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. The Iron Claw
    The chemistry between the brothers is palpable, creating emotional heft behind each victory and defeat.
  2. Origin
    For those who choose to take this riveting journey of discovery, they’ll find this picture gets them to a place of inspiring enlightenment and keeps them in that mindset far beyond the end credits scroll.
  3. Wonka
    In King and company’s capable hands, the care package delivered is a soul-warming cup of cocoa. Sweet yet never saccharine, cute yet never cloying, their hyper-stylized portrait of an iconic literary and cinematic figure is not only powered by the pure imagination that inspires the songs’ spectacle, but it’s also filled with audacious flourishes of charm, whimsy and poignancy.
  4. The Boy and the Heron
    If The Boy And The Heron is indeed Miyazaki’s final film, it can serve as both a victory lap and a plea for a successor to arrive and take up the mantle of trying to make the world a better place through art.
  5. Poor Things
    Poor Things is such a rare combination of talented collaborators working in perfect concert that it’s hard to consider the film anything short of masterful.
  6. Godzilla Minus One
    When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
  7. Eileen
    Oldroyd has crafted a strange and mysterious thriller with Eileen. It’s not entirely satisfying, however it’s also never less than imaginatively conceived and utterly beguiling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    Beyoncé wants to show you the work, the grit, the ingenuity. She wants to show you, as she repeats, her renaissance.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Wish
    Wish is a mess, but there are ways it could be called an innovative one.
  10. Maestro
    If the film is a tad baggy and unruly that seems by design and thus less a critique than an accurate assessment. But overall and while painting so boldly on such a broad canvas (the film spans decades and calls on its actors and make-up department to work overtime in delineating the passage of time) Maestro emerges as a bombastic aria of a biopic befitting its central subject.
  11. Napoleon
    Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins may not seem like the most original film, but the fact that it’s based on actual, if somewhat improbable, events means that it ultimately earns its uplifting perspective, owing largely to Waititi’s heartfelt commitment to the story.
  13. Saltburn
    The handful of explicit scenes feel like they’re included solely for shock value, coming across as schlocky and inert. That’s not to say the performances are at fault.
  14. Thanksgiving
    Packed with memorable kills, knowing winks, and a playful slasher whodunit plot, Thanksgiving is a horror feast worth sitting through, even if it never exactly pushes beyond the bounds of its central hook.
  15. May December
    With May December Haynes has crafted an implausible blend of raw authenticity and stylized histrionics that’s fueled by a curious intellectual inquiry: what role do we play in our own story?
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging.
  17. The Marvels
    Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.
  18. Priscilla
    Unafraid of shattering rose-tinted glasses, Coppola’s film is fierce in its subtlety, relying on Spaeney’s breathtaking performance and the inherent tragedy of Priscilla’s story to deliver a film that’s equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking.
  19. Rustin
    Bayard Rustin deserves to be remembered for the entirety of his being, both as an activist and as an openly gay Black man in a time when it was criminal. As much as Rustin attempts to balance both, it carries the former better than the latter.
  20. Pain Hustlers
    While it’s wildly entertaining to watch a performer walk such a tightrope, at some point you lament that the opioid crisis has been reduced to a circus sideshow.
  21. The Killer
    As The Killer moves through its nearly two-hour runtime, the vapor-high of a tightly choreographed opening sequence and the undeniable pleasure of being comfortably cradled in the hands of a master craftsman give way to a wandering mind.
  22. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers may peg its tale on a truism that can feel trite (you never know what others are going through). But Payne, Hemingson, and its central trio of actors find welcome nuances within that platitude.
  23. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Yes, there are kills, but they’re often as comical as they are scary, and deliberately so. It’s a fun gateway horror movie for kids—and the easily scared who want to test their limits lightly.
  24. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers Of The Flower Moon is as momentous as the country it’s set in and as full of history as the people whose murder it depicts.
  25. Nyad
    If, at the end of the day, Nyad feels like a well-oiled crowd-pleasing sports drama with a heartwarming (if slightly insidious) message about never giving up, that doesn’t blunt its impact.
  26. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    The film gives the audience a front-row seat and a pretty good approximation of what it was like to be there in the thick of it.
  27. The Burial
    The Burial is dramatic yet also funny. It works because it isn’t afraid to be “inspired by” the story’s actual people and isn’t just content to retell the events of this little-known but highly consequential civil court case.
  28. Anatomy of a Fall
    It’s a precise study of how strife and conflict metastasize if left unresolved. And by grounding these fine-tuned dramatics in the guise of a genre picture, it works to profound effect.
  29. Saw X
    Fans who tune in mainly for the insane timeline twists won’t get them, but otherwise, this is the most satisfying Saw installment since the first three. Also, be sure to stick around for a mid-credits scene.
  30. Dicks: The Musical
    This is as broad as comedies get these days. But its shock-and-awe sensibility is somewhat exhausting.
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