The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,443 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: 5,584 out of 10443
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10443
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10443
10443 movie reviews
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  1. A Home at the End of the World
    The result: some intriguing moments, even more intriguing performances, and a film that doesn't quite work.
  2. The Best Man Holiday
    While The Best Man Holiday doesn’t have anything especially original to say on the subject, it’s still refreshing to see a reunion movie set aside the usual themes of aging and reconciliation to focus on how a group deals with death.
  3. Copying Beethoven
    Aspires to the sublime, but it stalls at the merely ridiculous.
  4. 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.
  5. Outlaw King
    The heroes are noble but believable, the villains appropriately loathsome, and the violent clashes, particularly a turning-point castle infiltration, are exciting without indulging in a Gibson-style wallow in torture and gore. But the moments of offbeat personality that animate Mackenzie’s best work are fewer and farther between.
  6. Nights and Weekends
    To some extent, if you've seen one Swanberg film, you've seen them all; Nights And Weekends contains the usual mix of frank, awkward sex scenes and couples talking passive-aggressively around each other.
  7. Better Than Chocolate
    The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.
  8. Advantageous
    As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.
  9. Lemon
    Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.
  10. I Smile Back
    Silverman tackles the role with total conviction, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her play a similarly unhinged character in "Take This Waltz" — or, for that matter, anyone who’s seen her perform live.
  11. Tower Heist
    In the end, Tower Heist isn't a black Ocean's Eleven or a bold leap forward for feature-film distribution, just a passable piece of commercial entertainment that falls closer to product than art.
  12. Sarah's Key
    Veers in and out of conventionality, and ultimately sinks into it at the end. But first, it deals with old types in new ways, raising issues as it raises hackles.
  13. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo fades into the sidelines of his own movie, and that may be why the mournful finale of Battle feels so canned, like a roiling tide of crocodile tears. Eleven years ago, Jackson earned the fond, seemingly endless farewells of The Return Of The King. His Hobbit series has only one ending, and it comes not a moment too soon.
  14. The Silent Twins
    In The Silent Twins, the Gibbons sisters are let down by a script that undercuts the unique circumstances of their lives with familiar and ultimately less compelling storytelling tropes.
  15. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Between Two Ferns meanders; it invents often-pointless conflicts between its characters; it sometimes feels like a film casting around desperately for an emotional hook to rest itself upon.... It’s also deeply funny, surrounding a talented comedian with other talented comedians and letting them riff off of each other for a feature’s worth of length.
  16. Don't Move
    There's nothing cute, cloying, or playful about the lovers in Sergio Castellitto's opaque romantic drama Don't Move, but in their way, they're as incomprehensible as the stars of any gimmicky comic love film.
  17. Army of Darkness
    It’s just pure pleasure for 81 minutes, and that’s it.
  18. All Is True
    Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.
  19. Winter Solstice
    The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.
  20. Champs
    As a documentary, Champs feels a bit punch-drunk — weaving from one idea to the next while never quite zoning in on any particular target for too long.
  21. Amnesia
    Schroeder was reportedly inspired to make Amnesia as a tribute to his mother, who left Germany not long after the Nazis came to power and never wanted to return; he even shot the film in the house where she lived for many years (which was also a major location in his 1969 debut, More). But neither he nor his co-writers managed to prevent their ostensible subtext from swamping the text.
  22. The Manor
    As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.
  23. Battle Beyond the Stars
    Battle Beyond The Stars has a charm that belies its low budget and opportunistic origins.
  24. Humane
    It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.
  25. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    What a pity, then, that almost no imagination has been expended on the narrative.
  26. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    It wants to humanize the plight of the disabled, but it undermines its worthy aims by presenting its leads as martyrs and saints.
  27. Godzilla vs. Kong
    There may be a moral somewhere in Godzilla Vs. Kong about hubris and greed, but really, this movie knows you came to see monsters punch each other. And monsters punching each other you shall get.
  28. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Some good Bob Dylan songs are called in to underline the big moments, but end up eclipsing them instead. There's more drama and insight in a snippet of "One More Cup Of Coffee" than the entirety of Jack & Rose.
  29. Go for Sisters
    Like much of the later work by writer-director John Sayles, Go For Sisters is overlong, style-less, and dramatically undercooked.
  30. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    Though it sets out with noble intentions, What’s Love Got to Do With It is inelegant and reductive. It’s a well-meaning but misguided film that ends up playing into the same prejudices and preconceptions its characters are meant to be challenging.
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