The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,423 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 10423
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10423
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10423
10423 movie reviews
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  1. Hits
    The satire of self-satisfied, opportunistic Brooklynites is cutting, but it lacks the humanity afforded the upstate characters, and quickly repeats itself, seemingly by design.
  2. The Rewrite
    It’s poised to become one of the biggest rom-coms of 1998. But barring the invention of time travel, The Rewrite remains tethered to the realities of film releasing in 2015, which means it will get most of its play as a VOD simulation of earlier hits.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    All the performers are superb, though as the title suggests, this is Viviane’s show, and Ronit makes for an exceptional martyr (she gets a Passion Of Joan Of Arc-worthy close-up or two) who never loses her very human shadings.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Clearly aiming for “cult classic,” Wyrmwood is too basic to be anything more than a forgettable bro-pocalypse.
  5. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.
  6. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.
  7. Old Fashioned
    Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.
  8. What We Do in the Shadows
    The result is more often amusing than gut-busting, but it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and that’s fairly impressive in itself.
  9. The Last Five Years
    For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.
  10. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    A live-action Hammacher Schlemmer catalog of pseudo-retro novelties, spiced up with self-aware asides and over-the-top violence — slick entertainment, provided the viewer turns off whatever part of their brain is responsible for recognizing and parsing subtext.
  11. Seventh Son
    Seventh Son is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself.
  12. Jupiter Ascending
    It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi.
  13. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The visual effects and fast and furious quips combine for that rarest of releases: one that both parents and kids can enjoy (just like the show), leaving viewers of any age hoping that the next SpongeBob movie isn’t an entire decade off.
  14. Love, Rosie
    On the plus side, Collins (Mirror Mirror, The Blind Side) and Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games franchise) are both appealing enough, even if their chemistry makes Rosie and Alex’s we’re-just-pals stance appear even more ludicrous than intended.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ballet 422
    “Art isn’t easy,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, and in Jody Lee Lipes’ bleak beauty of a documentary, the act of creation is a resolutely joyless one — a tedious grind with little lasting reward.
  16. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”
  17. The Voices
    Satrapi makes some bad calls in her attempts to balance bleak humor with bleaker thrills, including ending the film on a glibly cheerful note. Her best decision, bar none, was entrusting such heavy material to the guy who played Van Wilder. Behind that perpetual smirk lurks a talent for quiet depravity. Bonkers looks good on him.
  18. Project Almanac
    As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.
  19. The Loft
    Besides being an early contender for the worst date movie of 2015, The Loft is a film that can’t decide what it wants. It’s a male fantasy, and a cautionary tale. It’s sleazy in concept, and timid in execution.
  20. Black or White
    Tempting though it might be to celebrate any earnest, good-faith attempt to talk about race in America, it’s clear that the creator of Mind Of The Married Man was not the right one to do the talking.
  21. Girlhood
    "Boyhood" has the natural endpoint of its lead growing into a young adult, while Girlhood stretches out in front of Marieme, an uncertain path into a haze.
  22. Wild Card
    A largely forgettable lark, notable more for its slight diversions from action-movie norms than anything else.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Alien Outpost
    It’s a real slog.
  24. Hard to Be a God
    It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?
  25. Amira & Sam
    Romantic comedy clichés are given a superficial East-meets-West (and vet-back-home) makeover in Amira & Sam, a love story whose likable stars can’t compensate for a story that tediously adheres to formula.
  26. Timbuktu
    In essence, Timbuktu is about how farce turns into terror.
  27. Mortdecai
    It’s exactly the sort of oddball trifle, like Hudson Hawk, that tends to attract the ire of baffled audiences and grumpy critics. It’s also the sort of oddball trifle that, like Hudson Hawk, will put certain aficionados of silliness in a pretty good mood.
  28. Black Sea
    Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.
  29. Son of a Gun
    Unfortunately, this promising material turns out to be merely the setup for a thoroughly generic action flick in which a gang of thieves without much honor attempt to pull off one last big heist. In the long, dispiriting slide to mediocrity thereafter, McGregor largely relapses into cute-rascal mode.
  30. Song One
    Not enough happens in Song One for the movie to really qualify as unpredictable, but it deserves credit for a steadfast avoidance of melodrama in a story that practically begs for it.
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