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. Thank You for Your Service
    Beyond its best little moments, the movie is addressing a serious issue, and it feels awfully churlish to complain that its earnest depictions of soldiers in psychological pain isn’t novel enough, or that Koale’s performance is a little shakier than Teller’s, or that the movie doesn’t have much to say about the Iraq War in particular, or that it eventually tries to pass off a lack of resolution as an abbreviated happy ending. But these stumbling blocks do stack up, standing in the way of Hall’s best intentions.
  2. All I See Is You
    Lively has become an expert at creating the impression that at some point, the movie behind her will come together. All I See Is You comes closer than "Adaline," but its adult intentions don’t go far enough.
  3. Leatherface
    To turn Leatherface into a tragic figure, twisted by traumatic upbringing into a monster, is to forget that he’s scariest as a force of nature, which tend to be tough to diagnose. Remember, no one cares what the shark from Jaws was like as a tortured guppy.
  4. Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
    A sequel so wholly anodyne that it doesn’t even deserve its exclamation point.
  5. Geostorm
    Butler sleepwalks through his thinly written role, and the ostensible tension between the two brothers, flaring up whenever the energy starts to sag, never feels like anything but a bald contrivance.
  6. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    It’s a gripping portrait of boots-on-the-ground activism, at least so long as it keeps the focus squarely trained on the actual activism.
  7. One of Us
    The film does little to explain the history behind the dynamic between their men and women, which is based, it seems, at least partly on a blinding fear of lust.
  8. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    The Killing Of A Sacred Deer doesn’t have as sharp an allegorical edge as his best work — it’s no Dogtooth in that respect — but it does find the director honing his command of unnerving atmosphere to a razor point, enhanced by a camera that glides menacingly down hospital corridors and gazes from above with the severity of a merciless god.
  9. The Snowman
    The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.
  10. Jane
    Jane boasts one thing that its predecessors did not: a treasure trove of truly stunning 16mm footage shot in the early 1960s by famed nature photographer Hugo Van Lawick (who would become Goodall’s first husband).
  11. Only the Brave
    So squarely old-fashioned that it’s a little jarring to notice that many of the characters have smartphones.
  12. Wonderstruck
    For all of the time-warp elegance, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Haynes has authored more of an exercise than a movie: a lovingly assembled flashback pastiche whose emotional core remains oddly theoretical.
  13. Jungle
    The fundamental intensity of Ghinsberg’s story is hard to totally squander. When it doesn’t give in to the desire to be a more traditional crowd-pleaser, Jungle provides a graphic and unvarnished account of a genuinely incredible story.
  14. Marshall
    This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.
  15. The Foreigner
    The Foreigner is a good, lean cut of meat—in other words, a typical Martin Campbell movie, expeditious and cold-blooded in its cross-cut, cloak-and-dagger plotting and violence.
  16. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    78/52 is at its best in cinema studies mode, examining specific compositional and editing choices made by Hitchcock and his collaborators.
  17. Happy Death Day
    It’s a reasonably clever spin, but not much more than that; once the novelty of the genre swap wears off, you’re just watching another inferior variation.
  18. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    Director Simon Curtis, the purveyor of such middlebrow fluff as Woman In Gold and My Week With Marilyn, lays the sentimental hues and sunbeams on thick, hoping that someone will give a sh-t.
  19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), is a fresh addition to Noah Baumbach’s ever-expanding gallery of neurotic, narcissistic New Yorkers.
  20. Human Flow
    Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.
  21. Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    The story is absolutely fascinating, even if the filmmaking isn’t.
  22. Una
    Una demonstrates that when it comes to the staginess of stage adaptations, the cure can be worse than the disease.
  23. Breathe
    Breathe seems to want nothing more than to be "The Theory Of Everything" for a slightly newer generation.
  24. The Florida Project
    There’s great integrity to showing life as it is really is, warts and all. But sometimes showing it as it should be has value, too.
  25. My Little Pony: The Movie
    My Little Pony: The Movie tries to get meta on the sickly sweetness of its subject matter.
  26. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    Still, even if The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson doesn’t wholly deliver on its premise, France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now.
  27. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    Equally remarkable and counterintuitive is Vaughn’s performance. He pulls a Bruce Willis here, shaving his head and substituting intimidating stillness for his trademark motormouthed hyperactivity. The transformation suits him surprisingly well.
  28. The Mountain Between Us
    Remove the nonsensical characterizations and The Mountain Between Us becomes a cornball paean to rock formations and (mostly male) beauty.
  29. Better Watch Out
    The film will continue to defy your expectations.
  30. A Question of Faith
    The plot’s mechanics in tying the families together are often clumsy and contorted, in ways that are strange without being particularly interesting.
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