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. Kate Plays Christine
    There’s an emotional dimension to Kate Plays Christine—an empathy linking an actor to the human headline she’s dressing up as—that’s nearly abstracted into oblivion by the film’s neurotic self-examination.
  2. The Lure
    For her debut feature, The Lure, Smoczyńska has very loosely adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story — so loosely, you might not realize that’s what she’s doing until halfway through — into a genre-defying film that blends elements of musicals, horror, romance, and fantasy into a contemporary fairy tale that celebrates the animalistic, the feminine, and the intimate intersections between the two.
  3. Morris from America
    Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.
  4. 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.
  5. The Confirmation
    The Confirmation isn’t much to look at, and its rhythms are wobbly (the quest narrative starts to feel strained early on), but Nelson is a dogged enough dramatist that even the story’s resolutions—even the really pat and obvious ones—are satisfyingly earned.
  6. Things to Come
    If Things To Come doesn’t completely fulfill Hansen-Løve’s career mission of elevating minor incidents to major themes, it still rings with her clarity and personality. She conveys in single sentences what less confident filmmakers might expound on in a monologue, and makes small gestures more poignant by tossing them off casually or making an unexpected cut.
  7. The Mermaid
    A relatively straightforward comic love story/environmental parable, it’s a sharper bit of whimsy than CJ7 and less weighed down with mythology than Journey To The West.
  8. Boom Bust Boom
    For those who aren’t automatically turned off by the idea of an issue-doc that Schoolhouse Rock-ifies a serious, grown-up subject, Boom Bust Boom is a worthwhile way to spend an hour.
  9. Holy Hell
    Holy Hell has an undeniable car-crash fascination, especially once Allen reveals just how deeply this particular phony guru abused the trust of his faithfuls.
  10. Patriots Day
    The movie, none too revelatory, mostly just stands as a sturdy thriller, one that’s more fleet than flat-footed as it shuttles among a veritable network of characters and story lines.
  11. The Meddler
    Here Scafaria makes nice use of her widescreen frame, and cuts the movie together crisply—a lot of the jokes actually come from the cuts, and the way they punctuate the often pitch-perfect dialogue.
  12. Presenting Princess Shaw
    This film barely brushes up against the many, many issues it raises, but those conversations can be had in the lobby, after the pleasure of watching an underappreciated artist finally get her due.
  13. Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice is the rare movie that’s immersed in improv as a subject, not a behind-the-scenes technique for goosing laughs.
  14. Life
    Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.
  15. Annabelle: Creation
    Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.
  16. A Cure for Wellness
    Equal parts baroque fairy-tale, atmospheric mystery, and hideous body-horror nightmare, the film puts what could have been a cost-effective genre exercise on steroids, giving life to a two-and-half-hour, R-rated Frankenstein monster.
  17. Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
  18. Julieta
    Almodóvar has directed what’s basically a melodrama as if it were a thriller—a fascinating experiment that doesn’t always work as intended, but creates a useful dissonance en route to a powerfully open-ended conclusion.
  19. 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.
  20. The Neon Demon
    Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.
  21. It
    While Pennywise is legitimately terrifying, overall, It is more intense than it is chilling.
  22. Time to Choose
    It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.
  23. 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.
  24. Tickled
    All the same, Tickled does shine a much-needed light on that individual’s long history of abusive behavior, which has resulted in only a light slap on the wrist, thanks to inherited wealth and the power it confers.
  25. Graduation
    In the end, it’s the hard questions that linger, disquietingly unanswered.
  26. Slack Bay
    In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.
  27. Personal Shopper
    Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.
  28. 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.
  29. Nocturnal Animals
    Like Ford’s debut, Nocturnal Animals treats film as a medium of luxury, where the emotive and the self-indulgent cross paths. He is primarily a sensualist.
  30. Gleason
    He can afford the best treatments and technologies and — by the end — even to extend his life, because he’s a well-off former NFL player. Most patients don’t have these luxuries.
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