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. She's Funny That Way
    Plotted as a round robin of dalliances and coincidences, it’s relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.
  2. Digging for Fire
    With so much talent involved, there are inevitably some amusing moments, which keep tedium at least partly at bay.
  3. Learning to Drive
    At least "Elegy" has some passion. Learning To Drive has harmless sweetness, many revealing speeches about life, and a Kingsley performance that shades strongly into a “Robin Williams as a straight-faced foreigner” routine.
  4. Hitman: Agent 47
    Agent 47 is just slightly less dull than its disavowed predecessor — or at least its dullness seems less active, because it doesn’t turn anyone as inherently interesting as Olyphant into a dour-faced killing machine.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sinister 2
    Not a moment of Sinister 2 is convincing or frightening.
  6. Air
    The movie cheats whenever it can. At least it’s interesting to look at, if only at first.
  7. Amnesiac
    The film uses minimal locations, minimal cast, and minimal blood for a story that, in another director’s hands, could play like Grand Guignol. But this sense of restraint — which, combined with some stylish choices on Polish’s part, can be quite elegant — is also what makes it largely forgettable.
  8. Tom at the Farm
    As interesting as it is to see the filmmaker move out of his wheelhouse, Tom At The Farm is neither dramatically satisfying nor psychologically convincing. Something was clearly lost in its transition from stage to screen.
  9. People Places Things
    People Places Things, though reportedly also based on Strouse’s own experience, plays like a mediocre, bloated sitcom episode — never novel or insightful, and only moderately funny.
  10. Ten Thousand Saints
    The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.
  11. Mistress America
    This new-new Baumbach isn’t necessarily better than the old-new Baumbach; "Young" felt meatier, with a stronger sense of who its neurotic New Yorkers were. But that film didn’t have Gerwig, bringing warmth, wit, and loopy star power to a character — a human bulldozer of incorrigible extroversion — as fictional as the Big Apple you see only on the big screen.
  12. Straight Outta Compton
    Aside from these few flourishes of the outré and symbolically charged, there’s little to distinguish the movie from any number of overlong hit-by-hit music biopics of the nodding-approvingly-from-behind-a-mixing-console variety.
  13. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    While The Man From U.N.C.L.E. probably isn’t any less of a caricature of its period than "Sherlock Holmes," it carries its fakeness with more snap in its step. The imaginary intrigue it generates is fleeting, but often beautiful.
  14. Meru
    How one responds to Meru will largely depend on whether its three subjects come across as heroically courageous or suicidally reckless.
  15. We Come as Friends
    The big difference is that We Come As Friends is observational, while the institutions Sauper is watching here are actively tampering with Sudanese customs, in the name of improving their economy and living conditions.
  16. Fort Tilden
    For all its exquisite theater-of-cruelty viciousness, Fort Tilden is finally a work of empathy about people whose own supplies are running on empty.
  17. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    The ordinariness of this film—and the flatness of its video-shot images, relative to Blank’s beautiful-looking ’70s films — isn’t a significant drawback, given how eloquent Leacock can be.
  18. Fantastic Four
    It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.
  19. The Great Man
    It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.
  20. The Runner
    There’s no revenge, no murder, and no kidnapping. It’s a low-budget New Orleans Cage movie with some dignity. It would be a pleasure to report that The Runner is also good, but this slim if mildly compelling film lands somewhere between character sketch and morality tale.
  21. Call Me Lucky
    Goldthwait stays behind the camera, but his long personal history with Crimmins provides him with access that no other filmmaker would likely have been able to get, given how ferociously the man guards his privacy.
  22. Cop Car
    A surprisingly nasty piece of work, more reminiscent of old John Dahl thrillers from the ’90s (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction) than of "Let’s Be Cops."
  23. Dark Places
    Aside from the A-list cast, there isn’t much to differentiate Dark Places from an especially grim TV movie.
  24. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The movie’s dedication to girls everywhere is unnecessary; it already feels so specific and true without it.
  25. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    The lack of dialogue makes Shaun The Sheep easy for younger children all over the world to understand, and the film is undeniably intended for that demographic.
  26. The Gift
    Pivoting out of conventional horror-flick territory into the realm of psychodrama, and drastically blurring the lines separating its heroes from its villains, The Gift turns out to be much smarter and more troubling than it looks on the surface.
  27. Ricki and the Flash
    Ricki And The Flash is a movie of things that may have been done better earlier — sometimes by Demme himself — but which are done all too rarely nowadays, which makes it feel both retro and refreshing.
  28. Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser
    At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.
  29. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    While it doesn’t operate at its full potential, Spivet nonetheless offers a bracing risk: a kid adventure with danger alongside its whimsy and sadness alongside its reassurances.
  30. Counting
    His film is vivid and yet elusive. He shoots first so that we might ask questions later.
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