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. House of Gucci
    Ridley Scott's melodrama about the Italian fashion family has its moments, but not enough of them.
  2. Together
    Only in fits and starts does Together capture the electricity of live performance.
  3. Huda's Salon
    Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality.
  4. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
  5. The Deer King
    Though the recipe of a feudal setting with fantasy and myth-making elements ought to be strong, the mixture is off, like a handsomely plated sandwich where the ingredients are more bland than anticipated.
  6. Sundown
    Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness.
  7. Encounter
    As the film reveals its intentions around Ahmed’s character, too many scenes rely on superficial dialogue and contrived situations to push the plot along.
  8. The Good House
    Weaver is so forceful and present she can plow through the movie’s flaws until we fail to notice them. For a film about denial, that sounds about right.
  9. Damnation Alley
    Mostly the film just feels too skimpy. The first third is largely taken up in establishing the nuclear devastation of Damnation Alley’s world, leaving just an hour for the heroes’ perilous road trip across lands infested with what Peppard calls “killa cockroaches.” By the time the action really gets cranking, the movie is half-over.
  10. The Manor
    As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.
  11. American Underdog
    Levi has a smirking quality to him that sometimes reads as if he can’t believe he’s starring in this crap. He is credible as a clean-cut, all-American boy, however, and he and Paquin work as an onscreen couple. In fact, some of their banter is kind of cute. The supporting cast has its charms as well.
  12. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s a film that is functioning on a very specific artistic wavelength that requires one to buy into it completely in order to fully appreciate its delights. Whether that specific frequency is too obtuse for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts for ’70s sci-fi is up for debate, but the curious would best be served to experience this strange new world for themselves.
  13. Lightyear
    What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.
  14. See for Me
    While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.
  15. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker defangs herself with The Sky Is Everywhere, which seems to aim for putting something broadly positive in the world but lands on inconsequential.
  16. Breaking
    Breaking is a noble and deeply sensitive effort that aims to commemorate an honorable veteran who was failed by the dysfunctional and racist country that he bravely served. But despite a committed cast, and a well-staged and devastatingly truthful finale, Corbin fails to break this story out of its predictable mold.
  17. House Party
    To its credit, and this isn’t damning with faint praise, the new House Party is frequently very funny. (The R-rated language and creative insults are a great asset, even if they might restrict the potential teen audience.) What it has in humor, though, it lacks in pace.
  18. Infinite Storm
    What sustains a viewer’s interest in Infinite Storm is Watts’ controlled performance, and the film’s direction.
  19. Meg 2: The Trench
    It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.
  20. I Love My Dad
    Morosini, though, is smart enough to know that just grossing us out for 95 minutes is not a movie. So he tries to make his film dramatically credible. This proves more difficult, as he has nothing new or insightful to say about father-son relationships or the pernicious possibilities of social media. But managing to push the squirm-inducing envelope while still getting us to root for a reprehensible dad becomes its own sort of twisted achievement.
  21. She Said
    There is a compellingly naturalistic chemistry between Kazan and Mulligan as the reporters develop a bond of their shared pursuit of the truth, but these character beats are, at best, a garnish on the side of a relatively bland meal.
  22. Devotion
    Devotion admirably tries to tell the story of a heroic man, trying to place him within a recognizable historical and social context. However, in its attempts to show heroism and fortitude, it misses the complexity that must have influenced someone who was able to rise so high.
  23. They/Them
    The moments when it succeeds at commenting on continuing anti-LGBT travesties feel like a landmark of queer cinema, proudly planting a pride flag in the horror genre’s fertile fields. Unfortunately, They/Them’s biggest stumbles come from a crisis of identity—not in its characters or queer themes, but in the genre conventions it employs, misunderstanding the opportunities its storytelling affords.
  24. Stars at Noon
    An occasionally seductive but muddled examination of a complex physical and emotional relationship.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hocus Pocus 2
    Hocus Pocus 2 (minus one shoulder shrug of a musical number) uses the franchise’s witchcraft and world-building to earnestly explore timely themes of identity and inclusivity, for a follow-up that fans may begrudgingly concede is better than the original.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging.
  27. Paddington In Peru
    More of an awkward step down than a pratfall from grace, Paddington In Peru is messier than its forebears.
  28. The Good Neighbor
    The only benefit the soul is likely to get from watching this is the comforting knowledge that you, the viewer, are not any of the people onscreen. Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching them be bad, of course. But it’s a detached kind of fun.
  29. Champions
    Harrelson is enjoyable as always, and the rest of the cast delivers, but the film is too warm, fuzzy, predictable, and by the numbers to be anything more than a pleasant diversion that will vanish from your mind by the time you leave the multiplex.
  30. Mack & Rita
    Visually, fusing the story with a warm, contemporary aesthetic makes it a pleasant enough affair. But ultimately, Mack & Rita is a passable work at best for Aselton (Black Rock and The Freebie serve as better showcases for her creative voice), and consequently, it’s unlikely to lead to her soon swapping chairs with the director of the next big-budget blockbuster.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Burial
    After lots of inconsequential talking that should have been streamlined, the film’s payoff—various shootouts and chases and showdowns—proves boring. Consequently, Parker’s film never fully recovers from its meandering build-up.
  32. Extreme Measures
    While Extreme Measures is competently directed by Michael Apted, and is never really boring, it's nothing we haven't seen before. And though it attempts to make an important point about the value of life, by the end viewers will only be reminded that they are two fruitless hours closer to the grave.
  33. Causeway
    Other than the pair of outstanding lead performances, there really isn’t much cause to watch it.
  34. Luckiest Girl Alive
    The unquestionably well-intentioned and obviously deeply personal Luckiest Girl Alive would benefit from more mature guidance.
  35. Significant Other
    At the halfway mark, a little spice gets shaken into the otherwise thin soup. It’s still far from a must-see, but there are rewards for those who stick to the end.
  36. The Little Mermaid
    But when it comes to picking out what parts of Ariel’s story to tweak for the new medium, the remake still emphasizes the wrong pieces, consequentially bloating a previously brisk story into a meandering pile of producers’ script notes.
  37. Elemental
    Its world building is so vast and so intricate (the city has a Wetro and you can watch films like Tide And Prejudice!) that it overshadows the textured plot about the burdens placed on second-generation kids.
  38. Old Man
    While still recommendable for Stephen Lang’s compelling eccentricities, Old Man bears that endorsement with a major caveat for surviving almost solely on that offbeat charisma.
  39. Moving On
    This Paul Weitz project may be a reminder that good chemistry and stellar leading ladies can only get you so far.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Infernal Machine
    Hunt and his very game cast work together to settle on something more watchable, but ultimately not memorable or necessary.
  41. Deadpool & Wolverine
    The result is lingering and unsatisfying uncertainty over whether this is a standalone novelty, a multiversal course correction, or a genuine send-off. Even its satire feels micromanaged. Wade Wilson can still bounce back with ease, but even in its diminished state, superhero bullshit remains a formidable foe.
  42. There There
    If the resulting film feels like little more than the cinematic equivalent of a series of B-sides of varying quality strung together, it at least whets the appetite for the next proper cinematic album that Bujalski releases.
  43. Poker Face
    When the entire theme is about misdirection, then yes, assessing how enjoyable the swerves and bluffs are, both narratively and conceptually, feels entirely appropriate. And they all too often feel like letdowns.
  44. Nocebo
    The “mystery” elements simply aren’t mysterious. Yet without them, the sparse moments of gore and icky bugs aren’t quite enough to pad things out.
  45. The Quiet Girl
    The Quiet Girl has a meaningful message on nurturing. But with so little of consequence going on, it’s crucial to get the emotions precisely right. Without voiceover narration tying everything together, some scenes feel out of place, random, or offer little beyond aesthetics.
  46. The Last Manhunt
    Momoa’s clearly abetting a passion project here, but unfortunately, Camargo hasn’t managed to capture a similar passion from his main cast.
  47. The Apology
    Where The Apology slips up, and where it slips up frequently, is in the journey between that wonderful opening turn towards darkness and the heart-wrenching conclusion, in which all three stars give it everything they’ve got and Locke’s script once again ratchets the tension and the darkness all the way up.
  48. Christmas with the Campbells
    It’s a surprisingly thoughtful blend of earnest and silly, and Niederpruem’s confident, Hallmark-tinged direction only adds to that sense of familiar surroundings ready to be subverted.
  49. Twisters
    The plug-and-play plot is predictable, but as in the original, Twisters is a functional thrill ride driven by charismatic, believable performances.
  50. Beau Is Afraid
    The movie starts with the volume cranked to 10, then never takes a breath. At three hours it is unbearable. Yes, this is meant to be a “bad trip” of a movie, taking you inside the experience of someone undergoing a crisis, but there’s a limit. And then it’s revealed that this grown man has mommy issues. For that you made me sit through all this noise?
  51. Slumber Party Massacre II
    Surreal, silly, and blessed with decent rock songs by Go-Go’s-esque girl-group Wednesday Week, SPM II doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s memorable.
  52. Strays
    For what it’s worth, Strays is nominally funny, but in a way that rarely provokes genuine laughs, just chuckles of appreciation. It’s a breezy, inconsequential film that will drip from the wrinkles of your brain like slobber from a chew toy, but as a late-summer distraction, maybe that’s enough.
  53. A Little White Lie
    The execution of the simultaneous mistaken identity and fish-out-of-water shenanigans that ensue is oddly muted; you keep waiting for Maren to amp up the comic energy and narrative complications, but it isn’t until the satisfyingly madcap climax that he really does.
  54. The Killer
    As The Killer moves through its nearly two-hour runtime, the vapor-high of a tightly choreographed opening sequence and the undeniable pleasure of being comfortably cradled in the hands of a master craftsman give way to a wandering mind.
  55. The Mother
    It’s decent but a tad too restrained for its own good.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Mafia Mamma
    If it all sounds silly, it is. But it works, far, far better than it should, for one main reason. Well, two, actually. The mighty Toni Collette (who also co-produced the movie) stars as Kristin, and she delivers a funny, touching, and effervescent performance that sweeps you along in its wake. Monica Bellucci plays Bianca oh-so-drolly and bounces beautifully off of Collette.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Whatever emotional heft the pic may aim to harness is lost amid glib jokes, overly complicated mythic lore, and ultimately, pat platitudes about embracing who you were always meant to be.
  58. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Yes, there are kills, but they’re often as comical as they are scary, and deliberately so. It’s a fun gateway horror movie for kids—and the easily scared who want to test their limits lightly.
  59. Lust for Life
    Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.
  60. Tiger Stripes
    Where it feels uninspired gore-wise, it similarly feels muddled in its message.
  61. Eric Larue
    Though carried by a subtle and strenuous performance from Greer, Eric LaRue‘s intentionally unanswered questions do less to provoke than render the film a collage of well-meaning, half-finished sentiments.
  62. The Amateur
    It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
  63. The Bikeriders
    It is too conventional to be an outlaw, but Nichols and the cast have a blast pretending.
  64. Society of the Snow
    Society Of The Snow may be the best version of this saga told so far. Still, it feels incomplete and doesn’t dig deeper even as it hints at greater pathos beneath the surface.
  65. Sing Sing
    The strength of the cast alone can’t elevate Sing Sing to the realm of truly socially conscious cinema.
  66. Mean Girls
    The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.
  67. Argylle
    In trying to do both—in trying to play it straight and yet show the very absurd mechanics of what it means to do so—Argylle lands in a kind of exhausting limbo, forever stretching its premise to its breaking point only to snap it back up again.
  68. The Boys in the Boat
    You cheer on these boys but you’re not left with much once the credits roll and their story becomes but a wistful tale of a time gone by.
  69. Land of Bad
    If you can get through a rough first act, you’ll see both absurd military superheroics and the greatest grocery run ever.
  70. Death of a Unicorn
    This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.
  71. Maria
    The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.
  72. Thelma the Unicorn
    Somewhere, buried under all that paint and glitter, there’s a lesson to take away from Thelma The Unicorn, but it’s nothing new.
  73. Moana 2
    It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.
