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. McFarland USA
    Of course, it would be even nicer to see this story from a student athlete’s point of view. Beyond the representation issue, it might allow the movie to eliminate its dull and unevenly developed scenes.
  2. 99 Homes
    While its righteous rage is bracing, fans of the filmmaker Bahrani used to be will mourn the subtlety and careful character development of his early triumphs. His heart remains in the right place, but his head has gone hopelessly Hollywood.
  3. Burying the Ex
    In spite of its modest running time, Burying The Ex feels stretched thin; it takes a good 35 minutes to get going, only kicking into gear once Evelyn returns from the dead.
  4. Jackie & Ryan
    The cross-cutting duet it builds to, with two people singing the same song separated by hundreds of miles, is a nice musical moment, but just that: a moment. Ideally, even a low-key romantic drama should have more than one.
  5. Madame Bovary
    Wasikowska gives a solid, emotionally precise performance, ably supported by the men around her (especially Ifans, who relishes Monsieur Lheureux’s unctuous cajolery), and the result is intelligent and eminently watchable.
  6. Pawn Sacrifice
    While this movie version of Fischer does indeed suffer from mental health issues that make it difficult for him to form functional human relationships, one of the film’s strongest, most potentially surprising pleasures is the sight of Maguire playing both with and against his usual type.
  7. Fort Bliss
    A movie like Fort Bliss seems designed to keep her (Monaghan) in fighting shape, in case bigger productions realize that she can do more than kiss a famous co-star.
  8. Fishing Without Nets
    If nothing else, Fishing Without Nets looks good on a big screen, directed in the kind of slick, just-off-arthouse style that mandates every shot of a character walking be framed from behind.
  9. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.
  10. Advanced Style
    Although Advanced Style is little more than a string of small profiles that broadly cohere into anti-ageist propaganda, it’s nevertheless a cogent reminder that people are so often defined by the things they need that it’s easy to dismiss the things that they don’t.
  11. Bad Turn Worse
    Had the film not been so open about its ambition, maybe its mediocrity wouldn’t seem quite so galling.
  12. You're Not You
    Here’s the frustrating thing about You’re Not You: Wolfe clearly knows what he’s doing and has the actors to pull it off, but he’s tasteful to a fault. Great melodramas achieve the sublime by risking ridicule, something which You’re Not You does only once.
  13. Deepwater Horizon
    As entertainment, it works in the most rote way: the star power of Wahlberg, Russell, and Kate Hudson, who plays Mike’s worried wife; Malkovich’s predictable sliminess; the minor pleasure of seeing the good guys get out; the slight kick of watching something big crumble and burn while knowing that it’s only a special effect, real-world basis be damned.
  14. Inferno
    This latest film, which was made on about half the budget of either of its predecessors, is as close as the Langdon-Howard cycle has gotten to actually being fun.
  15. Independence Day: Resurgence
    Resurgence ends up falling victim to its attempts to differentiate itself while remaining completely derivative.
  16. Happy Valley
    Happy Valley’s interviews with figures directly related to the case—Paterno’s widow and sons; Sandusky’s adopted stepson, who suddenly declared himself another of Sandusky’s victims toward the end of the trial, after having previously denied having been abused—shed no light on the subject whatsoever, coming across like an obligatory waste of time.
  17. The Last Witch Hunter
    It’s a shame that The Last Witch Hunter ends up crumbling into another generic showdown of murky fantasy effects and snatched artifacts, with a final shot that is literally framed around a door to possible sequels.
  18. Suicide Squad
    Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.
  19. 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.
  20. The Finest Hours
    As charming as the early scenes are, The Finest Hours doesn’t really come together as a love story, either, and Affleck’s scenes on the tanker are too abbreviated to really sink in as great survival drama.
  21. Before I Disappear
    The result is predictably, frustratingly bloated and meandering, even as the short’s charms remain largely intact.
  22. Criminal
    A high-concept thriller that teeters like a seesaw between deranged and dull.
