The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. Don't Breathe
    Half a century after "Wait Until Dark" pitted a blind Audrey Hepburn against the three crooks trying to get into her apartment, along comes Don’t Breathe to successfully invert its scenario.
  2. Kate Plays Christine
    There’s an emotional dimension to Kate Plays Christine—an empathy linking an actor to the human headline she’s dressing up as—that’s nearly abstracted into oblivion by the film’s neurotic self-examination.
  3. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Lo And Behold approaches the internet with the same mixture of wonder and dread that the director previously applied to pitiless nature, but the subject matter is inherently less cinematic.
  4. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    Portman’s emotional connection to the material couldn’t be more obvious, yet the film itself is still largely inert.
  5. Morris from America
    Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.
  6. Kubo and the Two Strings
    This is Laika’s least droll, least ghoulish feature so far; the plotting is even more dreamlike than "Coraline."
  7. Imperium
    Radcliffe’s performance also ramps up toward the end of the movie, when the pressures of undercover life and his struggle to empathize with these people — his main asset as an undercover agent — really begin to weigh on him.
  8. War Dogs
    Despite all the time War Dogs spends with these two characters, it never develops them past the initial impression that one is basically a good guy and that the other is bad news incarnate.
  9. Ben-Hur
    The Wyler film’s rousing chariot sequence—filmed separately and at lavish expense by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived — is hard to beat. But Bekmambetov acquits himself nicely, offering up a loud and vicious circular chase, with point-of-view shots of people getting hit by chariots as armored Romans scamper around like rodeo clowns.
  10. Ixcanul
    This is a decidedly small-scale tragedy, but it still packs a cumulative wallop.
  11. When Two Worlds Collide
    When Two Worlds Collide employs a variety of styles and approaches to construct a single gripping narrative.
  12. Spa Night
    Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.
  13. Disorder
    The trick of Disorder is that it plays right to the audience’s suspicions and desires.
  14. Hell or High Water
    Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation.
  15. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Hugh Grant’s face is perpetually locked in a concerned grimace as Bayfield, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere when he’s not doting on his wife.
  16. My King
    My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who’s better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what’s essential.
  17. Blood Father
    Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
  18. Sausage Party
    Rogen and Goldberg start with spoofery and work their way into something bolder and stranger; it’s as if playing in the Pixar sandbox, or a reasonable approximation thereof, can’t help but inspire creativity.
  19. Joshy
    While it is something of a comedy, Joshy is also serious, and its comic actors follow suit.
  20. Pete's Dragon
    Looking for poetry in a live-action family film is usually about as futile as hunting for dragons in your backyard; the vast majority of them wager on the indiscriminate tastes of kids and their dutiful chaperons. But Pete’s Dragon has poetry in spades.
  21. Anthropoid
    Dramatically, it’s not much of a movie, but if you just want to know how things went down, it’s certainly a more exciting précis than Wikipedia’s.
  22. The Lost Arcade
    At bottom, this is the story of freaks and geeks everywhere: a quest for the like-minded, rooted in obsessive engagement with a tiny sliver of pop culture.
  23. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    Stories Women Tell does succeed at what it primarily means to do, which is to take abortion out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more personal.
  24. Nine Lives
    Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.
  25. The Mind's Eye
    From its opening title card proclaiming “This film should be played loud,” the telekinetic body-horror film The Mind’s Eye is punk as f--k.
  26. The Little Prince
    Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.
  27. Little Men
    The younger characters are so full of life, and the older ones so full of trenchant but predictable talking-point issues, that it sometimes feels like a middling movie encroaching on a good one.
  28. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    This virtually action-free war movie (which premiered at Cannes last year with the English-language title The Wakhan Front) will frustrate anyone seeking concrete explanations. Its haunting atmosphere, however, in conjunction with its half-harrowing, half-sleepy milieu, keeps the film fascinating until it finally fizzles.
  29. Sun Choke
    The film doesn’t always work as a genre exercise, but it’s a winner as a character study, in large part because of how committed Hagan is to playing Janie’s derangement. Casting directors in search of the offbeat should take note.
  30. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights In Maine’s grieving has a short-story quality, and many movies would do well to follow that model.
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