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. The Fate of the Furious
    More so than in any of the other movies, Dom’s wrecking crew of car nuts comes across like survival-of-the-speediest tacho-fascists, high-fiving their way through a path of destruction and to a collateral death toll that one presumes now numbers in the hundreds.
  2. Love
    Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.
  3. The Benefactor
    That makes the role well tailored to its occupant: Gere stays within his range of moneyed playboys, while still getting to indulge in the kind of unflattering behavior that a more put-together Richard Gere character would never exhibit.
  4. By the Sea
    Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
  5. My King
    My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who’s better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what’s essential.
  6. Chronic
    When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy, and it really does play, for better and worse, like a lengthy exploration of that Shins song’s thesis.
  7. The Program
    It’s a rote hatchet job, rehashing information that virtually everyone already knows, but at least it facilitates one of the year’s oddest and gutsiest performances.
  8. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  9. Five Star
    There’s just not enough meat on these bones, and what meat there is has been thoroughly chewed over. Authentic casting doesn’t guarantee anything.
  10. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.
  11. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
  12. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    It may be the only official Star Wars feature that seems concerned exclusively with delivering a no-frills good time. Unfortunately, the film’s idea of a good time includes neither dynamite banter nor particularly memorable action scenes.
  13. Partisan
    That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.
  14. Meet the Patels
    Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.
  15. Demolition
    Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.
  16. Staten Island Summer
    Frustratingly, the movie is plenty likable when it’s not trying to show off its wistfulness.
  17. Misunderstood
    The ostensible boldness of Misunderstood is undermined by the sense that it’s also pandering—that its view of childhood as a bourgeois horror-show is at least as salable on the art-house circuit as it is authentic to its creator’s experiences.
  18. Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    A film that’s a lot like the last one, just not quite as funny or endearing. If you loved Goon, you’re gonna kind of like Goon: Last Of The Enforcers.
  19. The Dressmaker
    At its best, The Dressmaker looks like 1950s Vogue does the outback. Director Jocelyn Moorhouse poses Kate Winslet and the rest of her female cast in gorgeous finery against a dingy landscape, their expertly tailored garments contrasting splendidly against the dust. It’s a beautiful, bizarre, and funny juxtaposition. It works. The rest of the movie doesn’t.
  20. Truth
    That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.
  21. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.
  22. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
  23. Wolf Totem
    It sets out to take the viewer on a journey, but ends up giving them little more than a pleasantly diverting sight-seeing tour. There are worse ways to spend two hours. Better ones, too.
  24. Race
    The rest of Race has other moments of engagement in a slickly produced and watchable package. But ultimately, it offers history told as a series of passing anecdotes.
  25. Maggie's Plan
    A comedy that proves that an appealing cast (Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore) and a wonderful premise are no guarantee of big laughs.
  26. Francofonia
    Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.
  27. From Afar
    From Afar plays like a typical first feature, with ambition outstripping execution by a hefty margin.
  28. Into the Forest
    Indeed, there are stretches of Into The Forest during which one could momentarily forget that it’s a survivalist tale at all… or even that it’s taking place in the middle of nowhere, for that matter. The essential becomes irrelevant.
  29. Sunset Song
    Stultifying in spots, the period drama Sunset Song marks an unexpected misstep for Terence Davies, the eccentric filmmaker whose movies evoke limbo states of memory and repressed feeling using a very British vocabulary of drab spaces.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Lolo
    The film is at its best when its central trio fumbles around the same circle of hell they’ve obliviously created for themselves, making the best of a situation that is much worse than they could ever imagine.
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