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. Zoe
    Wrestling with the intrinsic creepiness of the premise would involve some social commentary, self-awareness, and honest-to-God storytelling, and that’s not Doremus’ bag.
  2. Unfriended: Dark Web
    It’s a patently ludicrous story. The storytelling, though, remains clever and grippingly singular, again finding creative ways to progress the narrative without cheating the locked-vantage format.
  3. McQueen
    A film that’s refreshingly free of the gushing sound bites from sycophantic celebrities that too often dominate fashion documentaries.
  4. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the title of which should be taken as a warning, knows all too well that its target audience wants more of the same. Heck, some of the songs (“Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” “The Name Of The Game,” etc.) are recycled from the first film.
  5. The Equalizer 2
    The Equalizer 2, which reunites Washington with director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk, puts fewer disposable goons in McCall’s crosshairs, trading the original’s rote killing-up-the-ranks revenge campaign for some half-assed approximation of a murder mystery. Call it a lateral move for this unfortunate franchise.
  6. The Third Murder
    The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.
  7. Blindspotting
    Diggs, Casal, and Estrada are all walking on a high wire here, requiring a balance so delicate that it may not be visible to some of the audience until they have to decide for themselves whether Blindspotting’s leap-of-faith climax works.
  8. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Ultimately, this is a movie to appreciate in isolated bits and pieces.
  9. The Night Eats the World
    In the end, though, it’s the very concepts that make The Night Eats The World sound insufferably pretentious on paper — namely, its high-minded ideas and emphasis on small moments — that tip the film toward intriguing rather than, well, zombifying.
  10. Skyscraper
    It feels like a dumbed-down, poor man’s "Die Hard," despite costing a lot more to make.
  11. What Will People Say
    he performances are strong, and the situation itself presumably carries a harrowing veracity, but an ordeal is about all the movie offers. Shaking your head over and over again is the only suitable reaction.
  12. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    It’s pleasantly baffling to discover that not only is Hotel Transylvania 3 easily the best film of the series, but it also feels more at home thematically on a cruise ship than its predecessors did at a haunted Transylvanian castle.
  13. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter
    The characters are stubborn as ever, but in lieu of the characteristic spectacular downfall, The Legacy Of A Whitetail Deer Hunter offers only the pokiest and most rote of plots.
  14. Whitney
    Whitney herself remains a figure of some mystery, her rise and fall refracting the hopes and anxieties of the people around her, with a tragic echo in the death of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, in 2015.
  15. The First Purge
    Wringing genre thrills from headline atrocities, The First Purge is at once crass and provocative in its timeliness—in Blumhouse’s toolshed, it’s the sledgehammer to Get Out’s scalpel.
  16. Sorry to Bother You
    Sorry To Bother You is often wildly funny, and if its broad arc is familiar stuff about a down-on-his-luck everyman experiencing success but at what cost, at least the plot specifics are unpredictable by dint of Riley’s imagination.
  17. Woman Walks Ahead
    Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.
  18. Uncle Drew
    Look, for a movie based on a soda campaign, Uncle Drew isn’t that bad. It’s got some solid comic alternates.
  19. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    For better and worse, Ant-Man And The Wasp knows it’s small potatoes.
  20. Dark River
    Throw in expert use of a picturesque yet oppressive location and Dark River almost manages to overcome narrative inertia via sheer force of will. It’s a beautifully crafted, moodily evocative film that’s missing just one spark of true inspiration.
  21. Three Identical Strangers
    So bizarre is this story that its most mundane aspects take on a certain profundity. Even when Three Identical Strangers falters, it fascinates, and that’s a claim very few documentaries can make.
  22. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    The occasionally hackneyed dialogue (one would hardly believe Sheridan also wrote the terrific Hell Or High Water) and anonymously copied direction comes across as a crude approximation of the original Sicario’s sinister narrative, with a similarly stripped-down mise-en-scène, but no sense of purpose.
  23. The Catcher Was a Spy
    Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."
  24. The King
    Elvis achieved a skyrocketing success previously unseen in pop culture, and then became his own victim by letting it get away from him. As Jarecki proves with this extended, sometimes bumpy, but still worthy metaphor, it’s the same with the U.S. We’ve been coasting along for so many years, taking democracy for granted, that the entire structure of the nation is now in peril.
  25. Araby
    The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.
  26. Boundaries
    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.
  27. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    It’s a small, offbeat movie, punctuated by bursts of terrible violence but also infused with a winning strain of deadpan humor that’s not too far removed from Jim Jarmusch.
  28. Gotti
    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.
  29. The Yellow Birds
    Directed by Alexandre Moors, who made the D.C. sniper movie Blue Caprice, The Yellow Birds might have used its nonlinear structure to confront us with how war reshapes these young men, putting who they were and who they become into conversation. But the performances don’t capture that psychological change.
  30. Tag
    There’s something mildly depressing about viewing petty gamesmanship as the engine that fuels and sustains male friendship. But funny is funny, and Tag gets by, appropriately enough, on the personalities of its stars.
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