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. Marjorie Prime
    The most stylish thing about it is the eerie original music by Mica Levi, the art-damaged noise-popster-turned-composer who previously scored "Under The Skin" and "Jackie."
  2. Patti Cake$
    There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.
  3. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which bears the tagline “Get triggered” and is essentially a dumber, tackier "Midnight Run," was destined to be one of those Neanderthalic, faux-merican EuropaCorp action movies, like "The Transporter" or "From Paris With Love" ­­— except fate fumbled, and the film ended up as a coasting-on-star-power Hollywood programmer directed by The Expendables 3’s Patrick Hughes.
  4. Lemon
    Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.
  5. The Wound
    The Wound excels so long as it hangs back a bit, watching Xolani struggle to project the authority that his role demands, despite being acutely aware of his own vulnerability.
  6. Logan Lucky
    Soderbergh isn’t exactly hiding a secret drama inside his barrel of laughs and twists. But his comeback project keeps quiet about being one of the sweetest, most affirming movies he’s ever made.
  7. The Trip to Spain
    Thing is, this third movie plays less like some bookend chapter of a complete saga than a floundering middle season of a television show that’s settled into a formulaic groove—which makes sense, given that each Trip is actually a condensed version of an episodic miniseries that aired on British television first.
  8. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.
  9. Good Time
    Stripping away almost all traces of movie-star glamour to reveal the naked, nervy talent underneath, Pattinson finally bursts out of the chrysalis of his pin-up boy celebrity. The metamorphosis from YA heartthrob into electrifying character actor is complete.
  10. Nocturama
    The film is a masterstroke of synthesis; whatever it borrows, it makes its own.
  11. The Only Living Boy in New York
    Marc Webb’s new movie, in contrast, uses the song for its title, the name of an in-movie manuscript, and as a late-breaking song cue that doesn’t drop the needle so much as clunk it down with turgid inevitability.
  12. Naked
    Let’s place the blame where it squarely belongs: on the moronic premise. Groundhog Day but he’s naked? Why?
  13. Annabelle: Creation
    Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.
  14. The Glass Castle
    While it’s understandable that Walls might not want to linger on the more grim aspects of her childhood, Cretton’s decision to pull punches on those exact moments takes what could be a powerful tale of resilience and forgiveness and spins it into just another piece of Hollywood feel-good fluff.
  15. Ingrid Goes West
    The biggest selling point of Ingrid Goes West is its screenplay, which is full of deadpan comic flourishes.
  16. Planetarium
    Numerous potentially interesting ideas orbit one another in Planetarium, but none boasts sufficient gravity to merit a landing, it seems.
  17. Whose Streets?
    What this film is not, in any way, is comprehensive. Very intentionally, Folayan and company don’t concern themselves with the bigger picture. This is ground-level journalism.
  18. The Dark Tower
    It would be a waste of everyone’s time to go on about how this 95-minute movie deviates from the source. Let’s just say it turns The Dark Tower into something generic, and leave it at that.
  19. Columbus
    Come for the breathtaking architectural scenery, stay for the likable pair staring up at it.
  20. Fun Mom Dinner
    While there is plenty of drinking and a fair amount of drugs (just pot though, let’s not go crazy), the overall effect is more akin to passing out on the couch at 9 p.m. than partying until dawn.
  21. Kidnap
    Kidnap is an asinine child-abduction thriller spliced with a touch of the early Steven Spielberg TV movie "Duel," and the most likable thing about it is that it is utter, unabashed garbage.
  22. Icarus
    Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy.
  23. Wind River
    Driven by another of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ murmuring folk soundtracks, Wind River turns out to be the weakest of Sheridan’s loose trilogy — the one with the thinnest characterizations and the toughest time disguising its subtext as plainspoken townsfolk rapport.
  24. Step
    Over and over, it pitches us reasons to care about these young women—an all-too-perfect example of a documentary that exists to make people feel good for watching it.
  25. 4 Days in France
    What makes 4 Days In France special, though, is that it’s far more expansive than its basic premise would suggest.
  26. The Emoji Movie
    There was probably never going to be a version of this film that would prove even remotely plausible as a movie someone felt passionately about making for artistic reasons; as far as expanding on smartphone-related IP, this is an even weaker starting point than Sony Animation’s recent The Angry Birds Movie.
