The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.
  2. Old Fashioned
    Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.
  3. What We Do in the Shadows
    The result is more often amusing than gut-busting, but it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and that’s fairly impressive in itself.
  4. The Last Five Years
    For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.
  5. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    A live-action Hammacher Schlemmer catalog of pseudo-retro novelties, spiced up with self-aware asides and over-the-top violence — slick entertainment, provided the viewer turns off whatever part of their brain is responsible for recognizing and parsing subtext.
  6. Seventh Son
    Seventh Son is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself.
  7. Jupiter Ascending
    It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi.
  8. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The visual effects and fast and furious quips combine for that rarest of releases: one that both parents and kids can enjoy (just like the show), leaving viewers of any age hoping that the next SpongeBob movie isn’t an entire decade off.
  9. Love, Rosie
    On the plus side, Collins (Mirror Mirror, The Blind Side) and Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games franchise) are both appealing enough, even if their chemistry makes Rosie and Alex’s we’re-just-pals stance appear even more ludicrous than intended.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ballet 422
    “Art isn’t easy,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, and in Jody Lee Lipes’ bleak beauty of a documentary, the act of creation is a resolutely joyless one — a tedious grind with little lasting reward.
  11. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”
  12. The Voices
    Satrapi makes some bad calls in her attempts to balance bleak humor with bleaker thrills, including ending the film on a glibly cheerful note. Her best decision, bar none, was entrusting such heavy material to the guy who played Van Wilder. Behind that perpetual smirk lurks a talent for quiet depravity. Bonkers looks good on him.
  13. Project Almanac
    As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.
  14. The Loft
    Besides being an early contender for the worst date movie of 2015, The Loft is a film that can’t decide what it wants. It’s a male fantasy, and a cautionary tale. It’s sleazy in concept, and timid in execution.
  15. Black or White
    Tempting though it might be to celebrate any earnest, good-faith attempt to talk about race in America, it’s clear that the creator of Mind Of The Married Man was not the right one to do the talking.
  16. Girlhood
    "Boyhood" has the natural endpoint of its lead growing into a young adult, while Girlhood stretches out in front of Marieme, an uncertain path into a haze.
  17. Wild Card
    A largely forgettable lark, notable more for its slight diversions from action-movie norms than anything else.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Alien Outpost
    It’s a real slog.
  19. Hard to Be a God
    It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?
  20. Amira & Sam
    Romantic comedy clichés are given a superficial East-meets-West (and vet-back-home) makeover in Amira & Sam, a love story whose likable stars can’t compensate for a story that tediously adheres to formula.
  21. Timbuktu
    In essence, Timbuktu is about how farce turns into terror.
  22. Mortdecai
    It’s exactly the sort of oddball trifle, like Hudson Hawk, that tends to attract the ire of baffled audiences and grumpy critics. It’s also the sort of oddball trifle that, like Hudson Hawk, will put certain aficionados of silliness in a pretty good mood.
  23. Black Sea
    Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.
  24. Son of a Gun
    Unfortunately, this promising material turns out to be merely the setup for a thoroughly generic action flick in which a gang of thieves without much honor attempt to pull off one last big heist. In the long, dispiriting slide to mediocrity thereafter, McGregor largely relapses into cute-rascal mode.
  25. Song One
    Not enough happens in Song One for the movie to really qualify as unpredictable, but it deserves credit for a steadfast avoidance of melodrama in a story that practically begs for it.
  26. R100
    It’s easier to define what R100 isn’t than what it is. First of all, despite the presence of ninja dominatrices, it’s not a steamy thriller, and the raincoat crowd should apply elsewhere.
  27. Strange Magic
    Strange Magic, an animated film from Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, borrows its sensibility from another movie from the summer of 2001: "Moulin Rouge." The new film’s composer and music director, Marius De Vries, even arranged songs for Baz Luhrmann’s phantasmagorical musical.
  28. The Humbling
    Even, however, if its thunder hadn’t been immediately stolen by "Birdman," which premiered three days before it at last August’s Venice International Film Festival, The Humbling would still look like a folly. Bad timing is the least of its problems.
  29. The Duke of Burgundy
    At its core, this is one of the most incisive, penetrating, and empathetic films ever made about what it truly means to love another person, audaciously disguised as salacious midnight-movie fare. No better picture is likely to surface all year.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cake
    Director Daniel Barnz, who also made the unbearably earnest "Won’t Back Down," never wavers in his more-is-more conviction. Perhaps with a better script and in surer hands, Cake could have been salvaged.
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