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. Red Notice
    This is the stuff that reminds us that Hollywood movies are made with charts and committees; we don’t enjoy it, but we put up with it in exchange for a good time. Red Notice only has the time part down. The good, like the bejeweled egg, is frequently missing.
  2. Kin
    It’s a simple idea, to take this working-class family and introduce what amounts to a high-tech ray gun, but the hook is so effective that it buys Kin a fair amount of time before the story turns from scrappy to stupid.
  3. Operation Finale
    Operation Finale means to embody the banality of evil, but it’s mostly mired in plain old banality.
  4. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Johnny English Strikes Again might actually come closer to success than its predecessors, if only by default. At very least, it proceeds unencumbered by excess story machinations.
  5. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    Though Sandel relies less on exasperating, rubbery digital effects than Rob Letterman, the DreamWorks Animation vet who helmed the original, his direction of the monsters and mayhem is never more than workmanlike, racing joylessly through a shaky plot that barely holds attention.
  6. Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    Breakin' 2 turned out to be pure, laugh-a-minute cheeseball entertainment. Granted, it's utterly terrible, with stiff, amateurish acting, enough vivid Day-Glo to blind an army of sunglasses-wearing Corey Harts, and the thinnest and hoariest of thin, hoary old plots. But the camp value is through the roof.
  7. The Grudge
    Overall, though, the director and co-writer’s merciless style is muffled by The Grudge’s over-reliance on clichéd jump scares; more damningly, only some of these are effective, even in terms of cheap thrills. This becomes especially true in the film’s second half, when the ghosts become at once more human and less creepy.
  8. The Towering Inferno
    As the bland, star-laden drama gets swallowed by fiery special-effects setpieces, it feels like one type of big-budget mediocrity giving way to the next.
  9. Clash of the Titans
    Titans forces all aspects of the movie except the spectacle into the background, and historical accuracy isn't much of a concern. It does feature a better-than-average cast, however, aside from uncharismatic star Harry Hamlin.
  10. A Kid Like Jake
    If Howard and Pearle’s idea was to show how an extended argument devolves into the worst values of a previous generation — lashing out with implicit homophobia, resentment, and misogyny in the film’s shouty, snotty, excessively busy final third — then it comes too late here, before being patly resolved. A sharper drama would have made it the focus.
  11. Downrange
    Downrange is trash, but in an almost elemental vein.
  12. Stockholm
    Hawke is no stranger to elevating subpar material with a committed performance, but his fidgety crook-with-a-heart-of-gold act is undercut by Budreau’s uncreative use of the limited setting (almost the whole thing takes place inside the bank) and unskillful handling of the broad tone.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Delta
    While the structure of The Delta—sort of a tag-team narrative that begins with Gray and switches to Chan halfway through—is an intriguing touch, this gritty film never follows through on the issues it raises.
  14. Who's That Knocking at My Door?
    The film never jells, but it's the Rosetta Stone for Scorsese's later work.
  15. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Yes, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is extremely silly. For its first 30 or so minutes, it also manages to be fun.
  16. Toys
    If Levinson weren't so intent on cramming whimsy and joy down the audience's throat for two punishing hours, he might very well have succeeded in his very noble ambitions. Whimsy is a tricky thing: too much can become oppressive.
  17. Capernaum
    Capernaum brims with compassion for the downtrodden, and that will likely be enough for many viewers (as it clearly was for the Cannes jury). But the film amounts to a series of easy emotional lay-ups, devoid of any psychological nuance or challenging inflection.
  18. Like a Boss
    If you’re looking for something truly groundbreaking—or hilarious—Like A Boss isn’t it.
  19. Summer of 84
    The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.
  20. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It’s gnarly as hell.
  21. The Hustle
    While The Hustle is more overt when it comes to discussing gender, including a monologue about why women are better suited to “the con” than men, it doesn’t really have all that much to say. Not about gender, not about con artistry, and definitely not about how to craft a satisfying studio comedy.
