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. Karl Marx City
    Karl Marx City is at heart a psychological family drama—the story of a tightly knit household that outlived an oppressive society, only to find itself faced with a doubt about the past that amounts to an existential quandary.
  2. Slamma Jamma
    It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.
  3. CHIPS
    Given the alternative between the big-screen CHIPS and an antiquated, low-stakes episode of the original TV series, we’d pick the latter in a heartbeat.
  4. Saban's Power Rangers
    When it comes time to morph and break out the Zords to the sound of “Go, Go, Power Rangers,” the film groans and shuffles, like a sulky teen who’s been told that they have to finish the dishes before they can borrow the minivan.
  5. Life
    Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.
  6. American Anarchist
    It’s only thanks to Powell’s own rhetorical waffling that the movie succeeds to the degree it does.
  7. Prevenge
    A wryly misanthropic slasher comedy about a woman whose fetus commands her to kill.
  8. Dig Two Graves
    The movie looks superb, especially for its minuscule budget. While Adams is clearly a very promising director, however, his screenwriting chops aren’t so advanced. This is one clunky amalgam of mystery and guilt.
  9. I Called Him Morgan
    When it’s all done, More and Morgan remain ciphers, and not the type whose intangibility is evocative of something greater. All we have are the known facts, and that is all that I Called Him Morgan provides in the end.
  10. Wilson
    It’s a gamble, building a comedy around a character this boorish.
  11. The Devil's Candy
    Byrne adds a twist by appealing to a growing and under-represented segment of the extreme art forms’ shared fan base: parents.
  12. Song to Song
    The quartet of actors lends Song To Song somewhat more focus, but it still finds ways to sprawl.
  13. The Belko Experiment
    The Belko Experiment teeters between “fun,” gory brutality and a more seriously disturbing variety — the latter epitomized by the film’s centerpiece, a chillingly organized process of elimination that echoes mass shootings and historic Final Solutions in equal measure.
  14. T2 Trainspotting
    It teeters on the edge of relapse, aimless and at a loss as to how it can motivate its returning ensemble of former and current lowlifes, who only ever needed one thing to get them from scene to scene.
  15. Beauty and the Beast
    Shiny but not exactly new, Bill Condon’s live-action Beauty And The Beast is a curious nostalgia object, synthetically engineered to reproduce all the same sensations as a 26-year-old movie.
  16. After the Storm
    An exercise in mellowness, right down to the snatches of tinkly-twinkly sentimental music.
  17. Frantz
    Beer and Niney do solid work, but their sensitive efforts can’t quite breathe life into a story that no longer seems terribly relevant.
  18. The Sense of an Ending
    The entire movie consists of this same delayed-gratification tactic, as significant events from Tony’s past are first teased and then revealed a bit at a time, via numerous flashbacks. A little of that sort of thing can be invigorating. Push it too far, however, and it starts to feel like a pointless game of narrative Keep Away.
  19. Raw
    The film gained an unfortunate reputation as a gross-out cannibal shocker on the festival circuit, and while that categorization is not entirely, technically incorrect — this is a piece of body horror, and an intensely visceral one — it detracts from the striking imagery and layered symbolism of Ducournau’s uncommonly assured debut feature.
  20. Personal Shopper
    Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.
  21. Actor Martinez
    It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.
  22. My Scientology Movie
    This stunt-driven nonfiction project rearranges the well-reported dirt on the church, placing it into the context of something considerably less useful: a documentary about how hard it is to make a documentary about Scientology.
  23. Kong: Skull Island
    Skull Island has a lot of globe-trotting fun assembling its team of expendables.
  24. The Last Word
    Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.
  25. The Shack
    There’s nothing about this unconscionably long movie (it runs a whopping 132 minutes) that suggests anyone involved ever watched it from start to finish. But it looks nice enough, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, with lots of flowers and flannel.
  26. Table 19
    And yes, it’s as tired as “The Breakfast Club remade with adults” implies.
  27. Catfight
    In more ways than one, Catfight lives down to its title. This is a spectacularly petty and mean-spirited comedy that pivots around, yes, two women beating the shit out of each other.
  28. Before I Fall
    What really stinks about Before I Fall is that it zaps all the fun and humor out of its time-bending premise, leaving behind a lot of moping to randomly selected pop cues.
  29. Wolves
    Most of the cast does a fine job of turning this hooey into something serviceable.
  30. Donald Cried
    The film’s gradual shift from broad yuk-fest toward something closer to indie drama (while still striving to be funny) isn’t wholly successful; it’s difficult to achieve the catharsis of, say, Kelly Reichardt’s "Old Joy" when you start out like "Napoleon Dynamite." But at least Avedisian tried.
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