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. Gleason
    He can afford the best treatments and technologies and — by the end — even to extend his life, because he’s a well-off former NFL player. Most patients don’t have these luxuries.
  2. Bad Moms
    The performers do sell a lot of this material. Bell is especially funny as a cheery, lonely mom whose litany of childcare responsibilities has cut her off from the rest of the world.
  3. Miss Sharon Jones!
    While that may sound like a downer, the film itself is anything but, offering a genuinely uplifting testament to one woman’s resilience.
  4. The Childhood of a Leader
    If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”
  5. Nerve
    Like most films about technology, Nerve will endure as a time capsule, fascinating future generations with either its prescience or its quaintness.
  6. Star Trek Beyond
    With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.
  7. Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice is the rare movie that’s immersed in improv as a subject, not a behind-the-scenes technique for goosing laughs.
  8. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Overall Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is as shallow as a puddle of Dom Pérignon spilled on the bow of a luxury yacht. That’s the joke, you see.
  9. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    That a film already busy with historical reenactments, interviews, and conspiracizing of the wildest sort should end with three consecutive musical numbers suggests a kind of vaudeville structure to D’Souza’s work.
  10. Lights Out
    The film is blatantly, unmistakably about mental illness, and that makes it hard to ignore or forgive what it ends up saying (hopefully by accident) on the subject.
  11. Ice Age: Collision Course
    Yes, yes, this is a kids’ movie, so it hardly matters that none of it makes one lick of sense, even on its own terms.
  12. Summertime
    Everything onscreen still feels credible, but forbidden-love stories are as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Summertime had briefly seemed to promise something more mercurial.
  13. For the Plasma
    Three cheers, then, for Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, whose joint first effort, For The Plasma, ranks among the year’s most singular movies, even as it also ranks among the year’s most painful movies to endure.
  14. Lucha Mexico
    Suffice to say, masks are a big deal in the world of Mexican professional wrestling, known colloquially as lucha libre. Why are they such a big deal? Even after watching the movie, it’s hard to explain.
  15. Outlaws and Angels
    The main problem with Outlaws And Angels, though, is that it lacks either a sense of authenticity or a streak of playfulness to give shape to its relentlessly ugly worldview.
  16. Equals
    Equals brings Stewart’s charisma back to a genre framework — though its form of low-key science fiction is no longer the kind of genre material that actually gets wide exposure.
  17. Café Society
    Woody, now in his 80s, narrates the movie, which lends it a vaguely, symbolically autobiographical slant.
  18. Phantom Boy
    Even though it doesn’t all come together thrillingly, Phantom Boy garners a lot of goodwill just for looking and feeling original.
  19. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    At best, the film is a Rorschach testimonial, lionizing its subject while offering enough objectivity to allow non-believers to opt out. At worst, it’s a very long infomercial.
  20. The Infiltrator
    Director Brad Furman (Runner Runner, The Lincoln Lawyer) can’t mount a coherent scene even in a Scorsese-aping Steadicam long take, but with this ersatz sting flick, he’s made something so amateurish and baffling that it comes around to being memorable.
  21. Ghostbusters
    As enjoyable as this movie is, sometimes it feels like it’s holding back; no one’s id runs wild. But the limitations of Ghostbusters make Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Jones even more valuable. They make a big franchise-starter warmer and more endearing than it needs to be.
  22. Men Go to Battle
    A big part of the appeal of Men Go To Battle lies in its poky sense of humor, which recalls regional filmmaking gems like "The Whole Shootin’ Match" in the early going.
  23. Fathers and Daughters
    Objectively speaking, it’s garbage, a suffocating mix of dad redemption, not-ready-for-Mr.-Right romance, and a bogus lit-world success story, with mental illness, slobs-vs.-snobs legal drama, and an Electra complex thrown in for flavor. On that level, it’s as shameless as porn.
  24. Cell
    Directed by Tod Williams (Paranormal Activity 2) and co-scripted by King himself, it brings a best seller to the big screen with a minimum of spectacle, a maximum of affordable Georgia locations, and a couple of names to splash prominently across the Amazon rental thumbnail.
  25. The Secret Life of Pets
    As it progresses, The Secret Life Of Pets starts to overreach dramatically, and loses some of its charm in the process.
  26. Our Little Sister
    As a result, the movie version feels a tad weightless, especially relative to its hefty running time. Anyone in the mood for two hours (and change) of sheer, unadulterated loveliness, however, will be amply rewarded.
  27. Captain Fantastic
    To those outside his bubble, it can look at best like a form of child abuse, at worse like a cult: the nuclear family as survivalist militia.
  28. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    There’s something liberating about a comedy where all four central characters f--k up with such youthful bravado.
  29. Under the Sun
    The truths revealed in this film have more to do with the North Korean government’s self-consciousness about how they’re perceived by foreigners. Here, they seem desperate to appear productive, congenial, devoted, and above all, happy.
  30. Zero Days
    The film does the job; it holds your attention. Overall, though, this is a classic “Say, why not read a book instead?” situation.
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