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. Twice Born
    One hundred minutes of snooze-inducing troubled romance eventually gives way to a strange, interesting backstory. It doesn’t manage to recast the preceding feature’s worth of movie in a different light, but instead makes the viewer wish the film had gotten to the end sooner.
  2. The Truth About Emanuel
    Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.
  3. Everyday
    Movies don’t necessarily have to tell stories, but if narrative is eschewed in favor of an unvarnished portrait of ordinary life, it’s best to cheat a little and make ordinary life feel extraordinary. Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday refuses to stoop to such measures; for better and for worse — mostly for worse — it sticks to the mundane promise of its title.
  4. Fantastic Four
    It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.
  5. Passengers
    The effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent, and to turn one of the most likable actors in Hollywood into a total fucking creep. A date movie, this is not.
  6. Sabotage
    David Ayer’s latest, Sabotage, is a sloppy DEA whodunit, distinguished by its scatological humor and gore.
  7. Child 44
    Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.
  8. The Lazarus Effect
    Like too many horror films, this one seems targeted at a hypothetical audience using only 10 percent of its brainpower.
  9. Masterminds
    Masterminds leans heavily on its cast of comic ringers—Ken Marino as a yuppie neighbor, Jason Sudeikis as a cavalier hit man, Leslie Jones as an irate federal agent—without giving them anything especially funny to say or do.
  10. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  11. Tusk
    Like most self-conscious attempts at a “midnight movie,” Tusk lacks the conviction that would make it anything more than an outré curiosity; it’s essentially a filmed dare, combined with fan service.
  12. Happy Christmas
    Nobody involved ever came up with an idea or character remotely worth exploring, yet they all forged ahead anyway, placing their faith in the filmmaking process itself, and this damp squib of an ostensible movie is the decidedly lackluster result.
  13. I Origins
    I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.
  14. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Batman V Superman takes a title fight kids of all ages have been speculating about for decades—costumed titan from the cosmos, meet costumed vigilante from the city—and invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.
  15. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.
  16. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.
  17. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.
  18. Yves Saint Laurent
    Yet another biopic that feels as though it were made by an accountant, Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent epitomizes the mediocrity of a genre that often aspires to secondhand storytelling instead of first-rate art.
  19. The Protector 2
    In brief spurts, the film is funny, but taken as a whole, it feels like a waste of talent. Cheesiness should not be the most memorable thing about a Tony Jaa movie.
  20. Moms' Night Out
    The film never seems hectoring or preachy. Unfortunately, it never seems funny either, coming across like a sanitized remake of some raunchier laughfest.
  21. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.
  22. Decoding Annie Parker
    As hackneyed as the movie’s portrayal of Parker’s life might be, it seems subtly shaded in comparison to the King narrative, which mostly consists of people in lab coats saying things aloud that they should already know, using easy-to-follow metaphors while pointing to a conveniently posted chart or diagram.
  23. If I Stay
    Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.
  24. All Cheerleaders Die
    In other words, what starts as a glorified "Pretty Little Liars" episode eventually evolves (devolves?) into a flippant hybrid of "The Craft" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer."
  25. Farmland
    A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.
  26. Rage
    Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.
  27. The Grand Seduction
    A confused, toothless comedy.
  28. Good People
    Good People might have been better titled "Dumb People", or at least "People Who Have Never Seen A Movie In Their Entire Lives."
  29. The Possession of Michael King
    After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.
  30. Max
    It is dull and weird — weird in that way that it is pronounced we-ee-eird, the stretched vowel signaling a weirdness that is probably unconscious on the part of the filmmakers.
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