The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. A Woman's Life
    Mostly, though, A Woman’s Life frustrates because it’s neither entertaining nor illuminating to watch a character passively absorb constant misery.
  2. Rock Dog
    With a product this generic, one at least expects it to do what it says on the tin.
  3. Tommy's Honour
    What this one offers in abundance is facts about golf in its early days. How the movie escaped a Father’s Day release in the U.S. is a mystery.
  4. True Memoirs of an International Assassin
    Cleverer than the average Kevin James comedy, though its better gags are unlikely to inspire more than a snicker.
  5. My Scientology Movie
    This stunt-driven nonfiction project rearranges the well-reported dirt on the church, placing it into the context of something considerably less useful: a documentary about how hard it is to make a documentary about Scientology.
  6. Ocean's 8
    Ocean’s 8 could learn a thing or two about brevity and craft: It belabors the basic plot points Ocean’s 11 dispatched with a single cut or smirk, the result a hacky imitation of the series’ glitzy pizzazz.
  7. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    By reducing teachings to vague platitudes and inspirational truisms, Bilal robs its religious story of any sense of grace, leaving only those components of early Islamic history generally not considered off-limits for visual interpretation—that is, a lot of early medieval warfare and violence.
  8. The Circle
    It’s hard to make a film that’s critical of digital technology without sounding like a square. It’s this uphill battle that The Circle fights for a little while, then loses about halfway through.
  9. By Sidney Lumet
    The late Sidney Lumet, a quintessential “actor’s director” who spent his entire life around the profession, is an engaging enough interviewee to qualify the documentary By Sidney Lumet as indifferently watchable.
  10. Gifted
    Call it a dumbed-down "Good Will Hunting."
  11. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing is less a fully formed satire than a clever idea stuck in first draft and stretched uncomfortably to feature length.
  12. Robin Hood
    Say this and little else for the new Robin Hood movie: It’s less of a self-serious slog than the last Robin Hood movie.
  13. The Last Word
    Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.
  14. Sleight
    All the comic-book elements are accents; what we’re really watching is the highly conventional, highly familiar tale of a good guy trying to extricate himself from a bad situation, the life of crime he’s fallen into to provide for his family. There is a formula here. It’s just had a Tony Stark suit of armor thrown on top of it.
  15. The War with Grandpa
    There’s a pleasing kernel of genuine warmth glowing at the heart of this movie, but it’s been heavily insulated—almost buried—by juvenile silliness. One could argue that this merely echoes the family dynamic, but your tolerance for buffoonery will still need to be quite high.
  16. Alone in Berlin
    A lump in the throat inspired by real-life heroism is all that this dour, monotonous drama has to offer. Indeed, it’s easy to guess that the story is fact-based—it’s far too blah to have been invented from scratch.
  17. 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.
  18. How to Be a Latin Lover
    The difference between this film and the majority of late-period Sandler flicks—besides the fact that nobody goes on vacation and that the dialogue is partly in Spanish—is that it’s pretty funny in spots.
  19. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.
  20. Cézanne et Moi
    Intensive research has killed many a biopic, but Cézanne Et Moi, which recounts the tempestuous lifelong friendship between Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola, labors even more tediously than most to accommodate personal details, whether or not those details serve the narrative.
  21. Spark: A Space Tail
    As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.
  22. The Dinner
    The Dinner wants to chill bloodstreams by revealing what decent, civilized people — the kind that adopt children from other countries, consider their politics liberal, and wine and dine in high class — are truly capable of. But as food for thought goes, that’s pretty lukewarm.
  23. Victoria and Abdul
    It’s just another piece of well-decorated regal real estate.
  24. 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.
  25. Patti Cake$
    There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.
  26. To the Bone
    It’s snarkier and a little more self-conscious than the rest, but just as cornball.
  27. The Yellow Birds
    Directed by Alexandre Moors, who made the D.C. sniper movie Blue Caprice, The Yellow Birds might have used its nonlinear structure to confront us with how war reshapes these young men, putting who they were and who they become into conversation. But the performances don’t capture that psychological change.
  28. Wolves
    Most of the cast does a fine job of turning this hooey into something serviceable.
  29. Wonder Park
    Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.
  30. Sing 2
    In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.
  31. 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.
  32. 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.
  33. Sand Castle
    It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."
  34. The Disaster Artist
    Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.
