The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. I Carry You with Me
    Teaching the audience about the intricacies of the U.S. immigration system isn’t the point of this film—the point is to make you feel the intangible ache of being where you belong and far away from home at the same time. In that way, the film poetically, heartbreakingly succeeds.
  2. The Ice Road
    Even at its dumbest, The Ice Road holds your attention; a climactic fight/chase scene even acknowledges that it’s hard to look badass on a slippery surface.
  3. Werewolves Within
    At least Ruben maintains his comic instincts and crack timing throughout. The film possesses a strong touch of Edgar Wright in how it manages both the humor and horror of its conceit.
  4. Good on Paper
    Instead of translating a real-life experience into something enjoyably madcap, Good On Paper more often than not feels like a friend recounting every detail of a story that’s less interesting than they think it is.
  5. Sun Children
    A tidal wave of compassion and empathy that crests into rage and sorrow—all of it provoked by the plight of Iran’s child laborers.
  6. False Positive
    Glazer and Lee both work primarily in comedy, but the commentary here is drier and more serious, producing knowing nods instead of outright laughter.
  7. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    The film is often unfocused, and—at a highly condensed 89 minutes—it makes only a cursory attempt to uncover aspects of this legend’s story not already included in her memoir. Maybe those interested should just read that instead.
  8. Gaia
    Even when the story takes on biblical overtones, the melodrama never blossoms. And in terms of suspense, Gaia doesn’t so much tighten the screws as endlessly turn them in the wrong direction.
  9. Summer of 85
    In the end, Summer Of 85 is about the idea of romance more than it is an actual romance, and on that level it succeeds almost too well, leaving one wishing for something more substantial.
  10. Fatherhood
    There could be something to say here about how comically low society’s expectations for fathers remain. The movie also briefly, incisively captures the new-parent contradiction of desperately needing help while wanting to be left alone, free of unsolicited input. But director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) keeps making odd choices for what, in a single father’s life, requires comic or dramatic emphasis.
  11. Luca
    The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.
  12. 12 Mighty Orphans
    12 Mighty Orphans tells the true story of a Depression-era high school football team improbably formed at a Texas orphanage, but the screenplay may as well have been invented from whole cloth, given its relentlessly formulaic nature.
  13. The Sparks Brothers
    If you’ve never heard of Sparks, the good news is that you’re the perfect viewer for Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers, a two-hours-plus sales pitch for why they’re worth your time.
  14. Censor
    Censor’s meticulous, insidious structure sticks to the subconscious; this is an auspicious debut in modern genre cinema.
  15. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway
    Uncharacteristically true to his word, Peter does less insufferable blathering this time around, but the subtitle The Runaway still threatens the audience with a better time.
  16. Infinite
    What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.
  17. Holler
    The specificity and authenticity of its setting are the biggest thing Holler has going for it, given that indie drama is rife with variations on this type of social realist coming-of-age tale. The gloomy mood also tamps down thriller elements that appear late in the story, which leaves little but despair for the audience to chew on.
  18. Tragic Jungle
    More conceptual than intuitive, Tragic Jungle offers the problem without the passion: a journey into the heart of darkness without the thrill of the unknown.
  19. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    What the set pieces have in common with everything else in this dunderheaded, insultingly mechanical franchise hopeful is the overwhelming feeling that everyone involved said “good enough” at every turn. It’s savvy only in the way it lowers the standards for this kind of thing, assuring that any future sequels that give half an ass instead of barely a quarter of one will prompt more enthusiasm, or at least relief.
  20. The Misfits
    The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now.
  21. Awake
    Awake becomes the saga of a mom’s redemption. Rodriguez works hard to make this personal angle compelling, exhibiting mama-bear ferocity, but the film’s ultra-bleak premise doesn’t cooperate.
  22. The Amusement Park
    The Amusement Park passes in a deranged blur; it’s a glorified PSA made with the means (and in the spirit of) antagonistic outsider art.
  23. Slow Machine
    A general menace permeates the film in the form of paranoid intrigue and clandestine government forces, but it’s always offset with plenty of offhand irony and snarky one-liners.
  24. Undine
    What’s atypically clumsy here is Petzold’s effort to synthesize big ideas: Not only is the architectural metaphor overstated and the mythological element frustratingly vague, but the two have nothing much to do with each other, making Undine play like a bidding war between high concepts—one of them academic, the other genre-inflected.
  25. All Light, Everywhere
    All Light, Everywhere is about both making and questioning connections, but by the end, its methods feel not so much productively protean as frustratingly noncommittal.
  26. Spirit Untamed
    Though it’s nominally liberated from its TV backstory, Spirit Untamed could still have benefited from a little more freedom.
  27. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.
  28. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Across the extended, handsomely shot sit-down interviews (with Ma’s daughter and the three other writers), what emerges is a fragmentary oral history of Chinese rural life across several transformative decades of the 20th century: family stories, tragedies, remembered slogans, the particulars of trying to grow crops in alkaline soil or coming of age as the son of a declared “counterrevolutionary.”
  29. State Funeral
    With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.
  30. Cruella
    A love of pure aesthetics will help anyone looking to appreciate the movie, whose sets and costumes are as indulgent as its soundtrack. As an opportunity for Emma Stone to purr and vamp in elaborate gowns, Cruella is plenty enjoyable. But the “too much is just enough” attitude that makes it visually pleasurable also makes it a slog in the storytelling department.
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