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. The Reflektor Tapes
    There’s a lot of “this was really important,” and “this changed us,” but very little in the way of specifics. Maybe they couldn’t put their fingers on it, and that’s fine, but there’s no sense that they even considered digging deeper. Still, several live performances and some powerful fly-on-the-wall moments make it tough to dismiss Reflektor Tapes entirely.
  2. Everest
    Part IMAX nature documentary and part Hollywood disaster movie, it does an effective job of conveying what it’s like to climb the mountain, the hours and days spent acclimating on practice hikes, and the punishing physical effects that accompany each subsequent change of altitude.
  3. Captive
    The leads acquit themselves relatively well here, hinting at the interesting character study that could have been, but by the end the only captive left is the viewer.
  4. Office
    Office is one of the most original and imaginative musicals of the last decade, in spite of Lo Dayu’s largely unremarkable, temp-track-like score.
  5. Cooties
    Before Cooties is a zombie movie, it is an earnest-young-teacher movie that diligently subscribes to every cliché of the form.
  6. Hellions
    Plenty of striking, clever, effective movies have been made simply by re-arranging and re-calibrating familiar genre elements. Hellions might have been one of these, if it was predicated on something slightly less shallow than “kids in masks + chanting + blood = scary.”
  7. The Cut
    The director’s assured tracking shots follow Nazaret through one bustling, disorienting locale after another as he searches for help, family, and relief from his hardship. Yet like the film, they’re ultimately superficial gestures that maintain a detached perspective on their subject, incapable of penetrating his traumatized mind and tormented heart.
  8. The New Girlfriend
    The real problem is that Ozon can’t quite decide whether he’s making the crowd-pleasing tale of a cross-dresser’s empowerment or the thornier, more compelling tale of a woman who tries to recreate her dead best friend, "Vertigo"-style (and then sleep with her).
  9. Sicario
    It’s an uncommonly bold gambit, expressly designed to frustrate people who want to see a strong woman deliver a righteous ass kicking. The progressivism here is instead rooted in futility and despair, which provides much more of a valuable shock to the system.
  10. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.
  11. Black Mass
    Without an emotional core, a stronger sociological angle, or many visceral thrills, Black Mass more or less limits itself to procedural status. Within those aims, it’s a pretty good one, absorbing and well-made.
  12. Pawn Sacrifice
    While this movie version of Fischer does indeed suffer from mental health issues that make it difficult for him to form functional human relationships, one of the film’s strongest, most potentially surprising pleasures is the sight of Maguire playing both with and against his usual type.
  13. The Fool
    Yuri Bykov’s third feature is in the same vein as a slew of recent Russian films sounding a strident alarm.
  14. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    While 90 Minutes In Heaven has a professional sheen miles above the clunky products peddled by PureFlix (God’s Not Dead) and their ilk, that just makes it duller.
  15. The Perfect Guy
    There’s certainly an audience for these thrillers, but imagine how big that audience might be for one that really works.
  16. Wolf Totem
    It sets out to take the viewer on a journey, but ends up giving them little more than a pleasantly diverting sight-seeing tour. There are worse ways to spend two hours. Better ones, too.
  17. Breathe
    Breathe, the second feature directed by French actress Mélanie Laurent (best known for playing the vengeful Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), tackles the subject from a refreshingly novel angle, depicting a platonic friendship that quickly grows toxic.
  18. A Brilliant Young Mind
    At times plays like a case study more than a drama.
  19. Sleeping with Other People
    The small miracle of Leslye Headland’s second film as writer-director is not that it sidesteps its influences or shuns its genre. It’s that it somehow makes the lusty undercurrents of its male/female friendship unironically romantic and, at times, unapologetically sexy.
  20. Meet the Patels
    Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.
  21. Goodnight Mommy
    This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.
  22. The Visit
    A refreshing (and memorably strange) genre piece, premised almost entirely on a child’s willingness to accept grown-up weirdness as long as it ensures stability.
  23. Welcome to Leith
    A solid documentary feeling of “you are there” isn’t always a substitute for “…but here’s what happened when you left, and here’s what it all meant.”
  24. Coming Home
    It’s a less pointed and implicitly feminist work than such classics as "Raise The Red Lantern" and "The Story Of Qiu Ju" —one could even call it a shameless weepie. Still, it’s a welcome throwback to one of the most emotionally wrenching actor-director partnerships in film history.
  25. Time Out of Mind
    It’s the epitome of the anti-vanity project—a way for a veteran charmer to prove that he has more to offer than charm.
  26. The Transporter Refueled
    Refueled isn’t a good movie by most metrics, but it is consistently committed to mainlining the basest action-movie pleasures at the expense of damn near everything else.
  27. Break Point
    Does a pretty good job at keeping the jokes wry and low-key, with just a few detours into broader, Will Ferrell-ish territory.
  28. Dirty Weekend
    Don’t get too excited: Not only is there nothing especially dirty about Dirty Weekend, the latest and lamest film by erstwhile provocateur Neil LaBute, but the movie doesn’t even occupy an entire weekend.
  29. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    As an expression of the filmmaker’s own sense of guilt over buying into the Apple myth, this picture intends to be a bummer.
  30. Dragon Blade
    Whether it’s introducing random flashes of white screen or slowing down shots to a stuttered chop, Dragon Blade seems to be going out of its way to make sure the action never rises above the level of “watchable enough.”
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