drama enough.
  15. Thunder Road
    One could argue that Thunder Road is more sympathetic than critical—which is to say, that it’s a movie that asks you to feel sorry for a white cop with serious women issues. If that’s an oversimplification, it’s because Cummings, who also wrote and directed the film, has delivered a remarkable tragicomic performance in the lead.
  16. Climax
    There’s a spontaneity to Climax—a naturalistic immediacy born of its exceptional, energetic cast of unknowns, firing off entirely improvised jokes and insults and threats.
  17. Breaking In
    The film’s sense of time lacks precision and urgency, and just having characters periodically point out that the clock is ticking doesn’t cut it.
  18. Filmworker
    Matthew Modine — who wrote about Vitali repeatedly in his published diaries of the hellish production of "Full Metal Jacket" and is also interviewed in Filmworker — echoes what seems to be a common sentiment about Vitali: that the guy is a friendly mystery, either a glutton for punishment or a saint.
  19. Life of the Party
    The movie portrays Deanna’s rediscovery of a pre-mom life, and how she squares that freedom with her identity as a loving mother, with a lot of warmth, and its refusal to gin up tired conflicts or mawkish lessons is admirable. That does, however, leave Life Of The Party without much comic momentum.
  20. Beast
    This psychodrama didn’t go exactly where I expected it would. It didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting either.
  21. Everybody Knows
    Quintessentially, and maybe to a fault, this is a Farhadi movie: another of the writer-director’s gripping studies of a family torn asunder by a compounding mess of deception and revelation.
  22. The Day After
    A lazy shoulder shrug of a movie that never bothers to work out who its characters are, what they want, or why their ostensible problems should be of interest to anyone else.
  23. The Seagull
    He’s (Mayer) assembled a terrific cast and mostly stayed out of their way, but the result still feels frustratingly arm’s-length, lacking the odd electricity of Louis Malle’s semi-staged "Vanya On 42nd Street."
  24. Sollers Point
    Sollers Point is easy to admire, abstractly and on principle. But you may still leave wondering if a little melodrama, a little bullshit, might have been preferable.
  25. Overboard
    The way the script pulls its punches is less offensive than simply toothless, giving Overboard the feel of a film written by a focus group, or maybe a script-writing robot programmed with the latest demographic trends.
  26. Manhunt
    With every overblown character introduction and goofy twist, it announces itself as intentionally cheesy guilty pleasure. With Woo, one expects a higher, more transcendent grade of cheese.
  27. Bad Samaritan
    This comparatively low-budget effort represents a marked improvement from Devlin’s debut theatrical feature, Geostorm, which was among last year’s very worst films. He’s graduated from painful tedium to an acceptable means of killing two hours. One step at a time.
  28. Racer and the Jailbird
    Despite Bibi’s need for speed, Racer And The Jailbird sputters more than it guns.
  29. The Guardians
    What starts out as a testament to female fortitude, reminding us that sacrifices were also made on the home front, gradually turns into high-toned soap opera.
  30. RBG
    Breathlessly superficial, school-presentation-ish documentary.
  31. Tully
    Though Davis makes Tully convincing both as a human being and as a mysterious godsend, it’s Theron whose work is absolutely vital to Tully’s success.
  32. Diane
    An occasionally perceptive and endearingly un-commercial drama undercut by some serious narrative awkwardness.
  33. Stockholm
    Hawke is no stranger to elevating subpar material with a committed performance, but his fidgety crook-with-a-heart-of-gold act is undercut by Budreau’s uncreative use of the limited setting (almost the whole thing takes place inside the bank) and unskillful handling of the broad tone.
  34. State Like Sleep
    The whole thing aspires to art, but can really only be appreciated as trash.
  35. Jellyfish
    Jellyfish takes the kitchen-sink approach, piling on external inequities and indignities on its protagonist.
  36. The Week Of
    Smigel may not want to take up permanent residence in the Happy Madison offices, but he raises his old friend’s game considerably.
  37. Ghostbox Cowboy
    It’s unclassifiable.
  38. Kings
    In its highly combustable, confusing, angry environment, where everyone from parents to rioters to cops is just making it up as they go along, the only thing that seems to matter are the underlying drives, whether it’s goodheartedness or resentment.
  39. The Bleeding Edge
    [An] overstretched look at the poorly regulated medical devices industry.
  40. Let the Sunshine In
    Perhaps it’s best to approach Let The Sunshine In as a talky palate-cleanser before Denis’ next big genre experiment, the forthcoming sci-fi movie "High Life." In space, one hopes, nobody can hear you blather.
  41. Duck Butter
    Duck Butter is clever without being all that hilarious, and personal without being all that revealing.
  42. Disobedience
    Plotting has never been a strong suit for Lelio, who made his name with character studies of unconventional women. Here, he tries his hand at something akin to classicism, and ends up mounting a compelling drama. Curiously, its main shortcoming parallels the human flaw that is its main theme: our yearning to leave often loses out to our inability to let go.
