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. IF
    IF feels markedly strung together, the consequence of its few creative ideas with no coherent visual language to bind them.
  2. Woman of the Hour
    This is a self-assured take on a story that stretches far, wide, and deep.
  3. Smile 2
    Yes, the varying quality of performances from the supporting cast and the film’s slightly bloated 127-minute runtime might leave cheeks straining. But the film finds dark humor in taking these desperate feelings of unease and feeding them to a kaleidoscopic creature of pain and viscera.
  4. The Shadow Strays
    The carnage, it should be re-stated, does not disappoint.
  5. Rumours
    Even in these early scenes, a strangeness pervades the film: ironic, sometimes stagey or soapy, occasionally punctuated by over-the-top musical cues.
  6. Blitz
    Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.
  7. Piece By Piece
    Rather than blazing a new trail for Lego cartoons, this may be the first one to feel like it’s adhering too closely to its instruction booklet.
  8. We Live in Time
    We Live In Time’s worst sin is making its thin characters so damn boring. They’re so likable and sweet, even their flaws are forgivable.
  9. Lonely Planet
    The fact that the movie has zero stakes and unfolds in one low emotional key is part of its appeal—the sort of subgenre known as “cozy romance” in publishing parlance.
  10. Nightbitch
    While Nightbitch certainly achieves relatability, it also presents a generic treatise on womanhood that reinforces more gendered conventions than it refutes.
  11. Caddo Lake
    Held and George’s film twists and turns, but charting their narrative swamp is a simple and unrewarding exercise.
  12. Pavements
    It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits.
  13. The Platform 2
    Gaztelu-Urrutia’s expansion feels redundant and over-explained, but also sludgy and disjointed. It’s like being served a second dinner after you’re uncomfortably full; the flavors taste the same, but the experience is far less fulfilling.
  14. Joker: Folie à Deux
    It isn’t just Harley Quinn fans who will be annoyed and possibly insulted by the filmmaker’s sour whims. The degree to which Phillips undermines fan expectations would be admirable if Joker: Folie À Deux wasn’t also something of a slog—and if its every creative decision didn’t feel strangely affectionless.
  15. Hold Your Breath
    For all of the horror subgenres crammed into Hold Your Breath, it never conjures sufficient scares.
  16. A Real Pain
    There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material.
  17. Heretic
    Divisiveness aside, and despite a few stumbles in pacing as it pivots from cool premise to interesting conclusion, Heretic is a wonderfully effective, chilling thriller from two of the best genre storytellers currently in the game.
  18. The Brutalist
    The Brutalist is operating in the shadow of a tradition of cinematic epics, there is an expected journey the film has the opportunity to stray from, and it doesn’t nearly enough.
  19. It's What's Inside
    While the film’s social commentary isn’t radically incisive, it does manage to capture the nature of a true party game: excitement initially abounds, but you can’t play along forever.
  20. Maria
    The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Look Back
    All of this beautiful animation intrinsically drives at why people create in the first place, highlighting both the life-affirming and deeply messy realities of making manga.
  22. House of Spoils
    The result is too serious to ever go full B-movie bonkers and too silly to ever actually scare, let alone say something meaningful.
  23. Apartment 7A
    Musings on motherhood, performance, and power are never fully articulated, leaving a flurry of concepts up in the air without resolve.
  24. Salem's Lot
    Salem’s Lot isn’t a disaster (far worse horror films have made plenty of money at the box office), but a bloodless and frail version of the story drained of its vitality.
  25. Saturday Night
    It’s more akin to speed-reading from the SNL memoir library than experiencing the thrilling unevenness—the captivating try-whatever stupidity—of the actual live show. It’s inconsequential in all the wrong places.
  26. The Wild Robot
    With its unexpectedly moving sights, remarkable voice ensemble, and pure clarity of humanist vision, The Wild Robot emerges as a stunning achievement.
  27. V/H/S/Beyond
    While other V/H/S installments have sometimes been scattershot, united by format and time period more than anything else, V/H/S/Beyond holds together almost perfectly as a thematic exploration of the things lurking just beyond our understanding.
  28. Uglies
    All of Uglies feels like a rush job where its creators had the instruction manual but lost the proper parts.
  29. Hard Truths
    It’s a boldly uncompromising work that strips some of the more cheerful elements to the bone. Yet despite this, there’s still a sense of warmth, of optimism, of quiet humor that shows how this deft storyteller can still surprise and enthrall, incorporating another exceptional ensemble willing and able to do the work to bring his lines to life.
  30. Never Let Go
    As recent horror offerings disproportionately lean toward disappointing remakes and tepid commentary on our modern way of life, it’s refreshing to encounter genre fare that is equal parts original and entertaining.
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