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. Raging Dove
    In the frustrating, underachieving documentary Raging Dove, the filmmakers seem to get shut down every time the film threatens to become interesting.
  2. Jobriath A.D.
    Jobriath A.D. is a tragic and occasionally fascinating look at pop stardom in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but its subject seems just barely compelling enough to sustain it.
  3. Skin
    This kind of hamfisted manipulation seems par for the course in a movie that’s eager to lob as much as it can as its central problems. The theme of change is purely cosmetic: The characters are intractable, and they all offer different versions of the same pathology.
  4. Brothers
    The intrinsically powerful material occasionally pierces through.
  5. Nocebo
    The “mystery” elements simply aren’t mysterious. Yet without them, the sparse moments of gore and icky bugs aren’t quite enough to pad things out.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.
  7. Happy Death Day
    It’s a reasonably clever spin, but not much more than that; once the novelty of the genre swap wears off, you’re just watching another inferior variation.
  8. The High Note
    The characters’ overall niceness makes the movie pleasant in the moment—and easy to shrug off as a fantasy.
  9. Henry Johnson
    Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.
  10. Eden
    Eden winds up yoking Howard’s more domesticated movies with his thwarted-adventure narratives. The suspense lies in whether certain characters will figure out whether they’re on a bold, one-off exploration or the cusp of a sustainable new life—and whether humanity on the whole is any good at telling them apart.
  11. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    Within its limited scope, the film celebrates Conti's peculiar dreams and earnest intensity without dipping into condescension.
  12. Penance
    The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.
  13. Prime
    Greenberg and Thurman are both engaging, but they can't quite compensate for their characters' shallowness. Streep, on the other hand, just can't stop compensating. Her oy-vey-can-you-believe-the-kid-and-his-shiksa performance is all studied mannerisms with no real heart.
  14. Jimmy P.
    Casting two great actors as doctor and patient helps a little.
  15. Knives and Skin
    Puts a forward-thinking feminist bent on the Riverdale school of neon Twin Peaks fetishism
  16. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Too often, The Next Level passes off callbacks to gags from its predecessor as jokes, all while presuming that viewers have an unhealthy familiarity with the Jumanji canon.
  17. Moana 2
    It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.
  18. Rising from Ashes
    Too bad, then, that Team Rwanda’s inspiring rise to prominence and eventual course triumphs are so thinly sketched that the film leaves the audience wanting more, in the most frustrating way possible.
  19. Mean Girls
    The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.
  20. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    As a sketch of the twilight of a great artist, The Farewell has merit, but the sketch would be better used as the background to a mural.
  21. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The fact that the story makes sense at all remains Coppola and his butchers' sole achievement.
  22. Risk/Reward
    For all the film's aggressive crosscutting, the individual stories would work just as well apart as together, because they pack less cumulative power when yoked awkwardly into one sweeping statement.
  23. I Am Chris Farley
    As a thoughtful examination of its subject’s life, I Am Chris Farley has its moments, but it plays more like a loving tribute than documentary, as if a bunch of his friends got together to tell stories. In that way, it succeeds, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the picture isn’t complete.
  24. Ask the Dust
    Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.
  25. First Snow
    Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.
  26. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington’s fifth feature — his best-known previous film was 2009’s equally gormless "Harmony And Me" — will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.
  27. The Equalizer 3
    There is nothing new here narratively, save the setting (shot with picturesque beauty by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), the names of the characters, and the details of the offense for which the evil doers will have to pay.
  28. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.
  29. Southbound
    Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.
  30. Shrek the Third
    Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.
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