The A.V. Club's Scores

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:
10422 movie reviews
  1. Scorsese goes to the trouble of making his antiheroes charismatic and exciting. Gotti, by contrast, inadvertently argues that John Gotti and his namesake son are too dull to be evil. It’s DrabFellas.
  2. A generic and frankly very tedious compendium of YA clichés.
  3. Domino is, for large stretches, just ludicrous—and atypically boring. It’s a sad sight to see from a filmmaker who, once upon a time, excelled at drawing a viewer into the thrill of seeing a sequence come together, with all the pieces falling into place. In Domino, one finds only the pieces.
  4. A nattering chore of a “family” comedy that feels written by committee and directed by indifferent machine.
  5. It’s supposed to be evocative, but in many scenes the characters just look dim and overly backlit, to the point of obscuring the actors’ expressiveness. There might be another metaphor in there somewhere.
  6. If Dog Days were a little weirder, it would just be a smug anti-comedy takedown of a late-period Garry Marshall picture, like "They Came Together" with its biggest laughs edited out.
  7. Its blasé attitude to the basics of movie action turn the video-game-esque quest plot into an exercise in tedium.
  8. It delivers the tedious, heavy-breathing buildup associated with the genre, but skimps on the scares and the gory, gooey good stuff.
  9. Of course, Cats has always been ridiculous, just as it has always been ridiculed. (“Cats is a dog,” declared a notorious review of the musical’s Broadway debut.) But Hooper can’t even get camp right.
  10. Director Graham Baker has little gift for atmosphere, and apart from one inspired sequence, I suspect I'll forget every aspect of this movie in a couple of days.
  11. Together, Weaver and Keaton sometimes manage to tease out the movie inside the movie, the one drawn to the connections between death and joy, youthfulness and mortality.
  12. Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.
  13. Awkward and unfunny in exceptionally long stretches, Reboot probably won’t turn his diehard fans against him. But it’s unlikely to win him any new converts either. For that, there’s "Clerks," "Mallrats," or "Chasing Amy."
  14. Surely, bland cultural insights can’t defeat a film whose main attraction is the promise of stupid, raunchy fun? Reader, Jexi fails even at that, as it awkwardly struggles across its slim running time to land a single one of its existentially painful, seemingly bot-generated jokes.
  15. In attempting to tell the story of this young woman’s death — not her life, no time for that either — I Still Believe cheapens it.
  16. In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.
  17. In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.
  18. The Black Hole will likely bore anyone not immediately captivated by V.I.N.CENT, the prissy, Cicero-quoting robot with a voice provided by Roddy McDowall and a body that looks like an art-nouveau reinterpretation of a can of beans.
  19. It’s a five-day toss-off that’s simultaneously an impressive feat and business as usual.
  20. Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.
  21. Artemis Fowl, the first Disney movie to have its theatrical release completely scrapped because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is bland and incoherent, with paper-thin character development, unimaginative world building, and a lot of daddy issues.
  22. Tyler Spindel, a Happy Madison veteran, directs The Wrong Missy with all of the worst tendencies of the Sandler shingle style. It’s a series of claustrophobically unfunny scenes that drag on and on, interspersed with establishing shots and music cues that look and sound like they were licensed from a stock library.
  23. It certainly isn’t Polish’s intention to make any grand political statements with his action thriller, but expecting empathetic connection with a callous white cop is a big ask in today’s climate. And it sours what’s otherwise just a lackluster B movie drowned in buckets of rain.
  24. Does The Tax Collector sound intriguingly bizarre? In actuality, it’s a tediously paced procedural about work-life balance in which suspense-free displays of hackneyed gangbanger signage are filled in with a few flashbacks that look like they were a cut from a much more exciting movie.
  25. Jack Frost's juxtaposition of the absurd and the absurdly predictable results in a film that's frequently entertaining, but for the wrong reasons.
  26. On stage, the contrivances might seem less glaring (although the songs truly are terrible). As a movie, The Prom is all-star, feel-good, zazzy nonsense. Long after Murphy’s film drops its cutesy cynicism, it still manages to accidentally produce a damning indictment of Broadway phoniness.
  27. Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.
  28. Director and cowriter André Øvredal (Trollhunter, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe) gets credit here for “original story,” but every single element has been borrowed, and precious little else of note about Mortal remains.
  29. None of the curious friction of its story, nor in its cast, results in any sort of frisson of excitement, dread, or even shock. The best Yuba can inspire is indignation. You get all these folks together, Tate Taylor, and the end result is this?
  30. This is the flimsiest of hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible salesman hocking his wares outside the subway.

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