The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. The Forest
    The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.
  2. Lamb
    Throughout Lamb, Laurence makes sure that every one of the character’s bad choices makes sense. That’s what makes the movie so sad.
  3. Anesthesia
    Still, it’s dispiriting to see him (Nelson) produce something as turgid and heavy-handed as Anesthesia, which employs a dozen or so cardboard characters as mouthpieces for singularly unilluminating thoughts about the ways in which people struggle to bury their unhappiness.
  4. The Treasure
    Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.
  5. Diablo
    Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
  6. Point Break
    The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.
  7. Anomalisa
    Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.
  8. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  9. Where to Invade Next
    Moore here makes his strongest bona fide argument in ages, albeit one that still gleefully stacks the deck and avoids examining possible downsides too carefully. He even comes across as genuinely patriotic, in his own way.
  10. 45 Years
    A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.
  11. Son of Saul
    No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.
  12. Sisters
    Fey and Poehler are clearly the center of the film, and watching their lively games of verbal ping-pong is always an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes or so.
  13. Extraction
    Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.
  14. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.
  15. Concussion
    Smith’s Omalu makes a compelling character, supported by his mentor Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks) and former team doctor Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin). But Concussion doesn’t crackle like the best whistleblower dramas.
  16. Joy
    Rough even by Russell’s standards, this grab bag of dropped plot points, visual metaphors, and theatrical cues looks like the underdrawing of a comic drama, only half covered in bright impasto strokes.
  17. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  18. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    What Abrams has done is strip Star Wars down to its core components, rearranging the stuff people liked about the original trilogy and getting rid of what they hated about the rest.
  19. The Revenant
    There’s a sense that the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of the parts, no matter how spectacular some of them are.
  20. The Hateful Eight
    This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.
  21. The Ridiculous 6
    While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.
  22. Don Verdean
    Both Rockwell and Clement are back for the latest Hess production, Don Verdean, which can’t even work up enough comic energy to be considered bad.
  23. Body
    The film is well-acted, slickly made on a shoestring budget, and blessedly efficient, with a runtime that inches just past the one-hour mark, credits included. It’s also nearly devoid of surprises, sending its characters through some Hitchcockian paces en route to an ending that’s more depressing for its predictability than its bleakness.
  24. The Big Short
    In the end, McKay’s edu-tainment tactics work, even if the laughs aren’t as hearty as his broader work with Ferrell. The Big Short pulls off its own oddball gambit: grabbing attention through fringe wonkiness rather than a tantalizing glimpse at bro-banker lifestyles.
  25. In the Heart of the Sea
    Even though In The Heart Of The Sea’s framing device often feels like it was written by someone who’d never read a word of Melville, its visual style makes for a bold approximation of his allusive prose.
  26. Boy and the World
    As with the movie as a whole, the message those scenes deliver is a heady mix of uplifting and devastating.
  27. Almost There
    Almost There, made under the banner of Windy City-based doc shop Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams), gives Anton’s kitschy-colorful portraiture the requisite close-up, but the film quickly becomes more compelling as a protracted intervention than as an act of advocacy.
  28. Stinking Heaven
    Like many of Joe Swanberg’s recent efforts, Stinking Heaven plays like a potentially strong idea for a movie that never quite takes shape, which is the problem with “writing” a movie while the camera rolls.
  29. Krampus
    Neither particularly frightening nor especially funny, the Yuletide horror-comedy Krampus scrapes by on the novelty of its setup.
  30. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.
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