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. Elle
    One conundrum is that Elle is singularly a Verhoeven film, but doesn’t quite look like one.
  2. The Monster
    With The Monster, writer-director Bryan Bertino plants a prickly mother-daughter drama at the center of a violent creature feature. It’s an intriguing combination in theory, but the individual elements both feel a little half-baked, and stirring them up into one doesn’t help. They’re two mediocre tastes that taste mediocre together.
  3. The Love Witch
    If The Love Witch simply raised the profile of its director, Anna Biller — a true auteur who not only wrote, directed, produced, and edited this film but also designed and hand made its sets and costumes — then it would be a success.
  4. Arrival
    Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts.
  5. Almost Christmas
    Whatever its faults, this is a nice movie, a crowdpleaser best experienced with an appreciative audience.
  6. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    This is an uncharacteristically unsubtle work from Lee — yet in the end, it’s not ineffective.
  7. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    The sets are either claustrophobically limited or anonymously empty; the period detail is nonexistent; and the special effects are on par with a Syfy original.
  8. Army of One
    The problem is that Army Of One doesn’t add up to much. It’s not quite a satire nor quite a full character study.
  9. Trash Fire
    While it doesn’t include any literal blazing piles of garbage, Trash Fire is spiteful and unpleasant from beginning to end, using every technique at its disposal — from stinging dialogue to grotesque prosthetics to morbid black comedy — to make the audience uncomfortable.
  10. Dog Eat Dog
    An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.
  11. Loving
    While one would have to be an unabashed bigot not to be moved by the Lovings’ plight, concluding that it’s not so easily dramatized requires no such prejudice. Quiet dignity in the face of adversity doesn’t make for an enthralling couple of hours.
  12. Hacksaw Ridge
    One might call this a refinement of Gibson’s fixations as a director: battles more terrifying than "Braveheart" and a portrayal of sacrificial lambhood that’s more compelling than "The Passion Of The Christ," in part because Doss, as much of an unwavering do-gooder as he might be, is an actual character with conflicts.
  13. The Ivory Game
    Unlike a lot of other advocacy docs—films that seek to raise awareness regarding some serious issue, often concluding with a call to action—Netflix’s The Ivory Game offers something spectacularly visual: elephants.
  14. Peter and the Farm
    This is one tortured soul, and a rare case in which a farmer’s struggles seem to be entirely of his own making.
  15. Doctor Strange
    “Cool enough” doesn’t do justice to this blockbuster’s city - and reality-bending set pieces. “Awe-inspiring” is closer.
  16. The Eagle Huntress
    Director Otto Bell has found himself in awe-inspiring territory. Aisholpan is a remarkable person interacting with majestic creatures, surrounded by staggering natural beauty. It’s easy to become entranced.
  17. Trolls
    Trolls may have a low bar going in, but the movie scales it quickly and admirably by defying conventions, adding both new and familiar musical numbers, and hiding a valuable, Zen-like message in plain sight.
  18. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    Perkins commits even harder to his singularly strange approach to the genre, turning a simple ghost story into an exercise in extremely prolonged unease. It could give Norman Bates the willies.
  19. Inferno
    This latest film, which was made on about half the budget of either of its predecessors, is as close as the Langdon-Howard cycle has gotten to actually being fun.
  20. Into the Inferno
    As fun as Herzog’s highly imitable voice can be, this particular film arguably works best when he remains quiet and simply stares at the fiery void.
  21. 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.
  22. Gimme Danger
    Considering how cheerfully its subject courted controversy, this is a chummy, openly booster-ish profile, designed as an introduction for those ignorant of the Stooges’ legacy. It’s plenty entertaining, but it’s also nearly as tame as Iggy, in his prime, was wild.
  23. I'm Not Ashamed
    Inelegantly compressing the year up to the shooting, I’m Not Ashamed has more than its fair share of clunkiness.
  24. Creepy
    Perturbed and darkly funny.
  25. The Handmaiden
    A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.
  26. American Pastoral
    This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.
  27. Boo! A Madea Halloween
    Madea remains a distinctive, weirdly compelling character. Maybe someday Perry will make a good comedy for her.
  28. In a Valley of Violence
    A by-the-numbers spaghetti Western that’s kind of slow and uneventful—and the world has no shortage of those.
  29. Moonlight
    Moonlight lets us see Chiron, to see his silent heartache written across three different faces, and that seems a hell of a lot better than good.
  30. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    Director Greg Mottola deserves some credit for trying to give the film a little bit of cinematic flair, something that’s lacking in many Hollywood comedies these days.
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