  27. The Incredible Jessica James
    To be fair, it’s difficult not to be outshone by Jessica Williams, whose star has been continually on the rise since her debut on The Daily Show in 2012. It’s interesting, then, that this irrepressible personality would have her first starring film role project be as low-key as The Incredible Jessica James, especially since it seems to have been written just for her.
  28. Brigsby Bear
    The big finale never reaches "Chuck & Buck" levels of therapeutic catharsis, because Mooney hasn’t really let us see James’ pain, only his gushy wide-eyed innocence, his lovability.
  29. Menashe
    Menashe Lustig brings warmth and a lumpen charisma to Menashe’s lead role, giving life to a film based in part on his own experiences.
  30. Atomic Blonde
    This can be pretty fun, but also tiring in stretches; Leitch’s fetishistic interest in clothes, scar tissue, furniture, and different shades of mood lighting and lens flare gives some of the action-less portions of Atomic Blonde a glazed-over, narcotic pace.
  31. Detroit
    It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished.
  32. The Last Face
    But that’s nothing compared to the sustained tone-deaf fiasco that is Penn’s latest feature, The Last Face — a movie so monumentally miscalculated, right from its opening explanatory text, that the audience at Cannes, where it (inexplicably) premiered in Competition last year, started laughing at it within the first 30 seconds. All one can really do is gape in wonder and puzzlement.
  33. From the Land of the Moon
    Cotillard tries hard to fashion a credible human being from this collection of shallow adolescent impulses, but the movie infantilizes Gabrielle at every turn.
  34. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    They’ve chased a valuable science lesson with something that comes closer, occasionally, to a celebrity profile.
  35. Person to Person
    It’s a film of ephemeral pleasures, adorned in a rich variety of voices, non-verbal gestures, and speech patterns: unfussy, unrushed, at times very funny.
  36. Landline
    Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.
  37. Killing Ground
    Killing Ground comes down to what you want to experience in a horror movie. Granted, all this elaborately constructed savagery is upsetting, so the film succeeds on that level. But without suspense to propel it forward, and without a compelling backstory to deepen the intrigue, upset is all we’ve got.
  38. Kékszakállú
    Solnicki has admitted in interviews that he more or less made the movie up as he went along, not knowing quite what he was after, and it shows. But he has a remarkable eye and boundless curiosity, and those two qualities are enough to sustain a brief yet restlessly inventive exploration like this one.
  39. Amnesia
    Schroeder was reportedly inspired to make Amnesia as a tribute to his mother, who left Germany not long after the Nazis came to power and never wanted to return; he even shot the film in the house where she lived for many years (which was also a major location in his 1969 debut, More). But neither he nor his co-writers managed to prevent their ostensible subtext from swamping the text.
  40. Girls Trip
    Before the opening credits have finished rolling, voice-over narration is lamenting the distance that can grow between even the tightest of friendships and hyping up the audience for a reunion of characters who have barely been introduced. It may be shameless, but it’s honest.
  41. Santoalla
    A story is only as interesting as what can be drawn from it, and Becker and Mehrer seem reluctant to draw too much, perhaps realizing the confines they have to work within; even at a scant 83 minutes, the movie feels over-stretched.
  42. Dunkirk
    Christopher Nolan’s terrific new film, Dunkirk, is powered by an engine of combusting contradictions: it’s at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine.
  43. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    The longer action scenes may not always rank with Besson’s early ’90s highlights (Léon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) or the mania of the more recent Lucy, but there isn’t a moment in this ludicrous, lushly self-indulgent movie that doesn’t feel like its creator is having the time of his life.
  44. Wish Upon
    The real shame is that Joey King got yanked into this cut-rate crap.
  45. Lady Macbeth
    By engaging with multiple forms of oppression, the film forms a radical statement on the intersections of racism, classism, and sexism that elevates it far beyond a nicely shot, Victorian-era episode of "Snapped."
  46. Endless Poetry
    Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.
  47. To the Bone
    It’s snarkier and a little more self-conscious than the rest, but just as cornball.
  48. Chasing Coral
    Chasing Coral has a cogent, timely argument to make — and, crucially, it’s an argument that demands visual presentation. For once, reading a book or in-depth article on the subject wouldn’t be remotely as persuasive (except perhaps regarding the question of whether human activity is primarily responsible). If your eyes work, your heart will sink.
