The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,410 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 2.7 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: 5,569 out of 10410
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10410
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10410
10410 movie reviews
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  1. Carry-On
    There’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves.
  2. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim is a slight Middle-earth adventure that’s fleet-footed but inconsequential.
  3. The Last Showgirl
    It’s Pamela Anderson’s deceptively fragile performance that shoulders The Last Showgirl, her breathy, girlish rasp the perfect match for Shelly’s fluttery chatterbox personality. She is captivating, fully dissolved in the character, and it’s evident the extent to which Anderson is injecting her performance with her own complicated feelings towards aging, success, and spectatorship.
  4. Kraven the Hunter
    Kraven The Hunter gets closer than any of its predecessors to understanding the silly, entertaining freedom of shedding continuity. Then again, maybe it’s best that this misbegotten series quits while it’s just-barely ahead.
  5. A Complete Unknown
    A Complete Unknown is an honest film that wants to get close to an enigma, maybe even unlock his mystery a little. After the film, Dylan might not be any less of an unknown, but it’s the film’s breathtaking pursuit that counts.
  6. Get Away
    While the performances are rooted in comedic tact, the film’s thematic interests are completely scattershot, leading to an overwhelmingly uneven tone.
  7. Y2K
    Y2K should mark the beginning of Kyle Mooney’s film auteurism, but his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been replaced by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline.
  8. That Christmas
    Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.
  9. The End
    The melancholy absurdity—dragged out over two-and-a-half hours—doesn’t revel in its ironic condemnation. It’s a long sigh, an off-key parody song performed before humanity’s curtain call.
  10. Nosferatu
    There are moments of genuine horror and genuine artfulness in Nosferatu, neither of which would have been possible if the writer-director had approached the project with tongue in cheek. But at two hours and 12 minutes, it’s a solemn death march towards an inevitable conclusion—which fits the theme, but strains the limits of audience engagement.
  11. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    Eschewing the formal flare of his previous work, Rasoulof finds something more immediate here, a drama that burns like a political thriller and sears like a documentary.
  12. Dear Santa
    If Christmas movies can’t be good, they can usually at least be pleasant distractions. Dear Santa is neither. It’s a regrettable film, one that wasn’t ever worth the wordplay that started it.
  13. Moana 2
    It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spellbound
    The​​ disparate elements of a self-serious, straightforward plot and maximalist creature design keep Spellbound feeling kiddywampus, teetering between cloyingly obvious sincerity and confusing complexity.
  15. The Piano Lesson
    In The Piano Lesson, the ghosts are as tangible as they’ve ever been, and the film barely containing them is as weathered and tense as any family in need of a séance.
  16. Wicked
    Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.
  17. Flow
    Though initially revolving around the attention to detail that takes center stage when creating a world of silent naturalism, the script from Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža sometimes overpowers the incredible showcase of light, color, and movement with out-of-place cartoonishness.
  18. Red One
    The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of Red One are almost enough to prompt a moist-eyed holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment.
  19. Gladiator II
    One can’t help but feel as though the whole movie were periodically bellowing the original’s most famous line: “Are you not entertained!?” The answer is no, not really, and no amount of digital gladiatorial carnage or bug-eyed overacting can mask the prevailing air of exhausted, decadent imperial decline.
  20. All We Imagine as Light
    Kapadia’s skill lies in her ability to interweave moments of hope into the anxiety. Her leads offer tenderness and pull back into self-protectiveness in equal measure.
  21. Elevation
    None of the actors do much with the uninspired material, but perhaps Baccarin is the most enjoyable to watch as she grumbles in monotone about how she wants to kill herself and handily espouses monster factoids from her diligent research as a former Caltech professor.
  22. Small Things Like These
    Small Things Like These instead functions as a parable about how minor acts of kindness can be the strongest defense against powerlessness in the face of corruption. It’s a moral poignant in its simplicity, if also a bit lacking in how utterly uncomplicated and even expected it is.
  23. Emilia Pérez
    Though its thematic threads are never woven into salient social commentary, there is a perverse pleasure to be had with Emilia Pérez, even if its positions on gender, sexuality, and broader Mexican society lack proper nuance.
  24. Juror #2
    To all appearances, it’s a solid, unpretentious piece of work, but like some of Eastwood’s more ambitious classics, it centers its murky moral contradictions without contriving a way to resolve them.
  25. Here
    For all of its ambitions, Here is ultimately too simplistic to work as either a domestic drama or a deconstruction of the same—an experiment in storytelling that turns out to be an object lesson in undercooked ambition.
  26. Time Cut
    Here, genre hybridization is a losing battle, sacrificing scares and intensity in favor of corny jokes about Instagram not yet being invented.
  27. Dahomey
    Assessing this move from the perspective of the pieces themselves—including an elaborate carved throne, a towering statue of King Ghézo, and metallic markers of death—as well as the recipients of these revenants, Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.
  28. Brothers
    Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.
  29. Memoir of a Snail
    Though crafted with wry care and a captivatingly scuzzy aesthetic, the bittersweet biography is so miserable that the “sweet” ends up as a cloying chaser to old escargot.
  30. Venom: The Last Dance
    Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance has a little fun in the meantime. But in the end, it’s just a writhing symbiote waiting for a host that never shows up.
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