The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Harriet
    A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.
  2. American Dharma
    What made this particular project so toxic? Simple: American Dharma is a fundamentally cordial conversation with Steve Bannon.
  3. Motherless Brooklyn
    This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.
  4. Paradise Hills
    This accessibility actually hurts the film, exposing the flimsy balsa-wood architecture under all those frills.
  5. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces caters to its intended viewers’ least savory biases, making sure all student activists shown fit into particular categories—overweight, gay, or simply “angry and black”—that stoke the resentment of the target demographic.
  6. Black and Blue
    A generically competent but unsuspenseful chase film that never lives up to its potential for either social commentary or thrills.
  7. Countdown
    In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.
  8. The Kill Team
    Its depiction of toxic masculinity and bloodthirstiness within the U.S. Army is blunted by an overly passive lead performance and a lack of specificity in its storytelling.
  9. Terminator: Dark Fate
    Dark Fate serves as a case study for the difficulty of crafting a satisfying follow-up to a pair of certified classics, a process that seems to involve constant toggling between hopelessness and insisting that all is not lost. As such, it’s hard to blame Cameron for keeping his old series at arm’s length. It’s also hard to stay interested in a franchise that looks, with each inessential sequel, more and more like a doomsday prepper rephrasing the same old prophecy.
  10. Synonyms
    Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.
  11. Frankie
    The whole thing struck me as pleasant, nicely judged, and unremarkable, right up to a final shot so graceful and moving that it sent waves of poignancy backwards through the movie.
  12. Wounds
    Hammer’s character, Will, is an empty vessel, no more than an updated model of the jerkwad boyfriend in every ’80s slasher.
  13. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
    Awkward and unfunny in exceptionally long stretches, Reboot probably won’t turn his diehard fans against him. But it’s unlikely to win him any new converts either. For that, there’s "Clerks," "Mallrats," or "Chasing Amy."
  14. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.
  15. By the Grace of God
    Mostly, though, this very empathetic project suffers from an inability to offer anything beyond what one would expect from its synopsis.
  16. The Cave
    It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.
  17. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.
  18. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    Refreshingly, Gilligan doesn’t try to run away from his TV-writing instincts: Each proceeding stage in Jesse’s high-stakes predicament plays out like its own distinct episode, a further blurring of the lines between media that might’ve been distracting in a bygone era, but is right at home on Netflix.
  19. Jexi
    Surely, bland cultural insights can’t defeat a film whose main attraction is the promise of stupid, raunchy fun? Reader, Jexi fails even at that, as it awkwardly struggles across its slim running time to land a single one of its existentially painful, seemingly bot-generated jokes.
  20. The Addams Family
    Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.
  21. Gemini Man
    One can smirk at the movie’s fuzzy philosophies and primordial clichés and still appreciate the delivery of Lee’s action scenes.
  22. Mister America
    Running only a little shorter than the average season of On Cinema At The Cinema, it’s never as cringe-inducingly funny or inventive as the webseries that spawned it.
  23. In My Room
    Written and directed by Ulrich Köhler (and co-produced by Köhler’s romantic partner, Maren Ade, a superb filmmaker in her own right), this droll yet poignant amalgam of the fantastic and the mundane ultimately suggests that while people can dramatically alter their behavior in response to extreme circumstances, on some fundamental level they don’t really change.
  24. The King
    It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.
  25. Pain and Glory
    Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.
  26. The Harder They Come
    While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.
  27. In the Tall Grass
    The movie is a mixed bag, well shot and well acted enough to mostly keep the viewer’s attention, but meandering enough to frustrate at the same time. It’s bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.
  28. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.
  29. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.
  30. Low Tide
    Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »