The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Presenting Princess Shaw
    This film barely brushes up against the many, many issues it raises, but those conversations can be had in the lobby, after the pleasure of watching an underappreciated artist finally get her due.
  2. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    It’s briskly paced and sometimes neat to watch in reality-bending 3-D, but none of it is quite as head-spinning as it should be. The movie doesn’t dare alienate its family base with genuine trippiness; instead, it pacifies with tedious familial backstory.
  3. The Idol
    There’s a fascinating story here, but the movie never gets out of its own way long enough to tell it.
  4. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.
  5. Pervert Park
    Pervert Park never demands forgiveness, only an attempt to understand and to maybe see where these dark impulses come from.
  6. Kaili Blues
    Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.
  7. Weiner
    This film doesn’t lionize Weiner or justify anything he did. What it does is capture the frenzy of politics, the iron-clad egos of politicians, and the failure of the media to cover the parts of campaigning and government that actually matter.
  8. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys is funny enough when it sticks to its heroes — whether pinned in a tight spot or bickering with each other — that its less-than-compelling intrigues and digressions come as an acceptable trade-off.
  9. Maggie's Plan
    A comedy that proves that an appealing cast (Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore) and a wonderful premise are no guarantee of big laughs.
  10. The Angry Birds Movie
    Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.
  11. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Efron imbues his handsome-dope routine with such nuance that Teddy is not only funny but also touching in his sincere desire for brotherhood, in short supply postgraduation. What could have been simplistic self-parody becomes a genuinely, almost confusingly terrific performance.
  12. Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
  13. ma ma
    Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate.
  14. The Darkness
    It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.
  15. Search Party
    Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.
  16. I Am Wrath
    If the film’s casual racism—the villains are almost all some shade of not-white—feels more perfunctory than malicious, it’s because it’s just another secondhand element in the collection of bad clichés passing for a script.
  17. Kill Zone 2
    Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.
  18. The Trust
    When it comes to the disposable VOD fare that Cage and Travolta have made a side career out of indiscriminately embracing, minor pleasures are a major improvement.
  19. Money Monster
    Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.
  20. The Lobster
    Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.
  21. Sunset Song
    Stultifying in spots, the period drama Sunset Song marks an unexpected misstep for Terence Davies, the eccentric filmmaker whose movies evoke limbo states of memory and repressed feeling using a very British vocabulary of drab spaces.
  22. Love & Friendship
    It does offer a very amusing portrait of guile and idiocy. Think of it as a divertissement. Both Austen and Stillman would surely approve.
  23. High-Rise
    The intoxicating mix of kitsch and chic barely conceals the psychosis underneath.
  24. Last Days in the Desert
    By the end, what seemed like a lovely rumination starts to sound more like poetry refashioned as prose.
  25. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    It’s worth seeing just for its object lesson in how shifts in perspective can radically alter the tenor and meaning of material that might otherwise come across as pompously silly.
  26. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.
  27. Elstree 1976
    Visually, Elstree 1976 is often striking, thanks to some haunting extreme close-ups of these actors’ Star Wars action figures.
  28. Dough
    Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.
  29. Dark Horse
    For the many, many viewers who’ve never heard of Dream Alliance, Osmond’s documentary is edge-of-the-seat stuff.
  30. Being Charlie
    Being Charlie is Rob Reiner’s best film in at least two decades — admittedly a low bar to clear, given the competition (which includes such forgotten piffle as Alex & Emma and Rumor Has It…), but even a modest Meathead comeback is more than welcome.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »