The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,456 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: 5,593 out of 10456
  2. Mixed: 3,748 out of 10456
  3. Negative: 1,115 out of 10456
10456 movie reviews
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  1. Mean Girls
    The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.
  2. Night Swim
    Despite some choppy waters in the back half, this is a fun, funny, often genuinely unnerving horror movie experience, one that might make you think twice about that first swim of the year when summer rolls around.
  3. Society of the Snow
    Society Of The Snow may be the best version of this saga told so far. Still, it feels incomplete and doesn’t dig deeper even as it hints at greater pathos beneath the surface.
  4. Ferrari
    The movie is often darkly funny as the characters lob barbs at each other. Nevertheless, the story feels a tad truncated in spots. An elongated run time would service the action and narrative a bit better—and, as Mann fans know, he does love releasing a good director’s cut.
  5. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    While Snyder may do his best to invent a dark, gripping universe to engross viewers, Rebel Moon is a limp, soulless regurgitation of tropes stolen from much more formidable films.
  6. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    This is a film that takes big swing after big swing, and leaves us filled up with spectacle, warmth, and a sense that the wait was probably worth it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Anyone But You
    The film is made as fun escapism, and it succeeds at that.
  8. All of Us Strangers
    Ultimately All Of Us Strangers says that only a lucky few get to free themselves to accept love and redemption. It’s a heartbreaking and sad notion, but when delivered with as much sensitivity and visual panache as Haigh does, it becomes cathartic.
  9. The Color Purple
    The Color Purple offers some entertaining moments, however the sum of it is much less than some of its standout parts. Bazawule clearly had a vision in adapting this story once more, and he’s aided by excellent work from cinematographer Dan Lausten and costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, yet that vision never fully coheres.
  10. The Boys in the Boat
    You cheer on these boys but you’re not left with much once the credits roll and their story becomes but a wistful tale of a time gone by.
  11. The Zone of Interest
    As a piece of observational cinema that borrows from the very visual grammar of nonfiction films, The Zone Of Interest is an instant classic, a masterpiece whose every gorgeously framed shot aims to stun you into silence. And into forceful remembrance as well.
  12. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    It’s rare to see family animated films as purely focused on fun as this one.
  13. American Fiction
    American Fiction is an intriguing conundrum. It starts as a sizzling, hilarious satire that manages to sling pointed arrows at most of its targets. However, by trying to become too many things, it ends up sanding the edges off its sharpness. Still, the journey to its denouement remains mostly entertaining.
  14. The Iron Claw
    The chemistry between the brothers is palpable, creating emotional heft behind each victory and defeat.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  30. 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.
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