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. Under the Shadow
    There’s still something exciting about seeing familiar tropes placed in an unfamiliar context — in this case, a nation ravaged by violent conflict and stifled by fundamentalist law.
  2. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    The whole movie falls between stylization, which it mostly lacks, and realism, which it can’t quite claim with its non-teenage teenager spouting non-swearing swears.
  3. The Alchemist Cookbook
    It’s difficult to imagine what a script for all of this would even look like. Whatever The Alchemist Cookbook has to express, it expresses through scenes that feel as though someone were dared to do something while a camera rolled, in the near-extinct tradition of the transgressive underground movie.
  4. Amanda Knox
    Amanda Knox serves as a corrective—a simple, brutal look at the dangers of hype, hysteria, and rushed prosecution.
  5. Masterminds
    Masterminds leans heavily on its cast of comic ringers—Ken Marino as a yuppie neighbor, Jason Sudeikis as a cavalier hit man, Leslie Jones as an irate federal agent—without giving them anything especially funny to say or do.
  6. Deepwater Horizon
    As entertainment, it works in the most rote way: the star power of Wahlberg, Russell, and Kate Hudson, who plays Mike’s worried wife; Malkovich’s predictable sliminess; the minor pleasure of seeing the good guys get out; the slight kick of watching something big crumble and burn while knowing that it’s only a special effect, real-world basis be damned.
  7. Passage to Mars
    If nothing else, Jean-Christophe Jeauffre’s insipid Passage To Mars instills a greater appreciation for the classic movies that clearly inspired it.
  8. American Honey
    American Honey doesn’t rise and fall on the strength of its love story, if that’s even what happens between Star and Jake. Arnold touches on a lot—rural poverty in America, class divisions, the impulsiveness and recklessness of youth—but never tames her film into a strict polemic.
  9. Denial
    Intentionally or not, Denial is perfectly timed to a season of insane conspiracy theories and feelings-based readings of facts.
  10. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    The problem is that everything fun and resonant about the movie (like a boy whose eye works as a movie projector, unspooling his dreams onto the wall) ends up feeling rather ornamental.
  11. Danny Says
    A bunch of Fields’ war stories are rendered with simple animations, and while those aren’t as effective as the dozens of great photographs that dot the film, they do break up what might otherwise be an overly talky doc.
  12. Girl Asleep
    Never betraying an iota of lived experience, it trots out tropes seen in dozens of movies and sitcom episodes (the embarrassing dad, the big party, the fictional rock star crush, etc.), which can ring true only because they’ve been in circulation for decades.
  13. The Age of Shadows
    Like "I Saw The Devil," The Age Of Shadows is a cat-and-mouse scenario that thwarts and subverts audience expectations.
  14. Queen of Katwe
    In some ways, the more novel element is the film’s depiction of chess, which in Katwe is a popular sport on the level of football. And while that might seem unlikely, it’s accurate, at least in the wake of Mutesi’s success.
  15. My Blind Brother
    With its three leads all having appeared repeatedly in the small-town setting of "Parks And Recreation," My Blind Brother sometimes feels like an alternate-world appendix to that beloved show.
  16. The Magnificent Seven
    More importantly, copying an earlier era’s empty slickness still produces only empty slickness.
  17. The Dressmaker
    At its best, The Dressmaker looks like 1950s Vogue does the outback. Director Jocelyn Moorhouse poses Kate Winslet and the rest of her female cast in gorgeous finery against a dingy landscape, their expertly tailored garments contrasting splendidly against the dust. It’s a beautiful, bizarre, and funny juxtaposition. It works. The rest of the movie doesn’t.
  18. Goat
    For once, the frat boys are depicted not as lovable dolts or harmless pranksters, but as sadistic bullies. Likewise, their excessive initiation rites are played not for lowbrow comedy, but for something closer to horror. This is basically the anti-"Animal House."
  19. Storks
    This is a lot of plot for a movie that endeavors primarily to entertain children, though the excess is more likely to give adults a headache.
  20. Beauty and the Beast
    Without a poignant note or undercurrent of suggestion, it amounts to a world of effects, rather than a world of magic.
  21. Audrie & Daisy
    Audrie & Daisy could’ve done more to connect up the way the internet looms over both cases.... What the documentary does well, though, is critique a culture that allows young men to disregard other people’s humanity.
  22. Chronic
    When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy, and it really does play, for better and worse, like a lengthy exploration of that Shins song’s thesis.
  23. The Lovers and the Despot
    Unfortunately, this bland, incurious oral history focuses exclusively on what’s admittedly the most superficially fascinating chapter of their lives: the eight years they spent making movies together in North Korea, after Kim Jong-il had them kidnapped.
  24. Hillsong - Let Hope Rise
    Structurally, Hillsong: Let Hope Rise is hopelessly confused, jumping back and forth in time and space documenting the buildup to a big Hillsong United show at The Forum in Los Angeles, where the band will debut its new album.
  25. Blair Witch
    Blair Witch will make popcorn fly. But it won’t make anyone believe.
  26. Bridget Jones's Baby
    In other words, 12 years have elapsed since the last Bridget Jones movie. A skinnier, more put-together Bridget isn’t necessarily a more interesting character; she’s a little more "Sex And The City" this time out, however incrementally.
  27. Operation Avalanche
    Alas, while modern technology allows for impressive, convincing effects work on a comparatively tiny budget, the basic concept itself hasn’t improved with age. Clever ideas are still in short supply.
  28. Snowden
    A duly serious and ambitious fall movie that, despite the best efforts of its formidable director and cast, can’t remotely match the excitement of real life.
  29. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    It’s a testament to the buoyancy of the film that such exhausted, well-trod material can still feel fresh.
  30. Mr. Church
    A small, unflashy, borderline incompetent movie like Mr. Church is certainly another sign that Murphy does what he wants. Maybe this guarded performance in a lousy movie is a sign of him wanting to do something better.
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