  35. Hot Summer Nights
    For all of this ersatz panache, the plot of Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script—less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.
  36. Venom
    The best moments toy with a kind of superhero body horror, but the movie never fully commits to that angle, maybe to appease a ratings board and perceived audience of 13-year-olds (isn’t that who Venom was designed to please?), or maybe because director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is more interested in the comic possibilities than the horrific ones.
  37. Mary Magdalene
    Once Mary makes the difficult decision to leave her family (rejecting the arranged marriage they’d planned for her) and follow Jesus (or “the rabbi,” as everyone mostly calls him, in a nicely accurate touch), she’s unfailingly loyal, understanding, compassionate, and wise. In a word, she’s boring. At least Jesus gets to be plagued by fear and doubt.
  38. Suburbicon
    The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.
  39. 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.
  40. The New Mutants
    While The New Mutants aspires to some inventive mash-up of high-school soap, haunted-house movie, and comic-book origin story, each of its elements feels half-baked; if Boone studied Buffy for reference, he clearly paid as little attention to it as his horny, preoccupied young heroes do.
  41. 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.
  42. 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.
  43. Happy End
    Happy End is far from the best Michael Haneke movie. But it just might be the most Michael Haneke movie — a kind of grueling greatest-hits collection from the reigning scold of European art cinema.
  44. 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."
  45. Woodshock
    Viewers who thought nothing much happened in "It Comes At Night" are advised to steer clear.
  46. Captive State
    It’s not unreasonable to expect something like excitement out of a story about freedom fighters plotting to take back the planet. Captive State does not clear that fairly low bar.
  47. Winchester
    The real problem is that all that speculative fun has been shaped into a rather clunky, derivative bit of supernatural claptrap: a haunted house movie curiously low on mystery or honest scares.
  48. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    It’s everything and nothing at once.
  49. Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
  50. 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.
  51. The Muppets Take Manhattan
    A rehash of The Muppet Movie that has the gang jumping over shorter hurdles to achieve the less-grand goal of mounting a Broadway musical. Of the first three Muppet movies, The Muppets Take Manhattan feels like the one aimed most directly at kids. In spite of its shortcomings, The Muppets Take Manhattan at least retains the spirit and message espoused by the first two entries in the series.
  52. The Running Man
    Once things get going, The Running Man just turns into a silly chase movie populated by baddies who look like B-level pro-wrestling villains.
  53. The Night Flier
    Not nearly as bad as it should be. For the most part, it's a well-made, enjoyably pulpy little genre film, albeit one that never quite overcomes the flimsiness of its source material.
  54. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    It’s the rare instance when you can see this great actor laboriously acting.
  55. I Do... Until I Don't
    The outline of a snappy relationship comedy is here, and Bell is talented enough to make one. Maybe next time she’ll commit to it.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    To his credit, it probably would have been easy to turn this particular book into a quasi-satirical parade of withering takedowns. Turning it into a flavorless, center-less journey of self-discovery was likely a lot more work. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.
  60. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    Cheech And Chong’s Next Movie was Cheech and Chong’s next movie, their dogged lack of imagination seldom as amusing as in the self-reflexive title. Already they had begun to lose steam, recycling a joke in which one character tricks another into railing a line of powdered laundry soap.
  61. Bushwick
    Bushwick imagines nothing less than the collapse of the United States Of America, with half the country in armed revolt. At a time when that possibility can feel all too frighteningly real, it’s dispiriting to see it employed as little more than an excuse to engineer a live-action Grand Theft Auto.
  62. Cleaner
    Don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool you: Cleaner is just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller.
  63. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.
  64. No Time to Die
    No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Urban Cowboy
    Unapologetically trashy, Urban Cowboy is a virtual pageant of high redneck style—there are lots of bootleg trousers, halter tops, shag haircuts, and feather-brimmed Stetsons—and Winger is fun as the unapologetically trashy gal who just wants to bag herself a real cowboy. Unfortunately, Urban Cowboy is dull one time too often to qualify as entertaining kitsch.
  66. The Natural
    It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.
  67. Cocoon
    The first half of Cocoon is easier to stomach, as a group of septua- and octogenarians steal away to a private pool that becomes the Fountain Of Youth. The scenes of revitalized St. Petersburg retirees aerobicizing and breakdancing do have a genuine sweetness, especially with the roles filled out by a cast of beloved Hollywood old-timers.
  68. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Unfortunately, Felt’s actions, while historically important, don’t exactly make for riveting drama, especially compared to a classic about two dogged reporters. Nor does the film succeed in making Felt himself particularly interesting, except perhaps as a proxy—purely by coincidence, one assumes, given any movie’s lengthy gestation period—for another, recently terminated FBI honcho.
  69. 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.
  70. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.
  71. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    Spurlock’s documentary turns out to be the exact thing it is meant to expose: an unfulfilling product passed off as something that’s good for you.
  72. Loving Pablo
    Cruz gets little to do in general apart from wear a succession of gaudy ’80s outfits, while Bardem, who gained weight for the role (reportedly aided by prostheses), acts primarily with his massive, frequently exposed gut. Both actors speak throughout in heavily accented English rather than Spanish, a choice that exemplifies Loving Pablo’s indifference to authenticity.
  73. Mary Shelley
    Art is actually as complicated as the lives that inspire it, which is probably why Mary Shelley builds its specious and underwhelming climax around the question of ownership. Perhaps that’s the most contemporary thing about it: intellectual property passed off as modern myth.
  74. The Third Murder
    The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.
  75. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Projects like this are invariably hit-or-miss, and Tiger Lily misses more often than it hits. Flashes of Allen's wit surface occasionally, particularly during bits in which he appears as himself, but they're few and far between, and generally drowned out by silly voices, a surprising amount of awkward silence, and pacing that makes the film seem much longer than its 80 padded minutes.
  76. Long Shot
    At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.
  77. The Ritual
    Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.
  78. Ghost Chase
    For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.
  79. The Rescuers
    While The Rescuers is at times a showcase for marvelously expressive art—especially in Kahl’s design for Madame Medusa, a sloppy, flailing disaster of a woman with a shapeless bust hanging to her waist and a face like a half-empty bag—the seams show throughout, and it’s all too easy to see the patchwork process that created it from foregrounds and backgrounds, and from animators of varying experience and talent.
  80. The Rhythm Section
    An always welcome presence, Law is the only cast member in The Rhythm Section to give the impression that he had any fun making the movie, playing B as a survivalist sourpuss with impossible reflexes. Nonetheless, he is consistently dressed and lit as though he were posing for a watch ad.
  81. Smallfoot
    It’s still mostly just a time-passer for younger kids — and, absent a strong point of view, as much of a hedged bet as its narration-and-song opening.
  82. Barbarella
    It’s at once smirky and tedious, and a missed opportunity to boot.
  83. Please Stand By
    It’s hard to be persuasive, though, when your protagonist comes across as a collection of quirky tics rather than a credible human being.
  84. Mortal Engines
    This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.
  85. 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.
  86. 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.
  87. Hotel Mumbai
    If the thought of seeing a lot of people get murdered with automatic weapons at close range makes you queasy right now, Hotel Mumbai is not a film you want to go anywhere near. Few slasher movies have such a high, graphic body count.
  88. Basmati Blues
    The movie starts out heedless in its desire to charm, but it winds up feeling constrained by self-consciousness, and more’s the pity.
  89. 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.
  90. Show Dogs
    That the comedy is second-rate is a given. But at least it’s brisk, inoffensive, and devoid of human mugging, with Arnett breezing through like a pro.
  91. Looking Glass
    Because Hunter’s movie works best in its early, less crazed stretch, there aren’t any really memorable sequences here coming from the director or his distinctive star.
  92. The Catcher Was a Spy
    Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."
  93. I Think We're Alone Now
    Unfortunately, I Think We’re Alone Now stops being interesting right when Grace (Elle Fanning) comes to town, mostly because she brings screenwriter Mike Makowsky’s trite ideas about loneliness and community along with her.
  94. Burden
    Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.
  95. Puzzle
    It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.
  96. Uncle Drew
    Look, for a movie based on a soda campaign, Uncle Drew isn’t that bad. It’s got some solid comic alternates.
  97. 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."
  98. The Heiresses
    Brun, who had never acted onscreen before (like almost the entire cast), won Berlin’s Best Actress prize, and her guarded yet tremulous performance is the film’s primary virtue. But she can’t singlehandedly bring depth to the superficial scenario that Martinessi has engineered for this intriguing character.
  99. Profile
    No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.
  100. Book Club
    The script is so lazy and outdated in its humor, it condescends to the same audience it purports to empower.
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