The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,423 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10423
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10423
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10423
10423 movie reviews
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  1. Cézanne et Moi
    Intensive research has killed many a biopic, but Cézanne Et Moi, which recounts the tempestuous lifelong friendship between Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola, labors even more tediously than most to accommodate personal details, whether or not those details serve the narrative.
  2. Spark: A Space Tail
    As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.
  3. The Dinner
    The Dinner wants to chill bloodstreams by revealing what decent, civilized people — the kind that adopt children from other countries, consider their politics liberal, and wine and dine in high class — are truly capable of. But as food for thought goes, that’s pretty lukewarm.
  4. Victoria and Abdul
    It’s just another piece of well-decorated regal real estate.
  5. Megan Leavey
    When Megan Leavey touches upon the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in both humans and animals, it looks capable of bringing something novel to the human-and-dog formula. Most of the time, it’s a rote biography of someone a dog really liked.
  6. Patti Cake$
    There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.
  7. To the Bone
    It’s snarkier and a little more self-conscious than the rest, but just as cornball.
  8. The Yellow Birds
    Directed by Alexandre Moors, who made the D.C. sniper movie Blue Caprice, The Yellow Birds might have used its nonlinear structure to confront us with how war reshapes these young men, putting who they were and who they become into conversation. But the performances don’t capture that psychological change.
  9. Wolves
    Most of the cast does a fine job of turning this hooey into something serviceable.
  10. Wonder Park
    Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.
  11. Sing 2
    In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.
  12. Step
    Over and over, it pitches us reasons to care about these young women—an all-too-perfect example of a documentary that exists to make people feel good for watching it.
  13. War Machine
    This is the most bizarre lead performance of Pitt’s career, as he plays McMahon as a stroke victim doing the world’s worst impression of George Clooney.
  14. Sand Castle
    It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."
  15. The Disaster Artist
    Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.
  16. Hot Summer Nights
    For all of this ersatz panache, the plot of Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script—less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.
  17. Venom
    The best moments toy with a kind of superhero body horror, but the movie never fully commits to that angle, maybe to appease a ratings board and perceived audience of 13-year-olds (isn’t that who Venom was designed to please?), or maybe because director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is more interested in the comic possibilities than the horrific ones.
  18. Mary Magdalene
    Once Mary makes the difficult decision to leave her family (rejecting the arranged marriage they’d planned for her) and follow Jesus (or “the rabbi,” as everyone mostly calls him, in a nicely accurate touch), she’s unfailingly loyal, understanding, compassionate, and wise. In a word, she’s boring. At least Jesus gets to be plagued by fear and doubt.
  19. Suburbicon
    The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.
  20. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    Where Score proves its value to those fans is when it simply allows them to watch these composers at work.
  21. The New Mutants
    While The New Mutants aspires to some inventive mash-up of high-school soap, haunted-house movie, and comic-book origin story, each of its elements feels half-baked; if Boone studied Buffy for reference, he clearly paid as little attention to it as his horny, preoccupied young heroes do.
  22. The Trip to Spain
    Thing is, this third movie plays less like some bookend chapter of a complete saga than a floundering middle season of a television show that’s settled into a formulaic groove—which makes sense, given that each Trip is actually a condensed version of an episodic miniseries that aired on British television first.
  23. The Day After
    A lazy shoulder shrug of a movie that never bothers to work out who its characters are, what they want, or why their ostensible problems should be of interest to anyone else.
  24. Happy End
    Happy End is far from the best Michael Haneke movie. But it just might be the most Michael Haneke movie — a kind of grueling greatest-hits collection from the reigning scold of European art cinema.
  25. Godard Mon Amour
    Though adapted from her memoirs, Godard Mon Amour dubiously minimizes her character. The most it offers is a depiction of a deteriorating marriage between a beautiful woman and an asshole who’s in the middle of a crisis of artistic conscience. And Godard already made one of those. It’s called "Contempt."
  26. Woodshock
    Viewers who thought nothing much happened in "It Comes At Night" are advised to steer clear.
  27. Captive State
    It’s not unreasonable to expect something like excitement out of a story about freedom fighters plotting to take back the planet. Captive State does not clear that fairly low bar.
  28. Winchester
    The real problem is that all that speculative fun has been shaped into a rather clunky, derivative bit of supernatural claptrap: a haunted house movie curiously low on mystery or honest scares.
  29. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    It’s everything and nothing at once.
  30. Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
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