The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,442 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: 5,583 out of 10442
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10442
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10442
10442 movie reviews
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  1. Our Kind of Traitor
    Director Susanna White, on only her second feature, jazzes up the proceedings to match the skill of actors like McGregor, Harris, and Skarsgård. Most notable is her smart use of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.
  2. My Big Night
    My Big Night, pitched in a state of perpetual frenzy, whiffs out in its ending.
  3. The Duel
    Blessed with solid supporting character work and several scenes of genuine good fun, the movie manages to make its nearly two-hour run-time pass by easily enough, but not so much so that the seams on this patchwork quilt don’t still show.
  4. Sun Choke
    The film doesn’t always work as a genre exercise, but it’s a winner as a character study, in large part because of how committed Hagan is to playing Janie’s derangement. Casting directors in search of the offbeat should take note.
  5. Under the Gun
    Tragic anecdotes put a human face on this still-polarizing issue and serve Soechtig and Couric’s broad argument in Under The Gun better than any heavy-handed music cues and animated statistics ever could.
  6. Dog Eat Dog
    An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.
  7. I, Daniel Blake
    The movie is plenty affecting when it sticks to credible, low-key difficulties faced with weary decency; there was no need to crank the pathos up to 11 and throw a full-scale pity party.
  8. The Unknown Girl
    The Unknown Girl isn’t just their first bona fide thriller. It’s also the first Dardenne film in more than 20 years that could reasonably be described as less than exceptional, even a little clumsy.
  9. Loving
    While one would have to be an unabashed bigot not to be moved by the Lovings’ plight, concluding that it’s not so easily dramatized requires no such prejudice. Quiet dignity in the face of adversity doesn’t make for an enthralling couple of hours.
  10. Blood Father
    Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
  11. Endless Poetry
    Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.
  12. Mimosas
    Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation.
  13. Zero Days
    The film does the job; it holds your attention. Overall, though, this is a classic “Say, why not read a book instead?” situation.
  14. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    At its best, The Thoughts That Once We Had functions like a kind of film-buff mixtape, queuing up one magic moment after another. But the quasi-academic aims of the project mute Andersen’s passion; the director must have felt he needed a respectable framework for his cinephilia, but the personal component often seems directly at odds with the Deleuze component.
  15. The Phenom
    The Phenom is merely well-acted and well-made, rather than heart-stopping. There are worse fates for a sports movie, to be sure.
  16. Morgan
    The director, Luke Scott (son of Ridley), doesn’t exactly elevate this material, but he does see it through. The voice of Brian Cox goads the action into Bourne territory to counter its "Ex Machina" overtones, but the movie works best when it riffs away from its antecedents into even more pitiless territory.
  17. Nerve
    Like most films about technology, Nerve will endure as a time capsule, fascinating future generations with either its prescience or its quaintness.
  18. Anthropoid
    Dramatically, it’s not much of a movie, but if you just want to know how things went down, it’s certainly a more exciting précis than Wikipedia’s.
  19. Carnage Park
    Keating keeps the story tight, giving the audience enough twists and turns to keep the ride fun.
  20. Marauders
    Marauders is like a sophomoric college essay: It’s full of interesting ideas that get bungled in the execution.
  21. Atomic Blonde
    This can be pretty fun, but also tiring in stretches; Leitch’s fetishistic interest in clothes, scar tissue, furniture, and different shades of mood lighting and lens flare gives some of the action-less portions of Atomic Blonde a glazed-over, narcotic pace.
  22. Wicked
    Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.
  23. Rough Night
    To compare Rough Night to another relatively recent female-led comedy, the film incorporates its violence with less tonal whiplash than in the 2013 Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy "The Heat," not only because of the tone set by the hard-R dialogue, but also because the dead body jokes are more "Weekend At Bernie’s" than anything.
  24. Summertime
    Everything onscreen still feels credible, but forbidden-love stories are as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Summertime had briefly seemed to promise something more mercurial.
  25. Bleed for This
    Bleed For This looks at Vinny Paz and sees only unshakable determination, and though there’s a certain queasy, even darkly comic thrill to seeing the man (courageously? foolishly?) bench press his injuries away, Teller can’t make much of a character out of nothing but raw conviction and a spectacularly crappy mustache.
  26. League of Gods
    It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.
  27. Their Finest
    But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.
  28. Klown Forever
    On Curb, it’s Larry David’s neuroses that drive his frequent public humiliation. In Klown, the problem is more that Casper and Frank can’t keep it in their pants.
  29. My Blind Brother
    With its three leads all having appeared repeatedly in the small-town setting of "Parks And Recreation," My Blind Brother sometimes feels like an alternate-world appendix to that beloved show.
  30. Fences
    Washington gives a magnetic, layered performance, backed by a largely superb cast, most of whom reprise their roles from the Broadway revival of Wilson’s classic. But the film itself is eluded by the epic qualities of the original text, which play directly to the captive space of the theater.
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