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. Focus
    On the most basic level, the con-artist romance Focus is a Cary Grant movie in the "North By Northwest" or "Charade" mold.
  2. Wild Canaries
    At its core, Wild Canaries is a reminder that relationships require a sense of adventure, and maybe a little mystery, to keep the magic alive. Indie comedies, as the film proves, benefit from the same.
  3. The DUFF
    A better question to ask about this movie, however, is “What is up with the writers of teen movies and their obsession with name-checking apps, an approach that all but guarantees that the film will be dated by the time it hits Netflix?”
  4. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    The difference here — aside from the fact that the jokes aren’t as funny and that John Cusack is nowhere to be found — is the lack of a motivating factor.
  5. Approaching the Elephant
    The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.
  6. Digging Up the Marrow
    More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.
  7. All the Wilderness
    Nothing even remotely wild touches this generic indie movie, which embraces every imaginable cliché in depicting the emotional travails of a sensitive kid in mourning. There isn’t a wolf in it, nor a fox, nor a hog, nor much of anything else. Maybe a chicken.
  8. Wild Tales
    The filmmakers have cannily structured this crazed collection of shorts, using running time and general quality as organizational criteria. The best segments serve as bookends. The worst ones are buried in the middle.
  9. McFarland USA
    Of course, it would be even nicer to see this story from a student athlete’s point of view. Beyond the representation issue, it might allow the movie to eliminate its dull and unevenly developed scenes.
  10. Queen and Country
    As a sequel, Queen & Country doesn’t work at all, primarily because Boorman waited far too long.
  11. Accidental Love
    To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.
  12. Hits
    The satire of self-satisfied, opportunistic Brooklynites is cutting, but it lacks the humanity afforded the upstate characters, and quickly repeats itself, seemingly by design.
  13. The Rewrite
    It’s poised to become one of the biggest rom-coms of 1998. But barring the invention of time travel, The Rewrite remains tethered to the realities of film releasing in 2015, which means it will get most of its play as a VOD simulation of earlier hits.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    All the performers are superb, though as the title suggests, this is Viviane’s show, and Ronit makes for an exceptional martyr (she gets a Passion Of Joan Of Arc-worthy close-up or two) who never loses her very human shadings.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Clearly aiming for “cult classic,” Wyrmwood is too basic to be anything more than a forgettable bro-pocalypse.
  16. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.
  17. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.
  18. Old Fashioned
    Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.
  19. What We Do in the Shadows
    The result is more often amusing than gut-busting, but it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and that’s fairly impressive in itself.
  20. The Last Five Years
    For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.
  21. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    A live-action Hammacher Schlemmer catalog of pseudo-retro novelties, spiced up with self-aware asides and over-the-top violence — slick entertainment, provided the viewer turns off whatever part of their brain is responsible for recognizing and parsing subtext.
  22. Seventh Son
    Seventh Son is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself.
  23. Jupiter Ascending
    It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi.
  24. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The visual effects and fast and furious quips combine for that rarest of releases: one that both parents and kids can enjoy (just like the show), leaving viewers of any age hoping that the next SpongeBob movie isn’t an entire decade off.
  25. Love, Rosie
    On the plus side, Collins (Mirror Mirror, The Blind Side) and Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games franchise) are both appealing enough, even if their chemistry makes Rosie and Alex’s we’re-just-pals stance appear even more ludicrous than intended.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ballet 422
    “Art isn’t easy,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, and in Jody Lee Lipes’ bleak beauty of a documentary, the act of creation is a resolutely joyless one — a tedious grind with little lasting reward.
  27. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”
  28. The Voices
    Satrapi makes some bad calls in her attempts to balance bleak humor with bleaker thrills, including ending the film on a glibly cheerful note. Her best decision, bar none, was entrusting such heavy material to the guy who played Van Wilder. Behind that perpetual smirk lurks a talent for quiet depravity. Bonkers looks good on him.
  29. Project Almanac
    As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.
  30. The Loft
    Besides being an early contender for the worst date movie of 2015, The Loft is a film that can’t decide what it wants. It’s a male fantasy, and a cautionary tale. It’s sleazy in concept, and timid in execution.
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