The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Nine Days
    More often than not, it’s better when filmmakers have a point-of-view, a sense of style, and something to say—all of which is undeniably true of Oda. But Nine Days resonates at such a distinct frequency that some may find it hauntingly beautiful (and have found it so, ever since the film debuted at Sundance back in 2020) while others may find it much too blaring.
  2. Sheep Without a Shepherd
    When Sheep Without A Shepherd goes big, it goes really big, both in terms of melodrama and directorial flair. Chen is delightfully wicked as the morally compromised chief of a corrupt and abusive police department, however, and the plot is engrossing enough to forgive the movie’s excesses.
  3. Jungle Cruise
    Absent cleverness, Collet-Serra offers some comfort for weary eyes, like the flashes of silent black-and-white footage of the stars shot with Lily’s newfangled movie camera. At the risk of sounding like a critic from a way-old demographic, Jungle Cruise works best when it leans in this more old-fashioned direction.
  4. The Green Knight
    Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.
  5. Last Letter from Your Lover
    What the adaptation has going for it is two charismatic young stars, Felicity Jones and Shailene Woodley, pitching in to tell an enjoyable but extremely conventional story.
  6. Kandisha
    The question is whether Kandisha’s intriguing elements are strong enough to cancel out its more uninspired ones. For Bustillo and Maury completists and seasoned fans of monster movies and ’90s horror who are accustomed to cherry-picking cool elements from forgettable films, the answer is yes. For the rest of the viewing public, summoning this demon probably isn’t worth the pain.
  7. Old
    The film has flashes of clumsiness that should be familiar to those who have stepped before into the Twilight Zone of its maker’s imagination. But Old is also, in its most intense moments, one of his most genuinely disturbing visions: a horror movie about that most universal of horrors, inescapable mortality.
  8. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins doesn’t reach the giddy, earnest heights of something like Aquaman or a Wachowski project. It methodically sets up sequels—to be recast and released around 2030, judging by the Joes’ cinematic track record so far. But the dubiousness of its present-day achievement, the sheer ludicrousness of making the best G.I. Joe movie in 2021, is part of the dumbfounding fun.
  9. Val
    If you’re already a fan of Kilmer’s work, there’s clear value in watching him pal around as a young man on the brink of stardom or rehearse as Jim Morrison for The Doors. But for everyone else, Val can sometimes feel like an uncomplicated victory lap.
  10. Mandibles
    If you seek something that coalesces in a satisfying way, this ain’t the auteur for you. If you long to be caught off guard, take a seat.
  11. Fear Street Part Three: 1666
    1666 offers about the best you could expect from it: a modestly rewarding resolution, like a finale that makes you glad you finished up the season but not convinced you’ll tune in for the next one.
  12. Her Socialist Smile
    Her Socialist Smile develops, in other words, a kind of ethics of the image. Gianvito is not, of course, suggesting that we should somehow give up our senses—only that, whatever the technology or medium we engage with, it is our responsibility to keep our minds from becoming what Keller called “automatic machines.”
  13. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    In terms of celebrating his life by letting us soak in his impassioned, inspiring presence one more time, the film is successful. But viewers should take one more note from the man himself and not fall for easy scapegoats and trite narratives, whether they concern countries or a person who devoted his life to exploring them.
  14. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    Maybe the rabbit and his studio both took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Space Jam: A New Legacy takes almost nothing but wrong turns, all leading to a glittering CGI trash heap of cameos, pat life lessons, and stale internet catchphrases. Its first misstep: keeping Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the gang on the bench for about as long as it would take the audience to watch three and a half Merrie Melodies.
  15. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
    After 30 or 40 minutes, it becomes clear that, despite a few more callbacks, this is a more-of-the-same sequel, not a next-level sequel.
  16. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
    The documentary combines interviews with original company members and archival footage with vérité-style training scenes from a college dance troupe’s reinterpretation of the piece. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an artist that simultaneously taps into the personal and political dimensions that inform the creation of art.
  17. Pig
    Like the animal itself, Pig is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.
  18. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Gunpowder Milkshake comes alive in its darkly comic action sequences, which prioritize creativity as much as brutality, with an uncommon focus on props, locations, and wide compositions.
  19. Summertime
    The collaborative spirit of the project is inspiring, enough to recommend the film to creative teenagers and theater kids of all ages. The poetry can be pretty engaging, too, once you get over yourself.
  20. The Woman Who Ran
    An unassuming but richly suggestive portrait of a lonely vacationer.
  21. Fear Street Part Two: 1978
    The kills come and go with a perfunctory swiftness that suggests a condescension to the material, not a genuine affection for it. That’s why the gore feels like scant reward: There’s plenty of blood but no heart put into pumping it.
  22. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    Family Business feels like trying to eat lunch in a room full of screaming toddlers who keep slapping the sandwich out of your hands.
  23. The Tomorrow War
    The movie accumulates much from its betters before it starts to rot from the inside. Eventually, it becomes a distended corpse of a big-ticket blockbuster, washed up on streaming.
  24. The Forever Purge
    In The Forever Purge, we’re told a story that a battered nation has heard a lot—a sermon of immigration and class warfare that’s too heavy-handed to say anything its prospective audience hasn’t been told on countless social media feeds over the last few years.
  25. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Where Summer Of Soul really distinguishes itself is in Thompson’s inspired filmmaking. Making his directorial debut, the Roots drummer and frontman approaches this condensed narrative with a musician’s sense of timing, expertly assembling rhythmic montages with editor Joshua Pearson that transcend flashy music-video devices to relay a sense of conversation, of voices reaching across the decades to be heard.
  26. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.
  27. America: The Motion Picture
    Gory, horny, and at least visually bold, America is almost always fun to gawk at, even when the writing is letting it down. But that writing is a real problem.
  28. Black Widow
    For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.
  29. No Sudden Move
    Movies routinely place characters in desperate, life-or-death situations, but rarely do we see them behave in a genuinely desperate way. No Sudden Move, a period crime drama written by Ed Solomon and directed by Steven Soderbergh, corrects this oversight in a way that’s at once hilarious and distressing.
  30. Zola
    Zola is first and foremost a zany, catastrophic road-trip dramedy, one that balances the whimsy of social media with the harrowing reality of being trapped in a dangerous situation.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »