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. I Love My Dad
    Morosini, though, is smart enough to know that just grossing us out for 95 minutes is not a movie. So he tries to make his film dramatically credible. This proves more difficult, as he has nothing new or insightful to say about father-son relationships or the pernicious possibilities of social media. But managing to push the squirm-inducing envelope while still getting us to root for a reprehensible dad becomes its own sort of twisted achievement.
  2. Bullet Train
    Leitch’s talky, violent hit man movie, with Brad Pitt at the center of an over-cranked ensemble cast, reminds us why Hollywood has all but abandoned attempts to copy the successes of Tarantino and Ritchie. This film is not just bloated, tedious, dim-witted, and glib, it’s also redundant.
  3. Vengeance
    Among some of the movie’s heady notions the movie attempts to assay are the idea and consequences of people living in their own highly individualized spaces; the question of whether any truth can be embedded in pure intuition; and the empty distractions of collapsing civilization, in which culture is relegated to increasingly meaningless fragmentary morsels.
  4. Purple Hearts
    Purple Hearts would be a lot more interesting if it interrogated the specific moments of weakness that attract Cassie to Luke, but that’s far too complex an idea to explore in this kiddie pool of sentimentality.
  5. Paradise Highway
    As intriguing as the combination of Binoche and Grillo might sound, it would be much more impactful if they shared the screen for more than a handful of scenes. As such, the movie begins with a bang, but it ends with a whimper.
  6. Resurrection
    Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
  7. Thirteen Lives
    Howard’s film winds up as a rote retread, transitioning from headline news to big-screen snooze.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    DC League of Super-Pets
    Co-writing with John Whittington, director Jared Stern pulls off a near-impossible feat—creating a film that’s great for kids, entertaining for pretty much any adult taking kids to the theater, and close to perfect for those parents out there who also happen to be massive DC fans.
  9. A Love Song
    On the surface, there’s little more simple than a story of two people trying to make a connection. On an emotional level, however, few things are more complicated. Like life, A Love Song offers no easy conclusions—just simple realizations. In expert hands, that’s enough.
  10. Sharp Stick
    Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.
  11. Not Okay
    This deceptively frothy yet incisive little film asserts that even if the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, redemption can’t be claimed in public spaces. Rather, it has to be earned in private, and sometimes, forgiveness isn’t necessarily the most virtuous next step—especially since healing takes time. For these mature observations alone, we have no choice but stan a peerless Quinn.
  12. My Old School
    Cumming is magnificent in this role, mastering the exact rhythm of Brandon’s speech while also interpreting his emotions with a naturalism that blends seamlessly with testimonials from former students and instructors.
  13. Nope
    What Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?
  14. Anything's Possible
    Anything’s Possible may be flawed for what it fails to fully develop around the edges of its story, but the central relationship that holds the film together is so compelling that the rest hardly matters.
  15. Alone Together
    While we may soon tire of movies using the pandemic as a narrative catalyst (if we haven’t already), Katie Holmes’ Alone Together feels vitally of-the-moment at a time when so many films are ignoring the poignancy of that moment altogether.
  16. Persuasion
    Despite these modern constraints, Cracknell’s adaptation crackles with life. Especially with an effervescent actress and hunky actor delivering compelling performances—in Johnson’s case, sometimes directly to the camera—this funny, poignant and enrapturing film gives ingenious new power to some of the Jane Austen’s greatest hits.
  17. The Deer King
    Though the recipe of a feudal setting with fantasy and myth-making elements ought to be strong, the mixture is off, like a handsomely plated sandwich where the ingredients are more bland than anticipated.
  18. This Is GWAR
    For all the documentary reveals about the band, it leaves you asking further questions, and wanting much more—an apt metaphor for a band that created an impressive legacy, and yet whose members rarely came to a consensus.
  19. She Will
    It’s the film’s mercurial nature, its hazy dreamlike logic, that makes it so extraordinary.
  20. The Gray Man
    Gosling’s one of those actors for whom a recurring action hero role somehow feels long overdue, and the Russos have taken advantage of more than just his good looks and smoldering gazes.
  21. Don't Make Me Go
    Even for a movie obsessed from the outset with its destination, Don’t Make Me Go mostly takes a road to nowhere.
  22. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    Reckless cultural insensitivities aside, Stone and Hopper’s writing is simply not smart or funny. Poop and fart jokes comprise the core of their repertoire, and if you’re curious how reliant the film is on this material, Paramount is literally handing out whoopee cushions to promote the film.
  23. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Newman’s film gets enough right to be just as solid as a summer cinematic distraction as Owens’ book was as beachside literature. The atmosphere and beauty of the Carolina marshes are masterfully captured, and it bears repeating that Daisy Edgar-Jones is a magnetic leading presence, investing Kya with equal parts relatability and spiny distance for a character that seems to have leapt from the page, whole and vivid.
  24. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    In the tradition of Britain’s class comedies, what makes Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris comes down to the difference between, say, your average fashion designer and someone like Dior: with a pattern, anyone can make clothes—but in Manville’s hands, she stitches together something magical.
  25. Fire of Love
    Positively swollen with vulnerability in addition to an infectious curiosity about the world, it’s the type of film which leaves the trajectory of your day inarguably changed—colors a little brighter, feelings a bit rawer, reflections a bit heavier.
  26. The Road to Galena
    It is a movie of tropes and clichés that argues, with generic earnestness and a near-total lack of surprise, that the city is a corrupting influence compared to the nurturing, sun-drenched simplicity of the country.
  27. Murina
    The look (and sound) of Murina are mesmerizing.
  28. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    The issues the movie attempts to tackle—parental expectations, heartbreak, anxiety over choosing the right path—have all been addressed better in other films.
  29. The Forgiven
    Discrimination, exoticization, willful ignorance, poorly disguised disdain for local customs—you name it, these vacationing Westerners have it.
  30. Code Name Banshee
    In the end, Code Name Banshee doesn’t have interesting ideas about who its characters are, or even wish to be. It’s a cliché-driven, rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets, nothing more.
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