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. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    The second recent documentary focused on Roy Cohn, Bully. Coward. Victim.: The Story Of Roy Cohn is as stuffed and jumbled as its title’s punctuation. Despite this, the film manages to inject some genuine personality into its Wiki reckoning of Cohn’s cursed résumé.
  2. The Turning
    In a movie as utterly lost as The Turning, everything from the performances to the production design to the music cues amount to one big pile of dirty mirrors and doll parts.
  3. Bombshell
    The film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold, hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rookie of the Year
    Rookie isn’t a bad movie. It’s also not good.
  5. The Call of the Wild
    It is neither disaster nor dream, landing firmly somewhere in the disappointing middle.
  6. Slay the Dragon
    Slaying The Dragon is meant as an urgent call to action ahead of this year’s elections, and it is here that it really falters.
  7. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The result is an uneven paean to a man who deserves a more complicated portrait.
  8. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Eight Seven
    Jackson's performance is impressive: He effectively conveys every nervous and belligerent nuance, but his character eventually disappears beneath a morass of gimmicks, clichés, and political cynicism.
  10. Respect
    Franklin’s real life was obviously rife with drama worthy of the big screen, but Wilson and TV-trained director Liesl Tommy take a comprehensive, arrhythmic approach that treats major life events like soapy episodes or grist for the pop-psych mill.
  11. Bloodshot
    The real issue, though, isn’t that Bloodshot would fail an IQ test. It’s that its dumb fun isn’t executed with panache, smart or otherwise.
  12. Irresistible
    When the wisdom being imparted is this conventional, you better find a dramatically or comedically satisfying way to package it. Stewart hasn’t.
  13. The Many Saints of Newark
    Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.
  14. Uncle Frank
    Uncle Frank anchors itself to the war within Frank, but it’s the conflict within the film itself that’s most potent. That’s a fight no one wins, least of all the audience.
  15. The Glorias
    The result is a choppy mix of timelines, color schemes, and differing levels of realism that’s too unfocused to really inspire.
  16. Extraction
    Add a script that would have seemed derivative even in the early ’90s, and you begin to get a sense of the kind of undigested pastiche that director Sam Hargrave and writer-producer Joe Russo are going for.
  17. Banana Split
    The problem with Banana Split isn’t the surface phoniness or lazy comedy but the fact that the movie doesn’t offer any insight into its ostensible subjects—among them break-ups, female friendship, and teenage jealousy
  18. Fatale
    What keeps Fatale from really working as a noir pastiche (or, dare to dream, a Coens-esque ghoulish comedy of violently incompetent malfeasance) is its gentle, kid-gloved deference to the idea that Derrick is a good guy, rather than a weak-willed dope or even an affable bumbler in over his head.
  19. Rumble
    There’s liveliness in the conception of Rumble, knocked around and out by the demands of formulas no one has bothered to figure out.
  20. The High Note
    The characters’ overall niceness makes the movie pleasant in the moment—and easy to shrug off as a fantasy.
  21. The Quarry
    This muddled slow-burn tragedy — adapted from the Damon Galgut novel of the same name — is unfocused and overly familiar. It also fumbles its political commentary.
  22. Midnight Madness
    Midnight Madness' comedic tone can accurately be described as a sort of cross between Eight Is Enough and early-period Troma, a blend best epitomized by a scene involving conflicting interpretations of the phrase, "between a large pair of melons." And, in case you're wondering, yes, at one point fat snobs do get thrown in the pool. What is not to love?
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Octagon
    Even if it’s not a good movie, it’s an important one, culturally and within the history of action movies. Along with Eric Van Lustbader’s novel The Ninja and the miniseries Shogun, both of which also came out in 1980, this was the first time the idea of the ninja, the shadowy mystical assassin figure, really permeated Western pop-culture consciousness.
  24. Love Wedding Repeat
    The film’s desire to lampoon its rom-com cake and eat it too leaves it on an uncomfortable middle ground; a third act shift toward emotional earnestness doesn’t land, because the main players possess no depth.
  25. Fatherhood
    There could be something to say here about how comically low society’s expectations for fathers remain. The movie also briefly, incisively captures the new-parent contradiction of desperately needing help while wanting to be left alone, free of unsolicited input. But director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) keeps making odd choices for what, in a single father’s life, requires comic or dramatic emphasis.
  26. To the Stars
    As writer Shannon Bradley-Colleary and director Martha Stephens embark on a love story so subtle, it isn’t really a love story at all. In some hands, that would be intriguing. Here, however, it’s just lukewarm.