  22. Nobody's Fool
    When his zany cast of characters (many but not all played by Perry himself) takes leave of his material, as in Nobody’s Fool, his movie’s faults start to look more congruent with less auteur-driven studio comedies.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Muppets from Space
    The cavalcade of guest spots does give viewers the rare opportunity to see Andie MacDowell getting punched in the stomach by Miss Piggy, as well as the chance to watch Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes reject the amorous advances of a wise-cracking prawn, but they also undermine Muppets From Space's attempts to transcend its dull, plodding shenanigans.
  24. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.
  25. Hal
    Though clearly aimed at fans, it presents only a chummy overview of his life and career, too superficial to work as a biography, an in-depth appreciation, or even a primer.
  26. Ben Is Back
    Ben Is Back, which buries its promise, premise, and stray traces of insight under a heap of narrative contrivance, leaves you itching for a drama with something solid to actually say about addiction.
  27. What Men Want
    It tries to replicate the earlier film’s redemption arc, all the while proving that it is more than willing to adhere to the same double standards it ostensibly pokes fun at.
  28. C.H.U.D.
    Perfect for bleary-eyed late-night viewing and pretty much unwatchable at any other hour, it does make for an oddly appropriate refresher course for life under a Republican president.
  29. Let's Spend the Night Together
    The great Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, Being There) directs, but doesn’t make his presence felt too often. In the midst of the personal and professional problems that plagued him after his '70s heyday, Ashby mostly finds a few angles, hopes for the best, then edits it together with all the artfulness of a televised sports broadcast.
  30. Our Time
    However truthful or invented Our Time may be, its dynamic is tiresomely petty and small, resisting Reygadas’ occasional efforts at expressionism. It plays like therapy.
  31. The Front Runner
    It’s a feature-length whine of frustrated entitlement. A movie less suited to its cultural moment would be hard to imagine.
  32. Midway
    A stolid film that largely rests on its director’s competence at helming extravagant aerial views of pyrotechnic destruction.
  33. The Command
    It doesn’t help that The Command looks phony right from the outset, being an English-language film involving virtually no actual Russians.
  34. The Biggest Little Farm
    The Biggest Little Farm has many valuable points to make about the connection between how our food is grown and eco-friendly living, but style betrays substance so often here that the message gets lost in the shuffle. Unless that message is simply We Bought A Farm!
  35. Donnybrook
    Here, Sutton is working with actual characters, played by professional actors, and his instinct is to flatten them as much as possible.
  36. Child's Play 2
    In every way, it hangs together less effectively than its predecessor, but Mancini’s script is smartly self-aware (a recurring theme in these films), and new director John Lafia creates some enjoyably gonzo moments.
  37. Curse of Chucky
    This sixth film in the series just completely ignores the self-aware spoofing of the most recent installments, instead returning to the back-to-basics horrors of a possessed doll who’s out to murder a family—one that could just kick it in the face at any time, because it’s a doll.
  38. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
    A slightly above-average slasher film that's only partially redeemed by small but endearingly loopy shreds of black humor.
  39. Vice
    Apart from one initially funny (but ultimately over-extended) gag involving a fake credits sequence, the material is mostly glib and second-rate—and, when it comes down to it, about as dry, oversimplified, and under-dramatized as a class presentation.
  40. Lords of Chaos
    Åkerlund’s understanding is more like contempt, in a film that downplays the bigotry of the Norwegian black metal scene and shrugs off the severity of its actions with a “boys will be boys” approach that has no reverence for the scene, but doesn’t provide any insight into it, either.
  41. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
    Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.
  42. The Best of Enemies
    Bissell’s fudging of the facts (which includes completely making up the reasons behind the charrette) doesn’t create a story that’s more insightful or dramatically cohesive than the real thing; the only thing it reveals, if indirectly, is liberalism’s longstanding discomfort with the relationship between civil rights and labor movements.
  43. A Dog's Way Home
    This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.
  44. Saludos Amigos
    Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale, joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and entertain, but fails on both counts.
