The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,456 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: 5,593 out of 10456
  2. Mixed: 3,748 out of 10456
  3. Negative: 1,115 out of 10456
10456 movie reviews
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  1. Bride Hard
    Bride Hard aims for the goofy joy of a drunken bachelorette party, but is more like the morning-after hangover.
  2. 28 Years Later
    A blistering adventure filled with dread and wonder, there’s a macabre classicism to the film—a sense that, even if life as we know it falls apart, some essential elements persevere.
  3. Deep Cover
    The central conceit quickly feels like window dressing for a film that wants to be in a particular genre but hasn’t put in any real effort to fit there.
  4. Familiar Touch
    As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.
  5. Elio
    Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.
  6. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.
  7. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    In telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    Rather than trying to train something new, How To Train Your Dragon is riding an already proven beast; even its “first flight” has been done before. It can’t reach those old heights, let alone any new ones. And it doesn’t try to, nor does its audience really want it to. For live-action remakes, cruising altitude is the highest they can hope for.
  9. Materialists
    The film lacks the finesse for character and chemistry that the filmmaker showcased in her inaugural effort.
  10. Echo Valley
    To the extent Echo Valley sporadically connects or has some saving grace, it’s because of the efforts of its other players, behind but especially in front of the camera.
  11. Predator: Killer of Killers
    There’s little to no fat to be found in this film; it’s a lean, mean action-thriller that threads the needle between speculative storytelling and brutal sci-fi carnage.
  12. Ballerina
    Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog.
  13. The Ritual
    The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions.
  14. 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.
  15. Lost in Starlight
    Han Ji-won’s sci-fi romance is caught between its genres.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  22. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Bloodlines honors a legacy of unrepentant silliness and gleeful gore with a knowing wink.
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