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. The Mustang
    It’s all well-trod territory. And yet — and here’s another cliché — The Mustang breathes new life into most of those conventions, thanks in no small part to Schoenaerts and his remarkable work.
  2. Combat Obscura
    Unsurprisingly, the results aren’t pretty.
  3. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
    It’s a watchably low-key family adventure, but that’s a low bar to clear for Nancy Drew, so well-suited to function as a gateway text—to Sherlock Holmes, Veronica Mars, Philip Marlowe, Brick, House, Encyclopedia Brown fanfic... almost anything involving advanced noticing.
  4. Us
    Us is something of a frustrating watch, a visual and technical marvel that just doesn’t seem to know what it is. Unlike Get Out, which only swelled in impact as you left the theater, Us is best viewed on a visceral level, not an intellectual one.
  5. Two Plains & a Fancy
    Comedy is complicated and contextual, and the line between intentional and unintentional humor becomes confusing when the former mimics the latter.
  6. Triple Frontier
    Triple Frontier becomes a fascinating sustained exercise in absurdist triage, as one mishap after another forces the men to decide whether they’re prepared to throw away obscene amounts of money in order to save their skins.
  7. Gloria Bell
    The slimness of the plot—and its familiarity, if you’ve seen Lelio’s original film — also allows the viewer to focus on Gloria Bell’s true raison d’être: the one and only Julianne Moore.
  8. Black Mother
    What distinguishes the film is Allah’s superb eye and talent for portraiture.
  9. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Still, the respectful thing to do, it seems, is to treat An Elephant Sitting Still like any other film, imagining how it would look were Hu already hard at work on his next project. A lot depends on just how much sustained misery one likes to endure.
  10. Captain Marvel
    It’s comparatively short and fast-paced by modern standards. Unfortunately, it also has a lackluster plot; bog-standard chase scenes and pew-pewing space ships; a notable shortage of interesting characterizations; and a fight scene set to No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” that is nowhere as awesome or as silly as it should be.
  11. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
    The films are inane, sloppy, tone-deaf, moralizing, and have no sense of quality control, but there’s nothing quite like them. Madea, we hardly knew ye…
  12. Transit
    Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?
  13. Greta
    This is a slight film, unlikely to be remembered in the long-term by anyone but completists who discover it during deep dives into its leads’ respective filmographies. But, oh, what a giddy ride awaits them.
  14. Apollo 11
    Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.
  15. The Wedding Guest
    It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.
  16. The Hole in the Ground
    Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.
  17. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    As an act of storytelling, it’s curiously perfunctory, never rising to the level of effort and care put into creating its cornucopia of visual pleasures.
  18. The Competition
    Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.
  19. Paddleton
    Paddleton takes its emotional cue from "Terms Of Endearment," expanding that film’s final stretch into an entire feature and replacing mother-daughter bonds with the deep but usually unspoken love shared by two male buddies.
  20. Fighting with My Family
    Fighting With My Family is a shamelessly formulaic sponsored post of a crowd-pleaser that’s also, in its best moments, a genuinely stirring celebration of chase-your-dreams moxie.
  21. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    What’s so grand about Ruben Brandt isn’t its story or the characters, which are both abstractions. It’s the animation—the detailed artwork, so dense that it warrants repeat viewings.
  22. Donnybrook
    Here, Sutton is working with actual characters, played by professional actors, and his instinct is to flatten them as much as possible.
  23. Hotel by the River
    But despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself.
  24. Birds of Passage
    Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote.
  25. Sorry Angel
    The film has some lovely beats, and good chemistry between its leads.
  26. Happy Death Day 2U
    The happy surprise of Happy Death Day 2U is that it does find ways to tweak the formula of its predecessor, to break the cycle of franchise redundancy.
  27. Isn't It Romantic
    It’s a feature-length in-joke for fans who will always pause if My Best Friend’s Wedding pops up during a lazy Saturday afternoon channel-surfing session, but who ultimately consider rom-coms a slightly shameful guilty pleasure.
  28. What Men Want
    It tries to replicate the earlier film’s redemption arc, all the while proving that it is more than willing to adhere to the same double standards it ostensibly pokes fun at.
  29. The Prodigy
    The filmmakers figure out how to make a creepy kid chilling again, then stop short, closing the case too early. In other words, they’ve got an underachiever on their hands.
  30. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot
    The gambit doesn’t really work — fans of "The Notebook" and people who own "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama" will both come away disappointed — but it’s hard not to respect Krzykowski’s attempt to do something different.
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