  45. Miss Bala
    It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.
  46. Bird Box
    In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.
  47. The Secret Life of Pets 2
    Actual kids will probably enjoy The Secret Life Of Pets 2, just as they probably enjoy whatever mini-movies Illumination churns out to supplement its hyper-successful home-entertainment releases. But they might also start to sense just how mini this sequel feels, and start fidgeting after 15 or 20 minutes.
  48. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    In nearly every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night is as run-of-the-mill a slasher film as the ’80s produced, enjoyable today primarily for its kitsch value.
  49. Shaft
    Among all the cardinal sins of moviemaking it commits (up to and including reusing an iconic needle drop from a Martin Scorsese movie), the worst is this: It makes Shaft look uncool.
  50. The Kitchen
    While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.
  51. Cruising
    In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype–the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others–the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same.
  52. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.
  53. Angel Has Fallen
    Given the awfulness of its predecessor, which was this publication’s pick for the worst film of 2016, a sequel that’s merely pedestrian represents a dramatic improvement.
  54. Men in Black: International
    Director F. Gary Gray, while experienced in both action and comedy, also struggles to keep the film’s picaresque plot on track.
  55. The Wolf Hour
    A gloomy psychological thriller interested in the distinct paranoia of a woman living in self-exile in the South Bronx.
  56. Deadly Blessing
    Craven’s best work resolves the contradictions of his bloodlust and intellect—in that, Deadly Blessing isn’t one of his best.
  57. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.
  58. Velvet Buzzsaw
    If there’s undeniable difficulty in Velvet Buzzsaw’s genre alchemy—its attempt to mix a caustic, half-comic portrait of the gallery set with a supernatural Tales From The Crypt scenario—it’s all in service of a moldy screed about the commodification of art. Is there anything safer than telling people something they’ve heard a thousand times before?
  59. The White Crow
    Unlike its subject, The White Crow is ultimately forgettable.
  60. A Dog's Journey
    Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.
  61. The Highwaymen
    After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.
  62. After the Wedding
    Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.
  63. The Witches
    Where is the Zemeckis who projected a cartoon-noir Christopher Lloyd into every child’s nightmares? The same director has thrown a softening, coddling filter over Dahl, preserving the shape of his source material while sanding down its edges.
  64. The Sunlit Night
    Unfortunately, everything engaging about the narrative is overshadowed by gratuitous quirkiness.
  65. The Brink
    The inherent risk of this vérité approach is that your subject won’t prove to be all that fascinating, and The Brink, while far more openly critical of Bannon than "American Dharma," ultimately offers little justification for spending an hour and a half in his company.
  66. The King of Staten Island
    Apatow appears to have moved on from using airless domestic and urban comforts as backdrops, and that’s probably a good thing. But The King Of Staten Island’s patience-testing failings, however well-intentioned, suggest that for now, he’s only found a new way to lose the plot.
  67. Olympic Dreams
    This is a more professional-looking production, with a much stronger cast, but it has the same half-assed feel.
  68. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.
  69. Valley of the Dolls
    It's more in the so bad it's almost good mode.
  70. The Dead Don't Die
    Sure, the cast is full of exciting names, but all of Jarmusch’s absurdist thematic flourishes—the Romero tributes, the meta commentary, the political humor—are half-baked and inconsistently applied.
  71. Paint Your Wagon
    Paint Your Wagon divided audiences and critics. With its central three-way marriage, debauchery, polygamy, Paddy Chayevsky script, and unconventional stars, it was too damn weird and adult for family audiences and too corny, old-fashioned, and bloated for the druggies and stoners.
  72. Skin
    This kind of hamfisted manipulation seems par for the course in a movie that’s eager to lob as much as it can as its central problems. The theme of change is purely cosmetic: The characters are intractable, and they all offer different versions of the same pathology.
  73. Meeting Gorbachev
    The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since?
  74. Trial by Fire
    But Zwick and Fletcher, in their eagerness to make an argument against the death penalty, needlessly stack the deck.
