The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Ben-Hur
    The Wyler film’s rousing chariot sequence—filmed separately and at lavish expense by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived — is hard to beat. But Bekmambetov acquits himself nicely, offering up a loud and vicious circular chase, with point-of-view shots of people getting hit by chariots as armored Romans scamper around like rodeo clowns.
  2. Ixcanul
    This is a decidedly small-scale tragedy, but it still packs a cumulative wallop.
  3. When Two Worlds Collide
    When Two Worlds Collide employs a variety of styles and approaches to construct a single gripping narrative.
  4. Spa Night
    Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.
  5. Disorder
    The trick of Disorder is that it plays right to the audience’s suspicions and desires.
  6. Hell or High Water
    Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation.
  7. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Hugh Grant’s face is perpetually locked in a concerned grimace as Bayfield, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere when he’s not doting on his wife.
  8. My King
    My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who’s better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what’s essential.
  9. Blood Father
    Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
  10. Sausage Party
    Rogen and Goldberg start with spoofery and work their way into something bolder and stranger; it’s as if playing in the Pixar sandbox, or a reasonable approximation thereof, can’t help but inspire creativity.
  11. Joshy
    While it is something of a comedy, Joshy is also serious, and its comic actors follow suit.
  12. Pete's Dragon
    Looking for poetry in a live-action family film is usually about as futile as hunting for dragons in your backyard; the vast majority of them wager on the indiscriminate tastes of kids and their dutiful chaperons. But Pete’s Dragon has poetry in spades.
  13. Anthropoid
    Dramatically, it’s not much of a movie, but if you just want to know how things went down, it’s certainly a more exciting précis than Wikipedia’s.
  14. The Lost Arcade
    At bottom, this is the story of freaks and geeks everywhere: a quest for the like-minded, rooted in obsessive engagement with a tiny sliver of pop culture.
  15. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    Stories Women Tell does succeed at what it primarily means to do, which is to take abortion out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more personal.
  16. Nine Lives
    Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.
  17. The Mind's Eye
    From its opening title card proclaiming “This film should be played loud,” the telekinetic body-horror film The Mind’s Eye is punk as f--k.
  18. The Little Prince
    Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.
  19. Little Men
    The younger characters are so full of life, and the older ones so full of trenchant but predictable talking-point issues, that it sometimes feels like a middling movie encroaching on a good one.
  20. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    This virtually action-free war movie (which premiered at Cannes last year with the English-language title The Wakhan Front) will frustrate anyone seeking concrete explanations. Its haunting atmosphere, however, in conjunction with its half-harrowing, half-sleepy milieu, keeps the film fascinating until it finally fizzles.
  21. Sun Choke
    The film doesn’t always work as a genre exercise, but it’s a winner as a character study, in large part because of how committed Hagan is to playing Janie’s derangement. Casting directors in search of the offbeat should take note.
  22. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights In Maine’s grieving has a short-story quality, and many movies would do well to follow that model.
  23. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Although it’s casual to a fault, Dream Is Destiny is generally engaging and liberally sprinkled with real insights into what makes this filmmaker special.
  24. Suicide Squad
    Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.
  25. League of Gods
    It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.
  26. Indignation
    This is a bleak film, one whose undercurrent of morbidity stems any romanticization of the past. That ominousness can at times be suffocating, as the action barrels toward a conclusion it insists on foreshadowing. Light summer fare this is not.
  27. Equity
    Equity may not be the fanciest or flashiest of financial thrillers — more like off-brand David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh — but it gets the job done.
  28. Homo Sapiens
    The fact that movies are a technology of motion makes them uniquely suited to capturing stillness; Geyrhalter takes full advantage, using vivid sound design and his own eye for striking static compositions to create haunting tableaux.
  29. Into the Forest
    Indeed, there are stretches of Into The Forest during which one could momentarily forget that it’s a survivalist tale at all… or even that it’s taking place in the middle of nowhere, for that matter. The essential becomes irrelevant.
  30. Jason Bourne
    Rather than push this character or story forward, the film cravenly hits the reset button, doing more of the same with much less passion and skill.
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