The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. Israel: A Home Movie
    Israel’s most interesting — and revealing — footage tends to be the most candid: beach-goers in the ’30s, scenes from family gatherings and celebrations, a coke-fueled celebrity wedding in the ’70s. The commentary gimmick justifies itself in these stretches.
  2. Sweetgrass
    The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.
  3. A Girl and a Gun
    Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it can’t maintain its muddled thesis for even that brief period.
  4. Absence
    There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.
  5. Stuck in Love
    As writer-director Josh Boone introduces these characters, he superimposes words on the screen to suggest how they channel their thoughts and conversations into their work. But that’s the extent of the film’s interest in writing, which serves strictly as a “classy” backdrop for a series of painfully contrived amorous meltdowns among a family who might as well run a dry-cleaning business.
  6. The Look of Love
    The movie is a character study in search of a character.
  7. The Way, Way Back
    Just about everyone and everything in The Way, Way Back feels programmed, as though the film were written using Mad Libs.
  8. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    Let Me Explain finds Hart at the peak of his powers, so the film’s long coronation feels justified, if gaudy. Strip away the preamble and just give him a mic, and he’d earn it all the same.
  9. Despicable Me 2
    What’s missing — and this was the crucial component of part one — is a little sour to undercut the sweet. Like its protagonist, a bad guy gone boringly good, Despicable Me 2 has no edge. It’s fatally nice and insufficiently naughty.
  10. The Lone Ranger
    Hammer’s performance — always game, never mugging — certainly helps; his likable but buffoonish Lone Ranger is an essential part of the movie’s irreverent tone.
  11. Museum Hours
    Essentially an essay film, Museum Hours is less interested in plot than in using its characters as a way to give ideas shape and voice; however, because their performances are natural and improvisatory, the movie never seems didactic.
  12. A Band Called Death
    The film springs to life in its second half, when the members’ grown kids, who are also working musicians, discover that their dads/uncles were in a forgotten, innovative band that the family had never once mentioned.
  13. Redemption
    When Redemption works, it’s as a series of writerly miniatures fleshed out by Statham’s street-tough charisma and Chris Menges’ neon-soaked nighttime camerawork.
  14. Laurence Anyways
    For once in a Dolan film, an actor upstages the camera moves. That’s a promising precedent, as well as a hint that artistic adulthood won’t spoil this hotdogging prodigy.
  15. Byzantium
    With her piercing baby blues that never seem to settle on a subject, even when she’s locked in conversation with it, Ronan seems just… off enough to play a vampiric vixen.
  16. Some Girl(s)
    The title’s parenthetical plural sums up the problem with Some Girl(s): Five slow-cook dialogues that reveal the nice-guy protagonist as a super-tool is four too many.
  17. I'm So Excited
    After establishing a jaunty tone with its candy-colored, Saul Bass–style opening credits, the film racks up a high strain-to-laugh ratio; there’s a sense Almodóvar can’t quite keep track of all his gags.
  18. White House Down
    While White House Down isn’t going to score points for originality, seriousness, or subtlety (Emmerich likes his political messages blunt and loud), it is a lot of fun; if nothing else, Emmerich is a great widescreen showman who knows how to stage mayhem on a grand scale.
  19. The Heat
    Part of the point here is to stake a claim on a genre that’s traditionally been a boys’ club, and in that regard, The Heat delivers: In a bonding moment, this odd couple goes on a bender as epic as anything in "The Hangover." Their enthusiasm with weapons should alarm viewers across all demographics and species.
  20. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    Lian Lunson’s camera allows the music to take center stage via straightforward, graceful compositions—close-ups and medium shots dominate, and edits are kept to a relative minimum—that allow for long, unbroken views of the artists at forceful, mournful work.
  21. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    How to Make Money Selling Drugs is breezy fun, even when it eventually turns openly cynical.
  22. Monsters University
    True to its name, Monsters University brims with cleverly designed creatures, a student body worthy of the recently deceased Ray Harryhausen. What the movie lacks is its precursor’s human ace-in-the-hole—that pint-sized, inadvertent agent of chaos, Boo.
  23. Maniac
    If it’s possible to be both impressed and appalled by a movie’s pull-no-punches savagery, Maniac earns that dubious distinction.
  24. Unfinished Song
    Unfinished Song is basically two movies inelegantly stuffed into one. Both are about aging — its setbacks and second chances — but only one of them feels like an honest exploration of the topic. The better half of the film is a kinder, gentler cousin to 2012’s "Amour."
  25. This Is Martin Bonner
    It’s a brief wisp of a movie, but one that’s not easy to shake.
  26. A Hijacking
    While the improvisatory movement of the camera helps create a sense of ambiguous tension in the scenes where the crew interacts with the pirates, it also undercuts several more overtly dramatic moments. However, this shortcoming of filmmaking imagination is largely redeemed by the pessimistic wallop of the movie’s ending.
  27. The Attack
    All the same, as dramatized here, The Attack skirts perilously close to being an apologia for suicide bombing.
  28. World War Z
    World War Z bucks the current trend in summer blockbusters by feeling weirdly understuffed. It’s an episodic adventure without enough episodes.
  29. Rushlights
    Unabashedly pulpy, Rushlights brings to mind the noir cheapies churned out by the studios of Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early 1950s. It has a few of the better qualities of sub-B noir—above-average camerawork, a rogues gallery of bit players — and all of the flaws.
  30. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
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