  75. General Magic
    If one is not already paranoid about the relationship of politics, money, and the tech sector or about the industry’s general lack of perspective on itself, then this sort of uncritical puff piece should do the trick.
  76. The Art of Racing in the Rain
    The Art Of Racing In The Rain will play well for those who consider their pets to be full-fledged family members, but otherwise this dog’s journey lacks a purpose or any sense of artistry.
  77. Vita & Virginia
    Once Sackville-West gets bored with Woolf and starts seeing another woman, garden-variety jealousy takes over. Not quite as fascinating as the story of a man who inexplicably metamorphoses into a woman and doesn’t age for 300 years.
  78. Satanic Panic
    It’s campy, it’s gory, it’s a little bit titillating, and it features one of those novelty performances from famous actors that tend to bring a lot of press to otherwise under-the-radar productions.
  79. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Too often, The Next Level passes off callbacks to gags from its predecessor as jokes, all while presuming that viewers have an unhealthy familiarity with the Jumanji canon.
  80. The Addams Family
    Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.
  81. Darlin'
    As it is, it’s another jarring mismatch in a film full of them. The core issue seems to be indecision over whether this is all supposed to be camp or not.
  82. Point Blank
    This one feels one-size-fits-all—which is to say, it isn’t especially tailored to either of its stars. It just sort of hangs on them, getting more and more tattered as it goes along.
  83. Tel Aviv on Fire
    Despite its loaded premise, Tel Aviv On Fire rarely sparks more than mild amusement.
  84. Blackbird
    With its quasi-literary tone and over-calculated concessions to the messiness of real life, the movie settles for coming across like a clumsy amalgamation of the wonderful Amy Bloom short story “Love Is Not A Pie” and the 1998 Sarandon tearjerker "Stepmom." The hollow, unsatisfying feeling the movie leaves behind may be the most authentically funereal thing about it.
  85. The Song of Names
    What he discovers is powerfully moving, but every step of his journey — and of the copious flashbacks that fill in various blanks — tests the viewer’s patience. It’s like eating an entire box of stale cereal to get to the prize.
  86. Greed
    Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure.
  87. Guest of Honour
    Every so often, Egoyan takes another stab at the offbeat, achronological, weirdly intimate mode in which he originally specialized, but the spark never quite fully ignites. Guest Of Honour, his latest effort, is decidedly that sort of low-wattage Egoyan classic, serving up familiar preoccupations and structural curlicues—minus any inspiration.
  88. Don't Let Go
    What keeps Don’t Let Go watchable is, ironically, its predictability: the cop-movie clichés, the shootouts, the mishandled evidence, the bargain-bin twists.
  89. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.
  90. Halloween Kills
    The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.
  91. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends is almost passable as a nondescript sequel—a little blood pumped into the carcass of an indefatigable slab of intellectual property. But for somebody who has fought and lost and survived for so many years, it’s less vital a finale than Laurie Strode deserves.
  92. Daniel Isn't Real
    Mortimer builds Daniel Isn’t Real to a conclusion that, in concept, should be both tragic and terrifying. Here, it just feels perfunctory.
  93. Everybody's Talking About Jamie
    Whenever the movie seems prepared to dig a little deeper, it throws another self-actualization party in its own honor.
  94. Dark Waters
    Dark Waters would likely have been a forgettable mediocrity in anybody’s hands, given its fact-based, muckraking limitations. Coming from the visionary who gave us Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, and Carol, it’s a crushing disappointment.
  95. Wrinkles the Clown
    The story of Wrinkles The Clown and the public reaction to his antics is funny, weird, and timely — there may just not be enough of it to warrant a feature-length documentary.
  96. The King
    It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.
  97. Waves
    The good news is that the director’s ambitions, no matter how inadvisable, have attracted a strong cast and occasioned some of their best work.
  98. The Cave
    It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.
  99. Color of Night
    It’s too much fun to be a failure and too transparently, giddily awful to be an unqualified success, so I’m going to split the difference.
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