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. Blade Runner 2049
    This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.
  2. Flatliners
    Flatliners 2017 is the same dumb movie as Flatliners 1990, minus most of the surface charisma.
  3. American Made
    American Made has such style and energy that its hasty patchwork of a narrative becomes a kind of charm unto itself, even when it means losing track of talented actors.
  4. Super Dark Times
    Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.
  5. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Unfortunately, Felt’s actions, while historically important, don’t exactly make for riveting drama, especially compared to a classic about two dogged reporters. Nor does the film succeed in making Felt himself particularly interesting, except perhaps as a proxy—purely by coincidence, one assumes, given any movie’s lengthy gestation period—for another, recently terminated FBI honcho.
  6. Lucky
    It’s a remarkable gift to fans and cinephiles that Lucky serves as a first-rate showcase for its star as well as an ideal swan song. The man couldn’t have gone out any better.
  7. Gerald's Game
    Perhaps because he’s had a couple of decades to think about it, Flanagan’s vision for the film is assured, full of intimate closeups that allow Gugino’s multi-layered performance to shine.
  8. Friend Request
    There’s nothing remotely clever about this web-based fright flick, visually or conceptually. It’s flimsy genre junk of the most generic variety, just with a really groan-worthy Facebook spin.
  9. Woodshock
    Viewers who thought nothing much happened in "It Comes At Night" are advised to steer clear.
  10. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    Dumber and less stylish than its predecessor, Kingsman: The Secret Service, the cartoonish secret-agent pastiche Kingsman: The Golden Circle is also even more of an incoherent right-wing text, an exaggeration of the James Bond movies’ violence, fashion sense, and sex that keeps trying to pass off its ham-fisted conservative attitudes as smirking nihilism.
  11. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The Lego Ninjago movie isn’t any worse than any number of professionally made but unexciting cartoons aimed at kids, and sometimes a gag will pop through with the same high-energy surprise that powered so much of The Lego Movie.
  12. The Force
    To his credit, director Peter Nicks (The Waiting Room) accepts the dispiriting trajectory that this initially hopeful film ultimately takes—there’s no dissembling here. Trouble is, most of the ugly stuff happens off-camera, necessitating a secondhand second half that amounts to an embarrassed “Oops.”
  13. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two does a nice job getting way behind the scenes of a non-stop, sometimes grotesquely glamorous life.
  14. Thirst Street
    Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.
  15. Victoria and Abdul
    It’s just another piece of well-decorated regal real estate.
  16. Thelma
    Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.
  17. Stronger
    It’s nice to report that Green, Gyllenhaal, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany hit some grace notes—and plant the germ of some interesting ideas—en route to the expected lifting of spirits.
  18. Darkest Hour
    There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.
  19. The Disaster Artist
    Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.
  20. Brad's Status
    With Brad’s Status, Mike White (best known for writing School Of Rock and creating Enlightened) has chosen an alternate route: Make the movie you want to, but sheepishly apologize for its existence — not via interviews or post-screening Q&As, but within the context of the film itself.
  21. First They Killed My Father
    The most remarkable thing about First They Killed My Father is how quiet it is.
  22. American Assassin
    It’s paper-thin, predictable, and goofy as hell, but if you can get past the whole “pro-military propaganda” thing, it’s pretty fun in the moment.
  23. The Current War: Director's Cut
    The Current War employs actors capable of their own eccentric stylizations, and gives them very little leeway to make the material their own. Gomez-Rejon keeps snatching it back with every offbeat composition idea he can muster.
  24. The Shape of Water
    The actual animating force of this lushly told bedtime story is Del Toro’s swooning cinephilia, splashed across every available screen-within-the-screen, and expressed through black-and-white musical fantasy sequences, lavish throwback period detail, and the accordion whine of Alexandre Desplat’s wistful cornball score.
  25. Strong Island
    The effect is stark, expressionistic, and powerful. It creates the sense that what’s being said is important.
  26. mother!
    It’s almost unbelievable that something this narratively arty is being released as a mainstream horror movie, but the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky’s most skillful.
  27. Battle of the Sexes
    Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.
  28. Dayveon
    By displacing some familiar gang-movie dynamics into an environment less often glimpsed on film, Abbasi stays true to the offbeat heart of his influences. The strength of his work here indicates an even more distinct voice might yet emerge.
  29. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    Landing closer to Coens country, Three Billboards is more of a slow-roasting tragicomedy about grief and culpability, with higher stakes, a lower gag count, and emphasis on the tragic. But McDonagh still lives for detours and digressions, for the opportunity to stall the plot and humorously slow play a conversation.
  30. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Maybe a little longer and more scattered than it needs to be, with one too many scenes that just plant the camera in front of a gabbing speaker. His early movies were more urgent, in part because they kept their focus narrower
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