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. Shadow
    The scales ultimately tip slightly in favor of style, but when that style is this gorgeous, remembering a movie for the way it looks rather than its plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  2. El Chicano
    The story never even grazes the sublime; it’s dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don’t celebrate a reunion. They’re at war.
  3. The Intruder
    The film is so full of jump scare fake-outs and shout-at-the-screen moments, it neglects to build sustained suspense — a far worse sin than its lack of logic, which can actually be kind of fun.
  4. Tell It to the Bees
    What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.
  5. Non-Fiction
    This is, in other words, Assayas’ homage to highbrow gabfests — the mid-period films of Woody Allen (complete with a Bergman reference) and especially the work of Éric Rohmer, the pseudonymous critic-turned-director who made a career of exploring his characters’ private dilemmas, but remained famously secretive about his own personal life.
  6. UglyDolls
    Adults in charge might want to take a cue from the movie’s penny-pinching, and save some money on movie tickets.
  7. Meeting Gorbachev
    The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since?
  8. Ask Dr. Ruth
    As a documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth has it kind of easy: It’s got an enchanting subject eager to tell a fascinating story.
  9. Body at Brighton Rock
    While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.
  10. The White Crow
    Unlike its subject, The White Crow is ultimately forgettable.
  11. Avengers: Endgame
    An earnest, overstuffed, fitfully funny superhero melodrama, Endgame hits the buttons it wants to hit, and sometimes affectingly.
  12. J.T. Leroy
    This story remains fascinating, but the perspective here feels skewed.
  13. Little Woods
    Little Woods revolves around a remarkable lead performance: Thompson shows her range as an actress in this film in ways that, as fun as they can be, she just doesn’t get to in any of her blockbuster roles.
  14. Rafiki
    In some ways, Rafiki recalls Nijla Mu’min’s 2018 film "Jinn," which also superimposes a unique, beautifully realized point of view onto a conventional coming-of-age story.
  15. The Curse of La Llorona
    More fitfully funny than it is frightening, The Curse Of La Llorona might be the first film in the Conjuring universe to remain a standalone.
  16. Teen Spirit
    In a film seemingly aimed more at teens than adults, Minghella effectively updates that familiar star-is-born template for an arthouse-minded Instagram generation.
  17. Hail Satan?
    Lane’s lighthearted approach will probably convert more than a few viewers to the TST cause — it’s a short walk from pissed-off atheist to smirking satanist. Given how entrenched the culture wars have become in America, maybe all Satan needs at this point is a good publicist.
  18. Under the Silver Lake
    Enabling and mocking paranoid obsession at the same time might sound incoherent. In this hilariously demented spin on L.A. noir, it’s simply honest.
  19. Grass
    What’s most fascinating about Grass is the way Hong modulates the film’s atmosphere, gradually transforming its banal beginnings into something genuinely haunting and unresolved.
  20. Fast Color
    While the story may be flimsy in places, the performances are anything but.
  21. Breakthrough
    Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.
  22. After
    The real problem with After is that it’s a lifeless slog of thinly written clichés, one that’s missing the charismatic spark of the actual One Direction boys.
  23. Her Smell
    Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.
  24. Hellboy
    Less a thrilling adventure tale than a trip to a teenager’s messy, sock-strewn bedroom.
  25. Girls of the Sun
    Without a more clearly defined cultural basis for its characters’ actions, Girls Of The Sun is a story about sisterhood that doesn’t provide its women the detail they deserve.
  26. Little
    Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.
  27. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Though his symbolism sometimes errs on the side of obviousness, Bi shows an uncommon knack for recreating and exploring the space of a dream—its transforming identities and places, the unreality made more transportive by the 3D format’s underutilized potential for creating dramatic space, matched by the mutations of the camerawork from close-up to tracking shot to crane shot and back again.
  28. Mary Magdalene
    Once Mary makes the difficult decision to leave her family (rejecting the arranged marriage they’d planned for her) and follow Jesus (or “the rabbi,” as everyone mostly calls him, in a nicely accurate touch), she’s unfailingly loyal, understanding, compassionate, and wise. In a word, she’s boring. At least Jesus gets to be plagued by fear and doubt.
  29. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
    The worst part of The Haunting Of Sharon Tate is how seriously it takes its ham-fisted themes of fate and the nature of reality; the movie opens with an Edgar Allen Poe quote, for f*ck’s sake.
  30. Pet Sematary
    This may look like the same story, but the soul of it is missing — lost on the way out of the ground.
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