  43. Avengers: Infinity War
    Infinity War inherits plenty of the problems endemic to crossovers: the privileging of quantity over quality, of spectacle over story, and of the shock value of major changes to the status quo over just about everything else.
  44. Mrs. Hyde
    Like Bozon’s other films, Mrs. Hyde just comes across as randomly odd, throwing together a bunch of disparate, individually intriguing elements and hoping they’ll add up to something cohesive and satisfying. As usual, they don’t.
  45. Downrange
    Downrange is trash, but in an almost elemental vein.
  46. Vampire Clay
    It’s not a great film by any means, but it is the epitome of a “Fantastic Fest movie,” meaning enjoyed best with friends and a few drinks.
  47. Traffik
    Trying to figure it out makes Traffik weirdly compelling, but nowhere near good.
  48. I Feel Pretty
    The eerily laugh-free pre-head-trauma opening stretch requires Schumer to play mousy (not her strong suit), while the inevitable climactic speech tests the limits of her acting ability. Somewhere in there are a handful of good jokes about Renee’s delusional self-image...and a few tedious ones.
  49. The Devil and Father Amorth
    The stuff is about as convincing as a chain letter and requires considerable padding, despite a slim running time.
  50. Super Troopers 2
    Its very existence is a testament to lowered expectations. That said, it seems like a real missed opportunity for Broken Lizard, which has only seen diminishing returns since the original.
  51. This Is Our Land
    Belvaux has made a gutsy, discomfiting movie about going along to get along, and just how dangerous that impulse can ultimately be.
  52. Godard Mon Amour
    Though adapted from her memoirs, Godard Mon Amour dubiously minimizes her character. The most it offers is a depiction of a deteriorating marriage between a beautiful woman and an asshole who’s in the middle of a crisis of artistic conscience. And Godard already made one of those. It’s called "Contempt."
  53. Ghost Stories
    Ghost Stories works best as an exercise in nostalgia. Those seeking hardcore, modern-day scares will be disappointed.
  54. The Broken Tower
    It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.
  55. Come Sunday
    Despite committed performances from most of the cast (especially Ejiofor, who imbues Pearson with a gentle yet stubborn spirit), Come Sunday can’t shake its middling script and perfunctory direction.
  56. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    It’s a muddled, contradictory, confusing mess, made even more so by the darkly cynical streak that runs through the film.
  57. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  58. Submergence
    An objectively bad movie, paradoxically ponderous and pointless.
  59. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.
  60. The Rider
    More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.
  61. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."
  62. Beirut
    Though entertaining in stretches, the central metaphor of back-channel dealmaking as a game of Texas Hold ’em — played by Skiles and different factions within the CIA, the PLO, and the Israeli government — comes up short in the end.
  63. The Miracle Season
    It is not unusual for an underdog sports picture to be predictable. But The Miracle Season seems downright preordained, and not just in its arc. The movie is constitutionally incapable of surprise even on a moment-to-moment level.
  64. The Endless
    Although The Endless works just fine as a standalone film, looking at it in the wider context of Benson and Moorhead’s work highlights another, more meta theme: the desire to return to an earlier, simpler period in one’s life, and relive those glory days forever.
  65. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is an entertaining and crowd-pleasing monster movie, one that leaves you wanting more—and once you get over wondering what a subtler and more accomplished director might have done with this material, it’s not hard to let yourself be won over by its charms.
  66. Where Is Kyra?
    Unlike Oren Moverman’s superficially similar "Time Out Of Mind," in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man, Where Is Kyra? doesn’t constantly feel like what it necessarily is: the work of wealthy people simulating poverty. In part, that’s thanks to Pfeiffer’s vanity-free, internalized performance, which could hardly be more different from her deliciously abrasive turn in last year’s "Mother!" (It’s great to have her back.)
  67. Blockers
    The comedy Blockers, which is not written, produced, or directed by Apatow but feels descended from some of his work, sets for itself a more ambitious challenge, daring itself to give each member of its ensemble a coming-of-age arc, and to pull off two different high-concept comedies at once in the process.
  68. Sweet Country
    Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.
  69. Chappaquiddick
    The stranger and more corrosive subtexts it locates in the Kennedy circle’s actions in the aftermath of the crash are undermined by its classy restraint, which saps the most conceptually outrageous moments.
  70. You Were Never Really Here
    For all the influences glowing dimly under its skin, You Were Never Really Here remains its own bewildering animal, unmistakably Ramsay’s.
  71. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    So what was Tyler Perry going for here? Based on the sanctimonious streak that runs throughout his work, one might posit that he was trying to wrap a gleefully outrageous thriller around a lesson on marriage, like a slice of bacon around a particularly bitter pill. Except, at some point, the bacon got hopelessly overcooked.
  72. God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
    A Light In Darkness isn’t as offensive as the first film—it lacks the requisite misogyny and Islamophobia, and does a better job of looking like it’s almost a real movie—but it’s not far behind, an emblematic film for the foul moment.
  73. Finding Your Feet
    Pitched to the weekday-matinee crowd, the insipid British retirement-age comedy Finding Your Feet doesn’t have much to recommend it apart from its grossly overqualified cast, led by Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall.
  74. Outside In
    While this is probably Shelton’s best fully scripted dramatic feature — a big improvement on the incoherent "Touchy Feely" (2013) — it’s the sort of earnest, conventional movie that many indie directors could make (and many do).
  75. Revenge
    The film works best if you approach it as a fantasy, with Jen as a near-supernatural angel of vengeance; otherwise, it’s easy to get hung up on the inconsistencies as the action grows increasingly over-the-top.
  76. Gemini
    As visually appealing as much of Gemini is, it wouldn’t work nearly so well without Lola Kirke playing Jill.
  77. Ready Player One
    Ready Player One, based on the bestseller of the same name, is a pandering, crassly commercial victory of intellectual property law that’s also, in its best moments, a grand popcorn entertainment, made with skill and wit and even sincerity.
  78. Ismael's Ghosts
    Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.
  79. Midnight Sun
    The authentic Sparks movies at least tend to be howlers, with shamelessly overcomplicated narratives and risible twists. Midnight Sun, on the other hand, is straightforward and trite.
  80. Sherlock Gnomes
    Most of the movie’s star power has been harnessed without much obvious reason, right down to the movie’s seeming origins as a delivery system for the Elton John catalog.
  81. I Kill Giants
    Beyond the characterization of its complex anti-heroine, though, I Kill Giants doesn’t stray too far from an established collection of story beats, stretched thin over a slightly too-long 106-minute run time.
  82. Isle of Dogs
    If this is a superficial tribute, it’s also an affectionately dense one. Most accurately, what we’re seeing is an Andersonian alternate universe: a Japan as old and new, real and unreal, steeped in pastiche and invented from scratch as the brownstone New York of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
  83. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    As movies expressly courting the faith-based audience go, Paul, Apostle Of Christ acquits itself reasonably well from moment to moment, avoiding the howlers that plague such Pure Flix titles as "Samson" and "God’s Not Dead."
  84. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.
  85. Unsane
    Most of the thrills here come from watching one of our canniest directors perform rattling wheelchair dollies on a waxed hospital floor while over-punctuating video-noisy close-ups and cheesy music cues.
  86. Roxanne Roxanne
    By shaping Roxanne Roxanne as a character profile, Larnell accentuates his actors’ performances and crafts a nuanced community portrait, two strengths exhibited in his delightful first feature, "Cronies."
  87. The Workshop
    Cantet remains a gifted filmmaker — The Workshop’s semi-improvisational aspects are no less impressive than those in "The Class," and he’s at least superficially engaged with the current state of the world — but this isn’t the return to form that his fans have awaited over the past decade.
  88. I Can Only Imagine
    This is an interesting idea, executed with a reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes art to go along with a faith-based movie’s reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes entertainment.
  89. Benji
    Shot in widescreen in New Orleans, this new Benji looks burnished and luxe in comparison with the visibly threadbare original, to which it pays several nods for the fans.
  90. Tomb Raider
    When it comes to what should be the reliably dumb fun of tomb raiding, maybe there are worse crimes than insulting viewers’ intelligence or bombarding them with crappy special effects. Boring them? Now that’s a felony offense.
  91. 7 Days in Entebbe
    Lacking both the exploitation-movie claustrophobic urgency of Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt" and the Irwin Allen-disaster-film factor of the Irvin Kershner-directed NBC version, "Raid On Entebbe," 7 Days instead goes for businesslike professionalism.
  92. Journey's End
    Is there any artistically compelling reason for the existence of the latest adaptation, which is clearly meant to take advantage of the centennial? Not really, but it’s a good play, once again providing juicy roles to fresh and established talent. That’ll suffice.
  93. The Hurricane Heist
    A workmanlike cross between a disaster movie and a caper-chase flick...the film never rises to the promise of its awesomely literal title.
  94. Gringo
    Solid chunks of the screwball humor land like bricks, and the characters — most of them idiots, a**holes, or suckers — are colorfully over-the-top but not especially memorable.
  95. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    Just as the movie seems to have exhausted its supply of generic guilty pleasures, it ascends to some more operatic and mordant plane of slasher-dom in a wacko sequence that involves the aforementioned “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” a swimming pool, and a perfectly timed smash zoom.
  96. The Outsider
    Asano and the rest of the Japanese cast provide baseline credibility, but they can’t generate excitement from this morass of clichés.
  97. A Wrinkle in Time
    Only Reid and Pine feel like they’re playing fully imagined characters, and DuVernay wrestles with how to make the overstuffed material both contemporary and timeless.
  98. The Death of Stalin
    The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.
  99. Claire's Camera
    Serves as a thoroughly engaging divertissement. That it comes across as more than a little half-assed is part of its unruly charm.
  100. Death Wish
    Whether uncritically brought over in remake translation or genuinely reaffirmed, the movie’s fucked-up politics poison the fun. By the end, which creates an unmistakably symmetrical arc for Paul, Death Wish has all but devolved into a scare-tactics advertisement for locked-and-loaded home protection.
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