The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. I Origins
    I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.
  2. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie talks a lot about storytelling, but practices very little of it.
  3. Alive Inside
    Alive Inside runs a brisk 78 minutes, but that’s still far more time than it requires to make its point; once you’ve seen a couple of old people suddenly come to life upon hearing “I Get Around” or “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” there’s not much to be gained by being presented with half a dozen more instances.
  4. Sex Tape
    It’s less a movie than a bad sitcom episode stretched to feature length and raunched up to an R rating.
  5. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.
  6. The Purge: Anarchy
    Retains the original’s premise and politics, but actually puts them to use.
  7. Affluenza
    The film is an empty shell, reducing a complex lament to a shallow portrait of wealthy hedonists behaving badly.
  8. Road to Paloma
    Before the plot butts in, Road To Paloma works reasonably well as a moody travelogue that keeps finding new ways to show off its dingy bona fides.
  9. A Long Way Down
    This film adaptation, however, never succeeds in settling on a tone at all, veering ineptly from flippant goofiness to maudlin sentiment and back again.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Made in America
    Jay Z spends much of the film trumpeting his own keen eye for diversity, without acknowledging the fact that as festival bills go, Made In America is utterly unremarkable—and nowhere near as diverse as he claims.
  11. Land Ho!
    While it’s heartening in one sense to see this youthful, offbeat take on two men’s determination to stay eternally fresh, there’s something about the ease with which the characters reorder their lives that makes Land Ho! seem both a little slight and a little precious.
  12. Rage
    Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.
  13. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Yet for all the heart and soul the actor pours into his role, watching Dawn still feels a bit like seeing massive, expensive wheels spin in place.
  14. Boyhood
    There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.
  15. Closed Curtain
    Closed Curtain is a spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren’t about himself—which seems to be the point.
  16. Me and You
    The movie is an underwhelming coming-of-age fable that skirts around its own lurid undertones.
  17. Wrinkles
    Ultimately, though, Wrinkles doesn’t offer the aesthetic rewards necessary to make its sad material compelling.
  18. Gabrielle
    Frequently charming. Marion-Rivard, who won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar earlier this year (the film itself won Best Picture), gives a strong, sophisticated performance, even as she’s disarmingly open in a way that would be almost impossible for an actor without Williams syndrome to fake.
  19. America: Imagine a World Without Her
    Graced with a hilariously definitive title, America is astonishingly facile, a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments.
  20. Earth to Echo
    The most derivative movie of the summer, Earth To Echo, is also the most visually unpredictable, chock-full of degraded digital textures that seem ready to boil off the screen, picture-boxed within Mac desktops and overlaid with extraterrestrial interface trees.
  21. Premature
    Watching Bill Murray go through the same scenario over and over is one thing. Experiencing the same feeble dick jokes over and over is another.
  22. Deliver Us From Evil
    The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.
  23. Tammy
    McCarthy co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and appears as the heroine’s wormy tyrant of a boss. Their collaborative mojo results in some winning sweetness, but not a lot of hilarity.
  24. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    The fourth, longest, and flimsiest entry in the director’s signature franchise finds Bay mostly in cruise control, snapping to only when the movie veers away from the “robots fighting in tax-friendly locations” formula—which, unfortunately, isn’t very often.
  25. Begin Again
    True to its title, Begin Again periodically restarts itself, nestling flashbacks within flashbacks; it’s an unnecessarily complicated structure for what is, frankly, little more than a corny, overstuffed, “let’s put on a show” musical.
  26. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    While Swartz almost certainly would not have been sentenced to 50 years in prison, a system that tries to scare harmless do-gooders into submission does America no credit. In this case, it succeeded all too horribly well.
  27. Drones
    Mumford and O’Leary struggle to make sense of their characters, but are stymied by a script that regards them primarily as mouthpieces for talking points that, again, aren’t even the points anyone’s using when talking about drone warfare.
  28. They Came Together
    Seeing clichés mimicked this skillfully is plenty hilarious.
  29. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Provides little in the way of comforting catharsis. That may be because Berlinger, a thorough and impassioned muckraker, has managed to find hints of injustice in the justice that was served.
  30. Snowpiercer
    Though shocking violence and black humor run through the length of the movie, what comes through most strongly is its pessimistic political conscience; were the movie less earnest, it might seem Verhoeven-esque.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »