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. A Hero
    Part of the movie’s brilliance is in how it questions the very concept of a good deed.
  2. Procession
    Greene, whose earliest documentaries were rooted in the cinéma vérité tradition and its portraits of ordinary American lives, has crafted a poignant group portrait with something to say about the crossed wires of pain and memory.
  3. Home Sweet Home Alone
    An argument can be made for not parsing the social messaging of films like this one too deeply, as the creative team probably didn’t. But Home Sweet Home Alone does merit such criticism, if only because there’s really not much else going on.
  4. Cusp
    In walking the line between asking empathy for these girls and also using them as a sort of cautionary tale, Cusp fails to offer more than a somewhat surface-level understanding of toxic masculinity.
  5. Belfast
    This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.
  6. Mayor Pete
    Moss spends the better part of a year just trying to get his subject to betray some raw emotion, even going so far as to have Chasten pose interview questions at one point. It’s not as if Buttigieg stonewalls the camera, either. He’s just not, at heart, a very demonstrative guy.
  7. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    It’s harmless bad, not torture bad.
  8. Beans
    A specifically French-Canadian and Native coming-of-age story that’s heavy handed in some ways and delicate in others.
  9. The Beta Test
    Cummings and McCabe zero in on an angle they do understand—the death scream of the untouchably powerful man—and can make fun of with precision.
  10. Spencer
    Stewart never seems to find an emotional reality for the icon she’s playing; the resonance begins and ends with the stunt casting of one hounded target of the bursting flashbulbs as another.
  11. Red Notice
    This is the stuff that reminds us that Hollywood movies are made with charts and committees; we don’t enjoy it, but we put up with it in exchange for a good time. Red Notice only has the time part down. The good, like the bejeweled egg, is frequently missing.
  12. Hive
    This is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.
  13. Finch
    Finch’s main problem is its amiable, low-key vibe, which feels at odds with such a grim scenario.
  14. Antlers
    The film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best.
  15. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    Though Eubank and Landon deserve some credit for mixing up the Paranormal Activity storytelling formula, it remains clear that there’s not many scares left to milk from this franchise.
  16. Last Night in Soho
    Let’s just say that Last Night In Soho is giallo in at least one big respect: Like many of those films, it starts off with a strong concept, then crumbles when it’s time to move beyond striking imagery and get down to the more functional aspects of storytelling.
  17. The Souvenir: Part II
    It’s looser, wilder, funnier, and almost euphorically uplifting, rocketing at increasing speed towards a new life for its main character and directorial proxy that makes the starting premise look almost irrelevant.
  18. Eternals
    Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat?
  19. Attica
    What’s been forgotten is that the prisoners’ dramatic seizure of Attica was intended to give them a platform for their legitimate grievances—to get the tax-paying citizens to understand what exactly their money was buying. If nothing else, Nelson’s Attica gives these men another opportunity to raise their voices.
  20. Passing
    As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive.
  21. Army of Thieves
    The idea of a group of decidedly minor-league cons trying to make it into the major leagues, maybe with a Now You See Me standard of realism, is not unappealing. But the promise of a brainless good time proves false once the actual thieving begins.
  22. The French Dispatch
    The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.
  23. The Harder They Fall
    The gonzo factor (sadistic violence plus multiple music numbers) is intermittently engaging. The characters, not so much.
  24. Becoming Cousteau
    What this fascinating, thoughtful documentary is really about is how even an icon can evolve. The “becoming” part of a life never really ends.
  25. A Cop Movie
    Aside from the Mexico City setting, it doesn’t really accomplish anything unique either. A Cop Movie feels in the end like, well, a cop movie, only with an eye for society instead of the unit. That’s not enough to separate it from the pack.
  26. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    The more Electrical Life conforms to what one would expect of a Louis Wain biography, the less idiosyncratically compelling it becomes. An entirely fictional story loosely inspired by the man and his wife, but beholden to nothing, might have been genuinely electrifying.
  27. Night Teeth
    First-time screenwriter Brent Dillon’s script excels at the little details of social structure, human and vampire, that distinguish Night Teeth from other politically minded genre picks.
  28. After We Fell
    Even as young adult softcore, After We Fell is limp. Though the series switched over to an R rating starting with its previous installment, the repetitive sex scenes set to moody pop songs are lacking in anything resembling genuine heat, even as new series director Castille Landon tries to spice things up by adding hot tubs, phone sex, and gym equipment into the mix.
  29. Dune: Part One
    However inconclusive as a story, the resulting film is a rarity among the overlong effects-heavy blockbusters of the last decade: One actually wishes it didn’t have to end so soon.
  30. Four Hours at the Capitol
    After watching Four Hours At The Capitol, the January 6 attack feels more like a horror film, one that ends with the monster still at large.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »