The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,447 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: 5,587 out of 10447
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10447
  3. Negative: 1,114 out of 10447
10447 movie reviews
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  1. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Every year, so many artless, gormless, generically slick thrillers make their way into theaters that any time a genre director displays basic filmmaking smarts, the result ends up seeming like a retro novelty. Such is the case with writer-director Scott Frank’s murky potboiler A Walk Among The Tombstones.
  2. Significant Other
    At the halfway mark, a little spice gets shaken into the otherwise thin soup. It’s still far from a must-see, but there are rewards for those who stick to the end.
  3. Backstage
    Bercot moves the characters up and down like lines on a chart, never granting full access to what any of them are thinking. And access is what Backstage promised.
  4. Morning Glory
    Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.
  5. 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.
  6. The Last Kiss
    Unfortunately, nothing about Tony Goldwyn's vapid, navel-gazing, claustrophobic adaptation of a 2001 Italian film rings remotely true.
  7. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Less a fantasy than a somber, enveloping mood piece, which is a large part of what makes it so strangely, irrationally compelling.
  8. Wrath of Man
    Wrath is also fun, after a fashion, only with the grim undercurrent of a movie more interested in generating violence than truly motivating it. This is especially true in the second half, when Ritchie offers solutions to a mystery that never really had any viable suspects.
  9. Today's Special
    So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.
  10. Mascots
    The only thing Mascots has to be is laugh-out-loud funny, and yet, most of the time, the only things it elicits are reflexive chuckles and a sense of creeping boredom.
  11. The Ritual
    Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.
  12. Last Chance Harvey
    If nothing else, Last Chance Harvey proves that you're never too old to be the subject of a zany trying-on-dresses montage, but considering the prestige of its leads, that's a minor victory at best.
  13. Horrible Bosses
    In the film's funniest scene, a coked-up Day rocks out to The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" in a car in a state of ecstatic frenzy.
  14. Mama
    Plenty of horror movies are willing to settle for making audiences jump. Mama is more ambitious by far: It makes sure viewers are emotionally committed even when they aren't clutching their armrests or covering their eyes.
  15. The Company You Keep
    The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.
  16. Them That Follow
    Perhaps that’s why, despite some skillful scene-setting and committed supporting performances, Them That Follow is lifeless enough that small inconsistencies in accents, costuming, and set dressing appear more significant than they would in a more, well, thrilling thriller.
  17. Proxy
    Proxy’s greatest attribute is its deliberate dismantling of the audience’s assumptions.
  18. Galveston
    This latest film isn’t entirely successful — Pizzolatto’s book stubbornly resists first-time screenwriter Jim Hammett’s efforts to reshape its narrative for the screen — but it confirms Laurent as a significant talent behind the lens, particularly adept at building queasy tension.
  19. Cet amour-là
    Moreau is magnetic as the wise-but-neurotic scribe, though the same can't be said of Demarigny, whose timid portrayal of a reverent fanboy sucks the energy out of most of his scenes. Dayan's direction is even more problematic.
  20. Dark Blue
    Flaws and all, Dark Blue has a combustible energy that's usually anathema to Hollywood, reopening an old wound that has festered too quietly for more than a decade.
  21. Two Men Went to War
    Cleverly realizing a novel premise, it's a slight but charming look at the lighter side of WWII.
  22. Burden
    Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.
  23. Flash of Genius
    It's a smart movie for grownups, an increasingly rare commodity.
  24. Brother to Brother
    Well-intentioned to a fault, the film packs a strange, ultimately unsuccessful combination of prurience and clumsy identity politics.
  25. You've Been Trumped
    Aside from the corny title, Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped is a fine, powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, using old-fashioned vérité techniques - and more than a little audience manipulation - to show how political influence and media savvy help the wealthy exert their will.
  26. It's Complicated
    It’s Complicated is the sort of “mature” character piece the French do regularly and better (and without the need for quotation marks around “mature”), but the cast at least helps relieve some of the tidiness that belies the title.
  27. little man
    While Conn's story is inherently compelling, it's pretty much ruined in the telling thanks to her unnerving choice to fill it with a twinkling piano-heavy score, florid narration, and trembling slow-motion.
  28. Havoc
    Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.
  29. I Origins
    I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.
  30. Unfinished Song
    Unfinished Song is basically two movies inelegantly stuffed into one. Both are about aging — its setbacks and second chances — but only one of them feels like an honest exploration of the topic. The better half of the film is a kinder, gentler cousin to 2012’s "Amour."
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