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. Police Story 2 (1988)
    Opens with a montage of thrilling clips from its predecessor, then hits all the same notes, harder and duller.
  2. The Art of Self-Defense
    In a movie that often observes male dysfunction with some ironic distance, Eisenberg brings the satire closer to the bone.
  3. Two Plains & a Fancy
    Comedy is complicated and contextual, and the line between intentional and unintentional humor becomes confusing when the former mimics the latter.
  4. Ramen Shop
    If you can tolerate a little saccharine piano music and ethereal backlighting with your food porn, Ramen Shop is an appetizing little bite of multicultural foodie edutainment.
  5. Tell It to the Bees
    What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.
  6. The Perfection
    The Perfection takes deep, fetishistic satisfaction in pushing the envelope, then pushing it some more, building in seductive fits and shocking starts to an orgiastic frenzy of cinematic excess. Is it a progressive movie? Not especially, but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re getting into.
  7. Nightmare Cinema
    Now, Garris’ unflagging enthusiasm for uplifting his fellow creators has found a new manifestation: Nightmare Cinema, a sort of sideways revival of the Masters Of Horror franchise.
  8. Ready or Not
    The charitable reading is that Ready Or Not understands how moneyed entitlement knows no gender — that the only way to break the arbitrary yet destructive grasp of the super-rich is to chop it off, or possibly light it on fire. So no, not a subtle movie. But a fairly satisfying one.
  9. Judy
    It’s an intriguing idea that results in a painfully by-the-books biopic. That being said, a gusty, heartbreaking turn from Renée Zellweger makes the exercise worth sitting through.
  10. Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
  11. Pain and Glory
    Banderas’ performance is so rich, in fact (he won Best Actor at Cannes), that it creates the illusion of a narrative with real depth and texture—he keeps us invested in Salvador even as the film repeatedly declines to complicate the man’s life any further.
  12. Les Misérables
    While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted May 20, 2019
  13. Oh Mercy!
    The only real gravitas comes from the reliably excellent Zem, here doing minor wonders with the clichéd role of the good-hearted, unwaveringly calm human lie detector.
  14. Sorry We Missed You
    For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.
  15. The Traitor
    The screenplay — written by Bellocchio in collaboration with several others — has no particular point of view regarding Buscetta, seeming content merely to take us step by step through his two decades as an informant.
  16. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  17. Invisible Life
    Much of this is relentlessly bleak and hopeless—true to reality, perhaps, but also repetitious and dramatically inert.
  18. On a Magical Night
    Despite its welcome breezy and surreal qualities, On A Magical Night has more psychological shortcuts than insights.
  19. Fire Will Come
    Quiet, slow-moving, ambiguous character studies might be a dime a dozen on the festival circuit, but there are few that remind us that there are things out there that still feel as big as myth.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lux Æterna
    Cinephiles will grin at Noé’s references to Dreyer, Godard, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder, and everyone with functioning eyesight will stare agape at the closing lightshow, but the experience won’t lead to substantive post-movie conversations as Irreversible and Climax did.
  21. 21 Bridges
    This is a well-crafted, exciting movie, sometimes more impressive for maintaining those qualities in the face of an utterly unsurprising story.
  22. Crawl
    If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama.
  23. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.
  24. Tales of Terror
    Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.
  25. Mike Wallace Is Here
    To be blunt—which Wallace, who died in 2012, always was—Mike Wallace Is Here is fascinating but scattered, and never quite decides what its target should be.
  26. Onward
    Watching Onward, it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe Pixar has overplayed the mundane half of its winning equation. They’ve made a movie about looking for misplaced magic in the modern world that, well, kind of misplaces the magic.
  27. Jawline
    Mandelup does, however, treat both the internet personalities and the fans beholden to them with great respect.
  28. The Fury
    The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.
  29. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.
  30. The Way We Were
    Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.
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