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. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    The movie’s attempts at ruthless pulp manipulation don’t land; cruelly offing a character whose entire personality is “pregnant” is a cheap bid for John Wick stakes.
  2. About Endlessness
    While Andersson has continued in his signature style for this coda, erecting pallid beige-and-grey backlot dioramas with a painterly eye for crowded composition, he repurposes the technique toward a newfound elegiac, gentle register.
  3. What Drives Us
    The film works better as a casual glimpse behind the curtain of big-name acts, exuding a voyeuristic appeal in the footage and anecdotes of beloved musicians opening up about their pasts. It’s breezy fun, if a little forgettable, spending 90 minutes with charismatic performers who have a knack for a good yarn.
  4. Limbo
    The narrowness of the frame forces us closer to what is caught within it, and the result is often bracing or achingly tender.
  5. Mortal Kombat
    This is supposed to be a world of fighters with bizarre outfits and combat abilities, but a lot of the time, the viewer will just find themselves staring at a screen that’s mostly rocks.
  6. Stowaway
    The film is strongest when simply exploring the terrible notion of triage among the healthy, with everyone involved fully aware of which individual will be deemed the most expendable.
  7. Together Together
    It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.
  8. Jakob's Wife
    Despite the conviction Crampton and Fessenden bring to their onscreen relationship, however, Jakob’s Wife is more successful as a gleeful bloodbath than it is as a character-driven horror-drama.
  9. In the Earth
    In The Earth feeds the indiscriminate appetites of gorehounds and bong-rippers alike. Everyone else may find it as ghastly boring as the violence is just plain ghastly.
  10. The Banishing
    While it’s admirable that this isn’t just another haunted house movie that relies solely on atmosphere and a handful of jump-scares, The Banishing is, in the end, a bit too much: Watching it is akin to sitting through a supercut of highlights from a season of American Horror Story (subtitle: British Countryside). There’s fun to be had, but too little of it can be un-ironically admired.
  11. Thunder Force
    Overall, the comedy in Thunder Force is apathetic and airless, no matter how hard McCarthy tries.
  12. The Columnist
    Overall, this is a sophisticated take on over-the-top material, arch but not quite Serial Mom-style campy.
  13. Voyagers
    Maybe the film’s escalating conflict would be more exciting if the characters themselves (played by the likes of Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, among an ensemble of fellow twentysomething model types) weren’t such blank-eyed nothings.
  14. Night in Paradise
    Night In Paradise is an exceptional resource for anyone trying to understand how stories can be told within the frame, even as it consistently trips on its relentless grimdark tendencies. There are no pleasant people to be found here; there is no path that doesn’t lead to the grave.
  15. The Power
    The movie’s period spookiness and its #MeToo outrage have virtually nothing to do with each other, diminishing the efficacy of both and making it feel like a tract.
  16. Moffie
    At its worst, Hermanus’ forceful direction can land with this sort of thudding literality. But befitting its harrowing subject of young men hammered into rigid conformity, Moffie leaves a lasting mark all the same.
  17. The Unholy
    This is the flimsiest of hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible salesman hocking his wares outside the subway.
  18. Concrete Cowboy
    Derived from the novel Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri, this film iteration bargains in vague platitudes as it unsuccessfully tries to piece together a collage of factors threatening the viability of this one-of-a-kind place.
  19. Bad Trip
    As if to counteract the bummer of watching a raucous comedy on Netflix rather than in a theatrical setting, Bad Trip comes equipped with its own crowd energy—a collective faith that there’s no idiotic stunt that can’t be pulled back from the brink of disaster.
  20. Funny Face
    Donnybrook aside, Sutton has largely devoted his career to mood pieces like Dark Night and Memphis where concept is key. In Funny Face, he puts everything in movie-movie-ish scare quotes—a self-defeating approach for a paean to urban authenticity.
  21. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
    There are longueurs where Mosese’s approach shows its limits, as the film’s rhythms go from stately to stultifying. More often, though, Mosese manages to fuse his film’s stylistic tensions with Mantoa’s struggles of expression, her efforts to carry on in both word and deed.
  22. Godzilla vs. Kong
    There may be a moral somewhere in Godzilla Vs. Kong about hubris and greed, but really, this movie knows you came to see monsters punch each other. And monsters punching each other you shall get.
  23. Shoplifters of the World
    Shoplifters Of The World seems intended as a love letter to The Smiths, but in trying to convey the British band’s importance, it comes across more like fan fiction—too reference-heavy for a general audience, too shallow for those already in the know.
  24. Violation
    Violation is not a movie one can casually recommend, and even aficionados of the horror genre may find it off-putting in its extreme violence or its grandiose self-seriousness. Perhaps the best way to think of this film is as a ritual, a transgressive act of dark magic that manifests all the slimy, sinister creatures crawling along the underside of more straightforward revenge narratives. You can’t banish a demon without conjuring it first.
  25. Roe v. Wade
    Loeb mostly tamped down the lunacy endemic to an obscure corner of choir-preaching moviedom, and for what? No critical mind runs the risk of mistaking this partisan broadside for innocent edutainment.
  26. Nobody
    Make no mistake, this is pure caveman bullshit. Yet it’s caveman bullshit made with style and wit, qualities that extend from its screenplay to its performances to its staging.
  27. The Courier
    As Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taught us, you need a montage, and The Courier serves up several expert ones, leaning hard on shots of Penkovsky snapping photos of documents in shadowy storage rooms. Cooke also has a terrific camera sense in general, and can create a mood just by abruptly shifting angles.
  28. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    What becomes clear in this film—if it wasn’t obvious already—is that sometimes the ways in which the rich and powerful thrive have nothing to do with merit. Sometimes they just buy access to people like Singer, who are good at selling their customers a story they can tell.
  29. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The reality is that Justice League’s problems go beyond who was behind the camera. The villain is still generic and silly-looking. The plot is still assemble-the-team boilerplate, hinging on the hunt for glowing MacGuffins with a goofy name.
  30. The Inheritance
    Every object, many of them clearly worn by use, feels hand chosen; every shade of color feels handpicked; every piece of furniture or fabric feels specific to that room. Asili’s controlled design doesn’t render The Inheritance sterile. Instead, it swells with free-wheeling creativity and Black pride.
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