The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
For 10,411 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: 5,570 out of 10411
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10411
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10411
10411 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Sundown
    Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness.
  2. The King's Daughter
    If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.
  3. Redeeming Love
    Redeeming Love is a kinky power fantasy in the halfway convincing disguise of wholesome faith-based entertainment.
  4. The Pink Cloud
    Gerbase, making an impressive feature debut, proves herself a sensitive observer of human nature. The Pink Cloud joins a tradition of sci-fi films like Her that are less interested in their futuristic concepts than how they might affect people.
  5. Scream
    The script, from veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt and Castle Rock scribe Guy Busick, leans in to the franchise’s fidgety intelligence, swerving and ducking and winking at the camera like the “meta whodunit slasher” it proudly proclaims itself to be.
  6. Sansho the Bailiff
    Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.
  7. Belle
    Individual moments in Belle are frequently magical: Many of the real-world scenes are beautifully staged and illustrated, with characters moving quietly and slowly through outdoor spaces while sunlight dapples across the water and birds flit by.
  8. Italian Studies
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
  9. Ray Donovan: The Movie
    This is perfunctory storytelling, a rather artless and dull 100 minutes that does nothing but check off a few predictable narrative boxes.
  10. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.
  11. See for Me
    While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.
  12. The 355
    In a spy thriller, a woman who drinks her whiskey neat—girlbosses never dilute—and kicks men in the face wearing a stacked heel has become as much of a cliché as the womanizing secret agent. And The 355 does nothing to complicate, deconstruct, or refresh that cliché.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Beanie Mania
    Beanie Mania weaves an entertaining, fast-paced narrative that reveals the depths to which collective fanaticism, greed, and the influence of the internet, even in its earliest days, all combined to create an inflection point that led to an unprecedented and unsustainable investment bubble.
  14. Jockey
    Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Super Bob Einstein Movie
    A worthy tribute to a singular comedic voice. ... It shows why Bob Einstein could make audiences laugh for almost 50 years—but it also shows why he’ll be making them laugh for a lot longer.
  16. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    Just getting to see McDormand and Washington assay these famous parts makes this Macbeth worth preserving for posterity, alongside Fences in the Denzel Washington Giants Of Theatre section. But Coen’s equivalent of a solo album has its own virtuosic style.
  17. Parallel Mothers
    The film is at its most powerful, however, when Almodóvar relies on his muse and intensely fixates on her character as Janis silently absorbs waves of devastation or allows herself to confess, the words rapidly, cathartically tumbling out of her. In those moments, Parallel Mothers becomes a beautiful tribute to their enduring, working relationship and the trust the director regularly puts in Cruz, whose performance he never surrounds with flashy flourishes.
  18. The Matrix Resurrections
    Where Resurrections really disappoints is in the staging of the action. The Hong Kong-influenced long shots that made The Matrix so revolutionary are all but absent, replaced by rapid cuts that render the fight choreography less legible than in previous installments.
  19. A Journal for Jordan
    Adapted from a 2008 memoir by former New York Times writer and editor Dana Canedy, it trades in cloying sentimentality and romance, the gooey melodrama done no favors by Washington’s stiff, anonymous direction.
  20. Sing 2
    In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.
  21. Memoria
    There’s something uniquely intense about hearing an entire audience remain utterly still during a movie’s transporting final minutes, afraid to cough or squeak their seat’s rusty springs or even breathe too loud, for fear of breaking the spell. Memoria inspires that kind of rapture. Experience its full dynamic range.
  22. American Underdog
    Levi has a smirking quality to him that sometimes reads as if he can’t believe he’s starring in this crap. He is credible as a clean-cut, all-American boy, however, and he and Paquin work as an onscreen couple. In fact, some of their banter is kind of cute. The supporting cast has its charms as well.
  23. The Lost Daughter
    For most of the movie’s running time, Gyllenhaal pulls off a remarkable trick, turning everyday inconveniences like rotting fruit and rude people—and deeper existential crises like regretting parenthood—into sources of nerve-jangling tension. The film is like a chase picture, with a heroine racing in vain to escape societal expectations.
  24. The Tender Bar
    The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck
  25. The Novice
    The filmmaker, who also co-edited The Novice, depicts Alex’s freshman year in quick-cutting, frenetic, anxiety-ridden fashion, with composer Alex Weston’s string-heavy score properly ratcheting up the tension and Fuhrman gamely acting like a harried but dedicated ball of nerves.
  26. Swan Song
    Simply put, Swan Song would be dead on arrival without Ali’s dual performance, which manages to ground the film’s tearjerker premise in credible human emotion.
  27. Rumble
    There’s liveliness in the conception of Rumble, knocked around and out by the demands of formulas no one has bothered to figure out.
  28. Cyrano
    A musical with numbers written by The National was a terrific idea, and so was Dinklage as Cyrano. Just not at the same time.
  29. The King's Man
    The concept of a supervillain hellbent on Scottish independence is, admittedly, kind of funny (not to mention in keeping with the overall politics of the Kingsman films). But The King’s Man can’t figure out what to do with the idea, apart from having the largely unseen bad guy yell a lot in a Scottish accent. Like so much of the film, it’s trying to have it both ways—to be stupid and clever at the same time, and coming across mostly as the former.
  30. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »