The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
    Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.
  2. The Best of Enemies
    Bissell’s fudging of the facts (which includes completely making up the reasons behind the charrette) doesn’t create a story that’s more insightful or dramatically cohesive than the real thing; the only thing it reveals, if indirectly, is liberalism’s longstanding discomfort with the relationship between civil rights and labor movements.
  3. A Dog's Way Home
    This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.
  4. Saludos Amigos
    Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale, joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and entertain, but fails on both counts.
  5. Miss Bala
    It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.
  6. Bird Box
    In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.
  7. The Secret Life of Pets 2
    Actual kids will probably enjoy The Secret Life Of Pets 2, just as they probably enjoy whatever mini-movies Illumination churns out to supplement its hyper-successful home-entertainment releases. But they might also start to sense just how mini this sequel feels, and start fidgeting after 15 or 20 minutes.
  8. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    In nearly every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night is as run-of-the-mill a slasher film as the ’80s produced, enjoyable today primarily for its kitsch value.
  9. Shaft
    Among all the cardinal sins of moviemaking it commits (up to and including reusing an iconic needle drop from a Martin Scorsese movie), the worst is this: It makes Shaft look uncool.
  10. The Kitchen
    While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.
  11. Cruising
    In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype–the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others–the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same.
  12. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.
  13. Angel Has Fallen
    Given the awfulness of its predecessor, which was this publication’s pick for the worst film of 2016, a sequel that’s merely pedestrian represents a dramatic improvement.
  14. Men in Black: International
    Director F. Gary Gray, while experienced in both action and comedy, also struggles to keep the film’s picaresque plot on track.
  15. The Wolf Hour
    A gloomy psychological thriller interested in the distinct paranoia of a woman living in self-exile in the South Bronx.
  16. Deadly Blessing
    Craven’s best work resolves the contradictions of his bloodlust and intellect—in that, Deadly Blessing isn’t one of his best.
  17. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.
  18. Velvet Buzzsaw
    If there’s undeniable difficulty in Velvet Buzzsaw’s genre alchemy—its attempt to mix a caustic, half-comic portrait of the gallery set with a supernatural Tales From The Crypt scenario—it’s all in service of a moldy screed about the commodification of art. Is there anything safer than telling people something they’ve heard a thousand times before?
  19. The White Crow
    Unlike its subject, The White Crow is ultimately forgettable.
  20. A Dog's Journey
    Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.
  21. The Highwaymen
    After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.
  22. After the Wedding
    Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.
  23. The Witches
    Where is the Zemeckis who projected a cartoon-noir Christopher Lloyd into every child’s nightmares? The same director has thrown a softening, coddling filter over Dahl, preserving the shape of his source material while sanding down its edges.
  24. The Sunlit Night
    Unfortunately, everything engaging about the narrative is overshadowed by gratuitous quirkiness.
  25. The Brink
    The inherent risk of this vérité approach is that your subject won’t prove to be all that fascinating, and The Brink, while far more openly critical of Bannon than "American Dharma," ultimately offers little justification for spending an hour and a half in his company.
  26. The King of Staten Island
    Apatow appears to have moved on from using airless domestic and urban comforts as backdrops, and that’s probably a good thing. But The King Of Staten Island’s patience-testing failings, however well-intentioned, suggest that for now, he’s only found a new way to lose the plot.
  27. Olympic Dreams
    This is a more professional-looking production, with a much stronger cast, but it has the same half-assed feel.
  28. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.
  29. Valley of the Dolls
    It's more in the so bad it's almost good mode.
  30. The Dead Don't Die
    Sure, the cast is full of exciting names, but all of Jarmusch’s absurdist thematic flourishes—the Romero tributes, the meta commentary, the political humor—are half-baked and inconsistently applied.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »