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. Family Romance, LLC
    Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there.
  2. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Deriving endless anxiety from brawny men moving as gingerly as possible, it’s a riveting anti-action movie, one of the most memorable high-concept pictures ever made in Europe.
  3. Welcome to Chechnya
    What’s perhaps most remarkable about Welcome To Chechnya is the level-headed perspective many of these subjects have about what’s happening to them.
  4. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The result is an uneven paean to a man who deserves a more complicated portrait.
  5. My Spy
    The action material in My Spy undermines its would-be cuteness, while remaining questionable on a level of cheap thrills.
  6. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    That’s always been a part of Ferrell’s work — his understanding of American mediocrity, and his delight in poking at its oblivious limitations. Eurovision both softens and expands his worldview, allowing him to indulge some small-town-dreamer pathos without getting into hokey Americana. If he’s playing the hits, he’s starting to interpret them with style.
  7. Force of Nature
    It certainly isn’t Polish’s intention to make any grand political statements with his action thriller, but expecting empathetic connection with a callous white cop is a big ask in today’s climate. And it sours what’s otherwise just a lackluster B movie drowned in buckets of rain.
  8. Irresistible
    When the wisdom being imparted is this conventional, you better find a dramatically or comedically satisfying way to package it. Stewart hasn’t.
  9. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    Ultimately, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise is a documentary about the myriad ways that the poor stay poor, and the way our society marginalizes them by reducing them to numbers on a balance sheet instead of people with their own unique stories to tell and their own network of friends and family who love and rely on them.
  10. Babyteeth
    As that ending approaches, the tone shifts from dark comedy to sentimental drama, adding a maudlin aftertaste to an otherwise appealingly bitter brew.
  11. You Should Have Left
    At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.
  12. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    The second recent documentary focused on Roy Cohn, Bully. Coward. Victim.: The Story Of Roy Cohn is as stuffed and jumbled as its title’s punctuation. Despite this, the film manages to inject some genuine personality into its Wiki reckoning of Cohn’s cursed résumé.
  13. Miss Juneteenth
    At its heart, Miss Juneteenth is about the relationship between a mother and her daughter, which Peoples brings to the screen with a subtlety that’s very true to life.
  14. Wasp Network
    The initial hour is a tightly wound piece of directorial surveillance in Assayas’ trademark style, fluidly tracking the obscure motives and movements of the characters. The rest is a lot less compelling.
  15. 7500
    Just as Tobias can’t escape the tragedy unfolding just beyond the cockpit door, 7500 struggles to overcome some unfortunate and very outdated optics.
  16. Artemis Fowl
    Artemis Fowl, the first Disney movie to have its theatrical release completely scrapped because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is bland and incoherent, with paper-thin character development, unimaginative world building, and a lot of daddy issues.
  17. Hill of Freedom
    It may not be the heftiest or most penetrating entry in the Hong oeuvre, but it’s one of the funniest and probably the most accessible.
  18. Da 5 Bloods
    Spike Lee’s cultural messaging for once fails him in the politically muddled Da 5 Bloods. With the film, Lee offers his submission to a history of bloodied, masculine Vietnam War movies. Sadly, he’s more concerned with making a Vietnam movie that looks Black than one that actually takes on the complexities of Blackness, war, and global imperialism.
  19. You Don't Nomi
    It may not be as bizarrely entertaining as the film it obsesses over, but You Don’t Nomi is a captivating document of how a piece of art—especially one this deeply, powerfully weird—can take on a life wholly beyond its original intentions.
  20. The King of Staten Island
    Apatow appears to have moved on from using airless domestic and urban comforts as backdrops, and that’s probably a good thing. But The King Of Staten Island’s patience-testing failings, however well-intentioned, suggest that for now, he’s only found a new way to lose the plot.
  21. The Last Days of American Crime
    In its final hour, The Last Days Of American Crime finally gets down to the business of its big heist, revealing both the propulsive entertainment value the filmmakers have been inexplicably stalling and the thinness of the whole enterprise.
  22. Becky
    Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.
  23. Dreamland
    In the end, Dreamland never bothers to decide whether it’s trying to be an elegiac, philosophical head trip or an over-the-top action thriller.
  24. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    Like Miranda himself, We Are Freestyle Love Supreme has an exuberant theater-kid earnestness that will either prove endearing or grating depending on how you feel about backstage warm-up games and spontaneous sidewalk performances.
  25. Yourself and Yours
    Viewers who cherish ambiguity will have no trouble finding plenty of it here, as Hong never explicitly tips his hand regarding this woman’s disputed identity.
  26. Tommaso
    Like so much in this deceptively earnest film, the Roman backdrop creates ambiguous terms. One is left to wonder whether Tommaso’s internal chaos is that of an eternal figure in an ancient city, or just another guy trying to keep it together as he makes the turn to the Piazza Dante.
  27. Shirley
    Mocked by her peers, mistreated by her husband, and burdened by mental illness, Jackson lived with the psychic evils that lurk in her writing. But for Decker, what’s important about Shirley’s misery is how she used it to fuel her work.
  28. The High Note
    The characters’ overall niceness makes the movie pleasant in the moment—and easy to shrug off as a fantasy.
  29. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    Although the documentary is a brisk 74 minutes, filmmaker Elizabeth Carroll seems to so fully capture Kennedy’s unfiltered personality that Nothing Fancy becomes not just a portrayal of a world-famous authority on how various communities within Mexico farm, prepare, and eat their traditional dishes, but also a commentary on how we view or judge places through their food. Kennedy has complaints, and Nothing Fancy lets her air them.
  30. The Trip to Greece
    At least everyone seems self-aware about how much they’re repeating themselves yet again.
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