  74. Hundreds of Beavers
    Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was.
  75. The Watchers
    The Watchers isn’t terrible: Shyamalan’s direction is legible, and the whole thing makes sense on a thematic level. (Maybe a little too much sense, actually.) But it lacks the creativity and confidence to go beyond “competent” and into “inspired”—probably because this one is just for practice.
  76. Love Hurts
    Love Hurts proves that honest emotions aren’t everything; sometimes you can just buy yourself enough goodwill to get by with last-minute junk.
  77. Alien: Romulus
    While incredible practical gore effects and stunning set pieces make Álvarez’s installment well worth watching, it’s as void of meaning as space itself. There are no answers, not even questions, merely what we manage to project onto vast emptiness.
  78. Humane
    It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.
  79. The Phoenician Scheme
    The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)
  80. The Instigators
    Besides the cast, the best thing The Instigators has going for it is Liman’s pacing. Maybe in some earlier, irreversibly bygone era it would seem like less of a virtue, but there’s something to be said for a modern director who still has the skills necessary to move from one thing to another with a minimum of wasted time.
  81. Parthenope
    There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.
  82. Emilia Pérez
    Though its thematic threads are never woven into salient social commentary, there is a perverse pleasure to be had with Emilia Pérez, even if its positions on gender, sexuality, and broader Mexican society lack proper nuance.
  83. M3GAN 2.0
    It seems that Johnstone and his collaborators learned the wrong lesson from M3GAN‘s shocking success.
  84. Drop
    Relying too much on bombast and shaky effects that diminish the tension, the movie isn’t confident enough to see its premise all the way through. At its best, though, Drop updates the small-scale, high-concept suspense that Hollywood has had on airplane mode for too long.
  85. Armand
    The film is replete with striking visual flourishes, yet its storyline suffers from the inclusion of an unnecessary air of surrealism.
  86. Bugonia
    Lacking distinctive social commentary, meaningful character development, or a salient environmental angle, the update feels all but incapable of speaking to the moment.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Gazer
    There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more compelling.
  88. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
    As a dramatic interpretation of Moore’s characters and their hardships, it’s hard to think how a direct translation could much improve upon what Mabry and her cast have put on screen. But without that context, the cavalcade of pain is excessive, perhaps even bordering on farcical, without the breathing room that the novel’s prose provides.
  89. Unstoppable
    It’s commendable to avoid further clichés with regard to the portrayal of physical difference in film, but Unstoppable fails to pin down what exactly should take their place.
  90. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim is a slight Middle-earth adventure that’s fleet-footed but inconsequential.
  91. Apartment 7A
    Musings on motherhood, performance, and power are never fully articulated, leaving a flurry of concepts up in the air without resolve.
  92. Saturday Night
    It’s more akin to speed-reading from the SNL memoir library than experiencing the thrilling unevenness—the captivating try-whatever stupidity—of the actual live show. It’s inconsequential in all the wrong places.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Relay
    Rather than discovering anything novel or liberating about the hostile, modern battleground of America, Relay‘s compelling set-up becomes overly dependent on typical rug-pulls and action beats.
  94. Vice Is Broke
    For as much as Huang tries to go for a more freewheeling approach, treating his interviews like off-the-cuff conversations taking place in bars and restaurants, Vice Is Broke isn’t that intimate or revealing.
  95. Hold Your Breath
    For all of the horror subgenres crammed into Hold Your Breath, it never conjures sufficient scares.
  96. Heart Eyes
    Even when its characters do get earnest, Heart Eyes has its tongue so far in its cheek that these moments of vulnerability are also viewed from an ironic distance. Instead of feeling for these characters, we’re waiting for the bloody punchline—which will come, and will be funny in a deliciously morbid kind of way. There’s nothing to hold on to, and certainly nothing to be afraid of.
  97. Companion
    The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    Rather than trying to train something new, How To Train Your Dragon is riding an already proven beast; even its “first flight” has been done before. It can’t reach those old heights, let alone any new ones. And it doesn’t try to, nor does its audience really want it to. For live-action remakes, cruising altitude is the highest they can hope for.
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