The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
For 10,419 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 2.5 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    The second interesting thing about Every Thing Will Be Fine is that it’s very bad, and that its bizarre throwaway lines and shrugged-off subplots brings to mind Tommy Wiseau instead of Douglas Sirk — an impression underscored by extensive, largely mismatched dubbing.
  2. Do You Believe?
    A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.
  3. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Here, the monsters are entirely incidental to the story. Instead we are forced to sit through 119 punishing minutes of what plays like a dorm-room answer to modern war films, complete with the constant profanity and masculine hysterics that pass for impact in an immature script.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Survivor
    Fans of Jovovich’s Resident Evil series know the pleasures inherent in watching her sprint hither and yon. That’s about the only thrill provided by Survivor.
  5. Fifty Shades Darker
    It’s a female-driven fantasy, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. And God help the poor woman who believes it.
  6. The Sea of Trees
    As it turns out, there is something worse than Nicholas Sparks, the king of morbid romantic kitsch, and that’s a Nicholas Sparks pretender with highfalutin pretensions.
  7. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.
  8. War Room
    Much of what follows is turgid and, for non-believers, ridiculous.
  9. Norm of the North
    Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.
  10. Scoob!
    You can’t even get mad at the script for its half-hearted gestures towards self-aware commentary; writers must keep themselves entertained, after all, when churning out one of the many drafts a film like Scoob! goes through before production begins.
  11. Leatherface
    To turn Leatherface into a tragic figure, twisted by traumatic upbringing into a monster, is to forget that he’s scariest as a force of nature, which tend to be tough to diagnose. Remember, no one cares what the shark from Jaws was like as a tortured guppy.
  12. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    Even as a star text, it’s shoddy.
  13. The Space Between Us
    Chelsom applies the middle-school-dance sentimentality with a ladle, leaning heavily on the tinkle of an overbearing score and a soundtrack of generic, cost-efficient pop cues.
  14. God's Not Dead 2
    The first film pandered to a heavy persecution complex; this installment’s relatively subtler, but there are dog whistles aplenty.
  15. Diablo
    Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
  16. Cabin Fever
    Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.
  17. Yoga Hosers
    Trouble is, Yoga Hosers isn’t really a movie. It’s a quarter-to-1:00 a.m. SNL sketch, nightmarishly distended into oblivion. It’s a corny Canuck joke, told for 88 surreally unfunny minutes. It has a target demographic of one: He wears hockey jerseys and, again, loves his daughter.
  18. 31
    Zombie’s new movie, 31, is all attitude. It’s also the worst thing he’s ever made—interminable, incoherent, and devoid of suspense.
  19. The Snowman
    The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.
  20. The Emoji Movie
    There was probably never going to be a version of this film that would prove even remotely plausible as a movie someone felt passionately about making for artistic reasons; as far as expanding on smartphone-related IP, this is an even weaker starting point than Sony Animation’s recent The Angry Birds Movie.
  21. Term Life
    Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.
  22. The Perfect Match
    Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.
  23. Miracles from Heaven
    Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.
  24. Nine Lives
    Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.
  25. Collateral Beauty
    Collateral Beauty is one of those cloying movies about learning to take the good with the bad that feels like it was made by aliens with little grasp of human life.
  26. I Am Wrath
    If the film’s casual racism—the villains are almost all some shade of not-white—feels more perfunctory than malicious, it’s because it’s just another secondhand element in the collection of bad clichés passing for a script.
  27. The Wild Life
    The sort of uninspired international pre-sales item that usually goes straight from a basement booth at the Cannes film market to a Netflix parent’s peripheral vision. The sole interesting thing about NWave’s animation is its use of the camera, which plays to 3-D’s pop-out factor.
  28. American Pastoral
    This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.
  29. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    The sets are either claustrophobically limited or anonymously empty; the period detail is nonexistent; and the special effects are on par with a Syfy original.
  30. The Last Face
    But that’s nothing compared to the sustained tone-deaf fiasco that is Penn’s latest feature, The Last Face — a movie so monumentally miscalculated, right from its opening explanatory text, that the audience at Cannes, where it (inexplicably) premiered in Competition last year, started laughing at it within the first 30 seconds. All one can really do is gape in wonder and puzzlement.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »