The A.V. Club's Scores

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:
10435 movie reviews
  1. The Boss, without quite reaching the heights of McCarthy’s work with Paul Feig, establishes its star as sort of a comic auteur — which is not the same as repeating herself.
  2. The main reason for anyone to see One More Time...is Walken, who brings a lot of life and fine shading to what could’ve been a one-note deadbeat dad type.
  3. The first film pandered to a heavy persecution complex; this installment’s relatively subtler, but there are dog whistles aplenty.
  4. It’s more like an extremely confusing and sloppily written chunk of Purge fan-fiction—a tortured use of another movie’s absurd mythology to help make muddled quasi-satirical points, while indulging the apparently fail-safe punchline of saying the word “purge” about once a minute.
  5. So give Don Cheadle credit for innovation, at least: His Miles Davis biopic (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in), Miles Ahead, tackles the problem head-on… by inventing cinematic things for Davis to do when he’s not playing music, including ludicrous car chases and gunfights.
  6. The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.
  7. A non-professional making his screen debut, Paradot serves up plenty of volatility, but he never quite succeeds in making Malony seem like a kid with real potential that’s being squandered.
  8. Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.
  9. Darling is light on plot and long on style, meaning that horror fans who criticized "The Witch" as “boring” may have a similar reaction here as well.
  10. Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.
  11. In its funky, aimless, winningly juvenile way, Everybody Wants Some is about as inclusively celebratory as any college comedy in memory: Per its title, it really does want everybody to get some.
  12. Ironic, given what a deeply personal filmmaker she could be, that the film that best shows her brilliant intellect and insight isn’t her own.
  13. Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.
  14. Anyone deep enough into the genre to watch a movie like Baskin may find it, for all its bizarre and beautiful surrealistic imagery, oddly uninspiring.
  15. While there isn’t much to distinguish Born To Be Blue’s dramatic stakes from any number of stories about self-destructive, self-centered artists (or “movies about jazz musicians,” as they’re more commonly known), the film is given a spark of life by the inspired casting of Ethan Hawke.
  16. Valley Of Love is at its best when it wanders away from its ostensible premise and just lets two old pros connect, riffing lightly on our knowledge of their real-life histories.
  17. Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."
  18. Batman V Superman takes a title fight kids of all ages have been speculating about for decades—costumed titan from the cosmos, meet costumed vigilante from the city—and invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.
  19. Trapero...often demonstrates his technical mastery here. But as a storyteller, he’s unfortunately less successful.
  20. It’s not scary, and not goofy enough to be funny.
  21. This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.
  22. With a cast this talented...Get A Job is never painful to endure, but neither does it ever rise above lazy mediocrity.
  23. If there’s anything tying together the detours and roadblocks that comprise Big Holiday, it’s the film’s big, bold, screaming celebration of human difference.
  24. With just a few minor tweaks, Take Me To The River could play as a moody supernatural horror picture, with Logan as the dangerously curious hero being warned away from an evil he shouldn’t confront.
  25. The Confirmation isn’t much to look at, and its rhythms are wobbly (the quest narrative starts to feel strained early on), but Nelson is a dogged enough dramatist that even the story’s resolutions—even the really pat and obvious ones—are satisfyingly earned.
  26. What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.
  27. Maybe that call will be answered next time with enough incremental improvements to finally notch a good Divergent movie, a possibility Allegiant raises repeatedly and frustratingly. Ultimately, though, this movie isn’t just adhering to a formula; it’s carefully following a recipe designed to offset any good ingredients that get mixed in there by mistake.
  28. It’s a rote hatchet job, rehashing information that virtually everyone already knows, but at least it facilitates one of the year’s oddest and gutsiest performances.
  29. If you enjoy strippers delivering monologues on Bugs Bunny — something that actually happens in this movie — then Too Late will scratch that same adolescent itch that leads young film buffs to dress in black suits and Ray-Bans after seeing "Reservoir Dogs" for the first time.
  30. Desplechin tackles drama with wildly confident eclecticism, sometimes even besting Martin Scorsese in pure movie-mad feverishness: iris shots, radically different camera styles, unexpected musical and literary quotations, theatrical flourishes, scenes broken up in collage.

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