  49. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The end result is too boxed in by the demands of the franchise era and the usual restrictions of a PG-13 rating to qualify as art. It can’t show morally troubling violence or embrace hopelessness, and its day trip into the heart of darkness has to end with a ray of sunshine—“The horror, the horror...” in quotation marks.
  50. The Rehearsal
    The Rehearsal, director Alison Maclean’s first feature since the 1999 Denis Johnson adaptation Jesus’ Son, is such a hodgepodge of arthouse references, arch distancing effects, and emotionally vacant wide-screen compositions that one could easily mistake it for an awkward debut film.
  51. City of Ghosts
    There are many moving scenes in City Of Ghosts, but towards the end of the film one especially powerful sequence shows a RBSS member shaking uncontrollably as he thumbs through a stack of pictures of his friends, dead and alive.
  52. A Ghost Story
    Get on the wavelength of this mesmerizing, singularly unusual genre experiment and the undead being at its center stops looking so silly.
  53. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Much of the film’s infectiously youthful spirit comes courtesy of its star. At 21, Tom Holland is only a hair younger than Toby Maguire was when he first donned the tights.
  54. The House
    The pace is hectic, but the jokes just aren't there.
  55. Three Amigos!
    Martin’s script—co-written with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and songwriter Randy Newman—is full of inspired bits of comic business, such as Martin making a “lookuphere!” bird call to get his chums’ attention, Chase pouring water all over his face while his mates’ canteens are dry, and the Amigos summoning an invisible swordsman whom Chase accidentally shoots.
  56. The Little Hours
    Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.
  57. Pop Aye
    Pop Aye is a standard, if well-made, indie road trip dramedy. But, you know, with an elephant.
  58. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    Banzai is an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.
  59. The Reagan Show
    It’s an approach that works well when the audience enjoys the company of this person who’s become a permanent fixture on their TV. But it’s also one that enrages opposing voters, who can only ever see the maddening fakery.
  60. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    The B-Side feels a tad overextended—but it’s a pleasure to see a warm, creative, and not even remotely evasive individual in front of his camera for a change.
  61. Despicable Me 3
    Does the sight of a mulleted figure in shoulder pads blasting away his foes with a weaponized keytar sound mildly amusing? Congratulations, you’ll be able to sit through this.
  62. Baby Driver
    Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.
  63. Okja
    If Bong, the South Korean writer-director behind The Host, Memories Of Murder, and Snowpiercer, never squares the film’s satirical means with its sentimental ends, he at least throws the weight of his considerable filmmaking talent behind both.
  64. The Beguiled
    What this Beguiled has done is deepen the material’s implicit wellsprings of loneliness and longing, mitigating some of the inherent sexism by attempting to genuinely grapple with the desires of its cooped-up characters. It’s “tasteful” hothouse pulp, if such a thing is possible.
  65. The Big Sick
    There was more than the usual dating-scene obstacles threatening their future together. Collaborating on the screenplay for The Big Sick, Nanjiani and Gordon have made a perceptive, winning romantic comedy from those obstacles, including the unforeseen emergency that provides the film its title.
  66. The Ornithologist
    Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.
  67. My Journey Through French Cinema
    This focus on minutiae doesn’t paint a complete picture, nor is it meant to. But it underlines a point too rarely made: Every film is an accumulation of things the average person wouldn’t notice. If there’s a real educational function to criticism, it isn’t to inform, but to teach an audience how to look.
  68. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    It’s a subject that should appeal to anyone who doesn’t wield the words “the media” as an insult.
  69. The Bad Batch
    Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible.
  70. In Transit
    For better and worse, Maysles and his team don’t impose any sort of grand philosophical thesis on these random encounters. The notion of wanting to pick up stakes and restart your life in a new location recurs throughout, but the film (which runs a brisk 76 minutes) is mostly content just to sample the populace, trusting in humanity itself to hold the viewer’s interest.
  71. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The more striking moments of The Last Knight—this is an ostentatious Michael Bay movie, after all—speak just as loudly to its director’s indifference to both source material and visual scale.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    All Eyez on Me
    At this most perfunctory level, All Eyez On Me succeeds, but on pretty much every other one imaginable, it is a failure.
  73. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    Where Score proves its value to those fans is when it simply allows them to watch these composers at work.
  74. Rough Night
    To compare Rough Night to another relatively recent female-led comedy, the film incorporates its violence with less tonal whiplash than in the 2013 Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy "The Heat," not only because of the tone set by the hard-R dialogue, but also because the dead body jokes are more "Weekend At Bernie’s" than anything.
  75. The Book of Henry
    Director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World, Safety Not Guaranteed) lacks any of the eccentricities that might make this quirky and contrived material work, even at face value.
  76. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    Stylistically, Once Upon A Time In Venice is mostly indistinguishable from a middling TV pilot that never made it to series.
  77. 47 Meters Down
    47 Meters Down never remotely approaches greatness, but for an hour or so, its unfussy, workmanlike portrait of ordinary people in crisis (plus killer sharks) gets the job done.
  78. Harmonium
    The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.
  79. Maudie
    The problem is as old as the biopic: Somewhere in trying to tell a life story, life gets lost.
  80. Cars 3
    The best thing that can be said about Cars 3, the studio’s dispiritingly formulaic return to a world of talking jalopies, is that it isn’t another feature-length showcase for the limited comedic stylings of Larry The Cable Guy.
  81. Megan Leavey
    When Megan Leavey touches upon the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in both humans and animals, it looks capable of bringing something novel to the human-and-dog formula. Most of the time, it’s a rote biography of someone a dog really liked.
  82. My Cousin Rachel
    It might not be a visual buffet on the order of Guillermo Del Toro’s "Crimson Peak," but sometimes a more modest meal will do.
  83. It Comes at Night
    Maybe there’s something out there, or maybe there’s nothing at all. Most horror films presuppose that the former is the scarier of the two options, but It Comes At Night is more concerned with the seemingly bottomless depths of the unknown.
  84. The Mummy
    The Mummy is crippled by a failure of imagination.
  85. The Hero
    A film that generously gives Elliott one of the few lead roles of his lengthy career, but mostly asks him to embody clichés, without providing any sense of how he might improve upon them.
  86. Night School
    Night School takes the human-interest route instead, and while that doesn’t allow for the most complete vision of the program, it does put a touchingly human face on the movie’s opening statistic—as well as grant a sliver of hope for those 1.2 million American kids who abandon their education every year.
  87. Beatriz at Dinner
    The movie, which marks the belated reunion of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, who previously collaborated on "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," insists on letting its characters behave like, well, characters. And that’s what makes it frustrating in retrospect.
  88. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    It’s much more involving as a work of pure and hypnotic collage than as a researched narrative of facts, dates, and names.
  89. Band Aid
    You’ll believe you’re watching two people who love each other but no longer know how to live with each other. You may still wish Band Aid better distinguished their relationship.
  90. Churchill
    The result is monotonous, its only memorable image being the salacious wink of Cox’s open fly, mid-frame during a shot of Churchill getting out a car. (Presumably this was the best take.)
  91. Vincent N Roxxy
    Vincent N Roxxy, which suffers from many of the same shortcomings that plagued tough-talking Tarantino homages in the late ’90s but distinguishes itself with a satisfying climax.
  92. Dean
    Dean turns out to be quite touching, in retrospect. If only it were funny, clever, or in any other way particularly inspired from moment to moment.
  93. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    Captain Underpants’ charm lies in its lighthearted and lightly scatological silliness, so it’s a shame that the movie sometimes overstuffs itself.
  94. Wonder Woman
    The best thing about Wonder Woman, the overlong and intermittently enjoyable new DC superhero spectacular, is Wonder Woman herself.
  95. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    Adios serves as a loving tribute to their memory, but has little else to offer that the original film didn’t provide.
  96. Hermia & Helena
    Part of the charm of Hermia & Helena is in the way it freely and randomly plays with form, employing luxuriantly slow dissolves, unexpected snatches of superimposed text, and even a black-and-white film-within-the-film.
  97. War Machine
    This is the most bizarre lead performance of Pitt’s career, as he plays McMahon as a stroke victim doing the world’s worst impression of George Clooney.
  98. Berlin Syndrome
    This tedious kidnapping drama doesn’t have anything especially insightful to say about Clare’s ordeal, which makes watching her go through it an even more trying experience.
  99. Baywatch
    In spoofing something so forgettable, they’ve made something even less memorable.
  100. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Waste enough of the audience’s time with the adventures of a couple of uncharismatic dinguses, and Depp’s stage-drunk, innuendo-laced, cabaret-emcee shtick starts to creep back into being funny.
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