The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. The Upside
    The rest is feel-good painted unenthusiastically by numbers: a repetitive series of artificially inflated character conflicts and tossed-off resolutions, interspersed with slapstick and jokes about prissy rich snobs, ultimately adding up to far less than the sum of its well-worn parts.
  2. A Dog's Way Home
    This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.
  3. Rust Creek
    Screenwriter Julie Lipson’s well-written, naturalistic dialogue helps pass the time, as does Michelle Lawler’s lovely scenic cinematography. But although what we get instead stands on its own merits, this survival thriller could have used a few more thrills.
  4. Escape Room
    The escape-room scenes themselves (a.k.a. the good stuff) are imaginatively conceived and deftly executed enough to justify a late-night cable viewing.
  5. Holmes & Watson
    If there are any new jokes left to tell about Holmes, they’re nowhere to be found in the abysmal Holmes & Watson, which might be the worst feature-length film ever made about the “consulting detective” from Baker Street.
  6. Buffalo Boys
    Buffalo Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain, which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.
  7. Second Act
    Lopez gets a decent scene partner in Hudgens and an even better one in Leah Remini, who steals the movie as Maya’s brassy, no-nonsense best friend.
  8. Welcome To Marwen
    It’s the weirdest film of his (Zemeckis) career. One of the worst, too.
  9. Stan & Ollie
    An opportunity to see John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan mimic two of early cinema’s most iconic figures, which is this film’s true raison d’être.
  10. On the Basis of Sex
    It’s an impressive journey unimpressively retold, relying on overly familiar biopic tropes about the difficulty of being a woman in the man’s world of the 1950s.
  11. Vice
    Apart from one initially funny (but ultimately over-extended) gag involving a fake credits sequence, the material is mostly glib and second-rate—and, when it comes down to it, about as dry, oversimplified, and under-dramatized as a class presentation.
  12. Bumblebee
    Thematic muddles would matter less if Bumblebee delivered more as an action movie, but despite some neat car-chase complications, this series remains stubbornly averse to shaping its action barrages into satisfying set pieces.
  13. The Mule
    In some ways, The Mule represents a late-period version of classic Eastwood, in that it’s even pokier and more workmanlike than his best work, and sometimes downright strange.
  14. Mary Poppins Returns
    It’s less heartwarming than heart-microwaving.
  15. Capernaum
    Capernaum’s neorealist spirit is smothered by its sentimentality and endless string of indignities; it’s as if the film is operating as Zain’s trial defense, every moment making his case that it probably would have been better if he’d never been born.
  16. Bird Box
    In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.
  17. Mortal Engines
    This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.
  18. Aquaman
    It owns up to its cheese.
  19. Ben Is Back
    Ben Is Back, which buries its promise, premise, and stray traces of insight under a heap of narrative contrivance, leaves you itching for a drama with something solid to actually say about addiction.
  20. Vox Lux
    It’s a more cynical, and arguably more realistic, depiction of the unique malignancies of fame than this year’s other Oscar-baiting pop musical, "A Star Is Born." But ultimately, it’s no more insightful.
  21. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    The film is something like a digital tiger itself: an approximation, not exactly the same as the real thing. With the cut to credits, it ceases to exist.
  22. The Great Pretender
    The Great Pretender has its share of dark punchlines, but its central concern is a sympathetic one: what we see in other people and how we would like to see ourselves.
  23. Tyrel
    Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.
  24. Clara's Ghost
    Unfortunately, like most home movies, it’s of precious little interest to non-relatives.
  25. Mary Queen of Scots
    By focusing on Mary (the subject of its source material), the film feels lopsided, especially without any other interesting characters apart from Elizabeth.
  26. The Possession of Hannah Grace
    It’s exorcism’s greatest hits, if exorcism were a band playing 300 casinos and state fairs a year.
  27. People's Republic of Desire
    Wu weaves together the stories of two live-streaming stars, a manager, and a devoted fan to form a portrait not only of the extreme acceleration that defines contemporary Chinese pop culture, but also the bizarre fantasy economy and parasitic interdependencies of late capitalism as a whole.
  28. Everybody Knows
    Everybody Knows never quite makes the leap from engrossing to exciting. Even the story’s one big plot twist is obvious enough that many will guess it well in advance, and it doesn’t reverberate backward the way that long-buried secrets usually do in Farhadi’s work.
  29. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    The filmmaking itself is often witty, finding gags in whip-crack editing and shifts in perspective.
  30. Happy as Lazzaro
    Poised somewhere between despondency and hope, its conclusion suggests that, unable to see pure goodness even when it’s right before our eyes, we unwittingly snuff it out. Yet that goodness will endure — and it will outlast us.
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