The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. All That Jazz
    Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts.
  2. Being There
    Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.
  3. The Jerk
    Sweet, lighthearted, occasionally hilarious.
  4. ...and justice for all.
    Justice is seldom as deep or trenchant as it wants to be, but there's abundant pleasure to be gleaned from skating along its surfaces.
  5. Vengeance Is Mine
    At times a frustrating experience, Vengeance Is Mine transforms over the course of its running time, Enokizu’s impenetrable nature eventually bottoming out and blossoming into a perverse relatability.
  6. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.
  7. Time After Time
    It may eventually champion love as the guiding light amidst so much homicidal darkness, but Meyer’s film—happy ending be damned—resonates most deeply when confronting the ugly, inescapable reality that man’s murderous past is likely also his future.
  8. Rock 'n' Roll High School
    Underneath its chipper, anything-for-laugh grin, Rock ‘N’ Roll is as subversive as teen movies get, with an ending that, for all its absurdity, is still surprisingly shocking.
  9. The Concorde... Airport '79
    It’s The Love Boat in the air, basically.
  10. My Brilliant Career
    Through a miracle of timing, Davis landed the lead role in Gillian Armstrong's assured debut feature My Brilliant Career fresh out of performance school, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part.
  11. Fast Company
    Fast Company is an example of Cronenberg taking one step back from his idiosyncrasies, and spending 90 minutes reveling in one of his passions.
  12. The Amityville Horror
    In happier times, director Stuart Rosenberg confidently helmed Cool Hand Luke. Here, he resorts to one spookhouse cliché after another, and even the original touches are more puzzling than startling.
  13. Meatballs
    The movie has a lumpy shape, and its jokes are often obvious and crude, but it’s a lot sweeter than the other raunchy comedies of the era.
  14. Alien
    Despite years of imitators, sequels (some great, some not so), and edited-for-television broadcasts, Alien has lost none of its power, and the big screen only intensifies its impact.
  15. The Driller Killer
    Darkly fascinating, as much a document of the late-'70s New York punk and pop-art scenes as it is a grindhouse plugger.
  16. Game of Death
    There’s no reason whatsoever to watch the entire thing; just skip to the end, which features a series of bone-crunching fight sequences that suggest Lee was just getting warmed up when he left.
  17. Winter Kills
    Winter Kills provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favorably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone's JFK and James Ellroy's book American Tabloid.
  18. The China Syndrome
    Ultimately, Lemmon's performance is what makes The China Syndrome work: The script contains its share of technical jargon and clunky exposition, but his subtle transformation from complacency to anger to panic tells the story in raw emotional terms. The China Syndrome is ultimately a story about how the potential for human error can trump science and reason, and few actors have ever been as unmistakably human as Lemmon.
  19. Tourist Trap
    What keeps it all from becoming high camp is the film’s eerie atmosphere and unsettling childlike quality, which sucks the viewer into a nightmarish alternate reality with such plainspoken innocence that we have no choice but to accept it at face value.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Warriors
    The Warriors is a deeply silly movie. Its gangs are ridiculous comic-book figures. Still, director Walter Hill treats its world with total seriousness. Bleak synthesizer drones thrum and throb. The streets glow with slickly inky-black greasiness. Nobody smiles. It’s so awesome.
  21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    Set at the intersection of post-Vietnam paranoia and the myopic introspection that became hippiedom's most lasting cultural contribution, the Philip Kaufman-directed Invasion alternates social commentary with impeccably crafted scares. As much an echo of Don Siegel's 1956 original as a remake, it does little to change a formula that worked fine the first time around.
  22. Superman
    Effective both as Superman and as the bumbling Clark Kent, Christopher Reeve still seems ideal for the part, if for no other reason than his ability to summon up a convincing sense of intensity when charged with saving the world.
  23. Halloween
    A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.
  24. The Wiz
    The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.
  25. Midnight Express
    Midnight Express is at war with itself. Strong when it focuses on the psychological toll of prison, it falls apart when it turns the focus elsewhere, and its depictions of all Turks as swarthy, corrupt, and sadistic is pretty inexcusable.
  26. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.
  27. Paradise Alley
    Striking in the way it evokes fears of abandonment—children’s worries blown up to grown-up scale—and completely unlike any film Stallone has put his name on since.
  28. Days of Heaven
    It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]
  29. Piranha
    With Piranha, Dante delivers a superior Jaws rip-off with a light, goofy touch that anticipates the anarchic, gleeful mayhem of his later work.
  30. Interiors
    Much of the first half of Interiors feels like a stage play, though one in which characters walk in and out of frame. That, along with the overly symbolic breaking of a vase, have earned Interiors some criticism for being too on the nose, which isn’t entirely unfair. But the rest of the movie is so starkly bold that it renders those problems insignificant. It’s beautiful, affecting, and exactly as jarring as Allen probably intended it to be.
  31. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
    Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.
  32. Grease
    Grease is a pure pop construct, fueled by movie-star poses, hit songs, and persistent audience fantasies of being an acceptable kind of "bad." Barry Gibb-penned disco theme aside, Grease doesn't really belong to any one era. It's like it's always existed.
  33. Damien: Omen II
    The film could be subtitled A Portrait Of The Anti-Christ As A Young Man. The emphasis has been shifted from parental anxiety to the frustration of a boy struggling to identify—and then reconcile—his demonic birthright.
  34. Corvette Summer
    Corvette Summer was originally billed as "a fiberglass romance," and that about sums up its thematic ambitions. Robbins cares about the automobiles much more than the drivers. From the jargon-filled car talk to the repeated shots of tricked-out machines, Corvette Summer is about hot wheels, not what they mean.
  35. Martin
    Martin touches on any number of post-Vietnam ills (urban decay, drug addiction, crises in faith) without overstatement, allowing for a deeply considered exploration of horror's ability to comment on society, a sort of belated answer to Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. At the same time, Romero still forces Martin to work as strictly a horror film, albeit an eccentric one in which the violence has an uncomfortable plausibility, starkly contrasting Amplas' romanticized black-and-white vampiric fantasy life.
  36. The Manitou
    While Manitou does have its slower sections, the climax is a thing of beauty to be enjoyed forever, with crummy special effects, bad lightning, a star field, an Evil One symbolized by a cataract, and Tony Curtis struggling to maintain his dignity.
  37. The Fury
    The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.
  38. Blue Collar
    Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.
  39. Eraserhead
    See Eraserhead once and it’ll lodge itself firmly in some dank recess of your brain and refuse to vacate.
  40. The Duellists
    In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.
  41. High Anxiety
    Anxiety is nearly as obsessive in recreating Alfred Hitchcock's visual style as Gus Van Sant's Psycho was, but to much greater effect.
  42. 1900
    The story is almost too small for Bertolucci's sprawling approach, and the ungainliness of his international cast stifles both the dialogue and the performances.
  43. Damnation Alley
    Mostly the film just feels too skimpy. The first third is largely taken up in establishing the nuclear devastation of Damnation Alley’s world, leaving just an hour for the heroes’ perilous road trip across lands infested with what Peppard calls “killa cockroaches.” By the time the action really gets cranking, the movie is half-over.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  45. Bobby Deerfield
    Don't be fooled by the action-packed DVD cover: Pacino spends roughly five minutes of Deerfield racing, and two hours learning, from a woman facing death, how to embrace life.
  46. The American Friend
    Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
  47. House
    Watching this film is like jamming fistfuls of delicious candy into your mouth for 90 minutes. It’s a rush chasing a rush.
    • The A.V. Club
  48. Sorcerer
    Though there’s gunplay, and more than a few explosions, the focus of this grim jungle odyssey is on the prevention of carnage, the heart-in-throat attempts not to blow something up.
  49. The Rescuers
    While The Rescuers is at times a showcase for marvelously expressive art—especially in Kahl’s design for Madame Medusa, a sloppy, flailing disaster of a woman with a shapeless bust hanging to her waist and a face like a half-empty bag—the seams show throughout, and it’s all too easy to see the patchwork process that created it from foregrounds and backgrounds, and from animators of varying experience and talent.
  50. Exorcist II: The Heretic
    It would be a lot easier to buy Exorcist II: The Heretic as a mood piece if it was able to sustain a tone beyond clumsy exposition and hysterical camp for longer than a few minutes.
  51. For the Love of Benji
    An improvement on its predecessor insofar as it takes place in Athens rather than small-town Texas, meaning the scenery is better.
  52. Eaten Alive
    Lacking the eerie plausibility and stylishness of Chainsaw, yet filled with dead dogs, terrorized children, and bound women, it never transcends its Z-grade origins. It's an interesting footnote, and will likely be of interest to hardcore horror fans, but those looking for a lost masterpiece will likely come away disappointed.
  53. The Car
    It is, in short, sub-par as demon-possessed-car movies go, even if watching Brolin attempt to act horrified at the sight of a classic automobile makes it almost worthwhile.
  54. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    An overlooked gem in the annals of low-budget horror.
  55. Nickelodeon
    Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles.
  56. Mikey and Nicky
    Mikey & Nicky is sometimes dull and sometimes confusing—and it's both at once in the first 10 minutes, when Cassavetes is semi-comatose in a hotel room—but it also features plenty of absurd-but-believable human behavior.
  57. King Kong
    I’m still deeply fond of De Laurentiis’ King Kong now, no doubt in part because we’ll never see its likes again. Whatever the failings of its ape effects, they have a tangible quality that even Jackson’s great CGI work couldn’t fake.
  58. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
    This is pure, thick hokum. It’s also utterly absorbing, from start to finish.
  59. Assault on Precinct 13
    As incisive as it is thrilling, Carpenter’s film is also gorgeous. Carpenter’s imagery is a thing of propulsive beauty that both enhances suspense and expresses his characters’ ever-changing relations to one another. It’s a fleet, ferocious piece of genre craftsmanship.
  60. God Told Me To
    Ambitious in scale despite its modest budget, God Told Me To also established Cohen’s talent for getting a lot of bang for his limited buck. As a film about faith, it’s pure hooey, but it’s hooey with a provocative edge.
  61. Obsession
    The heightened luridness of Obsession does succeed in making Vertigo’s twisty plot seem all the more inessential to that film’s power. What both movies do is cut a tale of murder and madness down to its essence, exploring characters who’ve been damaged by social expectations and their own desires.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Gus
    While a far cry from Any Given Sunday, it’s amazing how much disbelief one can suspend with a cast that also includes Tim Conway, Dick Van Patten, and Tom Bosley, along with color commentators Dick Enberg, Johnny Unitas, and former Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane.
    • The A.V. Club
  63. Shivers
    Like the creatures in the films, and many of Cronenberg's other films themselves, Shivers is disturbing on an almost biological level.
  64. The Tenant
    Though the result is too slow and curious, with a weak lead performance by the writer-director, The Tenant's tone of abstracted anxiety is distinctive, and its central message, that the obnoxious define the world for everyone else, provides another tile in Polanski's career mosaic of paranoia and power brokerage.
  65. Silent Movie
    When American films were addressing social turmoil like never before, Brooks used his clout to turn back the clock by combining silly sight gags, show-biz satire, silence, and celebrity cameos in 1976's aptly named, ingratiatingly goofy Silent Movie.
  66. Deep Red
    For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.
  67. The Missouri Breaks
    Missouri Breaks begins as a ramshackle comedy and ends as a dour tragedy about the death of the old west with Brando serving as its singularly warped Angel of Death.
  68. Stay Hungry
    A smiley-face ending feels like a lazy copout, but the end credits, which put faces to all the names in the uniformly fine cast, underline this shaggy sleeper's greatest strength: creating a slew of characters worth getting to know.
  69. Robin and Marian
    Robin And Marian would merely be an exercise in theory if the actors didn't make it breathe. Their scenes together a combination of easy humor and wistful grace notes, Connery and Hepburn find an easy rapport, playing something between legendary lovers and an old married couple.
  70. Taxi Driver
    Scorsese's seductive, dreamlike imagery and Schrader's voiceover narration draw the audience into Bickle's head and reveal the world through his eyes, which see only ugliness and filth.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dog Day Afternoon
    Dog Day Afternoon is a frank social melodrama that’s also a celebration of quotidian bravery. The camera might linger on guns and barely restrained violence, but it also dwells upon the love and the support that’s extended in the weirdest and most unexpected of places.
  72. F for Fake
    A loving tribute to chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. It is, in other words, a valentine to filmmaking in general, and its larger-than-life creator in particular.
  73. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    The plot is only semi-comprehensible, but the nearly non-stop musical numbers-brilliant conflations of glam-rock and showtunes-and transgressive sexual energy keep things moving.
  74. Race with the Devil
    A near-exact cross between Rosemary's Baby, Duel, and The Parallax View, Race With The Devil has problems getting over the flat, TV-style direction by Cleopatra Jones director Jack Starrett, but it gets by on engaging drive-in goofiness, even if it's tough to swallow the idea that mid-'70s Texas swarmed with Satanists.