  27. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    While the first Train To Busan was an affecting, character-driven tale of grief and redemption, Peninsula flounders in generic spectacle. Even fans may wonder if there are any bones left to pick on this franchise.
  28. Nona: If They Soak Me, I'll Burn Them
    Donoso does put an effort into maintaining visual interest throughout this micro-budgeted character study, alternating between professionally shot, full-frame tableaux and intimate, grainy camcorder footage, accentuated with light touches of Brakhage-style experimental montage. However, it remains an undeniable—and inconvenient—fact that the most interesting aspects of If They Soak Me are all offscreen.
  29. The Marvels
    Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.
  30. Infinite
    What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.
  31. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    We’re used to these movies being designed to launch us into one big final fight, and that’s fine, but the craftsmanship this time is shoddy, packed with dead ends, and struggling to maintain its grasp on an emotional throughline.
  32. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    The best bits come from the unexpected faces, however, as both Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain return from beyond the veil to extol the upsides of mind-altering substances.
  33. All Day and a Night
    Cole had a key part in one of the biggest game-changers in Black cinema this decade: a co-writing credit on Black Panther. But where that film was expansive and forward-thinking, this one feels like a throwback—and not in a good way.
  34. 7500
    Just as Tobias can’t escape the tragedy unfolding just beyond the cockpit door, 7500 struggles to overcome some unfortunate and very outdated optics.
  35. Dreamland
    In the end, Dreamland never bothers to decide whether it’s trying to be an elegiac, philosophical head trip or an over-the-top action thriller.
  36. Becky
    Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.
  37. The Kissing Booth 2
    In broadening the world of the first film without really deepening it, The Kissing Booth 2 often feels more like a spinoff TV series—although at an unconscionable 132 minutes long, it’s hardly a breezy watch.
  38. You Should Have Left
    At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.
  39. Tom & Jerry
    It’s as though Tom And Jerry was intended to be enjoyed from home all along: Not only are you free to poke around on your phone between the set pieces, but you can use that phone to call up the 90-odd Tom And Jerry cartoons that also come with your HBO Max subscription.
  40. Ava
    Ava is a napping-on-the-couch movie through and through, with recognizable names and a sexy premise but no distinct personality.
  41. Summerland
    The above-average cast of adult and child actors has its charming moments, but once the plot enters the tearjerker cliché phase, it becomes clear that what we are being offered is a nostalgia that’s no different from the kind that extolls more conservative values. It’s less a new coat of paint than a varnish.
  42. Project Power
    You might as well spend a couple hours with this film on in the background, but don’t expect much about it to stick with you—except for the jaw-dropping Henrietta Lacks monologue. You may need to pop a pill to forget that.
  43. We Can Be Heroes
    Rodriguez’s kid movies are always sweet-natured, and do an admirable job of speaking directly to their target audience. But while he can generate countless environments from his Austin studio, the camerawork on these projects, constrained and uninspired, hints at their single-room origins.
  44. Greenland
    If a movie has to kill off most of the species in the name of the nuclear family, it should at least do it with some staging and style.
  45. French Exit
    The film’s artificial, stylized remove—what might be called his current style, a kind of half-ironic, half-romantic wooziness—seems an odd landing point for the scrappy DIY filmmaker behind Momma’s Man and the genuinely touching and hilarious Terri, which DeWitt also wrote and which was so human it hurt.
  46. Enola Holmes
    Without much of a mystery to solve, this young Holmes comes across more like a junior-level Wonder Woman: intelligent and highly trained yet puzzled by this unfamiliar, unfair world of men.
  47. Pieces of a Woman
    Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.
  48. Dear Comrades!
    Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction.
  49. Concrete Cowboy
    Derived from the novel Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri, this film iteration bargains in vague platitudes as it unsuccessfully tries to piece together a collage of factors threatening the viability of this one-of-a-kind place.
  50. Penguin Bloom
    Because Watts is a gifted actor, Penguin Bloom does sometimes convey paraplegia’s emotional trials.
  51. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.
  52. Evil Eye
    There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.
  53. Ali G Indahouse
    In jumping from the small screen to the big one, the franchise seems to have dropped its collective IQ by a good 50 points. Cohen's HBO series was a smart show pretending to be stupid. Making its debut on DVD after a brief 2002 theatrical run, Ali G Indahouse feels like a stupid movie made by smart people.
