The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Spencer
    Stewart never seems to find an emotional reality for the icon she’s playing; the resonance begins and ends with the stunt casting of one hounded target of the bursting flashbulbs as another.
  2. Belfast
    This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.
  3. House of Gucci
    Ridley Scott's melodrama about the Italian fashion family has its moments, but not enough of them.
  4. Together
    Only in fits and starts does Together capture the electricity of live performance.
  5. Huda's Salon
    Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality.
  6. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
  7. The Deer King
    Though the recipe of a feudal setting with fantasy and myth-making elements ought to be strong, the mixture is off, like a handsomely plated sandwich where the ingredients are more bland than anticipated.
  8. Sundown
    Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness.
  9. Encounter
    As the film reveals its intentions around Ahmed’s character, too many scenes rely on superficial dialogue and contrived situations to push the plot along.
  10. The Good House
    Weaver is so forceful and present she can plow through the movie’s flaws until we fail to notice them. For a film about denial, that sounds about right.
  11. Damnation Alley
    Mostly the film just feels too skimpy. The first third is largely taken up in establishing the nuclear devastation of Damnation Alley’s world, leaving just an hour for the heroes’ perilous road trip across lands infested with what Peppard calls “killa cockroaches.” By the time the action really gets cranking, the movie is half-over.
  12. 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.
  13. American Underdog
    Levi has a smirking quality to him that sometimes reads as if he can’t believe he’s starring in this crap. He is credible as a clean-cut, all-American boy, however, and he and Paquin work as an onscreen couple. In fact, some of their banter is kind of cute. The supporting cast has its charms as well.
  14. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s a film that is functioning on a very specific artistic wavelength that requires one to buy into it completely in order to fully appreciate its delights. Whether that specific frequency is too obtuse for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts for ’70s sci-fi is up for debate, but the curious would best be served to experience this strange new world for themselves.
  15. Lightyear
    What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.
  16. See for Me
    While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.
  17. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker defangs herself with The Sky Is Everywhere, which seems to aim for putting something broadly positive in the world but lands on inconsequential.
  18. Breaking
    Breaking is a noble and deeply sensitive effort that aims to commemorate an honorable veteran who was failed by the dysfunctional and racist country that he bravely served. But despite a committed cast, and a well-staged and devastatingly truthful finale, Corbin fails to break this story out of its predictable mold.
  19. House Party
    To its credit, and this isn’t damning with faint praise, the new House Party is frequently very funny. (The R-rated language and creative insults are a great asset, even if they might restrict the potential teen audience.) What it has in humor, though, it lacks in pace.
  20. Infinite Storm
    What sustains a viewer’s interest in Infinite Storm is Watts’ controlled performance, and the film’s direction.
  21. Meg 2: The Trench
    It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.
  22. I Love My Dad
    Morosini, though, is smart enough to know that just grossing us out for 95 minutes is not a movie. So he tries to make his film dramatically credible. This proves more difficult, as he has nothing new or insightful to say about father-son relationships or the pernicious possibilities of social media. But managing to push the squirm-inducing envelope while still getting us to root for a reprehensible dad becomes its own sort of twisted achievement.
  23. She Said
    There is a compellingly naturalistic chemistry between Kazan and Mulligan as the reporters develop a bond of their shared pursuit of the truth, but these character beats are, at best, a garnish on the side of a relatively bland meal.
  24. Devotion
    Devotion admirably tries to tell the story of a heroic man, trying to place him within a recognizable historical and social context. However, in its attempts to show heroism and fortitude, it misses the complexity that must have influenced someone who was able to rise so high.
  25. They/Them
    The moments when it succeeds at commenting on continuing anti-LGBT travesties feel like a landmark of queer cinema, proudly planting a pride flag in the horror genre’s fertile fields. Unfortunately, They/Them’s biggest stumbles come from a crisis of identity—not in its characters or queer themes, but in the genre conventions it employs, misunderstanding the opportunities its storytelling affords.
  26. Stars at Noon
    An occasionally seductive but muddled examination of a complex physical and emotional relationship.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Hocus Pocus 2
    Hocus Pocus 2 (minus one shoulder shrug of a musical number) uses the franchise’s witchcraft and world-building to earnestly explore timely themes of identity and inclusivity, for a follow-up that fans may begrudgingly concede is better than the original.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging.
  29. Paddington In Peru
    More of an awkward step down than a pratfall from grace, Paddington In Peru is messier than its forebears.
  30. The Good Neighbor
    The only benefit the soul is likely to get from watching this is the comforting knowledge that you, the viewer, are not any of the people onscreen. Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching them be bad, of course. But it’s a detached kind of fun.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »