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. Lovelace
    Seyfried expertly balances the girl-next-door star power that made the real Lovelace an unlikely casting choice with a more subtle strain of fear; Sarsgaard is as terrifying and hiss-worthy as he’s been since "Boys Don’t Cry."
  2. Nebraska
    Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.
  3. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  4. State 194
    As a primer, however, the film does the job, albeit less thoroughly and with more needless digressions than would even a lengthy magazine article on the subject.
  5. Out of the Furnace
    Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.
  6. Fury
    It’s all very Peckinpah — or at least it could be, if Ayer had any sense of poetry.
  7. Tammy
    McCarthy co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and appears as the heroine’s wormy tyrant of a boss. Their collaborative mojo results in some winning sweetness, but not a lot of hilarity.
  8. You Will Be My Son
    With this basic conflict established early on, You Will Be My Son endlessly spins its wheels, offering up scene after scene of Deutsch screwing up, or just plain existing, and Arestrup tossing deeply disgusted glances in his direction.
  9. Project Almanac
    As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.
  10. Devil's Due
    While it’s generally above-average for this sorry genre, it’s so derivative, in both style and narrative, that there’s still an overwhelming sense of plodding inevitability to the whole affair.
  11. Like Father, Like Son
    Like Father, Like Son has the overall depth and tenor of a Lifetime movie. Kore-Eda can do much better.
  12. 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.
  13. Blood Ties
    With his English-language debut, Blood Ties, Canet takes on material of even less interest to today’s big studios, constructing something much more ambitious than a straight thriller — a sprawling familial crime drama, heavier on relationships than chases or shoot-outs.
  14. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
  15. The Expendables 3
    With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be.
  16. Chef
    For anyone who’s followed Favreau’s career since the mid-’90s, the temptation to read Chef as veiled autobiography will be overpowering.
  17. Touchy Feely
    Without an improvisational buffer, in which actors feel their way naturally and uncertainly from moment to moment, Shelton’s scenario feels as painfully contrived as it is.
  18. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    The problem is that everything fun and resonant about the movie (like a boy whose eye works as a movie projector, unspooling his dreams onto the wall) ends up feeling rather ornamental.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    That Awkward Moment
    That Awkward Moment desperately wants to speak to a new generation of romantic-comedy devotees without proving it has the authority to do so. It’s not as laboriously dumb as the overloaded ensemble rom-coms of Garry Marshall ("Valentine’s Day," "New Year’s Eve") or the similarly star-studded "He’s Just Not That Into You."
  20. Thanks for Sharing
    Oddly, counterintuitively even, what’s most endearing about the film is how middle-of-the-road it is. While 2011’s "Shame" treated the same subject with too much seriousness, and next week’s "Don Jon" treats it with too little, Thanks For Sharing acknowledges that sex addiction, like most other problems in life, can be a source of both suffering and humor.
  21. Still Mine
    Cromwell delivers his defiantly gruff dialogue with amusing relish, while still grounding his protagonist’s actions in desperation and desolation. And his nostalgic conversations with Bujold while the two lay in bed have a naturalness that almost overshadows the creakiness of the surrounding material.
  22. I Declare War
    The problem, mainly, is that Lapeyre’s kids are stock types: runts, bullies, toadies, a girl with a big crush. In essence, they are kids’-movie tropes pretending to be war-movie tropes — one layer of generic material being used to cover another.
  23. After Tiller
    After Tiller is an hour and a half of folks on their best behavior, presented as a candid portrait.
  24. Una Noche
    Throughout, Una Noche’s details — an old man singing as he staggers down the street, young boys wasting away their days playfully leaping into the water — feel authentic.
  25. Parkland
    As vicarious, you-are-there re-creations of historical events go, it’s creditably workmanlike; whether that’s the best use of the dream factory is another matter.
  26. The Judge
    The movie isn’t without its pleasures, most of them related to performance. Farmiga, a perennially underrated actor, gives Samantha a measured confidence that sets Hank’s manic cockiness on edge, and Billy Bob Thornton does an effective variation on a slimy archetype as the prosecutor, Dwight Dickham.
  27. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.
  28. A.C.O.D.
    Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.
  29. Paradise: Faith
    A powerful final scene reveals that Seidl knew exactly where he was going. But the journey is stultifyingly static, repeating the same basic information over and over with only negligible variations.
  30. Birth of the Living Dead
    Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.
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