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 Life List
    The trouble is that The Life List too often struggles to reconfigure its well-known tropes into something that feels alive and human, which is what one comes to romantic melodramas for.
  2. Coexistence, My Ass!
    Filmmaker Amber Fares assembles a ton of footage into a thorough portrait of a disillusioned activist-comedian, though that portrait and the one-woman show it revolves around are themselves limited messengers of a worthwhile call to action.
  3. Nobody 2
    Though the punches maintain their force in Nobody 2, the sole punchline they support has become a grating dad joke, one that you’ve heard so many times that it’s lost all meaning.
  4. Henry Johnson
    Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.
  5. The Smashing Machine
    Safdie splits the difference, striving to replicate the gritty, in-the-moment documentary feel of the source movie he clearly admires, and coat it in the triple-A Hollywood sheen befitting this kind of serious star vehicle.
  6. Him
    As the final moments of Him unfold, there’s an attempt to drastically course-correct. . . But it’s a desperate Hail Mary after a poorly played game, without a hope of bailing out the team behind it.
  7. Predator: Badlands
    Dan Trachtenberg's latest Predator movie is a safe, frictionless, lore-centric franchise expansion.
  8. The Chronology of Water
    Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.
  9. The History of Sound
    From its opening moments, The History Of Sound feels like it’s going to be something grand. It’s this feeling that makes the warbling result that much more disappointing, a song soon to be forgotten.
  10. Deep Cover
    The central conceit quickly feels like window dressing for a film that wants to be in a particular genre but hasn’t put in any real effort to fit there.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jay Kelly
    Every moment of Jay Kelly lives between the textual (the internal conflict of the fictional actor) and the metatextual (what the story tells us about the real creative forces behind the film).
  12. The Home
    The truth is that crummy, un-scary horror movies are nothing new, and are more the norm than the exception. And while The Home doesn’t distinguish itself in terms of style or subtext (one can argue that it doesn’t have any of the latter), it at least throws out just enough gross-out imagery to keep a viewer awake.
  13. Fixed
    The film’s intermittent charms come thanks to some of the voice actors.
  14. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    In telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.
  15. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    The fourth theatrical feature film in the SpongeBob SquarePants oeuvre—The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants—doesn’t give audiences a memorable outing, much less a best day ever. It’s a big downgrade, and a huge disappointment for long-time fans of the subversive and unapologetically silly character.
  16. Night Always Comes
    Prolific TV director Benjamin Caron‘s self-serious movie keeps digging itself into a hole, first with its narrative, then with its heroine’s increasingly lurid backstory, until, like that heroine, it can’t claw its way out.
  17. Ballad of a Small Player
    Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt.
  18. The Pickup
    The Pickup is entertaining on that most basic of slack-jawed levels: It has likable stars doing movie stuff (car chases, elaborate deceptions) that the movie seems to bank on blurring into memories of other, better capers.
  19. The Map That Leads to You
    While The Map That Leads To You looks great—much of it clearly shot on location in Spain during golden hour—it’s too staid and calm to reflect the throw-caution-to-the-wind passion of its two young protagonists. Rather than getting swept up in Heather and Jack’s courtship, the film keeps them at a distance, like a slow-motion car crash you can’t look away from.
  20. Eternity
    By sidestepping the sharper, tougher questions about matters of the heart, the film still plays it too safe. Freyne may love all three characters, but what he doesn’t do is make his audience care deeply enough about which of them will get their happy ending—and which one won’t.
  21. How to Make a Killing
    At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    The Immortal Man is not a good entry point into Peaky Blinders for the same reason it is not rewarding for existing fans: It traffics only in the late stages of Shelby’s arc, but offers nothing new to those who have already been there, done that.
  23. Relationship Goals
    As a bit of forgettable, low-stakes Valentine’s Day viewing for the religious set, one could do worse. But those who only date their rom-coms “intentionally” could definitely do better.
  24. Her Private Hell
    There’s still evidence of his sardonic wit and stylistic flourishes but, save for brief blasts of cool brilliance, the film is for the most part a dud, as floaty and ephemeral as the fading mist that passes for one of the film’s central menaces.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tow
    By making the film about one woman (kind of) helping herself, with only vague connections to the world and the people around her, the filmmakers give up any worthwhile point about poverty, injustice, or community.
  26. Over Your Dead Body
    Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.
  27. Pizza Movie
    There is room for vulgarity, horror, absurdity, and a whole lot of heart in Pizza Movie, though just barely, like attempting to host a rager in a 12′ x 14′ dorm room. The resulting stoner comedy is awkward, weird, and doesn’t quite work, but it just might become a core memory for those among the couchlocked who have yet to experience a proper house party.
  28. Apex
    Apex mistakes going bigger for going better when what it really needs is a little more cleverness, either in how Ben operates or how Sasha tries to survive her impossible scenario. For a movie with some pretty ridiculous plot swerves, everything winds up feeling oddly straightforward, which makes the survival genre’s requisite catharsis and comeuppance land anticlimactically.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    ChaO
    A talented animation team does its best to bail water from this sinking ship, but an overreliance on contrivances and slapstick leaves too many holes to plug.
  30. Swapped
    Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.
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