The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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 2.6 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Kaboom
    Kaboom is pure fantasy in every sense of the word: It's a riff on sexy, sassy teen movies and conspiracy thrillers that at times seems to exist only so Araki can get his beautiful young cast to strip off their clothes and pair off in every conceivable combination, just as he used to do in his earlier, more scandalous films.
  2. When We Leave
    When We Leave is a film without villains. Instead, it features a set of circumstances that inevitably and needlessly spin out of control.
  3. The Dictator
    The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate.
  4. Carancho
    If anyone's likely to have trouble with Carancho, it's fans of Trapero's previous films, who won't be able to help noticing the sizeable step he's taken toward conventionality.
  5. Orgasm Inc.
    Broadly speaking, Canner hails from the Michael Moore school of first-person editorializing, but Orgasm Inc. isn't given to vanity or cheap shots.
  6. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.
  7. Poetry
    Whenever all the pieces are in place, though, Lee reverts to the kind of storytelling he does best.
  8. Putty Hill
    This is a movie about the casual ways people know each other, even when their relationships are hard to explain-or perhaps even justify.
  9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    This is the most epic of the Harry Potter movies, the one that finally dispenses with side-quests and open-ended plotlines and offers up all the final payoffs.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 14, 2011
  10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    Mara's Salander is the film's lifeblood, a shrewd yet vulnerable outsider whose resilience and pluck help Fincher elevate The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo above the standard procedural. But just barely.
  11. The Adventures of Tintin
    While it's essentially just another slick Spielberg action machine, it's operating effectively on all cylinders throughout.
  12. Beginners
    Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.
  13. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.
  14. Heartbeats
    Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.
  15. Moneyball
    Miller directs with intelligence, though not flair, but the script makes up for any flagging energy with crackling Sorkin dialogue and performances that sing with revolutionary fervor.
  16. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur Christmas gets a little sappy toward the end - it is a Christmas movie, after all - but it otherwise strikes just the right combination of naughty and nice, reverent and irrelevant, holiday-sweet and Aardman dry.
  17. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    The filmmakers throw everything at the audience, literally and metaphorically, and the results are exhilarating rather than exhausting.
  18. Bernie
    Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.
  19. Melancholia
    The grand concept is really just a vehicle for a more intimate study of depression and its dangerous, shifting polarities.
  20. The Music Never Stopped
    The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.
  21. I Saw the Devil
    A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.
  22. Black Death
    Black Death bears some similarities to a zombie movie in the way the plague inevitably overtakes the populace, and it also has one foot in the "creepy community" genre, alongside films like "The Wicker Man" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!"
  23. