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 Marvels
    Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.
  2. Infinite
    What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.
  3. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    We’re used to these movies being designed to launch us into one big final fight, and that’s fine, but the craftsmanship this time is shoddy, packed with dead ends, and struggling to maintain its grasp on an emotional throughline.
  4. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    The best bits come from the unexpected faces, however, as both Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain return from beyond the veil to extol the upsides of mind-altering substances.
  5. All Day and a Night
    Cole had a key part in one of the biggest game-changers in Black cinema this decade: a co-writing credit on Black Panther. But where that film was expansive and forward-thinking, this one feels like a throwback—and not in a good way.
  6. 7500
    Just as Tobias can’t escape the tragedy unfolding just beyond the cockpit door, 7500 struggles to overcome some unfortunate and very outdated optics.
  7. Dreamland
    In the end, Dreamland never bothers to decide whether it’s trying to be an elegiac, philosophical head trip or an over-the-top action thriller.
  8. Becky
    Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.
  9. The Kissing Booth 2
    In broadening the world of the first film without really deepening it, The Kissing Booth 2 often feels more like a spinoff TV series—although at an unconscionable 132 minutes long, it’s hardly a breezy watch.
  10. You Should Have Left
    At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.
  11. Tom & Jerry
    It’s as though Tom And Jerry was intended to be enjoyed from home all along: Not only are you free to poke around on your phone between the set pieces, but you can use that phone to call up the 90-odd Tom And Jerry cartoons that also come with your HBO Max subscription.
  12. Ava
    Ava is a napping-on-the-couch movie through and through, with recognizable names and a sexy premise but no distinct personality.
  13. Summerland
    The above-average cast of adult and child actors has its charming moments, but once the plot enters the tearjerker cliché phase, it becomes clear that what we are being offered is a nostalgia that’s no different from the kind that extolls more conservative values. It’s less a new coat of paint than a varnish.
  14. Project Power
    You might as well spend a couple hours with this film on in the background, but don’t expect much about it to stick with you—except for the jaw-dropping Henrietta Lacks monologue. You may need to pop a pill to forget that.
  15. We Can Be Heroes
    Rodriguez’s kid movies are always sweet-natured, and do an admirable job of speaking directly to their target audience. But while he can generate countless environments from his Austin studio, the camerawork on these projects, constrained and uninspired, hints at their single-room origins.
  16. Greenland
    If a movie has to kill off most of the species in the name of the nuclear family, it should at least do it with some staging and style.
  17. French Exit
    The film’s artificial, stylized remove—what might be called his current style, a kind of half-ironic, half-romantic wooziness—seems an odd landing point for the scrappy DIY filmmaker behind Momma’s Man and the genuinely touching and hilarious Terri, which DeWitt also wrote and which was so human it hurt.
  18. Enola Holmes
    Without much of a mystery to solve, this young Holmes comes across more like a junior-level Wonder Woman: intelligent and highly trained yet puzzled by this unfamiliar, unfair world of men.
  19. Pieces of a Woman
    Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.
  20. Dear Comrades!
    Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction.
  21. Concrete Cowboy
    Derived from the novel Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri, this film iteration bargains in vague platitudes as it unsuccessfully tries to piece together a collage of factors threatening the viability of this one-of-a-kind place.
  22. Penguin Bloom
    Because Watts is a gifted actor, Penguin Bloom does sometimes convey paraplegia’s emotional trials.
  23. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.
  24. Evil Eye
    There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.
  25. Ali G Indahouse
    In jumping from the small screen to the big one, the franchise seems to have dropped its collective IQ by a good 50 points. Cohen's HBO series was a smart show pretending to be stupid. Making its debut on DVD after a brief 2002 theatrical run, Ali G Indahouse feels like a stupid movie made by smart people.
  26. After We Collided
    After We Collided is too invested in its central couple to know what to do with its new romantic rival. Which is a shame because Sprouse turns in one of the film’s livelier performances.
  27. Books of Blood
    Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Adam
    There’s a good movie, at times, a really good movie, hiding out in all the soulless clutter of Black Adam’s plot. Unfortunately, all the considerable talents here struggle to deliver it.
  29. Marnie
    It's a must for those already enthralled by Rear Window, Vertigo, and the like, but a bit of a slog for anyone else.
  30. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Day, who’s very good, moves through it with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is as much a star in the green room as she is onstage, faced with applause or the harsh bathroom-mirror reflection of abuse and addiction. But many of the other characters might as well be reading off of cue cards.
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