The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. A Perfect Day
    On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.
  2. Norm of the North
    Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.
  3. Intruders
    Intruders ultimately comes across like basic-cable schlock (or is it Netflix schlock now?), slightly redeemed by the germ of a great idea, even if said idea never truly germinates.
  4. Band of Robbers
    There’s an element of parlor trickery here that the movie’s never entirely able to overcome.
  5. In the Shadow of Women
    Shot on black-and-white film that has the luster of hard coal, In The Shadow Of Women is often quite beautiful—and it has some jokes, too.
  6. The Benefactor
    That makes the role well tailored to its occupant: Gere stays within his range of moneyed playboys, while still getting to indulge in the kind of unflattering behavior that a more put-together Richard Gere character would never exhibit.
  7. Moonwalkers
    By the umpteenth scene where the “joke” is that one of the characters is on drugs, the movie’s strained wackiness becomes wearisome.
  8. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.
  9. Ride Along 2
    The implausibilities, cop-movie checkboxes, and mildly wasted talent make Ride Along 2 lazy, but not downright loathsome. If anything, it’s perhaps slightly more amusing and agreeable than the original—a sign of how little that film’s seemingly surefire premise wound up mattering.
  10. The Forest
    The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.
  11. Lamb
    Throughout Lamb, Laurence makes sure that every one of the character’s bad choices makes sense. That’s what makes the movie so sad.
  12. Anesthesia
    Still, it’s dispiriting to see him (Nelson) produce something as turgid and heavy-handed as Anesthesia, which employs a dozen or so cardboard characters as mouthpieces for singularly unilluminating thoughts about the ways in which people struggle to bury their unhappiness.
  13. The Treasure
    Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.
  14. Diablo
    Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
  15. Point Break
    The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.
  16. Anomalisa
    Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.
  17. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  18. Where to Invade Next
    Moore here makes his strongest bona fide argument in ages, albeit one that still gleefully stacks the deck and avoids examining possible downsides too carefully. He even comes across as genuinely patriotic, in his own way.
  19. 45 Years
    A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.
  20. Son of Saul
    No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.
  21. Sisters
    Fey and Poehler are clearly the center of the film, and watching their lively games of verbal ping-pong is always an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes or so.
  22. Extraction
    Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.
  23. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.
  24. Concussion
    Smith’s Omalu makes a compelling character, supported by his mentor Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks) and former team doctor Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin). But Concussion doesn’t crackle like the best whistleblower dramas.
  25. Joy
    Rough even by Russell’s standards, this grab bag of dropped plot points, visual metaphors, and theatrical cues looks like the underdrawing of a comic drama, only half covered in bright impasto strokes.
  26. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  27. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    What Abrams has done is strip Star Wars down to its core components, rearranging the stuff people liked about the original trilogy and getting rid of what they hated about the rest.
  28. The Revenant
    There’s a sense that the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of the parts, no matter how spectacular some of them are.
  29. The Hateful Eight
    This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.
  30. The Ridiculous 6
    While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.
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