The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. The Angry Birds Movie
    Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.
  2. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Efron imbues his handsome-dope routine with such nuance that Teddy is not only funny but also touching in his sincere desire for brotherhood, in short supply postgraduation. What could have been simplistic self-parody becomes a genuinely, almost confusingly terrific performance.
  3. Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
  4. ma ma
    Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate.
  5. The Darkness
    It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.
  6. Search Party
    Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.
  7. I Am Wrath
    If the film’s casual racism—the villains are almost all some shade of not-white—feels more perfunctory than malicious, it’s because it’s just another secondhand element in the collection of bad clichés passing for a script.
  8. Kill Zone 2
    Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.
  9. The Trust
    When it comes to the disposable VOD fare that Cage and Travolta have made a side career out of indiscriminately embracing, minor pleasures are a major improvement.
  10. Money Monster
    Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.
  11. The Lobster
    Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.
  12. Sunset Song
    Stultifying in spots, the period drama Sunset Song marks an unexpected misstep for Terence Davies, the eccentric filmmaker whose movies evoke limbo states of memory and repressed feeling using a very British vocabulary of drab spaces.
  13. Love & Friendship
    It does offer a very amusing portrait of guile and idiocy. Think of it as a divertissement. Both Austen and Stillman would surely approve.
  14. High-Rise
    The intoxicating mix of kitsch and chic barely conceals the psychosis underneath.
  15. Last Days in the Desert
    By the end, what seemed like a lovely rumination starts to sound more like poetry refashioned as prose.
  16. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    It’s worth seeing just for its object lesson in how shifts in perspective can radically alter the tenor and meaning of material that might otherwise come across as pompously silly.
  17. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.
  18. Elstree 1976
    Visually, Elstree 1976 is often striking, thanks to some haunting extreme close-ups of these actors’ Star Wars action figures.
  19. Dough
    Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.
  20. Dark Horse
    For the many, many viewers who’ve never heard of Dream Alliance, Osmond’s documentary is edge-of-the-seat stuff.
  21. Being Charlie
    Being Charlie is Rob Reiner’s best film in at least two decades — admittedly a low bar to clear, given the competition (which includes such forgotten piffle as Alex & Emma and Rumor Has It…), but even a modest Meathead comeback is more than welcome.
  22. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard’s misbegotten Palme D’Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a "Taxi Driver" for today’s Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between "Death Wish" and Ken Loach.
  23. A Bigger Splash
    The cast is uniformly strong, and willing to go wherever Guadagnino takes them, in however little clothing he deems necessary; the ensemble-wide equal-opportunity nudity is almost frequent enough to qualify as confrontational.
  24. Captain America: Civil War
    That Civil War doesn’t collapse under the weight of its various moving parts, that it manages to be the most serious entry yet in this franchise of franchises without sacrificing much in the way of valuable comic relief, is a testament to the creative mojo of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
  25. Term Life
    Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.
  26. Mother's Day
    Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.
  27. Keanu
    The film is a one-joke comedy, but the joke is decent, and it helps that the actors know how to deliver it.
  28. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    This is the very definition of the kind of movie people complain that “they” don’t make anymore: a modestly budgeted, character-driven drama for adults that doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence or lean on shock value.
  29. Viva
    Perugorría is such a terrific, soulful actor that he makes Viva’s predictable dramatic trajectory — disapproving dad slowly grows to accept his child’s differences, while the kid gradually learns to forgive his father’s lifelong absence — seem a bit less moldy.
  30. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The only way to enjoy this movie is to concentrate on its frequently stunning compositions and ignore the fact that none of it makes even a tiny lick of sense.
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