The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,441 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: 5,582 out of 10441
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10441
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10441
10441 movie reviews
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    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Creator
    The Creator is likely to stand as the most impressive and immersive sci-fi movie of the year.
  2. Good Kill
    The trouble begins when this gaunt, intelligent star is charged with embodying someone lacking in levity, someone burdened with excessive malaise. His deadly seriousness can be deadly dull.
  3. The Death of Robin Hood
    It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.
  4. Babies
    If anything, blame the kids: They’re all adorable, roly-poly delights, but the first year of life has its natural limitations.
  5. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Projects like this are invariably hit-or-miss, and Tiger Lily misses more often than it hits. Flashes of Allen's wit surface occasionally, particularly during bits in which he appears as himself, but they're few and far between, and generally drowned out by silly voices, a surprising amount of awkward silence, and pacing that makes the film seem much longer than its 80 padded minutes.
  6. Return
    Return is unusually attuned to its protagonist's alienation, which is especially painful because its source isn't some horrendous event she witnessed, but the hundreds of annoying aspects of everyday life.
  7. Hard Target
    It’s a sturdy bridge between two markedly different filmmaking cultures.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
    The film is ultimately more interesting than engaging; Durra doesn't yet have a grasp of the simultaneous warmth and needle-sharp satirical sense that infuse Stillman's films.
  9. Dai si gin
    The movie is one of To's typically tangled meditations on the smearing of good and evil, in moments where instinct overcomes morality. And ultimately, To cares less about the motivations of opposing forces than about the spectacular collisions they produce.
  10. They All Laughed
    For all its delightful performances, savvy location shooting, and breezy charm, They All Laughed is ultimately something of a tantalizing tease, all flirtation and no consummation.
  11. Waydowntown
    Occasionally resembling an episode of Seinfeld taken to the big screen, waydowntown shares that show's ability to mine mundane details for humor, and its Tomorrowland-gone-awry setting provides plenty of raw material.
  12. Wendigo
    A skillfully acted and psychologically well-crafted but ultimately disappointing thriller.
  13. Out of Time
    The two of them (Washington/Mendez) together, playing police-procedural dodgeball, make for a good movie. Too bad there are other people on the team, and that the pre-game show runs so long.
  14. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    It's clever enough, but it's mostly a contrivance to hide the fact that there's nothing interesting about the story itself.
  15. Secretary
    There's something appealing about an unapologetic love story set in an office that's only a few clicks off from looking like a fetish dungeon, and Spader and Gyllenhaal make sure that the romance, kinks and all, carries the day.
  16. Drumline
    Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.
  17. Chaos
    In the end, Chaos is as compelling as it is confounding, and it's compelling in large part because of the confusion it stirs.
  18. A Perfect Getaway
    Even if you know what’s coming, it’s a neat bit of meta-thriller filmmaking, as much about the mechanics of storytelling as a reasonably satisfying example of it.
  19. Love Crime
    A corporate crime thriller that explores the relationships of women in power, but while Corneau delivers a slick, well-acted piece with a surprising mid-movie twist, Love Crime is too thin and too on-point to deliver the jolt he and co-screenwriter Nathalie Carter most likely intended.
  20. Native Son
    The early stretch of the movie is its strongest, as Johnson lays out the bric-a-brac of Bigger’s life, which involves a good deal of code-switching, and carefully tweaks the novel’s key relationships, updating the condescension of his employer’s rich-kid daughter, Mary (Margaret Qualley), to a new era of white guilt and microaggressions.
  21. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    Walk Hard offers a quantity of laughs that few comedies could match, yet it's likely to leave viewers vaguely unsatisfied, particularly when the closing minutes completely run out of steam. That's the danger of spoofs: You're only as good as your last laugh.
  22. Unlocking the Cage
    In short, this is yet another doc that would make a first-rate book or lengthy article, gaining almost nothing from its chosen medium apart from (maybe) greater exposure. There’s no legitimate taxonomic reason for this material to be designated a film.
  23. The Guilty
    For most of its brisk 90 minutes, The Guilty is just Gyllenhaal, in tight close-up, constructing a movie out of sweat and tears alone: a glorified radio play of a thriller whose thrills are generated almost entirely through his reactions.
  24. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    It’s rare to see family animated films as purely focused on fun as this one.
  25. Z
    Z’s greatest virtue is in the delivery of its frights, which hit like a slap in the face despite falling into the general category of “jump scares.”
  26. Hold the Dark
    If Hold The Dark lacks the sheer razor-wire tension of Saulnier’s earlier crime-horror corkers, it still knows how to make the carnage count—to force us to experience, on a gut level, every casualty.
  27. My Cousin Rachel
    It might not be a visual buffet on the order of Guillermo Del Toro’s "Crimson Peak," but sometimes a more modest meal will do.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    As its title suggests, Satan grapples with the existence and nature of evil in the world, but it's hard to take such weighty matters seriously when they're explored with all the subtlety and grace of an anti-abortion pamphlet.
  29. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.
  30. Young & Beautiful
    It’s remarkably assured and subtle work, worthy of comparison to Catherine Deneuve’s brilliantly blank turn in Buñuel’s film.
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