  75. Cooley High
    With its sprawling cast of characters, digressive plot, and hit soundtrack (in this case, a boisterous Motown primer), Cooley High has been compared to another last-days-of-youth movie that came out just two years earlier, American Graffiti. Both films inevitably lace their fun with melancholy, chasing a long, wild coming-of-age bacchanal with the impending hangover of adult life. Difference is, Cooley High’s eulogy for childhood turns out to be much more sadly literal.
  76. Jaws
    Spielberg balances terror on the water with a rich portrait of an island police chief (Roy Scheider) torn between public-safety concerns and a community that thrives on the tourist dollar.
  77. Nashville
    It’s at once ridiculous and genuinely inspiring—Robert Altman in a nutshell.
  78. The Wind and the Lion
    The Wind And The Lion—which was a hit, but not on the order of Milius’ later Conan The Barbarian or Red Dawn—never feels like the product of post-Vietnam America; it just comes from Milius’ imagination, where history and fantasy meet each other halfway.
  79. Death Race 2000
    It’s all ridiculous and occasionally surreal, but Bartel never loses sight of the unpleasantness; when these cartoons explode, they don’t get to place any more orders with the Acme company. They just die.
  80. Dolemite
    Dolemite's plot has something to do with Moore squaring off against crooked cops and a crooked politician, but as in all of his movies, the story is less important than the cheap entertainment.
  81. Tommy
    For all that Tommy bungles or overdoes, it’s still a powerful experience, musically and visually.
  82. Night Moves
    Filled with shadows both literal and figurative, Night Moves elegantly combines the hard-edged pessimism, crackling banter, and all-consuming darkness of classic noir with the paranoia and bitterness that characterizes so much '70s cinema.
  83. The Stepford Wives
    With its references to consciousness-raising groups and other archaic matters, it's very much of its time, but the film is effective for its vision of homogenized suburbia as a place in which housewifery has made women as interchangeable as the mass-produced products in their supermarket.
  84. Black Christmas
    Much of the shtick used by Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore was later stolen both by countless hacks and at least one real artist (Halloween director John Carpenter), but few repeated Clark's most devious tactic, accompanying the violence with the sound of the killer's nerve-janglingly maniacal shouting.
  85. The Towering Inferno
    As the bland, star-laden drama gets swallowed by fiery special-effects setpieces, it feels like one type of big-budget mediocrity giving way to the next.
  86. Young Frankenstein
    Young Frankenstein (1974) and High Anxiety are as much loving homage as irreverent spoof.
  87. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.
  88. A Woman Under the Influence
    Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.
  89. Phantom of the Paradise
    A smorgasbord of camp, Grand Guignol, and bird imagery that thumbed its metal beak at commercial considerations.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Airport 1975
    Where to begin with this accidental comic classic, which gives its direct descendant—the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker parody Airplane!, effectively the nail-in-the-coffin of the ’70s disaster movie cycle—some very real competition in the guffaw department?
  91. Benji
    Benji is pretty dreadful, constructing its skeletal dramatic momentum from Benji foiling a robbery plot hatched by some very dim-bulb burglars who hole up in a decrepit mansion. Benji’s family consists of two unappealing child actors, their hectoring dad (he hates mutts!), and a theoretically endearing maid, all of whom define anti-charismatic.
  92. Alice in the Cities
    As a crash course in New German Cinema, this is tough to beat.
  93. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    The film never loses its intensity from the first moment Leatherface's sledgehammer drops. It's horror without a safety net: Survival isn't guaranteed for anyone, heroism and struggle are often futile, and as the old adage says, you can never come home again.
  94. Phase IV
    It’s a movie that seems to have been designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot.
  95. The Wicker Man
    The Wicker Man ultimately succeeds on the strength of its powerful imagery, its increasingly chilling tone, and its final, sudden shock.
    • The A.V. Club
  96. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The honesty behind Garcia's queasiest moments gives the film its pull.
  97. California Split
    Robert Altman’s most overlooked gem.
  98. The Parallax View
    The plot doesn’t always make sense, but it doesn’t need to, so thoroughly does it convey a sense that everybody is in on something, and there is no escape.
  99. My Name Is Nobody
    The definitive spaghetti Western parody.
  100. Daisy Miller
    The film looks amazing, but the cranked-up acting (complete with the most rapid-fire dialogue Bogdanovich had yet attempted) is tough to bear, especially as it becomes apparent that James' subtle character study is beyond the story-driven Bogdanovich's capabilities.
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