The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. Sandy Wexler
    Maybe it’s a question of drastically lowered expectations finally working to Sandler’s advantage, but Sandy Wexler is disarming in its charms.
  2. The Lost City of Z
    Through Gray’s orchestration of themes, ironies, and flashes of transcendence, the thick of the jungle becomes as haunting and multivalent an image as the hidden city. It is that which we all disappear into.
  3. A Quiet Passion
    What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.
  4. The Fate of the Furious
    More so than in any of the other movies, Dom’s wrecking crew of car nuts comes across like survival-of-the-speediest tacho-fascists, high-fiving their way through a path of destruction and to a collateral death toll that one presumes now numbers in the hundreds.
  5. Mimosas
    Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation.
  6. All These Sleepless Nights
    It’s a film of nearly pure sensation: woozy, intoxicating, visually gorgeous… and maddeningly repetitive.
  7. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    This handmade approach is a big part of the film’s DIY charm. It’s also a perfect match for the story, which seems to have been pulled, too, from the messy locker of teen-boy imagination.
  8. Tommy's Honour
    What this one offers in abundance is facts about golf in its early days. How the movie escaped a Father’s Day release in the U.S. is a mystery.
  9. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    In a sense, what we’re watching is a classic con-artist movie, built around someone who plies his shady trade not for money but esteem—the feeling that he matters, that his name carries weight.
  10. The Case for Christ
    The Case For Christ is pretty slow going, tedious rather than offensive, with Strobel repeatedly whiteboarding out the evidence as callback voice-overs add up all the pieces until he’s convinced. “All right, God,” he finally says. “You win.”
  11. Going in Style
    It’s probably worth noting that the whippersnapper behind the camera is none other than one-time sitcom star and indie darling Zach Braff. Did he owe someone a favor, or is this his attempt to break into the studio system he scorned with his last feature, the gooey Kickstarted passion project "Wish I Was Here"?
  12. Gifted
    Call it a dumbed-down "Good Will Hunting."
  13. Graduation
    In the end, it’s the hard questions that linger, disquietingly unanswered.
  14. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.
  15. Queen of the Desert
    Whatever imprint Queen Of The Desert makes belongs mostly to Kidman, who stresses Bell’s compassion, her fearlessness, her eponymous regality.
  16. Aftermath
    In fact, Aftermath only becomes interesting if considered as a dour subversion of the daughter-and-wife revenge scenarios of Schwarzenegger’s action movies — as star text, in other words.
  17. Your Name.
    There’s admittedly a certain pleasure in the deft fake-out that Shinkai executes here—most viewers will automatically make an assumption that’s ultimately proven wrong—but it comes at the cost of overall narrative incoherence.
  18. Win It All
    There’s enough disreputable behavior bookending the righteousness, and enough solid jokes along the way, to make the effort moderately entertaining.
  19. The Assignment
    It has no clue what it’s going for.
  20. Colossal
    Monster movies aren’t generally known for their subtlety, but leave it to Nacho Vigalondo to make one that keeps surprising its audience until the very end.
  21. Their Finest
    But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.
  22. Ghost in the Shell
    It is in its designs, more so than in its generic corporate-conspiracy plot, that this new Ghost In The Shell finds tantalizing expressions of theme.
  23. The Death of Louis XIV
    It’s such a conceptually fertile film that one wishes that it weren’t also a bore.
  24. The Boss Baby
    Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.
  25. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.
  26. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The Holocaust drama The Zookeeper’s Wife is handsomely made, well-acted, and lacking in much nuance.
  27. The Discovery
    At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.
  28. Cézanne et Moi
    Intensive research has killed many a biopic, but Cézanne Et Moi, which recounts the tempestuous lifelong friendship between Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola, labors even more tediously than most to accommodate personal details, whether or not those details serve the narrative.
  29. All This Panic
    Gage leans on the bright personalities of her subjects, while using roving handheld camerawork, smears of big-city color, and a shallow depth of field to capture some of the romantic grandeur they see in the world. All This Panic feels like a gift from her to them. Fortunately, we get to enjoy it, too.
  30. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Where The Art Life proves most informative to longtime Lynch fans is in its closely observed depiction of his creative process, glimpsed here as he putters around his home studio in the Hollywood Hills, his adorable toddler daughter in tow, creating paintings, sculptures, music, or whatever else strikes his fancy.
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