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. We the Animals
    Unlike Sean Baker, who grounded his "Florida Project" in a firm but never condescending viewpoint on the milieu, Zagar seems to lack a coherent directorial perspective on Torres’ story; he mistakes vérité-style handheld and frequent close-ups (mostly captured with wide-angle lenses) for genuine intimacy and engagement.
  2. Minding the Gap
    It generates a sense of personal immediacy that elevates Minding The Gap above the confines of mere portraiture; his presence facilitates (and sometimes hinders) honest admissions from his subjects.
  3. Juliet, Naked
    Epistolary courtship can be achingly romantic—but only on paper, where it belongs.
  4. Crazy Rich Asians
    Like the best musicals, Crazy Rich Asians joyously embraces a heightened aesthetic while keeping its story grounded in real emotional truth.
  5. Summer of 84
    The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.
  6. Madeline's Madeline
    Madeline’s Madeline, the third feature from writer-director Josephine Decker, is a self-devouring thing: a movie about artistic process that doubles as a document of—and even a commentary on—its own artistic process.
  7. Slender Man
    In a movie this flat-out dull, even a tasteful lack of direct exploitation feels like a failure of nerve.
  8. BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman, for all its indulgent… Spikiness, is held together by the force of Lee’s messaging. He’s the polemicist as insult comic, wedging truths between each karate chop to the (skin)head of racist America.
  9. Skate Kitchen
    In fact, all the weed smoking and street-smart sidewalk banter aside, Skate Kitchen’s perspective is, in many ways, downright innocent; as such, it may be a better fit for adolescent viewers than adult ones.
  10. The Meg
    The Meg is lackadaisically paced, dull to look at, and has trouble keeping track of space and plot.
  11. A Prayer Before Dawn
    Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire (Johnny Mad Dog) makes some audacious, impressionistic choices, focusing on the nexus of sensual and brutal, but this is the rare true story that really could have used some creative embellishment.
  12. Dog Days
    If Dog Days were a little weirder, it would just be a smug anti-comedy takedown of a late-period Garry Marshall picture, like "They Came Together" with its biggest laughs edited out.
  13. The Darkest Minds
    A generic and frankly very tedious compendium of YA clichés.
  14. Christopher Robin
    Beneath its wistful tone, Christopher Robin supplies the purest wish-fulfillment fantasy that a children’s movie can offer adults: that our childhoods miss us as much as we miss them.
  15. Like Father
    Perversely, it’s only after Like Father is in the clear from its potentially ridiculous set-up that it really starts to trade in phony sitcom-movie bullshit.
  16. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Much of what’s around them is rote and uneven, but Kunis and McKinnon are a comedic duo worth hanging on to.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nico, 1988
    Like Gus Van Sant’s "Last Days," Nico, 1988 is at its best in these liminal moments, its creation of a cognitive space to ponder an artist’s legacy, as well as literal spaces that reflect it: faded ballrooms, twilit monuments, bleary countrysides. Unlike that movie, though, Nico, 1988 occasionally succumbs to hoary biopic clichés, awkwardly imposing narrative beats.
  18. Night Comes On
    Fishback and Hall move confidently between the obvious ironies and foreshadowings of Spiro’s kitchen sink (as in, “everything but the ______”) realism.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Aug 1, 2018
  19. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    It’s telling that the filmmaker captures one of Gallagher’s best moments in a long and relatively uneventful take situated at a breakfast table; this movie may wander, but Akhavan’s attention to perfect little moments is unwavering.
  20. Death of a Nation
    D’Souza fails, as ever, to make an argument that would resonate outside the QAnon echo chamber.
  21. Hot Summer Nights
    For all of this ersatz panache, the plot of Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script—less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.
  22. The Captain
    The film is consistently beautiful to look at in an “industrial metal album cover” kind of way, pairing dimly lit, black-and-white cinematography and artfully composed mise-en-scéne.
  23. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    Moving like the lit fuse that blazes brilliantly across the opening credits of both the original Mission: Impossible television series and its first big-screen adaptation, Fallout turns out to be a breathlessly exciting action spectacular: the blockbuster spy thriller as sustained endorphin rush.
  24. Good Manners
    There’s nothing especially wrong with the arty horror movie that Good Manners becomes, mind you, and the metamorphosis (unexpected, for those who haven’t read a review or seen the poster image, anyway) offers pleasures of its own.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 24, 2018
  25. Puzzle
    It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.
  26. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Go To The Movies is for kids who like bright colors and wacky humor, certainly, but it’s also targeted directly at the sort of superhero nerd who would catch a reference like that.
  27. Zoe
    Wrestling with the intrinsic creepiness of the premise would involve some social commentary, self-awareness, and honest-to-God storytelling, and that’s not Doremus’ bag.
  28. Unfriended: Dark Web
    It’s a patently ludicrous story. The storytelling, though, remains clever and grippingly singular, again finding creative ways to progress the narrative without cheating the locked-vantage format.
  29. McQueen
    A film that’s refreshingly free of the gushing sound bites from sycophantic celebrities that too often dominate fashion documentaries.
  30. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the title of which should be taken as a warning, knows all too well that its target audience wants more of the same. Heck, some of the songs (“Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” “The Name Of The Game,” etc.) are recycled from the first film.
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