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 Equalizer
    It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.
  2. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    It’s hard to hear what All Is By My Side is saying about anything, given how many scenes feature vaguely druggy overlapping dialogue, part of a fussy sound design that’s paired with intentionally choppy editing.
  3. Pride
    Manipulative but big-hearted, Pride is an ode to activism as a social equalizer, and a gushy illustration of the belief that hearts and minds can be changed, and that it’s impossible to truly battle oppression without opposing all forms of oppression. Why resist?
  4. Tracks
    Rendered in the over-polished, pre-packed prestige style of director John Curran (The Painted Veil, Stone), Davidson’s journey appears meaningless, little more than a succession of pretty vistas for the dirt-caked trekker to squint at while having flashbacks of her childhood.
  5. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    There’s more existential wisdom in five random, zombie-infested minutes of Shaun Of The Dead than in the full two hours of this feel-good folly.
  6. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    It’s a movie where everything, from the sets to the cast and crew, is an unconvincing, low-cost substitute for something else.
  7. Fort Bliss
    A movie like Fort Bliss seems designed to keep her (Monaghan) in fighting shape, in case bigger productions realize that she can do more than kiss a famous co-star.
  8. The Zero Theorem
    If only this imaginative environment were populated with a single compelling character or stimulating idea, rather than serving as busy distraction from the narrative tedium.
  9. Tusk
    Like most self-conscious attempts at a “midnight movie,” Tusk lacks the conviction that would make it anything more than an outré curiosity; it’s essentially a filmed dare, combined with fan service.
  10. This Is Where I Leave You
    This Is Where I Leave You demonstrates, a great cast is a terrible thing to waste.
  11. The Maze Runner
    If you’re going to treat your audience like a rat in a maze, it’s best to offer a tastier reward than the promise of more maze to come.
  12. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Every year, so many artless, gormless, generically slick thrillers make their way into theaters that any time a genre director displays basic filmmaking smarts, the result ends up seeming like a retro novelty. Such is the case with writer-director Scott Frank’s murky potboiler A Walk Among The Tombstones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    20,000 Days on Earth
    One thing that ties all his projects together is a grainy, cinematic quality, which is partly the reason why 20,000 Days On Earth works so beautifully.
  14. The Guest
    Dumb fun is rarely this smartly delivered.
  15. The Hole
    Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.
  16. No Good Deed
    By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.
  17. The Green Prince
    Yet even if the individuals and their motives themselves don’t always come into full focus, The Green Prince is an absorbing psychological study of shifting allegiances.
  18. Stray Dogs
    The plight of this struggling family unit weighs more heavily on the heart with each passing minute, making Stray Dogs the rare marathon-length art film that seems to grow less oppressive the longer it goes on.
  19. Bird People
    It’s also just magnificently goofy, unafraid to court ridicule and confident enough to take captivating detours.
  20. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Without having seen the two-film version, it’s unclear whether the gender-segregated points of view would enhance that emotional intensity or create more redundancy in an already thin narrative. In this form, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby tows the line between just enough and a bit too much.
  21. The Skeleton Twins
    What saves the movie is its actors: Exploiting audience’s memories of their previous collaborations, Hader and Wiig really do seem related. And both actors handle the balance between drama and comedy with aplomb.
  22. The Drop
    Cultural authenticity seeps into the cracks of this low-key lowlife drama, whose best attribute is the pungent sense of place it possesses.
  23. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is kind of infuriating, mostly because it tries to so hard to be innocuous.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wetlands
    Wetlands makes the internal external; the secret, scary bits of female anatomy are on display in a way that isn’t meant to be particularly titillating to the male gaze.
  25. Frontera
    The complexities of those people are diluted in a movie that’s not quite a functional ensemble but not intimate enough to qualify as a character study.
  26. Memphis
    Constantly just dodging visual cliché, Sutton tries to isolate moments of beauty and frustration within a specific milieu. Sometimes he captures resonant moments in bars and in stray dialogue; other times, his purposelessness seems less like a strategy and more like an evasive feint.
  27. God Help the Girl
    God Help The Girl is, in other words, a spotty movie — sometimes silly, sometimes dead serious. It is, however, nobly spotty — inconsistent in a way contemporary productions rarely are, its shortcomings the result of an excess of creative energy, rather than a lack thereof.
  28. The Identical
    It’s the kind of curio that’s arguably more interesting to think about than to watch — a plodding melodrama that mixes royalty-free Elvis worship with preachy proselytizing.
  29. The Longest Week
    Aggressively derivative though The Longest Week is, however, it’s clearly the work not of a lazy thief, but of a raw talent who’s still struggling to find his own voice. In the meantime, his impressions are pretty darn impressive.
  30. Last Days in Vietnam
    It’s not a documentary that reinvents the form or will alter anyone’s perception of the war, but sometimes a rich, exhaustive chronicle is more than enough.
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