The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,409 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: 5,568 out of 10409
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10409
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10409
10409 movie reviews
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  1. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough. For the more superhero skeptical, it offers a helpful example of how simply skipping the origin stuff on the fourth try doesn’t automatically confer a sense of dramatic urgency or comic-book wonder.
  2. The Scout
    The Scout is as pretty-gloomy as an off day in New York, as winning as a good work anecdote, as defeating as another day on the job, and as listless as a generation starting to feel the shadow of their looming midlife crisis.
  3. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Unlike a recent franchise reimagination like 28 Years Later or even the pop culture savvy remix of 2022’s Scream (side note: both Wes Craven and Gillespie’s original films were written by Kevin Williamson), I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t successfully subvert its storyline nor glean anything remarkable by setting it in our current era.
  4. To a Land Unknown
    In its quiet reflection on the limited choices of those backed into a corner, the drama elegantly conveys how a people’s continued persecution not only starves, shoots, and bombs individuals, but erodes the solidarity of their whole.
  5. Daniela Forever
    As this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it’s trying to critique.
  6. Heightened Scrutiny
    With plenty of moving testimonials and charming talking heads, Heightened Scrutiny draws damning lines between the “just asking questions” opinion pieces published in respected mainstream media publications like The Atlantic and the New York Times and the legal arguments made in our judicial system.
  7. Superman
    Gunn eventually finds his footing and Superman returns to the fray, delivering heat vision reprisals and truth and justice platitudes to Luthor’s hostile forces (he leads a sycophantic science outfit that resembles DOGE gone berserk).
  8. Pretty Thing
    Even when compared to the recent underwhelming crop of erotic thrillers, topped by the enjoyably escalating silliness of Deep Water, Pretty Thing is especially chaste, abstaining from both sexual titillation and the campy fallout that results from making a series of decisions driven solely by libido.
  9. Sovereign
    Though Offerman buoys the film with terrifying aplomb, Sovereign is a missed opportunity to examine the cascading fallout from living in a country that fails its people and breeds violence.
  10. Heads of State
    As an action-comedy, Heads Of State is more successful at the former than the latter. It’s a junky, diverting movie, one with major tonal issues and a completely predictable storyline, no matter how many twists and red herrings the filmmakers throw at us. Not sharp enough to be memorable but just well-crafted enough that you wish everyone involved had tried a little harder.
  11. The Old Guard 2
    The Old Guard 2 is broader, zippier, and more caught up in explaining the rules of its immortal superheroes rather than simply living in their complex emotional reality.
  12. 40 Acres
    The problem is that 40 Acres simply sprinkles its few unique ideas atop a shambling post-apocalyptic template.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    Jurassic World Rebirth‘s attempt at rejuvenating its franchise mirrors the vitality of its once-extinct reptiles: This movie may have breathed life back where once it was thought lost, but this life is not pure or sustainable.
  14. F1: The Movie
    F1 feels, at times, like an underbaked episode of Netflix’s docuseries Drive To Survive—albeit one with Top Gun-style editing, incredible access, and enough drama to make someone bored of the racing become enthralled with the gladiatorial characters behind the wheel of these incredible machines.
  15. M3GAN 2.0
    It seems that Johnstone and his collaborators learned the wrong lesson from M3GAN‘s shocking success.
  16. Sorry, Baby
    Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.
  17. Bride Hard
    Bride Hard aims for the goofy joy of a drunken bachelorette party, but is more like the morning-after hangover.
  18. 28 Years Later
    A blistering adventure filled with dread and wonder, there’s a macabre classicism to the film—a sense that, even if life as we know it falls apart, some essential elements persevere.
  19. Deep Cover
    The central conceit quickly feels like window dressing for a film that wants to be in a particular genre but hasn’t put in any real effort to fit there.
  20. Familiar Touch
    As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.
  21. Elio
    Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.
  22. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.
  23. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    In telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    Rather than trying to train something new, How To Train Your Dragon is riding an already proven beast; even its “first flight” has been done before. It can’t reach those old heights, let alone any new ones. And it doesn’t try to, nor does its audience really want it to. For live-action remakes, cruising altitude is the highest they can hope for.
  25. Materialists
    The film lacks the finesse for character and chemistry that the filmmaker showcased in her inaugural effort.
  26. Echo Valley
    To the extent Echo Valley sporadically connects or has some saving grace, it’s because of the efforts of its other players, behind but especially in front of the camera.
  27. Predator: Killer of Killers
    There’s little to no fat to be found in this film; it’s a lean, mean action-thriller that threads the needle between speculative storytelling and brutal sci-fi carnage.
  28. Ballerina
    Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog.
  29. The Ritual
    The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions.
  30. The Mastermind
    A film so pure in its simplicity, relatable in its banality, quiet in its captivation, that it pulls off a nearly impossible feat: It’s a heist film that can’t be called a thriller.
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