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. Pieces of a Woman
    Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.
  2. Limbo
    While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.
  3. The Nest
    The Nest’s true star is that cavernous 15th-century mansion, which provides Durkin and Erdély with endless opportunities to carve out sinister voids that threaten to swallow this nuclear family whole.
  4. The Devil All the Time
    What’s haunting about The Devil All The Time — and, ultimately even a little hopeful — is this idea that there’s a world beyond this world, where perhaps not everyone is so cruel or intense. It may not be the biblical Heaven; but that’s okay. Sometimes Cincinnati will suffice.
  5. Blackbird
    With its quasi-literary tone and over-calculated concessions to the messiness of real life, the movie settles for coming across like a clumsy amalgamation of the wonderful Amy Bloom short story “Love Is Not A Pie” and the 1998 Sarandon tearjerker "Stepmom." The hollow, unsatisfying feeling the movie leaves behind may be the most authentically funereal thing about it.
  6. Apples
    The droll Twilight Zone absurdism is not without its pleasures, many of them comic.
  7. Nomadland
    As this flinty, self-sufficient, and geographically unmoored woman, McDormand provides a blend of toughness and vulnerability that’s a perfect fit for the material.
  8. The Disciple
    For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.
  9. One Night in Miami
    As one might expect from a movie based on a play and directed by a famous actor, dialogue and performances are the driving force.
  10. Ammonite
    Ammonite is too pallid to really get your blood flowing.
  11. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.
  12. Black Is King
    Black Is King reconfirms a notion that many understood back in 2016 with Lemonade: When it comes to pairing strong, resplendent imagery with equally rousing music, the only person who can potentially outperform Beyoncé is Beyoncé herself.
  13. Rent-A-Pal
    Rent-A-Pal goes full-tilt mayhem in its final act, shattering its carefully calibrated dread in a race to make an already belabored point: that technological advancements are to be questioned, and there is no substitute for human connection.
  14. Sibyl
    Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.
  15. All In: The Fight for Democracy
    Frankly, All In would be better if it were less expansive. A more straightforward bio-doc about Abrams, with extended digressions about the larger history behind her voting rights activism, might’ve been more powerful.
  16. Matthias & Maxime
    This is a film with big emotions and swoon-worthy wet hair moments, and it finds unexpected places in the subconscious to settle.
  17. Feels Good Man
    Pretty darn entertaining.
  18. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    For a film about heartbreak, The Broken Hearts Gallery is a bit too glossy for its own good.
  19. Mulan
    Rather than lean into the more mature elements that make it stand out, the movie does frustratingly little with its noteworthy upgrades on the original, resulting in a version of the story that’s only superficially more sophisticated.
  20. Antebellum
    If only the filmmakers trusted their actors to convey the messages of this story, instead of burdening them with obvious, explanatory lines and speeches.
  21. Tenet
    Rarely is a film of this budget and scope so proudly difficult to follow.
  22. i'm thinking of ending things
    By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?
  23. Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe
    Best of all, Candace Against The Universe plays up the heart of the relationship among Candace, Phineas, and Ferb: For all her schemes, the show often revealed that Candace really does love her brothers. But this new movie makes a point to show how much they appreciate her as well.
  24. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The Bill & Ted movies derive much of their humor from the blending of extremely low and extremely high stakes. Face The Music kind of blows it on the former: For all the preaching about the importance of togetherness and unity, the film mostly keeps its fiftysomething stars and their kids apart. Which is a shame.
  25. Class Action Park
    For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.
  26. The Binge
    Even the occasional funny line grows wearying, because nothing in this movie happens for any real reason. The details that labor to appear random, the big slapstick plot turns, and the predetermined character arcs are all equally meaningless, unchecked byproducts of filmmakers emptying their joke files with Superbad playing on a loop in the background.
  27. Tesla
    Far from the flamboyant figure of fantasy and popular myth, this version of the inventor is totally interiorized.
  28. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    While the first Train To Busan was an affecting, character-driven tale of grief and redemption, Peninsula flounders in generic spectacle. Even fans may wonder if there are any bones left to pick on this franchise.
  29. Unhinged
    This may be the first role that’s really capitalized on Crowe’s celebrity reputation as a hothead, even if the unnamed lunatic he’s playing only barks threats into a phone instead of chucking it at anyone.
  30. Boys State
    With so much attention paid to the campaign trail, Boys State fails to show us how the waterworks get built.
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