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. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    It’s pleasantly baffling to discover that not only is Hotel Transylvania 3 easily the best film of the series, but it also feels more at home thematically on a cruise ship than its predecessors did at a haunted Transylvanian castle.
  2. Sandy Wexler
    Maybe it’s a question of drastically lowered expectations finally working to Sandler’s advantage, but Sandy Wexler is disarming in its charms.
  3. Donald Cried
    The film’s gradual shift from broad yuk-fest toward something closer to indie drama (while still striving to be funny) isn’t wholly successful; it’s difficult to achieve the catharsis of, say, Kelly Reichardt’s "Old Joy" when you start out like "Napoleon Dynamite." But at least Avedisian tried.
  4. Detroit
    It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished.
  5. Landline
    Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.
  6. Berlin Syndrome
    This tedious kidnapping drama doesn’t have anything especially insightful to say about Clare’s ordeal, which makes watching her go through it an even more trying experience.
  7. Wind River
    Driven by another of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ murmuring folk soundtracks, Wind River turns out to be the weakest of Sheridan’s loose trilogy — the one with the thinnest characterizations and the toughest time disguising its subtext as plainspoken townsfolk rapport.
  8. Beatriz at Dinner
    The movie, which marks the belated reunion of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, who previously collaborated on "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," insists on letting its characters behave like, well, characters. And that’s what makes it frustrating in retrospect.
  9. Novitiate
    Betts appears to have started out with a rather mundane idea and then stumbled, over the course of her research, onto something much more fruitful. The result is as intriguing and frustrating as that suggests.
  10. Trophy
    It’s also slightly unfortunate — though admittedly no fault of director Shaul Schwarz (assisted by Christina Clusiau) — that Trophy covers a lot of the same ground as did recent Netflix documentary "The Ivory Game."
  11. Marshall
    This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.
  12. Super Dark Times
    Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.
  13. The Other Side of Hope
    In that respect, it may be self-conscious to a fault. Plotted with typical shagginess, it lags as it tries to treat its two protagonists equally; they may be kindred spirits, but Khaled’s fears of deportation and his search for Miriam are a lot more urgent than Wikström’s mid-life crisis. But in drawing the two men together, the film creates a simple, persuasive metaphor.
  14. The First Purge
    Wringing genre thrills from headline atrocities, The First Purge is at once crass and provocative in its timeliness—in Blumhouse’s toolshed, it’s the sledgehammer to Get Out’s scalpel.
  15. Actor Martinez
    It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.
  16. Dig Two Graves
    The movie looks superb, especially for its minuscule budget. While Adams is clearly a very promising director, however, his screenwriting chops aren’t so advanced. This is one clunky amalgam of mystery and guilt.
  17. Win It All
    There’s enough disreputable behavior bookending the righteousness, and enough solid jokes along the way, to make the effort moderately entertaining.
  18. The Land of Steady Habits
    In the well-trod territory of fiction about rich men in self-induced emotional crises, the film stands as a worthy, if not exactly groundbreaking, addition.
  19. Trolls World Tour
    In Trolls and the new Trolls World Tour, celebrity voices, high energy levels, nonsensical catchphrases, cross-promotional branding, cover-heavy soundtracks, and overuse of voice-over narration are all jacked up to 11, creating what are essentially marathon-length dance party endings. Yet somehow, this shamelessness gives the whole enterprise a kind of deranged honor.
  20. Mighty Joe Young
    It's all a little silly, and silly in a way that's less fun than the original—due in part to an obvious subplot involving a poacher played by a hammy Peter Firth—but its kid-friendly B-movie charm and the peerless Mr. Young make it worthwhile, undemanding entertainment.
  21. Small Crimes
    Small Crimes, as a film, ultimately errs on the side of being overly vague, perhaps because there simply isn’t any plausible way to get much of the history across via dialogue.
  22. Tout Va Bien
    Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.
  23. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    While Alvarez acquits himself with thrilling action sequences and breakneck pacing, the overall impression left by this “New Dragon Tattoo Story” is one of a razor-sharp blade dulled by the demands of franchise filmmaking.
  24. Battle of the Sexes
    Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.
  25. Band Aid
    You’ll believe you’re watching two people who love each other but no longer know how to live with each other. You may still wish Band Aid better distinguished their relationship.
  26. Stronger
    It’s nice to report that Green, Gyllenhaal, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany hit some grace notes—and plant the germ of some interesting ideas—en route to the expected lifting of spirits.
  27. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  28. Rodney King
    This is the second time Lee has filmed one of Smith’s plays, and like A Huey P. Newton Story, about the Black Panthers founder, it’s more of a valuable document of an event than a full-fledged movie.
  29. Thelma
    Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.
  30. Deadpool 2
    Though bringing in a bona fide action-cheese aesthete like David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) to direct counts as a minor coup, Deadpool 2’s attempts to fight superhero fatigue with self-awareness and meta shock value can become exhausting. Indulgent and uneven, but in spots gruesomely funny, the new film badly lacks the basic momentum of the original’s formulaic plot.
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