The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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: 5,578 out of 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. Synchronicity
    Synchronicity is more contraption than movie, its plot as mechanically functional as a clock, rotating characters around like gears.
  2. Martyrs
    Unfortunately, in goosing the momentum, the creators of the film have lost the soul of what was essential to this horrific tale
  3. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Harry Potter, for all his nice-kid incorruptibility, looks downright four-dimensional compared to Redmayne’s milquetoast Newt—an impossibly twee soul with few discernible flaws or even particularly interesting characteristics.
  4. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    The most bewildering thing about The Secrets Of Dumbledore is how superfluous each of its ideas feel in relationship to one another. There are countless globe-trotting international characters, worlds-within-worlds, and constantly competing historical, political, and mythological references, but they all fizzle because their ill-considered stakes never seem fully realized.
  5. Monster Hunt
    Monster Hunt combines a lot of qualities from the other items on the all-timer’s list: epic action, elaborate special effects, broad comedy, and a style that could best be described as “exhausting.”
  6. Intruders
    Intruders ultimately comes across like basic-cable schlock (or is it Netflix schlock now?), slightly redeemed by the germ of a great idea, even if said idea never truly germinates.
  7. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Photos, clips from Eisenstein’s own films and from newsreels, and the director’s erotic drawings are spliced in or sometimes projected over the background, but the overloaded visual plane only underlines the fact that Eisenstein In Guanajuato never moves anywhere; eventually, it becomes stultifying. It’s a movie jumping in place.
  8. Frank & Lola
    In a trim 88 minutes, it manages to make Poots and Shannon an intriguing duo, then lets them revert to odd mismatch. It may be worth watching, though, for anyone who’s ever wanted to see Shannon attempt to burn holes in Justin Long with his eyes.
  9. The Hollars
    John Krasinski’s second feature has such a milquetoast, melancholy-indie sound that its most arresting and dynamic musical moment comes when three characters unexpectedly break into “Closer To Fine” by the Indigo Girls.
  10. The Lovers and the Despot
    Unfortunately, this bland, incurious oral history focuses exclusively on what’s admittedly the most superficially fascinating chapter of their lives: the eight years they spent making movies together in North Korea, after Kim Jong-il had them kidnapped.
  11. Get a Job
    With a cast this talented...Get A Job is never painful to endure, but neither does it ever rise above lazy mediocrity.
  12. Glassland
    The script is consistently either overexplicit or undernourished, and there’s only so much two fine actors can do.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.
  14. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The more striking moments of The Last Knight—this is an ostentatious Michael Bay movie, after all—speak just as loudly to its director’s indifference to both source material and visual scale.
  15. A Country Called Home
    There are a lot of bad things this movie doesn’t do, which is not quite the same as doing anything particularly well.
  16. White Girl
    Ultimately, Wood doesn’t have much time to treat the romance between Leah and Blue with any more depth than the characters. It’s a shame. Her final shot would have real power in a richer, more perceptive film.
  17. Snowtime!
    Dialogue is witless (though at least there are no pop-culture references), and the kids are all generic types with pre-packaged personalities.
  18. Hands of Stone
    Somehow, Hands Of Stone even manages to make Don King (Reg E. Cathey) seem bloodless.
  19. Sweet Bean
    What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.
  20. Going in Style
    It’s probably worth noting that the whippersnapper behind the camera is none other than one-time sitcom star and indie darling Zach Braff. Did he owe someone a favor, or is this his attempt to break into the studio system he scorned with his last feature, the gooey Kickstarted passion project "Wish I Was Here"?
  21. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    What’s frustrating about Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is how clearly it wants to recapture the magic of its predecessors while fundamentally misunderstanding how to approach a sequel set so chronologically apart from the rest of the franchise.
  22. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    It’s the sort of film that’s destined to be the answer to a trivia question, and not much more.
  23. Men & Chicken
    The film is grotesque and bizarre without ever really being funny, and while the sight of Mikkelsen as a nebbishy loser is initially bracing, the novelty wears off fast, leaving little else.
  24. Holidays
    Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.
  25. The Infiltrator
    Director Brad Furman (Runner Runner, The Lincoln Lawyer) can’t mount a coherent scene even in a Scorsese-aping Steadicam long take, but with this ersatz sting flick, he’s made something so amateurish and baffling that it comes around to being memorable.
  26. Lights Out
    The film is blatantly, unmistakably about mental illness, and that makes it hard to ignore or forgive what it ends up saying (hopefully by accident) on the subject.
  27. Dough
    Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.
  28. Cell
    Directed by Tod Williams (Paranormal Activity 2) and co-scripted by King himself, it brings a best seller to the big screen with a minimum of spectacle, a maximum of affordable Georgia locations, and a couple of names to splash prominently across the Amazon rental thumbnail.
  29. Approaching the Unknown
    Too high-minded to ever stoop to suspense or fun, Approaching The Unknown is almost completely interiorized, unspooling in voice-over narration that sounds like a writing exercise that got out of control.
  30. Rules Don't Apply
    Aside from Beatty’s performance, the only consistent thing the movie has going for it is ineffable strangeness; it seems to be trapped at the bottom of the chasm that separates its subversive aims from its nostalgic pursuits.
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