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. Boris Without Béatrice
    Boris Without Béatrice never feels like the work of an artist who actually believes in everything he’s doing.
  2. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.
  3. Passenger
    When in doubt, screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess so awkwardly rush back to genre conventions that it feels like Passenger failing a series of trust falls before our eyes.
  4. Seeing Other People
    Eventually finds its rhythm with late flashes of dark humor and bedroom hijinks, but it takes too much time to get there.
  5. Gymkata
    A true masterpiece of unintentional comedy...fantastically surreal.
  6. The Intern
    The lack of comic goals allows Meyers to write and write; a key emotional scene between De Niro and Hathaway late in the movie rambles on like a first draft, and the movie swells to the two-hour mark.
  7. Dangerous Beauty
    Taken on a camp level, there's a lot of fun to be had here, even if the movie may actually take itself seriously.
  8. The Age of Adaline
    For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.
  9. 96 Minutes
    Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross' uncle and guardian, but they don't have much to work with.
  10. Girls of the Sun
    This bombastic bid for respectability mostly left me thinking that their courageous, inspiring inspiration deserved a better movie, one with more nuanced plotting and a less overbearing score.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    While spending two hours listening to Whitney Houston’s greatest hits will never be a waste of time, Dance With Somebody is a sanitized, trope-laden retelling of Houston’s life that lacks purpose and a point-of-view.
  12. Woman Walks Ahead
    Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.
  13. The Golden Compass
    The Golden Compass does manage the job of bringing Pullman's world to the screen. With luck, any future entries will try harder to get the job done right.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Black powder and Christian Slater are cool and all, but real dramatic successes come when a film has both heart and a slate of talented actors who aren’t just leaning on their oversized patchwork capes to tell the story.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Skateland
    If he were even a fraction as appealing to the audience as he so mysteriously is to everyone in the film, Skateland would be much more engaging.
  16. A Walk in the Woods
    Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.
  17. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    There is visual wit in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and some invention, too.
  18. First Descent
    Entertainingly captures the camaraderie and spirit of competition among the affable boarders as they battle nature in the form of imposing mountains, regular avalanches, and jagged rock formations.
  19. You're Cordially Invited
    You’re Cordially Invited is a rigorously unoriginal and uncreative film, in compliance with the flat mundanity of content that the streaming giants want their audiences to bask in.
  20. Zizek!
    It's a straightforward, relatively style-free piece, primarily of interest to those who want to hear Zizek's pronouncements. But what distinguishes the film is Zizek's peculiar self-awareness, which borders on paranoia
  21. Windtalkers
    Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay.
  22. Cherish
    In the end, it becomes the cinematic equivalent of one of the songs Tunney adores: enjoyable enough while it lasts, but so thin that its ingratiating charms seem as much a source of frustration as pleasure.
  23. Mammoth
    While Mammoth is frequently poignant and beautifully acted--especially by Williams, who’s so lost and lonely that she becomes casually cruel--the movie lacks the personal touch that’s distinguished even Moodysson’s “difficult” films.
  24. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    It's disheartening that a story with roots in autobiography, no matter how tentative, should end up as such an impersonal genre rehash.
  25. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    This is a much drier, more reserved affair, though it can be quite powerful on the rare occasions when it allows raw emotion to make its way to the surface.
  26. The Neon Demon
    Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.
  27. Let's Spend the Night Together
    The great Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, Being There) directs, but doesn’t make his presence felt too often. In the midst of the personal and professional problems that plagued him after his '70s heyday, Ashby mostly finds a few angles, hopes for the best, then edits it together with all the artfulness of a televised sports broadcast.
  28. Oh Mercy!
    The only real gravitas comes from the reliably excellent Zem, here doing minor wonders with the clichéd role of the good-hearted, unwaveringly calm human lie detector.
  29. The Last Full Measure
    Hagiography doesn’t magically becomes less tedious simply because its subject made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, however, and this stolid, mournful drama does little more than solicit the viewer’s respect and admiration for Pitsenbarger, whose entire life gets reduced to a single act of uncomplicated nobility.
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