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. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    Though Sandel relies less on exasperating, rubbery digital effects than Rob Letterman, the DreamWorks Animation vet who helmed the original, his direction of the monsters and mayhem is never more than workmanlike, racing joylessly through a shaky plot that barely holds attention.
  2. A Good Woman
    The trick to staging Wilde is to hint at the gravity beneath the witticisms. A Good Woman barely even gets the witticisms out, though it does contain Wilde's line about people being either tedious or charming.
  3. The Killer Inside Me
    Affleck is the perfect actor for this role, though he’s a little too mush-mouthed to do the voiceover narration required of a noir.
  4. The Rocker
    Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.
  5. Finding Your Feet
    Pitched to the weekday-matinee crowd, the insipid British retirement-age comedy Finding Your Feet doesn’t have much to recommend it apart from its grossly overqualified cast, led by Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall.
  6. Resistance
    Resistance is like a maudlin Robin Williams vehicle inorganically fused with a by-the-numbers wartime thriller. In place of showbiz clichés, there are tacky WWII-movie tropes.
  7. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.
  8. The Tender Bar
    The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck
  9. Bachelorette
    While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.
  10. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    The film is even less than the sum of its genre trappings.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Muppets from Space
    The cavalcade of guest spots does give viewers the rare opportunity to see Andie MacDowell getting punched in the stomach by Miss Piggy, as well as the chance to watch Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes reject the amorous advances of a wise-cracking prawn, but they also undermine Muppets From Space's attempts to transcend its dull, plodding shenanigans.
  12. Dog Eat Dog
    An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.
  13. Valley Girl
    Despite the occasional one-liner that lands and the commitment of a game cast, this Valley Girl’s charms are blotted out by its noisy neon brightness. By the end, even a fan of the original may feel dread instead of glee at the rise of synth on the soundtrack, announcing yet another interminable musical number.
  14. Gnomeo and Juliet
    Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.
  15. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.
  16. Wanderlust
    The effortlessly charming Rudd - who is never funnier here than when trying to psych himself up for a tryst with commune-dweller Malin Akerman with a series of increasingly preposterous voices - and an attractive, game supporting cast nearly sell the warmed-over material.
  17. Hypnotic
    Hypnotic isn’t just refreshingly straightforward for Rodriguez, but for Ben Affleck too.
  18. The Moment
    The Moment doesn’t meet the gold standard of self-pitying emptiness set by The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, but it does share with that movie the sense that the gorgeous surface is performing a kind of vamping at the behest of a music-video-thin story.
  19. Target
    Dillon comes off as a whiny, unlikable brat, the premise's comic potential goes unrealized, and the spy stuff feels familiar and halfhearted. Good as he is, Hackman can't transform the second-rate into a masterpiece.
  20. 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.
  21. Five Feet Apart
    Unfortunately, welcome insight into the physical and emotional experience of living with cystic fibrosis eventually gives way to increasingly improbable romantic and dramatic scenarios...By its third act, the film almost starts to feel like a parody of the most maudlin conventions of the “sick teen romance” genre.
  22. Deep Water
    Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, both terrific in their roles, play the couple around whom the film’s meditation on modern sexual relationships revolves, while Lyne proves not only that he can film hot scenes unlike almost anyone in the business, but inject them with a psychological sophistication that complicates their (and our) postcoital bliss.
  23. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    [REC] 4 is a tight, controlled film, not the explosive epic promised by the “Apocalypse” in its title.
  24. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    It ends up a whole lot of cute, branded nothing — watchable junk for young adults of tomorrow to look back on with inordinate fondness.
  25. Atropia
    Without a tangible connection to the material—most notably to Iraq and its people—Gates’ viewpoint feels unguided, doomed to be influenced by the same pervasive prejudices that Atropia ostensibly attempts to combat.
  26. The Lucky Ones
    Like its lead characters, Lucky is wounded, lost, and impractical, but it has a messy, winning humanity and an agreeably leisurely pace that almost redeems it.
  27. The Book of Eli
    Its hero may be on a mission from above, but in a refreshing twist, the fate of mankind rests with the literate.
  28. The Quarry
    This muddled slow-burn tragedy — adapted from the Damon Galgut novel of the same name — is unfocused and overly familiar. It also fumbles its political commentary.
  29. Australia
    It almost goes without saying that the film looks gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a scale. Australia is big. But it never fills the screen.
  30. Duane Hopwood
    Duane Hopwood is suffused with hangdog dreariness, equivalent to a unsoled shoe treading rainwater.
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