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. 7 Days in Entebbe
    Lacking both the exploitation-movie claustrophobic urgency of Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt" and the Irwin Allen-disaster-film factor of the Irvin Kershner-directed NBC version, "Raid On Entebbe," 7 Days instead goes for businesslike professionalism.
  2. Journey's End
    Is there any artistically compelling reason for the existence of the latest adaptation, which is clearly meant to take advantage of the centennial? Not really, but it’s a good play, once again providing juicy roles to fresh and established talent. That’ll suffice.
  3. The Hurricane Heist
    A workmanlike cross between a disaster movie and a caper-chase flick...the film never rises to the promise of its awesomely literal title.
  4. Gringo
    Solid chunks of the screwball humor land like bricks, and the characters — most of them idiots, a**holes, or suckers — are colorfully over-the-top but not especially memorable.
  5. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    Just as the movie seems to have exhausted its supply of generic guilty pleasures, it ascends to some more operatic and mordant plane of slasher-dom in a wacko sequence that involves the aforementioned “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” a swimming pool, and a perfectly timed smash zoom.
  6. The Outsider
    Asano and the rest of the Japanese cast provide baseline credibility, but they can’t generate excitement from this morass of clichés.
  7. A Wrinkle in Time
    Only Reid and Pine feel like they’re playing fully imagined characters, and DuVernay wrestles with how to make the overstuffed material both contemporary and timeless.
  8. The Death of Stalin
    The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.
  9. Claire's Camera
    Serves as a thoroughly engaging divertissement. That it comes across as more than a little half-assed is part of its unruly charm.
  10. Death Wish
    Whether uncritically brought over in remake translation or genuinely reaffirmed, the movie’s fucked-up politics poison the fun. By the end, which creates an unmistakably symmetrical arc for Paul, Death Wish has all but devolved into a scare-tactics advertisement for locked-and-loaded home protection.
  11. Mohawk
    Viewers who are looking for something thought-provoking as well as thrilling have come to the right place.
  12. They Remain
    Beyond the performances, They Remain is uneven. The film uses a series of innovative, old-school visual tricks to create a surreal and hallucinatory vibe, and when something works, it’s powerful and discomfiting.
  13. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer’s trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion. He doesn’t have the footage to make Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? come together as an investigation narrative, and his insistence on a quasi-chronological structure means that it doesn’t work as an essay, either.
  14. Werewolf
    Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.
  15. Love, Simon
    Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.
  16. Mute
    The film ignores all the potential commentary and conflict in its pulpy, hyperbolic premise (tradition technology, urban contradictions, etc.), offering only trivialities, superficialities, and contempt. It has as little to say as its protagonist. Possibly less, even
  17. Annihilation
    If "Ex Machina" was a mess of provocative, half-formed thoughts on gender, creation, and desire, Annihilation locates something closer to a clear, cogent thesis: that there’s nothing scarier than looking at those closest to you, or even yourself, and not recognizing the person staring back.
  18. Every Day
    There are any number of metaphorical applications for A’s condition, some implied more strongly than others, including trans struggles, gender fluidity...teenage desire to fit in, even accidental catfishing.... Every Day is sweet and sincere enough to remain open to these interpretations, but too gentle to assert itself into anything of real consequence.
  19. The Lodgers
    It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.
  20. Game Night
    This tame but fitfully funny goof on suspense cinema at least assembles an agreeable guest list.... As with any real game night, the company is more important than the game.
  21. The Young Karl Marx
    From its lifelessly anachronistic English dialogue to its Masterpiece Theatre lighting and production design, The Young Karl Marx tries to filter radical thought through the pace and aesthetics of a middlebrow drama.
  22. Samson
    A bargain-bin biblical epic that delivers the requisite mass-murder-by-ass-jaw as a cheapjack approximation of Zack Snyder-esque pomp, but is for the most part clinically dull.
  23. Red Sparrow
    It’s about halfway between "Atomic Blonde" and a Focus Features late-summer thriller, which more or less fits the Francis Lawrence aesthetic. He brings to this material what he brought to "The Hunger Games": a sense of style that feels constrained by obligations to hit a certain number of plot points.
  24. Nostalgia
    Hamm gets to dig deeper than he has before on the big screen, tweaking some Draperian notes of aloofness into a credible emotional dimension, even when Nostalgia abandons its unsensational, slice-of-life-in-boxes approach for something closer to traditional tragedy.
  25. The Party
    The shining star of this little community is Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), who’s put together an intimate gathering of friends to celebrate her recent promotion to Shadow Minister for Health.
  26. Black Panther
    There are hiccups in its ambition, but it’s hard not to get swept up in all the technologies, characters, and politics crammed into the movie’s compelling dramatic conflict, which casts the charismatic Michael B. Jordan—the star of Creed and Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station—as the most complex villain in the post-Dark Knight cycle of superhero blockbusters.
  27. Western
    Although thoughtful and probing, this portrait of good intentions gone awry has been so thoroughly intellectualized that there’s not much juice to it. It’s a movie that’s busy analyzing itself while you watch.
  28. Early Man
    Early Man can’t overcome the limitations of its premise—one of Park’s less fruitful genre mashups.
  29. Double Lover
    The film is as campy and nearly as regressive as the E.L. James adaptations it consistently out-kinks, except that it’s been made with a slumming Hitchcockian verve that enhances, rather than apologizes for, the proud disreputability of the material.
  30. Looking Glass
    Because Hunter’s movie works best in its early, less crazed stretch, there aren’t any really memorable sequences here coming from the director or his distinctive star.
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