The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. The Muppets Take Manhattan
    A rehash of The Muppet Movie that has the gang jumping over shorter hurdles to achieve the less-grand goal of mounting a Broadway musical. Of the first three Muppet movies, The Muppets Take Manhattan feels like the one aimed most directly at kids. In spite of its shortcomings, The Muppets Take Manhattan at least retains the spirit and message espoused by the first two entries in the series.
  2. The Running Man
    Once things get going, The Running Man just turns into a silly chase movie populated by baddies who look like B-level pro-wrestling villains.
  3. The Night Flier
    Not nearly as bad as it should be. For the most part, it's a well-made, enjoyably pulpy little genre film, albeit one that never quite overcomes the flimsiness of its source material.
  4. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    It’s the rare instance when you can see this great actor laboriously acting.
  5. I Do... Until I Don't
    The outline of a snappy relationship comedy is here, and Bell is talented enough to make one. Maybe next time she’ll commit to it.
  6. The Rehearsal
    The Rehearsal, director Alison Maclean’s first feature since the 1999 Denis Johnson adaptation Jesus’ Son, is such a hodgepodge of arthouse references, arch distancing effects, and emotionally vacant wide-screen compositions that one could easily mistake it for an awkward debut film.
  7. Fun Mom Dinner
    While there is plenty of drinking and a fair amount of drugs (just pot though, let’s not go crazy), the overall effect is more akin to passing out on the couch at 9 p.m. than partying until dawn.
  8. Lemon
    Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.
  9. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    To his credit, it probably would have been easy to turn this particular book into a quasi-satirical parade of withering takedowns. Turning it into a flavorless, center-less journey of self-discovery was likely a lot more work. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.
  10. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    Cheech And Chong’s Next Movie was Cheech and Chong’s next movie, their dogged lack of imagination seldom as amusing as in the self-reflexive title. Already they had begun to lose steam, recycling a joke in which one character tricks another into railing a line of powdered laundry soap.
  11. Bushwick
    Bushwick imagines nothing less than the collapse of the United States Of America, with half the country in armed revolt. At a time when that possibility can feel all too frighteningly real, it’s dispiriting to see it employed as little more than an excuse to engineer a live-action Grand Theft Auto.
  12. Cleaner
    Don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool you: Cleaner is just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller.
  13. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.
  14. No Time to Die
    No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Urban Cowboy
    Unapologetically trashy, Urban Cowboy is a virtual pageant of high redneck style—there are lots of bootleg trousers, halter tops, shag haircuts, and feather-brimmed Stetsons—and Winger is fun as the unapologetically trashy gal who just wants to bag herself a real cowboy. Unfortunately, Urban Cowboy is dull one time too often to qualify as entertaining kitsch.
  16. The Natural
    It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.
  17. Cocoon
    The first half of Cocoon is easier to stomach, as a group of septua- and octogenarians steal away to a private pool that becomes the Fountain Of Youth. The scenes of revitalized St. Petersburg retirees aerobicizing and breakdancing do have a genuine sweetness, especially with the roles filled out by a cast of beloved Hollywood old-timers.
  18. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Unfortunately, Felt’s actions, while historically important, don’t exactly make for riveting drama, especially compared to a classic about two dogged reporters. Nor does the film succeed in making Felt himself particularly interesting, except perhaps as a proxy—purely by coincidence, one assumes, given any movie’s lengthy gestation period—for another, recently terminated FBI honcho.
  19. Mrs. Hyde
    Like Bozon’s other films, Mrs. Hyde just comes across as randomly odd, throwing together a bunch of disparate, individually intriguing elements and hoping they’ll add up to something cohesive and satisfying. As usual, they don’t.
  20. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.
  21. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    Spurlock’s documentary turns out to be the exact thing it is meant to expose: an unfulfilling product passed off as something that’s good for you.
  22. Loving Pablo
    Cruz gets little to do in general apart from wear a succession of gaudy ’80s outfits, while Bardem, who gained weight for the role (reportedly aided by prostheses), acts primarily with his massive, frequently exposed gut. Both actors speak throughout in heavily accented English rather than Spanish, a choice that exemplifies Loving Pablo’s indifference to authenticity.
  23. Mary Shelley
    Art is actually as complicated as the lives that inspire it, which is probably why Mary Shelley builds its specious and underwhelming climax around the question of ownership. Perhaps that’s the most contemporary thing about it: intellectual property passed off as modern myth.
  24. The Third Murder
    The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.
  25. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Projects like this are invariably hit-or-miss, and Tiger Lily misses more often than it hits. Flashes of Allen's wit surface occasionally, particularly during bits in which he appears as himself, but they're few and far between, and generally drowned out by silly voices, a surprising amount of awkward silence, and pacing that makes the film seem much longer than its 80 padded minutes.
  26. Long Shot
    At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.
  27. The Ritual
    Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.
  28. Ghost Chase
    For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.
  29. The Rescuers
    While The Rescuers is at times a showcase for marvelously expressive art—especially in Kahl’s design for Madame Medusa, a sloppy, flailing disaster of a woman with a shapeless bust hanging to her waist and a face like a half-empty bag—the seams show throughout, and it’s all too easy to see the patchwork process that created it from foregrounds and backgrounds, and from animators of varying experience and talent.
  30. The Rhythm Section
    An always welcome presence, Law is the only cast member in The Rhythm Section to give the impression that he had any fun making the movie, playing B as a survivalist sourpuss with impossible reflexes. Nonetheless, he is consistently dressed and lit as though he were posing for a watch ad.
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