The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. First Man
    What Chazelle has made, in other words, is a nitty-gritty procedural that treats the NASA odyssey as a window into Armstrong’s unknowable mind, an inner space as mysterious as the outer one he blasts himself into.
  2. Slice
    The acting is hammy, but intentionally so, as is the crude, greasepaint-and-baby powder makeup on the ghosts. Clearly, Vesely has pushed the stylization of the piece as far as it can go in order to compensate for Slice’s low budget.
  3. White Boy Rick
    Best of all is Merritt, a remarkable find who makes an indelible impression in his very first onscreen role. Giving Rick just the right mix of bravado and awkwardness, he’s like an improbable gene splice of a young Matt Dillon with a young Seth Rogen. Don’t expect him to disappear for 30 years.
  4. Unbroken: Path to Redemption
    Unbroken: Path To Redemption ultimately preaches forgiveness—a message that, in and of itself, is unobjectionable.
  5. Mandy
    The look of the film is a hoot: double lens flares over wood paneling, psychedelic lighting, crude animated sequences, slow-mo and telephoto shots, and enough vintage MTV fog machines to kill a hair metal band.
  6. I Think We're Alone Now
    Unfortunately, I Think We’re Alone Now stops being interesting right when Grace (Elle Fanning) comes to town, mostly because she brings screenwriter Mike Makowsky’s trite ideas about loneliness and community along with her.
  7. Halloween
    Halloween isn’t explicitly a horror-comedy, but it does have the destructive habit of undercutting its scares with broad laughs, Green and McBride deflating the tension at every turn with goofball asides.
  8. The Predator
    Cartoonishly violent and proudly profane, The Predator is like a Hollywood action movie pulled into our reality from an alternate timeline.
  9. The Old Man & the Gun
    The Old Man & The Gun is so reliant on the echoes of past films, on the career it’s constantly evoking and riffing on, that it sometimes feels as ephemeral as dust floating in a projector beam. But there’s something truthful and even moving in the way Lowery conflates the joy of one impossible occupation with that of another.
  10. Dead Souls
    The storytelling ends up saying nearly as much as the stories themselves: Not simply capturing and filing memories, the film becomes a portrait of how these survivors have processed their trauma, how they’ve framed the horror of their experiences, and how they’ve coped with survivors’ guilt.
  11. I Am Not a Witch
    Nyoni is clearly confident in her vision and the story she wants to tell, and in her capable hands, the result is spellbinding.
  12. Blaze
    Blaze feels like a true passion project, an engine running on Hawke’s endless supply of enthusiasm for his subject.
  13. The Nun
    If your heart skips a beat during this movie, it’ll probably be from laughter. But if you adjust your expectations and go in expecting something loud, lurid, and frequently utterly ridiculous, it’s good for a cheap adrenaline rush all the same.
  14. Peppermint
    It’s a shame, because Garner’s herculean efforts throw the film’s sloppiness into even sharper relief. Like Keanu Reeves, Garner has a gift for making every kick, punch, bullet, and desk dropped on someone’s head feel like a spontaneous decision.
  15. Hal
    Though clearly aimed at fans, it presents only a chummy overview of his life and career, too superficial to work as a biography, an in-depth appreciation, or even a primer.
  16. Bisbee '17
    This one transforms practically the whole of Bisbee into a memorably uneasy amateur theatrical production.
  17. The Little Stranger
    In truth, The Little Stranger is barely a horror movie at all. It’s more of an impeccably crafted chamber drama with a supernatural bent, like Edith Wharton by way of Shirley Jackson.
  18. Let the Corpses Tan
    Like "Amer" and "The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears," Let The Corpses Tan is fetishistic, kaleidoscopic, and obsessed with the intersection between sex and death.
  19. Prototype
    There’s a lot to ponder in Prototype, not least in the confounding coda that suggests a note of hope for rebirth, but the film’s powers are visceral as much as (if not more so than) they are cerebral.
  20. Kin
    It’s a simple idea, to take this working-class family and introduce what amounts to a high-tech ray gun, but the hook is so effective that it buys Kin a fair amount of time before the story turns from scrappy to stupid.
  21. A.X.L.
    Something worse than bad. It’s utterly forgettable.
  22. Operation Finale
    Operation Finale means to embody the banality of evil, but it’s mostly mired in plain old banality.
  23. The Happytime Murders
    It’d be an intriguing premise — if, again, it weren’t so nearly identical to "Roger Rabbit," right down to the inevitable frame job. Also, if The Happytime Murders had taken a few more cues from that film and focused less on the rote whodunit and more on the funhouse-mirror L.A. where it takes place.
  24. Support the Girls
    Set in a tacky Hooters-style sports bar called Double Whammies, Andrew Bujalski’s delightful new comedy, Support The Girls, more than lives up to its winking/earnest double entendre of a title.
  25. Searching
    As a thriller, Searching is both ruthlessly absorbing in the moment and relatively disposable as soon as it ends, sliding itself gracefully into the desktop recycling bin.
  26. The Ranger
    With its blaring hardcore punk soundtrack and aggressive neon color palette, The Ranger isn’t remotely subtle. Given the type of movie it is, that’s mostly a good thing, though the in-your-face style gives away some of the aforementioned character-driven twists earlier than it should.
  27. Mile 22
    In almost all respects, but especially structurally, Mile 22 is a mess.
  28. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It’s gnarly as hell.
  29. The Wife
    It’s Close’s wonderfully subtle characterization of Joan that lifts The Wife above its cliché setups and neat role reversals, which is really rather ironic. Once again, it’s the wife doing all the hard work. At least this time, she gets top billing.
  30. Alpha
    Alpha has been sold, to some degree, as a family-friendly film, and while it’s too violent and perhaps too heavily subtitled for young kids (or, for that matter, some adults, who may notice how superfluous much of the dialogue is), it’s easy to picture some 10-year-olds taking to its exciting, cornball charms.
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