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. Unmade in China
    As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.
  2. Unfriended: Dark Web
    It’s a patently ludicrous story. The storytelling, though, remains clever and grippingly singular, again finding creative ways to progress the narrative without cheating the locked-vantage format.
  3. Shooter
    Fuqua keeps the action moving efficiently, but he doesn't know when to stop piling it on, and eventually, Wahlberg's army of one becomes more a comic-book vigilante than a righteously disgruntled patriot.
  4. Annabelle Comes Home
    For the most part, it works. True, the haunted objects are silly at times, but unlike The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home is only funny when it’s supposed to be. And it’s enjoyable because of its clockwork efficiency, not in spite of it.
  5. Robin Hood
    Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.
  6. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  7. Donnybrook
    Here, Sutton is working with actual characters, played by professional actors, and his instinct is to flatten them as much as possible.
  8. The Wiz
    The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.
  9. Flightplan
    But coming on the heels of "Red Eye," which is nothing if not an efficient thrill machine, Flightplan can only look conspicuously flat by comparison.
  10. RocknRolla
    As is the norm for Ritchie, Rocknrolla is also too long, too coolly violent, and too populated by characters who all talk like they've been reading the same pulp novelist.
  11. The Mauritanian
    It’s revealed that the evidence against Salahi, who admits only to training with the formerly CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen in an al-Qaeda camp back in the early ’90s, consists of summaries of reports and confessions, which neither side is supposed to see. But instead of rising to the challenge of such potentially abstract subject matter, the film opts for clichés: file boxes, lawyer talk over fast food, the classic confrontation in a poorly lit parking lot.
  12. Imaginary Heroes
    It looks good. It seems to work. It occasionally coheres into a priceless moment. But in the end, the pieces don't all fit together as they should.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    A disarmingly enthusiastic documentary about how its subject eventually found his own way into orbit.
  14. Broken
    Doggedly manipulative and yet consistently affecting, Broken piles on the miserablism to almost unbearable effect.
  15. Aladdin
    Ricthie’s Aladdin feels sluggish in comparison to the fast-paced original. Even the songs suffer; the direction of the musical numbers is surprisingly unimaginative and turgid, to the point that even surefire showstoppers like “Prince Ali” and the mighty “A Whole New World” end up succumbing to lackluster staging and uncomfortable performances.
  16. Keeping Mum
    Keeping Mum never really gets going, and it inches to the finish line like a narcoleptic turtle.
  17. Piranha 3-D
    Piranha 3D realizes its guilty-pleasure camp potential for about a minute and a half, proving yet again that there's no concept so foolproof filmmakers can't screw it up.
  18. John Dies at the End
    It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.
  19. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    There's little here that's especially cage-rattling or side-splitting. Ultimately, Allah only made these guys mildly likable.
  20. The Forever Purge
    In The Forever Purge, we’re told a story that a battered nation has heard a lot—a sermon of immigration and class warfare that’s too heavy-handed to say anything its prospective audience hasn’t been told on countless social media feeds over the last few years.
  21. Emancipation
    A drama that aches to connect with the George Floyd era is more like amped-up misery porn, a Will Smith vanity project that pales next to more accomplished films about Black suffering that better remind us of our nation’s ongoing shame.
  22. Ma
    Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster.
  23. Jungleland
    Earnest fraternal affection is the main attraction in Jungleland, director Max Winkler’s moody road-trip movie by way of a bare-knuckle boxing drama.
  24. Vanity Fair
    Either a radical reinterpretation of the source material or a mammoth failure of nerve. Whichever the case, it makes for a tremendously dull film that gives Witherspoon little to do except pose against a pretty backdrop.
  25. Tea with Mussolini
    While Zeffirelli couldn't have assembled a more capable cast, none of them, except Cher, are given characters colorful enough to make the film worthwhile; almost everyone gets lost amidst the Tuscan scenery.
  26. De-Lovely
    If Porter's songs are so timeless, why does the movie sound like something that might have played on VH1 five years ago?
  27. Ricky
    The frisson between the two halves is intriguing for a while, but it leaves the film feeling adrift.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    That's What I Am
    It's a dogged family entertainment determined to teach lessons about tolerance and how it should be extended to everyone, even redheads, gay people, and kids with cooties.
  29. Race with the Devil
    A near-exact cross between Rosemary's Baby, Duel, and The Parallax View, Race With The Devil has problems getting over the flat, TV-style direction by Cleopatra Jones director Jack Starrett, but it gets by on engaging drive-in goofiness, even if it's tough to swallow the idea that mid-'70s Texas swarmed with Satanists.
  30. Palmer
    The best thing that can be said about Palmer is that it’s innocuous: overlong and sentimental, but rarely annoying.
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