  54. After We Collided
    After We Collided is too invested in its central couple to know what to do with its new romantic rival. Which is a shame because Sprouse turns in one of the film’s livelier performances.
  55. Books of Blood
    Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Adam
    There’s a good movie, at times, a really good movie, hiding out in all the soulless clutter of Black Adam’s plot. Unfortunately, all the considerable talents here struggle to deliver it.
  57. Marnie
    It's a must for those already enthralled by Rear Window, Vertigo, and the like, but a bit of a slog for anyone else.
  58. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Day, who’s very good, moves through it with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is as much a star in the green room as she is onstage, faced with applause or the harsh bathroom-mirror reflection of abuse and addiction. But many of the other characters might as well be reading off of cue cards.
  59. Playing by Heart
    Playing By Heart covers a broad, multi-generational spectrum of romantic and familial relationships, but Carroll can't resist tying everything together in a shiny red bow. The result is daytime television at its most ambitious, an entire season's worth of flavorless melodrama and placating warmth.
  60. The Mauritanian
    It’s revealed that the evidence against Salahi, who admits only to training with the formerly CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen in an al-Qaeda camp back in the early ’90s, consists of summaries of reports and confessions, which neither side is supposed to see. But instead of rising to the challenge of such potentially abstract subject matter, the film opts for clichés: file boxes, lawyer talk over fast food, the classic confrontation in a poorly lit parking lot.
  61. Outside the Wire
    Mackie’s performance, for better and worse, is anything but robotic. He plays more or less the same charismatic wiseacre he usually does, interpreting Leo as a machine that’s every bit as uniquely expressive as is any human being. That injects some welcome levity into what’s generally a flat, dour adventure, directed by Sweden’s Mikael Håfström with little of the old-school verve that he brought to Escape Plan.
  62. Palmer
    The best thing that can be said about Palmer is that it’s innocuous: overlong and sentimental, but rarely annoying.
  63. Land
    With her square-jawed beauty and exacting gaze, Wright brings intelligence and dignity to her character’s self-imposed martyrdom. It’s a weighty performance from the routinely strong actor. Maybe too weighty: Even in her blunders, Edee is solemn and deliberate.
  64. The Color Purple
    The Color Purple offers some entertaining moments, however the sum of it is much less than some of its standout parts. Bazawule clearly had a vision in adapting this story once more, and he’s aided by excellent work from cinematographer Dan Lausten and costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, yet that vision never fully coheres.
  65. The Marksman
    If one were to diagnose a central problem with The Marksman, it’s that it isn’t actually a Clint Eastwood movie; it lacks the breathing room, the first-take nonchalance that always makes an attractive opposite to the Eastwoodian sense of purpose.
  66. Blithe Spirit
    Hall has taken away the brittle wit of Coward’s source material and replaced it with little other than some fun performances in search of a better movie.
  67. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The reality is that Justice League’s problems go beyond who was behind the camera. The villain is still generic and silly-looking. The plot is still assemble-the-team boilerplate, hinging on the hunt for glowing MacGuffins with a goofy name.
  68. In the Earth
    In The Earth feeds the indiscriminate appetites of gorehounds and bong-rippers alike. Everyone else may find it as ghastly boring as the violence is just plain ghastly.
  69. Jockey
    Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.
  70. On the Count of Three
    On The Count Of Three is not didactic, and thank goodness the filmmakers at least have the good sense to recognize that preachiness helps no one and solves nothing. But the film dumbs down a complex and taboo topic by placing blame squarely on bogeymen like bullies and abusers.
  71. Yes Day
    The difficult negotiations of childrearing might have been a fine subtext—something to occupy the attention of parents in the audience—for a comedy so unmistakably family-oriented in tone. But in Yes Day, that element of the story is less of a side dish served for a more mature palate than the whole entrée.
  72. The Power
    The movie’s period spookiness and its #MeToo outrage have virtually nothing to do with each other, diminishing the efficacy of both and making it feel like a tract.
  73. Things Heard & Seen
    Like many Netflix originals, Things Heard And Seen is the cinematic equivalent of a mass-market paperback, neither good enough to haunt the viewer nor bad enough to haunt the résumés of its cast and crew.
  74. Monster
    There’s plenty of complexity to be mined from a scenario in which perception carries more weight than the truth, but director Anthony Mandler, a music video and commercial veteran making his feature debut, takes a broad-strokes approach to Steve’s plight.
  75. 12 Mighty Orphans
    12 Mighty Orphans tells the true story of a Depression-era high school football team improbably formed at a Texas orphanage, but the screenplay may as well have been invented from whole cloth, given its relentlessly formulaic nature.
  76. America: The Motion Picture
    Gory, horny, and at least visually bold, America is almost always fun to gawk at, even when the writing is letting it down. But that writing is a real problem.
  77. Sweet Girl
    As hellaciously predictable and preposterous as Sweet Girl is, it could win over viewers nursing their own grudge against Big Pharma. Mainly, though, this is a vehicle for its star, that brawny softie Momoa.
  78. Samaritan
    It’s both ironic and fitting that while Samaritan positions itself as fresh territory for the actor, it’s only entertaining once it belatedly refashions itself as a throwback to vintage Stallone fare.
  79. The Misfits
    The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now.
  80. The Kissing Booth 3
    With its extended montages of road trips, summer bucket lists, flash mobs, water park shenanigans, and elaborate go-kart races, The Kissing Booth 3 doesn’t so much resemble a narrative film as an extended wrap party for the cast. The whole thing has the vibe of an Adam Sandler paid vacation flick, only with barely even the attempt at comedy.
  81. No Man of God
    Sealey, whose formal touch often flirts with cliché (lots of circling around Hagmaier and Bundy, with one man’s face temporarily obscured by the back of the other’s head), pointedly reminds us of Bundy’s many victims, even though none of them are shown.
  82. 65
    Aiming to be a gripping survival thriller, 65 rarely surprises. With only two characters to speak of, the stakes feel decidedly low.
  83. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    It’s an easier-to-follow variation on the template than most of its predecessors, but still one dependent on long-winded exposition dumps. And the character-based material here lacks Bumblebee’s sweetness, coming off as cloyingly manipulative instead.
  84. The Alpinist
    This is a movie, not a book or feature article. And having a subject who largely refuses to cooperate, thereby forcing the filmmakers to sit around at home and relate much of what happens indirectly, doesn’t exactly make for a classic.
  85. Wolf
    What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.
  86. Home Sweet Home Alone
    An argument can be made for not parsing the social messaging of films like this one too deeply, as the creative team probably didn’t. But Home Sweet Home Alone does merit such criticism, if only because there’s really not much else going on.
  87. South of Heaven
    Straight-faced and suspenseful at first, wacky and almost randomly nihilistic afterwards, South Of Heaven just doesn’t know what it wants to be.
  88. Madres
    Didactic in its approach to the material—which, to be clear, is absolutely horrifying and very real—Madres has some good ideas, but it fails to see the structural forest for the sumptuously photographed trees.
  89. I Want You Back
    Everything from Peter and Emma’s inane backstories to their sweaty attempts to win back partners who were clearly not right for them in the first place mark this as a case of a creative team going through the motions. The ending hinges on a callback so obvious and manufactured that it provokes eye rolls, even as it slightly subverts expectations.
  90. Being the Ricardos
    The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.
  91. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.
  92. Tall Girl 2
    There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.
  93. When You Finish Saving the World
    Eisenberg’s main concern is the screenplay, yet the canvas it’s drawing upon is so small that it boxes its imagination. The conflicts it creates for Evelyn and Ziggy are so simple and easily resolved that the film becomes a throwaway that’s quickly forgotten despite some of the cast’s good work.
  94. Summering
    Summering may be a breezy little trip through the nostalgia of youth, but its stabs at deeper meaning are woefully immature.
  95. Both Sides of the Blade
    This movie is not particularly good. One seizes upon highlights from the sideline when what’s happening front and center is just so dull.
  96. The Contractor
    Even moderately seasoned viewers will find few surprises in its twists and turns, and little to excite them on a purely visceral level. That leaves Pine and Foster as the constant—and a reliable one—in this emerging cinematic universe of theirs, but even they might not be enough in this to earn another installment this time around.
  97. The Bubble
    Even if the characters on screen didn’t become better artists during the pandemic, then Apatow at least should have. With The Bubble, he seems to have mistaken jokes about moviemaking for moviemaking that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
  98. Spin Me Round
    Spin Me Round is a nice-try attempt at a shapeshifting, fish-out-of-water rom-com that was probably funny in the room—but in the end, it doesn’t quite come together as a movie.
  99. Umma
    Until we’re a bit further removed from the current wave of anti-Asian hate crimes, Shim’s film underplays the potential nuance that might come from a proper exploration of that idea, instead reinforcing the idea that nonwhite language, imagery, and faces are to be feared—worst of all, to the people bearing them.
  100. Memory
    It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.
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