The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,410 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 2.7 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: 5,569 out of 10410
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10410
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10410
10410 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Lost in Starlight
    Han Ji-won’s sci-fi romance is caught between its genres.
  3. Tornado
    It’s more that the specific combination of jidaigeki period piece, highland character study, and frontier justice that’s new, making Tornado a harrowing, blustery, violent amalgamation of an idiosyncratic spirit.
  4. Mountainhead
    A wry smackdown of four insanely rich bros hanging out at a gaudy estate in the Utah mountains, the movie generates a decent amount of laughs, but it’s best when Armstrong puts satire aside for rage, seething at the tech kingpins destroying our society to increase their profits.
  5. The History of Sound
    From its opening moments, The History Of Sound feels like it’s going to be something grand. It’s this feeling that makes the warbling result that much more disappointing, a song soon to be forgotten.
  6. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t merely fall flat dramatically, but dashes any opportunity for visual intrigue in terms of cinematography, costume design, and, most vitally, its on-screen carnage.
  7. Fountain of Youth
    Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Eddington
    Eddington is only a partly coherent mishmash of tones and ideas: sincere and satirical, astute and self-obfuscating. The only thing it is completely is ambitious.
  9. The Phoenician Scheme
    The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Nouvelle Vague
    The filmmaker’s adoration for the people on-screen is never in doubt, but as consistently pleasant as his Godardian homage may be, it has limited use as an evocation or understanding of the late master’s work.
  11. Lilo & Stitch
    If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.
  12. Die My Love
    Ramsay lets her film, and her characters, exhale just a little. But there is a lot of earned wisdom and lived-in pain in that exhale, and in the entirety of Ramsay’s masterwork.
  13. Bono: Stories of Surrender
    While chiefly serving as an engaging conversation piece for those already familiar with the man and his band, director Andrew Dominik’s film is also an artistic, effectively streamlined celebration of reflection.
  14. Bring Her Back
    Like a punk band turning four chords into pure angst, Bring Her Back turns familiar trauma-based horror into a traumatic experience. To sit through Bring Her Back is to endure it.
  15. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.
  16. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.
  17. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Bloodlines honors a legacy of unrepentant silliness and gleeful gore with a knowing wink.
  18. Deaf President Now!
    Deaf President Now! honors that struggle, even if the polished packaging doesn’t always possess a similar righteous fury.
  19. Summer of 69
    Summer Of 69 doesn’t flesh out its characters, themes, or jokes with enough finesse to even rank within the storied teen sex comedy canon.
  20. Henry Johnson
    Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.
  21. Caught by the Tides
    It goes without saying that much of it will feel familiar to those already well-versed in the Jia filmography: there’s a yearning, a search, and, finally, a return.
  22. Dead Mail
    Although the film has a certain languidness—shaving the 100-minute runtime down would have amplified the tension—its commitment to dissecting the internal workings of analog keyboards and the USPS prove just as intriguing as the unstable killer who threatens professionals in both of these fields.
  23. Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
    Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted does stray into some dark areas—death, anxiety attacks, suicidal ideaton—but the spirit of the documentary (and the music) is overwhelmingly joyful.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fight or Flight
    Hartnett is the one element that makes the whole thing bearable. Yet he still isn’t enough to make it enjoyable, at least in any sustained way.
  25. The Rose of Versailles
    The crossdressing, androgynous heroine, whose internal struggle around binary gender roles still feels fresh, grounds the broad emotions and classic, over-the-top aesthetic permeating the film.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Surfer
    The Surfer slowly follows the threads of its hero’s unraveling neuroses, and Cage walks right up to the line of sanity as each strand comes undone. It is a marvelous pushback against expectations that he stays on the other side of that line.
  27. Thunderbolts*
    Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.
  28. The Legend of Ochi
    Yet for all of its imaginative inspirations, The Legend Of Ochi feels under-conceptualized: It’s a fairytale without much stirring under the studiously designed surface.
  29. Havoc
    Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.
  30. Until Dawn
    The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.
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