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. How to Be Single
    You might say that How To Be Single suffers from the influence of its older, more put-together sister Sex And The City, right down to the sappy montage and voice-over it needs to tie everything together at the end.
  2. Regression
    One can make a creepy demonic horror movie, or one can make a sorrowful exposé about a real-world phenomenon that destroyed multiple families, but it’s exceedingly difficult to make both at the same time.
  3. Jim: The James Foley Story
    Jim: The James Foley Story is more than just a tribute to a fallen journalist. It’s a deeply moving testament to a man who dared to face the worst of humanity and somehow managed to maintain his sense of empathy in spite of it all.
  4. Deadpool
    The eccentric touches—a Wham! musical cue, a dash of screwball body horror—are just accents on a stealth franchise extension. At a certain point, you have to do more than just recognize and point out the mold. You have to actually shatter it.
  5. The Choice
    Again and again, Sparks takes the stuff of great four-hankie melodrama—love, death, cute dogs—and grinds it into a formulaic mush. Ask more of your paperback romances. At least ask for a different one each time.
  6. Misconduct
    If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.
  7. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Photos, clips from Eisenstein’s own films and from newsreels, and the director’s erotic drawings are spliced in or sometimes projected over the background, but the overloaded visual plane only underlines the fact that Eisenstein In Guanajuato never moves anywhere; eventually, it becomes stultifying. It’s a movie jumping in place.
  8. Southbound
    Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.
  9. The Club
    This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.
  10. Tumbledown
    That Tumbledown sort of works in spite of all its clichés is a testament to the gifts of its two lead actors.
  11. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The movie feels bloodless, and not just because the gore is muted and computerized to stay within the boundaries of a PG-13 rating.
  12. Hail, Caesar!
    Somewhere in there are stretches of the Coens’ funniest comedy since "The Big Lebowski"; it just takes a little patience.
  13. Rams
    All Iceland all the time, and while it failed to snag a foreign-language Oscar nomination (after winning the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes last year), it does its country proud.
  14. Jane Got a Gun
    Even when the movie focuses on its imagery rather than its plot mechanics, it seems intent on covering its bases rather than committing to a particular look or mood.
  15. Fifty Shades of Black
    When Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick.
  16. Rabin, the Last Day
    The movie is almost literally a trial to watch, demonstrating all the passion and excitement of an unedited C-SPAN broadcast.
  17. The Finest Hours
    As charming as the early scenes are, The Finest Hours doesn’t really come together as a love story, either, and Affleck’s scenes on the tanker are too abbreviated to really sink in as great survival drama.
  18. Kung Fu Panda 3
    Kung Fu Panda 3 is Kung Fu Panda minus a dramatic arc, but with way more pandas.
  19. Lazer Team
    Lazer Team is carried along by the sheer enthusiasm of its main quartet....It’s just too bad that there’s less wit in the dialogue than there is in the Barenaked Ladies’ closing-credits song.
  20. Exposed
    If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.
  21. Dirty Grandpa
    There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.
  22. The 5th Wave
    Aside from a taste for Visual Storytelling 101 basics (a close-up of a dropped teddy bear, held for what seems like half a minute), British director J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) doesn’t do much to distinguish himself from any number of hired guns.
  23. Synchronicity
    Synchronicity is more contraption than movie, its plot as mechanically functional as a clock, rotating characters around like gears.
  24. Aferim!
    To the extent that the film has an emotional journey, it’s the story of this man’s very, very slight moral awakening, which achieves nothing whatsoever and doesn’t necessarily look as if it’s going to stick.
  25. The Boy
    At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.
  26. Ip Man 3
    As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.
  27. Monster Hunt
    Monster Hunt combines a lot of qualities from the other items on the all-timer’s list: epic action, elaborate special effects, broad comedy, and a style that could best be described as “exhausting.”
  28. Martyrs
    Unfortunately, in goosing the momentum, the creators of the film have lost the soul of what was essential to this horrific tale
  29. Mojave
    By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes.
  30. Bleak Street
    Neither Ripstein nor his wife and regular screenwriter, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, succeed in unearthing (or inventing) anything of more than sensational interest from this tragedy.
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