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. Night Comes On
    Fishback and Hall move confidently between the obvious ironies and foreshadowings of Spiro’s kitchen sink (as in, “everything but the ______”) realism.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Aug 1, 2018
  2. They Remain
    Beyond the performances, They Remain is uneven. The film uses a series of innovative, old-school visual tricks to create a surreal and hallucinatory vibe, and when something works, it’s powerful and discomfiting.
  3. The Manhattan Project
    Though the writing gets unforgivably club-fisted and implausible toward the end, The Manhattan Project shows surprising nuance in dealing with Collet and Lithgow, who are both slow to figure out that there are limits to scientific inquiry.
  4. I Kill Giants
    Beyond the characterization of its complex anti-heroine, though, I Kill Giants doesn’t stray too far from an established collection of story beats, stretched thin over a slightly too-long 106-minute run time.
  5. To Be or Not to Be
    An extraordinarily faithful—though schmaltzy and ultimately pointless— 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 farce.
  6. Infinite Football
    This is rich material, sharply developed. It’s also touchingly optimistic about man’s capacity for incremental change.
  7. Dark River
    Throw in expert use of a picturesque yet oppressive location and Dark River almost manages to overcome narrative inertia via sheer force of will. It’s a beautifully crafted, moodily evocative film that’s missing just one spark of true inspiration.
  8. Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, like that Nancy Drew movie, isn’t really for teenagers, any more than High School Musical is; it’s for tweenage-and-younger kids who look toward the high-school horizon with a combination of aspirational awe and chilling fear.
  9. Krull
    If it’s all more than a bit silly, not to mention derivative, Krull manages to cast a fantastical spell courtesy of Peter Yates’ direction.
  10. Christopher Robin
    Beneath its wistful tone, Christopher Robin supplies the purest wish-fulfillment fantasy that a children’s movie can offer adults: that our childhoods miss us as much as we miss them.
  11. The Seagull
    He’s (Mayer) assembled a terrific cast and mostly stayed out of their way, but the result still feels frustratingly arm’s-length, lacking the odd electricity of Louis Malle’s semi-staged "Vanya On 42nd Street."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Valley Girl
    the wooden acting and threadbare plot of the 1983 Romeo And Juliet-meets-The Graduate-meets-MTV love story Valley Girl is almost entirely redeemed by the stung cockiness of Nicolas Cage.
  13. Just One of the Guys
    Entertainingly goofy.
  14. Fast Color
    While the story may be flimsy in places, the performances are anything but.
  15. Fighting with My Family
    Fighting With My Family is a shamelessly formulaic sponsored post of a crowd-pleaser that’s also, in its best moments, a genuinely stirring celebration of chase-your-dreams moxie.
  16. Overlord
    It’s reasonably good, creepy fun, provided you’re not troubled by fleeting, uncomfortable thoughts like “Hey, that screaming bloodthirsty mutant monster could theoretically be a reanimated Anne Frank.”
  17. Blue My Mind
    In many ways, the film is reminiscent of last year’s arthouse horror hit Raw, using monstrous transformation as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening. It’s not as extreme as Raw in its content, though, nor as skillful in its technique.
  18. The Wife
    It’s Close’s wonderfully subtle characterization of Joan that lifts The Wife above its cliché setups and neat role reversals, which is really rather ironic. Once again, it’s the wife doing all the hard work. At least this time, she gets top billing.
  19. Sollers Point
    Sollers Point is easy to admire, abstractly and on principle. But you may still leave wondering if a little melodrama, a little bullshit, might have been preferable.
  20. Hotel Artemis
    We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.
  21. The Bleeding Edge
    [An] overstretched look at the poorly regulated medical devices industry.
  22. Diane
    An occasionally perceptive and endearingly un-commercial drama undercut by some serious narrative awkwardness.
  23. The Cable Guy
    The Cable Guy works best as a movie about how damn hard it is tell someone that you’re really not interested in getting to know them better.
  24. Good Boys
    Yet as with "Booksmart," the summer’s earlier riff on that Apatovian classic, there are times when Good Boys feels a little too nice to actually be uproarious. In more ways than one, it’s the training wheels for a better comedy — a slightly edgier and funnier one.
  25. Arctic
    As a showcase for Mikkelsen’s commitment, it’s sometimes gripping...Mads gets to show an intense vulnerability for once. That’s worth seeing, though one wishes Arctic complicated its life-and-death ordeal a little more, or at least varied its obstacles. At a certain point, even raw, screaming endurance isn’t quite drama enough.
  26. At War
    Ultimately, At War isn’t able to offer much more than gradual escalation of intensity. Even before the war is over, it’s hard not to withdraw.
  27. Leto
    What Leto understands is that the lives of these Russian rock pioneers never approached the excess and flashbulb excitement their American and British counterparts enjoyed. Steadicamming through modest concert venues and studio spaces, the film replaces the melodrama of the typical rock biopic with lots of downtime, spent recording and talking about music.
  28. Sorry Angel
    The film has some lovely beats, and good chemistry between its leads.
  29. The Wild Pear Tree
    At its best, The Wild Pear Tree captures not just the feeling, but also the process of coming to terms with one’s place in society — and that, if nothing else, requires patience.
  30. Dogman
    The lead performance, from the mostly unknown Fonte, is a small symphony of crumbling ingratiation: the portrait of a good man trying to cling to his principles in the face of stubborn, selfish immorality.
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