The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. Red Rocket
    Rex is a revelation here, a star reborn. He shrewdly conceals the depths of Mikey’s bone-deep selfishness under a lot of guileless blather, a hapless fool routine. The movie only works if our dawning awareness of his rottenness collides with what a hoot he can be, in all his calculated boylike scampishness.
  2. France
    Dumont does not make conventionally satisfying films, and, for all of his visual minimalism, he loves a mess. But he is more than capable of making movies that are engaging on a level beyond the purely intellectual. France, for the most part, isn’t one of them.
  3. National Champions
    This movie is all talk and no action. It’s a two-hour pregame show, with no game.
  4. Don't Look Up
    Don’t Look Up is both types of blunt: It makes no bones about exactly what the filmmakers think of climate-change deniers and social-media distractions, and it repeatedly blunts the impact of its satire by calling its shots early, often, and loudly.
  5. Being the Ricardos
    The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.
  6. The Forever Prisoner
    Gibney’s challenging interview style, the uncompromising tone of his questions, and the way he undercuts Mitchell’s self-aggrandizing martyrdom (and conveniently murky timeline regarding the deployment of EITs in the field) are satisfying distillations of what so many people who recognize Mitchell as a war criminal who got away would probably like to say.
  7. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.
  8. Nightmare Alley
    Film noir is a cynical genre, and the script makes gestures toward establishing that these characters live in a cold world where nothing matters but the almighty dollar. But del Toro is a romantic at heart, and can’t help swooning where the subtext wants to spit. His sensibility isn’t a bad thing. It just works better when the monsters aren’t human.
  9. West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
  10. Benedetta
    Belgian movie star Virginie Efira plays the title character with complete conviction, whether she’s kneeling in awe before the Virgin Mary or being pleasured with a dildo carved out of a statue of the Blessed Mother.
  11. The Hand of God
    It has as many superfluous sequences as great ones, with moments that serve no grander purpose than landing a single joke.
  12. The Scary of Sixty-First
    Nekrasova borrows from the best, courting comparisons to more highbrow pictures like Eyes Wide Shut and The Tenant. But she clearly started with an aim to get a rise out of people, and working backwards from there resulted in some slapdash storytelling.
  13. Silent Night
    For a film written and nearly finished before the pandemic (with some reshoots in late 2020), Silent Night practically bleats for relevancy.
  14. Wolf
    What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.
  15. Encounter
    As the film reveals its intentions around Ahmed’s character, too many scenes rely on superficial dialogue and contrived situations to push the plot along.
  16. The Humans
    The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.
  17. Bruised
    When it’s firing on all cylinders, Bruised finds the Sirk amid the Stallone, wringing truly grand melodrama out of women reshaping their lives while beating each other senseless.
  18. The Unforgivable
    The whole thing comes across as a movie star’s anti-vanity project, just an opportunity for Bullock to demonstrate her ostensible range. Okay, she can be hard and stoic and affectless. Noted.
  19. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    Alas, there’s no covert greatness to the just-plain-underwhelming Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City, a reboot totally bereft of the visual distinction or creative personality that often made its predecessors intriguing diamonds in the rough.
  20. Drive My Car
    Drive My Car effectively captures the double-edged nature of storytelling as a means of both processing and deflecting emotions; Uncle Vanya can be used to work through pain or to postpone it. Hamaguchi clearly recognizes film’s similar power.
  21. House of Gucci
    Ridley Scott's melodrama about the Italian fashion family has its moments, but not enough of them.
  22. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    While Jude succeeds at lampooning the chaos of contemporary political discourse, Bad Luck Banging takes on a few too many issues to make a coherent statement on any of them.
  23. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.
  24. The Power of the Dog
    The Power Of The Dog divulges its secrets in deliberate, measured fashion, growing richer with each new reveal.
  25. Zeros and Ones
    What Zeros And Ones conveys, in its shoestring terms, is the actual mood of a world of uncertainties.
  26. C'mon C'mon
    Mills’ core insight remains the same in every film: We’re all screwed up to some degree, all constantly improvising, all doing the best we can with relatively few guidelines. That’s not especially innovative or profound, perhaps, but seeing it refracted through a connection that movies tend to ignore lends it a certain sparkle.
  27. King Richard
    The movie keeps enough of Richard’s messy past off screen to feel like a hagiography with a few concessions, rather than a true warts-and-all portrait.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jagged
    The documentary ends up both a delightful ’90s time capsule and a sharp analysis of the social and cultural forces that shaped Morissette’s career—for better and worse.
  29. Encanto
    For all its compelling individual elements, Encanto doesn’t quite manage to weave them together into something greater than the sum of its parts—which is especially frustrating given that the idea of communal support is a driving ethos of the film.
  30. tick, tick...Boom!
    In joyfully embracing just about every tool in the movie-musical toolbox, Miranda crafts a fitting tribute to the act of artistic creation. And he might just make some musical converts in the process.
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