The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 7,973 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 47% 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: 61
Highest review score: 100 Some Like It Hot
Lowest review score: 0 America: Imagine a World Without Her
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,076 out of 7973
  2. Mixed: 2,964 out of 7973
  3. Negative: 933 out of 7973
7973 movie reviews
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  1. The Traitor
    There’s just no real perspective on Buscetta, which separates this brisk but uninvolving history lesson from the truly great mob movies. I was a little bored with it, too, honestly.
  2. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    A baffling passion project whose cruelly protracted runtime is eclipsed only by the monumentally tedious way it fills it.
  3. Zombi Child
    There are elements of coming-of-age drama, tortured romance, and supernatural horror, though part of the film’s strange power is that it never seems to commit to any of those genres, hovering in some liminal state instead, teasing the audience with the various possibilities of where it might go.
  4. Frankie
    The whole thing struck me as pleasant, nicely judged, and unremarkable, right up to a final shot so graceful and moving that it sent waves of poignancy backwards through the movie.
  5. Matthias & Maxime
    It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.
  6. Parasite
    For its first hour or so, Parasite is pure diabolical fun ... [Then it] shifts tonal gears in total service of its class politics, infecting the film’s breezy dark-comedy with notes of rage and melancholy.
  7. The Perfection
    The Perfection takes deep, fetishistic satisfaction in pushing the envelope, then pushing it some more, building in seductive fits and shocking starts to an orgiastic frenzy of cinematic excess. Is it a progressive movie? Not especially, but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re getting into.
  8. Aladdin
    Ricthie’s Aladdin feels sluggish in comparison to the fast-paced original. Even the songs suffer; the direction of the musical numbers is surprisingly unimaginative and turgid, to the point that even surefire showstoppers like “Prince Ali” and the mighty “A Whole New World” end up succumbing to lackluster staging and uncomfortable performances.
  9. Booksmart
    What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.
  10. Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood
    It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence.
  11. Brightburn
    Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.
  12. The Whistlers
    Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.
  13. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    Unfolding through stolen glimpses and increasingly loaded glances, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is really a portrait of a mutual, slow-motion seduction, and it seduces its audience just as gradually and effectively, pulling us into its old world with the beauty of its images and the quiet efficiency of its storytelling.
  14. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  15. The Wild Goose Lake
    What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.
  16. The Lighthouse
    The Lighthouse works better as a lunatic dark comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo, as well as a primo showcase for its two actors, coming magnificently unglued and volleying pages upon pages of flagrant insults at each other.
  17. Les Misérables
    While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted May 20, 2019
  18. A Hidden Life
    Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.
  19. Rocketman
    As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.
  20. Pain and Glory
    Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.
  21. Little Joe
    Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.
  22. Sorry We Missed You
    Sorry We Missed You piles on so relentlessly that its genuine poignancy begins to crumble into self-parody.
  23. Deerskin
    Funny and pointed. ... It’s really just one joke, scrupulously played out at feature length.
  24. Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
  25. Bacurau
    There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.
  26. A Dog's Journey
    Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    See You Yesterday
    See You Yesterday finds a striking-yet-natural balance between genre concept and a harsh reality that is achingly familiar to the people who have to navigate it every day.
  28. Trial by Fire
    But Zwick and Fletcher, in their eagerness to make an argument against the death penalty, needlessly stack the deck.
  29. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Although the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult novel finds welcome specificity in its world and character building, it never rises above the most generic of platitudes in its central teen love story.
  30. The Dead Don't Die
    It’s as if Jarmusch were doing a self-aware riff on self-aware riffing. It gets old fast.
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