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. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    It’s a muddled, contradictory, confusing mess, made even more so by the darkly cynical streak that runs through the film.
  2. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  3. Submergence
    An objectively bad movie, paradoxically ponderous and pointless.
  4. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.
  5. The Rider
    More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.
  6. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."
  7. Beirut
    Though entertaining in stretches, the central metaphor of back-channel dealmaking as a game of Texas Hold ’em — played by Skiles and different factions within the CIA, the PLO, and the Israeli government — comes up short in the end.
  8. The Miracle Season
    It is not unusual for an underdog sports picture to be predictable. But The Miracle Season seems downright preordained, and not just in its arc. The movie is constitutionally incapable of surprise even on a moment-to-moment level.
  9. The Endless
    Although The Endless works just fine as a standalone film, looking at it in the wider context of Benson and Moorhead’s work highlights another, more meta theme: the desire to return to an earlier, simpler period in one’s life, and relive those glory days forever.
  10. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is an entertaining and crowd-pleasing monster movie, one that leaves you wanting more—and once you get over wondering what a subtler and more accomplished director might have done with this material, it’s not hard to let yourself be won over by its charms.
  11. Where Is Kyra?
    Unlike Oren Moverman’s superficially similar "Time Out Of Mind," in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man, Where Is Kyra? doesn’t constantly feel like what it necessarily is: the work of wealthy people simulating poverty. In part, that’s thanks to Pfeiffer’s vanity-free, internalized performance, which could hardly be more different from her deliciously abrasive turn in last year’s "Mother!" (It’s great to have her back.)
  12. Blockers
    The comedy Blockers, which is not written, produced, or directed by Apatow but feels descended from some of his work, sets for itself a more ambitious challenge, daring itself to give each member of its ensemble a coming-of-age arc, and to pull off two different high-concept comedies at once in the process.
  13. Sweet Country
    Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.
  14. Chappaquiddick
    The stranger and more corrosive subtexts it locates in the Kennedy circle’s actions in the aftermath of the crash are undermined by its classy restraint, which saps the most conceptually outrageous moments.
  15. You Were Never Really Here
    For all the influences glowing dimly under its skin, You Were Never Really Here remains its own bewildering animal, unmistakably Ramsay’s.
  16. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    So what was Tyler Perry going for here? Based on the sanctimonious streak that runs throughout his work, one might posit that he was trying to wrap a gleefully outrageous thriller around a lesson on marriage, like a slice of bacon around a particularly bitter pill. Except, at some point, the bacon got hopelessly overcooked.
  17. God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
    A Light In Darkness isn’t as offensive as the first film—it lacks the requisite misogyny and Islamophobia, and does a better job of looking like it’s almost a real movie—but it’s not far behind, an emblematic film for the foul moment.
  18. Finding Your Feet
    Pitched to the weekday-matinee crowd, the insipid British retirement-age comedy Finding Your Feet doesn’t have much to recommend it apart from its grossly overqualified cast, led by Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall.
  19. Outside In
    While this is probably Shelton’s best fully scripted dramatic feature — a big improvement on the incoherent "Touchy Feely" (2013) — it’s the sort of earnest, conventional movie that many indie directors could make (and many do).
  20. Revenge
    The film works best if you approach it as a fantasy, with Jen as a near-supernatural angel of vengeance; otherwise, it’s easy to get hung up on the inconsistencies as the action grows increasingly over-the-top.
  21. Gemini
    As visually appealing as much of Gemini is, it wouldn’t work nearly so well without Lola Kirke playing Jill.
  22. Ready Player One
    Ready Player One, based on the bestseller of the same name, is a pandering, crassly commercial victory of intellectual property law that’s also, in its best moments, a grand popcorn entertainment, made with skill and wit and even sincerity.
  23. Ismael's Ghosts
    Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.
  24. Midnight Sun
    The authentic Sparks movies at least tend to be howlers, with shamelessly overcomplicated narratives and risible twists. Midnight Sun, on the other hand, is straightforward and trite.
  25. Sherlock Gnomes
    Most of the movie’s star power has been harnessed without much obvious reason, right down to the movie’s seeming origins as a delivery system for the Elton John catalog.
  26. I Kill Giants
    Beyond the characterization of its complex anti-heroine, though, I Kill Giants doesn’t stray too far from an established collection of story beats, stretched thin over a slightly too-long 106-minute run time.
  27. Isle of Dogs
    If this is a superficial tribute, it’s also an affectionately dense one. Most accurately, what we’re seeing is an Andersonian alternate universe: a Japan as old and new, real and unreal, steeped in pastiche and invented from scratch as the brownstone New York of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
  28. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    As movies expressly courting the faith-based audience go, Paul, Apostle Of Christ acquits itself reasonably well from moment to moment, avoiding the howlers that plague such Pure Flix titles as "Samson" and "God’s Not Dead."
  29. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.
  30. Unsane
    Most of the thrills here come from watching one of our canniest directors perform rattling wheelchair dollies on a waxed hospital floor while over-punctuating video-noisy close-ups and cheesy music cues.
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