  23. Son of a Gun
    Unfortunately, this promising material turns out to be merely the setup for a thoroughly generic action flick in which a gang of thieves without much honor attempt to pull off one last big heist. In the long, dispiriting slide to mediocrity thereafter, McGregor largely relapses into cute-rascal mode.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Immortalists
    Would that the film encouraged some deeper thought on the matter instead of inviting viewers to gawk at the subjects as if they were freak-show attractions.
  25. Wild Card
    A largely forgettable lark, notable more for its slight diversions from action-movie norms than anything else.
  26. Time Out of Mind
    It’s the epitome of the anti-vanity project—a way for a veteran charmer to prove that he has more to offer than charm.
  27. Human Capital
    It’s the kind of sprawling, everything’s-connected moral tapestry that reached its nadir with Paul Haggis’ inexplicable Oscar winner Crash—not remotely as dire, thankfully, but with many of the same fundamental flaws.
  28. Woman in Gold
    An early contender for the most Weinstein movie of the year, Woman In Gold bends a complicated legal quagmire—heavy on questions of ownership and national responsibility—into a crowd-pleasing David and Goliath story. The title, too generic for Klimt’s masterpiece, suits the movie just fine.
  29. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Directors Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge drive home the company’s grown-up fan base by logging an amusingly eclectic array of celebrity testimonials: Ed Sheeran, Trey Parker, and NBA star Dwight Howard.
  30. The Intern
    The lack of comic goals allows Meyers to write and write; a key emotional scene between De Niro and Hathaway late in the movie rambles on like a first draft, and the movie swells to the two-hour mark.
  31. Tip Top
    Confirms director and co-screenwriter Serge Bozon as one of French cinema’s true oddballs.
  32. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
    Simply put, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 doesn’t pop like a Johnnie To flick. Shooting in a digital format for the first time, and without his signature Technovision anamorphic lenses, To seems to have been thrown for a loop; his sense of space and rhythm are off, and his compositions are uncharacteristically flat and conservative.
  33. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    Maybe that call will be answered next time with enough incremental improvements to finally notch a good Divergent movie, a possibility Allegiant raises repeatedly and frustratingly. Ultimately, though, this movie isn’t just adhering to a formula; it’s carefully following a recipe designed to offset any good ingredients that get mixed in there by mistake.
  34. Tracers
    Tracers, then, is unavoidably a movie about Taylor Lautner joining a parkour gang, and often exactly as silly as that sounds. But it’s also a major improvement over Lautner’s last action-thriller, "Abduction," which had little action, few thrills, and zero abductions.
  35. Hits
    The satire of self-satisfied, opportunistic Brooklynites is cutting, but it lacks the humanity afforded the upstate characters, and quickly repeats itself, seemingly by design.
  36. The Boss Baby
    Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.
  37. Concussion
    Smith’s Omalu makes a compelling character, supported by his mentor Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks) and former team doctor Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin). But Concussion doesn’t crackle like the best whistleblower dramas.
  38. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    A feature-length tribute to great directors with no direction of its own, his second feature is the kind of self-consciously quirky, slapdash movie that still leaves a viewer eager to find out what its director will do next.
  39. Z for Zachariah
    Fans of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel will likely be appalled. Those unfamiliar with the cult classic, on the other hand, are more likely to scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering how a yarn with such potential is so suddenly derailed.
  40. Digging for Fire
    With so much talent involved, there are inevitably some amusing moments, which keep tedium at least partly at bay.
  41. Last Days in the Desert
    By the end, what seemed like a lovely rumination starts to sound more like poetry refashioned as prose.
  42. Ten Thousand Saints
    The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.
  43. Unexpected
    Its innocuous take on pregnancy is its most substantial flaw.
  44. The Wolfpack
    The Wolfpack is perhaps too reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry; what starts as a nonfiction mood piece grows frustratingly opaque as the brothers begin to venture out into the real world, meet girls, and get jobs.
  45. 5 to 7
    It’s a movie to be mildly enjoyed and then left behind — apropos, given the subject matter.
  46. Mr. Holmes
    Mr. Holmes has moments of palpable regret and loss, but visually speaking, it looks like a blandly touching movie about a lonely old man who befriends a scrappy kid and learns about the magic of storytelling. Eventually, that’s the unexciting destiny it fulfills.
  47. These Final Hours
    Incoherent and pointless as it is, These Final Hours moves with commendable swiftness.
  48. Diary of a Chambermaid
    In spurts, it resembles an homage to classic French cinema and an overheated, Tinto Brass-esque Euro skin flick, but still finds plenty of room for stultifying, upstairs-downstairs costume drama.
  49. Hot Pursuit
    Witherspoon and Vergara are both experienced comedic actors with charisma to spare, and watching them pal around is a perfectly pleasant way to pass some time. But with material this uninspired, 87 minutes of riding shotgun is long enough.
  50. Welcome to Me
    The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.
  51. Snowden
    A duly serious and ambitious fall movie that, despite the best efforts of its formidable director and cast, can’t remotely match the excitement of real life.
  52. Bluebird
    Earnestly well-intentioned and doggedly uncommercial, this is the kind of film that’s worth rooting for in principle, but a solid cast and evocative 35 mm photography can’t compensate for its slightly stultifying familiarity.
  53. The Dead Lands
    The problem with this kind of universal narrative is that, like the cult of the golden ratio, it emphasizes formulas at the expense of those expressive qualities that actually make art and entertainment.
  54. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    Whaley aims high for this sort of material, but his film, sweet as it is, gets a little too precocious.
  55. Secret in Their Eyes
    Yet nothing short of overhauling the material into something genuinely fresh could make Ray’s Secret feel essential. Tweaks aside, it remains, by in large, the same movie — which is to say, fundamentally redundant.
  56. The Danish Girl
    There’s an irony that a movie about a trans individual who needs to live and be accepted as a woman should have some of the worst symptoms of a very straight and very male gaze.
  57. Big Game
    Big Game fails to live up to the kookiness of this set-up. Instead, it opts for ’90s action movie clichés and generic coming-of-age-isms. Helander’s inelegant, exposition-heavy English-language dialogue doesn’t help matters.
  58. The Connection
    Without a hair-trigger renegade like Popeye Doyle or a long-awaited De Niro-Pacino showdown at its center, this procedural account, running well over two hours, takes on a certain plodding, obligatory vibe.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    3 Hearts
    While the controlling deities might have found some amusement in this narrative, in Jacquot’s hands the tale is more bland than tragic.
  60. Beauty and the Beast
    Shiny but not exactly new, Bill Condon’s live-action Beauty And The Beast is a curious nostalgia object, synthetically engineered to reproduce all the same sensations as a 26-year-old movie.
  61. Tangerines
    The shift from philosophical parrying to actual combat doesn’t make Tangerines more compelling; on the contrary, it suggests that the filmmakers didn’t have the confidence to tell their story without falling back on genre tropes.
  62. Adult Beginners
    Adult Beginners, by contrast, is mostly just… nice. Neither dramatic enough to qualify as drama nor amusing enough to completely succeed as comedy, it’s the kind of movie that coasts on pleasantness, content to elicit a few smiles before disappearing from memory banks.
  63. Burnt
    Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.
  64. Lambert & Stamp
    Packed with rare footage from the band’s early years, and narrated through present-day sit-down interviews, it’s pop oral history at its most formless and fannish: fixated on juicy tidbits, points of influences, and historical cameos, and sorely lacking a point of view.
  65. The Final Girls
    This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.
  66. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    As an expression of the filmmaker’s own sense of guilt over buying into the Apple myth, this picture intends to be a bummer.
  67. Learning to Drive
    At least "Elegy" has some passion. Learning To Drive has harmless sweetness, many revealing speeches about life, and a Kingsley performance that shades strongly into a “Robin Williams as a straight-faced foreigner” routine.
  68. 7 Chinese Brothers
    Bob Byington’s 7 Chinese Brothers is no "Listen Up Philip," but it’s an amiable enough slacker comedy, boosted by its star.
  69. Mia Madre
    A minor effort in which the movie-within-the-movie never seems like a real project — can’t help but be riveted by the fake production it’s mounted within itself.
  70. Every Secret Thing
    Every Secret Thing doesn’t feel like it fell off an assembly line, but that’s not saying that it’s been skillfully engineered. By the end, its rickety narrative architecture collapses entirely, leaving a lot of good actors stranded in the rubble.
  71. Pound of Flesh
    The action hit being evoked here is "Crank."
  72. Storks
    This is a lot of plot for a movie that endeavors primarily to entertain children, though the excess is more likely to give adults a headache.
  73. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.
  74. Skin Trade
    These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.
  75. Animals
    It never pushes far enough into that territory to distinguish its beautiful losers from the many addiction-movie characters that precede them.
  76. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    What’s perhaps most telling about the artist himself is a later-in-life project he builds in his cluttered backyard, a sort of funhouse ride through his own psyche.
  77. Strangerland
    Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.
  78. Irrational Man
    Though Irrational Man’s existentialist moral crisis is mostly hokum, the movie still has a whiff of charm, thanks to a handful of good one-liners, a little misdirection, and Phoenix’s off-kilter performance, which completely ignores the rhythm of Allen’s speech in favor of naturalistic mojo.
  79. The Fate of the Furious
    More so than in any of the other movies, Dom’s wrecking crew of car nuts comes across like survival-of-the-speediest tacho-fascists, high-fiving their way through a path of destruction and to a collateral death toll that one presumes now numbers in the hundreds.
  80. Love
    Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.
  81. The Benefactor
    That makes the role well tailored to its occupant: Gere stays within his range of moneyed playboys, while still getting to indulge in the kind of unflattering behavior that a more put-together Richard Gere character would never exhibit.
  82. By the Sea
    Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
  83. My King
    My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who’s better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what’s essential.
  84. Chronic
    When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy, and it really does play, for better and worse, like a lengthy exploration of that Shins song’s thesis.
  85. The Program
    It’s a rote hatchet job, rehashing information that virtually everyone already knows, but at least it facilitates one of the year’s oddest and gutsiest performances.
  86. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  87. Five Star
    There’s just not enough meat on these bones, and what meat there is has been thoroughly chewed over. Authentic casting doesn’t guarantee anything.
  88. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.
  89. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
  90. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    It may be the only official Star Wars feature that seems concerned exclusively with delivering a no-frills good time. Unfortunately, the film’s idea of a good time includes neither dynamite banter nor particularly memorable action scenes.
  91. Partisan
    That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.
  92. Meet the Patels
    Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.
  93. Demolition
    Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.
  94. Staten Island Summer
    Frustratingly, the movie is plenty likable when it’s not trying to show off its wistfulness.
  95. Misunderstood
    The ostensible boldness of Misunderstood is undermined by the sense that it’s also pandering—that its view of childhood as a bourgeois horror-show is at least as salable on the art-house circuit as it is authentic to its creator’s experiences.
  96. Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    A film that’s a lot like the last one, just not quite as funny or endearing. If you loved Goon, you’re gonna kind of like Goon: Last Of The Enforcers.
  97. The Dressmaker
    At its best, The Dressmaker looks like 1950s Vogue does the outback. Director Jocelyn Moorhouse poses Kate Winslet and the rest of her female cast in gorgeous finery against a dingy landscape, their expertly tailored garments contrasting splendidly against the dust. It’s a beautiful, bizarre, and funny juxtaposition. It works. The rest of the movie doesn’t.
  98. Truth
    That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.
  99. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.
  100. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
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