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. Lust for Life
    Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.
  2. Tiger Stripes
    Where it feels uninspired gore-wise, it similarly feels muddled in its message.
  3. Eric Larue
    Though carried by a subtle and strenuous performance from Greer, Eric LaRue‘s intentionally unanswered questions do less to provoke than render the film a collage of well-meaning, half-finished sentiments.
  4. The Amateur
    It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
  5. The Bikeriders
    It is too conventional to be an outlaw, but Nichols and the cast have a blast pretending.
  6. Society of the Snow
    Society Of The Snow may be the best version of this saga told so far. Still, it feels incomplete and doesn’t dig deeper even as it hints at greater pathos beneath the surface.
  7. Sing Sing
    The strength of the cast alone can’t elevate Sing Sing to the realm of truly socially conscious cinema.
  8. Mean Girls
    The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.
  9. Argylle
    In trying to do both—in trying to play it straight and yet show the very absurd mechanics of what it means to do so—Argylle lands in a kind of exhausting limbo, forever stretching its premise to its breaking point only to snap it back up again.
  10. The Boys in the Boat
    You cheer on these boys but you’re not left with much once the credits roll and their story becomes but a wistful tale of a time gone by.
  11. Land of Bad
    If you can get through a rough first act, you’ll see both absurd military superheroics and the greatest grocery run ever.
  12. Death of a Unicorn
    This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.
  13. Maria
    The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.
  14. Thelma the Unicorn
    Somewhere, buried under all that paint and glitter, there’s a lesson to take away from Thelma The Unicorn, but it’s nothing new.
  15. Moana 2
    It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.
  16. Hundreds of Beavers
    Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was.
  17. The Watchers
    The Watchers isn’t terrible: Shyamalan’s direction is legible, and the whole thing makes sense on a thematic level. (Maybe a little too much sense, actually.) But it lacks the creativity and confidence to go beyond “competent” and into “inspired”—probably because this one is just for practice.
  18. Love Hurts
    Love Hurts proves that honest emotions aren’t everything; sometimes you can just buy yourself enough goodwill to get by with last-minute junk.
  19. Alien: Romulus
    While incredible practical gore effects and stunning set pieces make Álvarez’s installment well worth watching, it’s as void of meaning as space itself. There are no answers, not even questions, merely what we manage to project onto vast emptiness.
  20. Humane
    It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.
  21. The Phoenician Scheme
    The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)
  22. Masters of the Universe
    The new Masters Of The Universe does not represent the best-case scenario, though if the bar truly is the ’87 version, consider it cleared with room to spare.
  23. The Instigators
    Besides the cast, the best thing The Instigators has going for it is Liman’s pacing. Maybe in some earlier, irreversibly bygone era it would seem like less of a virtue, but there’s something to be said for a modern director who still has the skills necessary to move from one thing to another with a minimum of wasted time.
  24. Parthenope
    There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.
  25. Emilia Pérez
    Though its thematic threads are never woven into salient social commentary, there is a perverse pleasure to be had with Emilia Pérez, even if its positions on gender, sexuality, and broader Mexican society lack proper nuance.
  26. M3GAN 2.0
    It seems that Johnstone and his collaborators learned the wrong lesson from M3GAN‘s shocking success.
  27. Drop
    Relying too much on bombast and shaky effects that diminish the tension, the movie isn’t confident enough to see its premise all the way through. At its best, though, Drop updates the small-scale, high-concept suspense that Hollywood has had on airplane mode for too long.
  28. Armand
    The film is replete with striking visual flourishes, yet its storyline suffers from the inclusion of an unnecessary air of surrealism.
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