The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. This One's for the Ladies
    Gene Graham’s humanizing, scrappy, documentary portrait of the black men and women of exotic dancing offers more than mere titillation.
  3. Rust Creek
    Screenwriter Julie Lipson’s well-written, naturalistic dialogue helps pass the time, as does Michelle Lawler’s lovely scenic cinematography. But although what we get instead stands on its own merits, this survival thriller could have used a few more thrills.
  4. The Wedding Guest
    It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.
  5. Triple Frontier
    Triple Frontier becomes a fascinating sustained exercise in absurdist triage, as one mishap after another forces the men to decide whether they’re prepared to throw away obscene amounts of money in order to save their skins.
  6. Buffalo Boys
    Buffalo Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain, which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  8. Little
    Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.
  9. Pink Flamingos
    Almost anyone could dig up and film someone with the ability to lip-synch using his a**hole, but it takes genius to set the scene to Surfin' Bird.
  10. The Hole in the Ground
    Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.
  11. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  12. Big Time Adolescence
    A debauched but heartfelt coming-of-age story about impressionable teenage boys and the imperfect male role models who influence them. Davidson’s most important skill is his ability to share the spotlight and create real chemistry with his co-stars.
  13. Tora! Tora! Tora!
    The careful balancing of the two sides produces its own interesting effect, however, showing how war goes from possible to inevitable, whatever the wishes on either side. Had Tora! Tora! Tora! taken the notion a bit further, it might have created a portrait of escalating tension chilling enough to rival its carefully orchestrated climactic bombing raid.
  14. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    If Brügger shares the doubts of Williams and other Hammarskjöld conspiracy theorists about Operation Celeste (in all likelihood a hoax, though not a Soviet one), he doesn’t let them get in the way of a good story. As for the latest official U.N. inquiry, its report is due sometime this year. But then, can you really trust it?
  15. The Death of Dick Long
    Billy Chew’s screenplay takes at least one important lesson from the best of both crime movies and small-town portraits: The characters, however minor or ridiculous, seem to lead lives that started well before the movie and will continue long after. Well, except for Dick himself. He’s gone.
  16. Honey Boy
    This is actually a fairly conventional indie drama.
  17. Official Secrets
    Things perk up when Fiennes belatedly appears, and while this isn’t one of the performances he’ll be remembered for, by any means, he delivers a fine moment of utter disgust at the government’s naked corruption in the film’s very last scene. Ending on that note feels right.
  18. Run
    A psychological thriller with frustratingly little to say about the trenches of the human mind, Run nevertheless satisfies as a taut and titillating get-out movie that lands somewhere between HBO’s "Sharp Objects" and "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?"
  19. I Am Mother
    So many truly disturbing revelations pile up in the final half hour or so that processing the relevant information leaves little time for raw emotion. Swank’s nameless character, in particular, remains a pencil sketch. Still, there’s no question that Sputore can direct a movie.
  20. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.
  21. American Pop
    All that aside, American Pop is still worth watching. Bakshi may not have perfectly captured eight decades of American music history, but his attempt to do so is often thrilling for reasons other than ambition.
  22. Monster Hunter
    There’s a couple badass heroes with humongous swords, a few big scaly monstrosities, and frequently not much else. The minimalism is consistent with Anderson’s career-long devotion to delivering caloric content with an unlikely combo of classical unities and pounding, insta-dated electronic beats. The movie’s called Monster Hunter—what more could it reasonably need?
  23. Abominable
    The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.
  24. The Competition
    Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.
  25. Ma
    Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster.
  26. By the Grace of God
    Mostly, though, this very empathetic project suffers from an inability to offer anything beyond what one would expect from its synopsis.
  27. The Golden Glove
    Whatever pleasure there is to be found in watching a film like The Golden Glove is in the intellectualizing, and the film does prompt a series of provocative questions about the implicit contract between artist and audience.
  28. The Plagiarists
    Ultimately, it’s the awkwardness that they’re prodding. The Plagiarists isn’t asking why one person would tell a lie, but why another would be so bothered by it — an ambitious line of inquiry for which the film provides more references than concrete answers.
  29. Synonyms
    Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.
  30. Combat Obscura
    Unsurprisingly, the results aren’t pretty.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »