The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    The essential question here, of course, is how kickass those action scenes are, since no one’s watching an xXx movie for the plot. (That particular assumption may explain how loose the continuity remains throughout.) The answer is variable.
  2. Split
    Split is funnier, campier, and more freewheeling than anything its writer-director has done — slightly overlong, but reminiscent of Brian De Palma films like "The Fury" and "Femme Fatale" in its refusal to be boring.
  3. Trespass Against Us
    Try as its talented cast does to pump some life into these desperate archetypes, it’s impossible not to draw unflattering comparisons with other, better films.
  4. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone
    Like so many movies designed for believers first and ordinary sinners second, if at all, Gavin Stone has trouble approximating the sensibility of actual entertainment and is particularly deadly as a comedy. Even David Spade movies tend to have more laughs.
  5. Detour
    Detour is just film-school-ish synthesis, right down to the cinematography-midterm shot lit through venetian blinds and the anachronistic analog static on the motel room TV—the story of a young man who hates his stepdad so much that he stumbles right into an over-complicated thriller set-up that can only be watched once.
  6. Staying Vertical
    Staying Vertical is distinguished largely by its poker-faced playfulness. Bonnard is a wonderfully quizzical presence in the lead, expertly creating the impression of a person who has no idea what he wants but is nonetheless determined to get it.
  7. Starless Dreams
    What distinguishes Starless Dreams is Oskouei’s voice, heard from off screen, getting these girls to be honest about where they’ve come from and why they’re less than anxious to return.
  8. Sleepless
    It might not be Donald Westlake, but it does its thing: meaningless, nonstop violence and movement, enacted by a large cast of characters who are only looking out to survive into the next scene.
  9. The Bye Bye Man
    On top of the general hoariness, this is also an uncommonly, at times unbelievably inept movie; from its acting to its script to most of its technical aspects, it feels barely fit for the big screen.
  10. The Son of Joseph
    It’s overlong, but behind its jabs at literary pretension, droll punchlines, and minimalist sight gags lies a search for the kind of guidance that parables used to impart.
  11. Monster Trucks
    Monster Trucks, in all its stupid, misguided, laughable anti-glory, is difficult to hate. Its stupidity is, at times, vaguely likable, and if not redeemed by strong craft, not harmed by technical deficiencies.
  12. Ma
    The result is decidedly uneven, but the film’s sheer creative ambition is invigorating.
  13. The Crash
    The Crash fumbles between bad diatribe and bad domestic drama, complete with subplots about absent parents and childhood cancer.
  14. Alone in Berlin
    A lump in the throat inspired by real-life heroism is all that this dour, monotonous drama has to offer. Indeed, it’s easy to guess that the story is fact-based—it’s far too blah to have been invented from scratch.
  15. Underworld: Blood Wars
    Too rote to be trash, it has to make do with being mere junk, impatiently exposing more incoherent machinations and more condo-board-like council meetings involving the dullest vampires in moviedom.
  16. Between Us
    Between Us is most compelling when it’s putting Feldman and Thirlby one on one, to talk about or around what ails their characters, in revealing tête-à-têtes or confessional voice-over.
  17. Arsenal
    Anything legitimately affecting about the movie bleeds out, and Cage delivering a blood-soaked monologue or simulating the sound of a burned esophagus isn’t enough on its own to turn Arsenal into the gory, borderline rococo thriller it starts aiming for around the halfway mark. It’s the rare case of a bonkers Cage performance counting as too little, too late.
  18. The Ardennes
    First-time director Robin Pront serves up plenty of brooding atmosphere, but the screenplay, adapted from a stage play by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who also plays the sensible Harvey Keitel role), never succeeds in eluding genre cliché.
  19. Railroad Tigers
    The Chinese film industry’s insistence on proving that it can make blockbusters that are as dull and crummy as anything to come out of Hollywood (but at only half the cost) continues unabated with Railroad Tigers.
  20. Live by Night
    The smoothness of the movie’s individual sequences bumps up against narrative raggedness, as Affleck labors to compress a sprawling, novel-ready narrative.
  21. Gold
    Gold is fitfully entertaining, but for a movie that gives itself license to go bigger and weirder than real life, its imagination for excess runs out whenever it isn’t focused intently on its star.
  22. Paterson
    In showing us the interest one man takes in everything around him, he’s suggesting that living a life of simplicity and security can be conducive to beautiful expression—even, or perhaps especially, in a place as ordinary as Paterson.
  23. Hidden Figures
    For all of its current touchstones, Hidden Figures feels far too late, both in the recognition these women deserve and the filmmakers’ goodhearted but dull approach to their stories.
  24. 20th Century Women
    While Beginners unfolded almost entirely from the point of view of its directorial stand-in, 20th Century Women creates a more generous equilibrium of perspective.
  25. Silence
    It is slow and solemn in stretches and often remote, but it rewards patience with a transcendent epilogue that departs from the main character’s point-of-view to find a glimmer of meaning.
  26. Toni Erdmann
    This is a high-concept comedy that’s firmly, almost defiantly rooted in the real world, among fully three-dimensional human beings whose behavior doesn’t conform to a rigid template. There’s nothing else like it in theaters right now. Brace yourself for the emotional whirlwind, and go.
  27. Passengers
    The effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent, and to turn one of the most likable actors in Hollywood into a total fucking creep. A date movie, this is not.
  28. Patriots Day
    The movie, none too revelatory, mostly just stands as a sturdy thriller, one that’s more fleet than flat-footed as it shuttles among a veritable network of characters and story lines.
  29. Julieta
    Almodóvar has directed what’s basically a melodrama as if it were a thriller—a fascinating experiment that doesn’t always work as intended, but creates a useful dissonance en route to a powerfully open-ended conclusion.
  30. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    Cox and Hirsch are both accomplished actors with an easy, believable chemistry, and Cox in particular has the gravitas to really sell some of the more grotesque plot twists.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »