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. Halloween Kills
    The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.
  2. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Hamaguchi’s deliberate disruptions of narrative flow are not crude storytelling gestures so much as attempts to create epiphanic moments out of time, where the rift between imagination and reality ceases to exist—at least until the wheel of fortune turns round once more.
  3. The Velvet Underground
    Haynes simply uses the tools at his disposal to get the job done. Ultimately, he captures the inspiring spirit of The Velvet Underground, a band built on the principle that marching to the beat of your own drum is a righteous, rebellious artistic act.
  4. The Last Duel
    The setting may be the 14th century, but this is very much a historical drama of modern concerns. Damningly, it suggests that yesterday’s injustices remain very much today’s.
  5. Bergman Island
    In its strongest, most evocative scenes, Bergman Island feels like peering in someone else’s window, sensing an echo of your own experiences, and marveling at all the ways a stranger could remind you of yourself.
  6. The Manor
    As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.
  7. Madres
    Didactic in its approach to the material—which, to be clear, is absolutely horrifying and very real—Madres has some good ideas, but it fails to see the structural forest for the sumptuously photographed trees.
  8. Black as Night
    Black As Night is assembled in an uninspired YA style that only accentuates the weaknesses of its script, which is laden with stilted dialogue and cringeworthy voiceover.
  9. Bingo Hell
    A sometimes clunky but always bold blend of social satire and delirious style.
  10. Ron's Gone Wrong
    There’s a system incompatibility error with the dominant bestie metaphor that leaves the film’s stance on Big Gizmo garbled.
  11. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.
  12. Justin Bieber: Our World
    Those who aren’t fans of his music to begin with may respect the stagecraft of his producers more than the artist himself, or be turned off altogether by the clumsy hagiography. In other words, this is a for-the-fans endeavor—no one else will want to get near Bieber here, especially since he’s unmasked.
  13. South of Heaven
    Straight-faced and suspenseful at first, wacky and almost randomly nihilistic afterwards, South Of Heaven just doesn’t know what it wants to be.
  14. Mass
    The cast carries the film; Dowd, as Linda, is especially terrific. Yet the feeling that one is watching a latter-day teleplay is hard to shake: The unvisual, periodically clumsy direction never finds a way around the confined space or the ugly lighting. One can applaud Kranz’s restraint.
  15. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
  16. V/H/S/94
    File 94 somewhere between the inspired, crowd-pleasing bloodshed of the second film and the series-low ineptitude of the third, V/H/S Viral.
  17. Lamb
    This intimate, four-character film has its own quiet rhythms, compatible with yet distinct from any perceived A24 house style. It’s a hybrid of unnerving, dread-based horror and genuine domestic drama. Are they naturally so different, anyway?
  18. The Addams Family 2
    What’s missing, among other things, is the dark humor that is the Addams family’s whole raison d’être.
  19. Titane
    There are a lot of wild twists and turns in this movie, but underneath there’s a constant: the agony of being trapped inside of a human body, and the itchy, restless desire to transcend it.
  20. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    It’s a faster, wilder ride—and a choppier one, even as it moves primarily in circles.
  21. No Time to Die
    No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache.
  22. Dear Evan Hansen
    Relatable in neither its bizarrely specific plotting nor its broadly generic emotions, Dear Evan Hansen is so self-serious that it almost plays like self-parody, only without any “so bad it’s good” fun. We may all be striving for human connection right now, but we’re unlikely to find any here.
  23. Birds of Paradise
    The real problem is that the film isn’t trashy, soapy, or stylized enough be fun.
  24. The Many Saints of Newark
    Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.
  25. The Mad Women's Ball
    This is a work of feminist melodrama, one that uses real events as a backdrop for a romantic, woman-centric tale of rebellious spirits and dreams deferred. As such, it might not be the most nuanced portrayal of this particular chapter in history. But it is passionate, fathers and doctors be damned.
  26. I'm Your Man
    This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama.
  27. The Starling
    The saddest thing about all of this is that McCarthy and O’Dowd make a convincing onscreen couple, and both of them are strong enough actors to find the real, defeated people in this phony script.
  28. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.
  29. Cry Macho
    The fact is that, as a movie, Cry Macho is slow and sometimes dull. But as a statement by Hollywood’s oldest leading man and working director, it offers its share of gleaming low-key insights.
  30. The Nowhere Inn
    Never consistently funny enough to work as straight comedy and too broad to succeed in its somber aspirations, the results are still engaging in their attempts to defy easy categorization. Like St. Vincent herself, The Nowhere Inn keeps morphing into something else.
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