The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. Aladdin
    Ricthie’s Aladdin feels sluggish in comparison to the fast-paced original. Even the songs suffer; the direction of the musical numbers is surprisingly unimaginative and turgid, to the point that even surefire showstoppers like “Prince Ali” and the mighty “A Whole New World” end up succumbing to lackluster staging and uncomfortable performances.
  2. Booksmart
    What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.
  3. Brightburn
    Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.
  4. The Whistlers
    Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.
  5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.
  6. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  7. The Wild Goose Lake
    What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.
  8. The Lighthouse
    The Lighthouse is more satisfying when viewed through the prism of its pitch-black humor; it’s fine as a thriller, borderline brilliant as a comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo.
  9. Les Misérables
    While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted May 20, 2019
  10. A Hidden Life
    Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.
  11. Rocketman
    As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.
  12. Little Joe
    Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.
  13. Sorry We Missed You
    For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.
  14. Deerskin
    Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.
  15. Bacurau
    There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.
  16. A Dog's Journey
    Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.
  17. See You Yesterday
    See You Yesterday finds a striking-yet-natural balance between genre concept and a harsh reality that is achingly familiar to the people who have to navigate it every day.
  18. Trial by Fire
    But Zwick and Fletcher, in their eagerness to make an argument against the death penalty, needlessly stack the deck.
  19. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Although the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult novel finds welcome specificity in its world and character building, it never rises above the most generic of platitudes in its central teen love story.
  20. The Dead Don't Die
    The film feels like a creative resignation, too, meeting the end of the world with a shrug of tepid postmodern shtick. It puts despair itself in quotation marks.
  21. Asako I & II
    This is a film that, through its deceptively mellow means, manages to plumb the depths of what it truly means to love amid the uncertainties of self, others, and everything else besides.
  22. Photograph
    What’s consistent about Photograph is the way it maintains the delicacy of a particularly fine short story, complete with some ghostly supporting characters and plenty of ellipses where more conventional movies would amp up the exclamation points.
  23. The Third Wife
    An unabashedly reticent arthouse film, The Third Wife takes its time drifting through May’s coming of age, which will try the patience of some audiences. But those open to the seduction of Mayfair’s understated drama and its beautiful natural imagery will be handsomely rewarded.
  24. The Souvenir
    There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.
  25. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    Though Parabellum delivers at least a couple of action scenes that rank with the best of the series...there’s a certain fatigue to its two biggest set pieces, both of which pit Wick and his allies against unending waves of faceless henchmen. Wick is unstoppable. Do the movies know where to stop?
  26. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  27. The Hustle
    While The Hustle is more overt when it comes to discussing gender, including a monologue about why women are better suited to “the con” than men, it doesn’t really have all that much to say. Not about gender, not about con artistry, and definitely not about how to craft a satisfying studio comedy.
  28. Poms
    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.
  29. Charlie Says
    For as much as Charlie Says tries to reframe everything we know about the Manson Family, its characterization of the women remains shallow.
  30. The Biggest Little Farm
    The Biggest Little Farm has many valuable points to make about the connection between how our food is grown and eco-friendly living, but style betrays substance so often here that the message gets lost in the shuffle. Unless that message is simply We Bought A Farm!
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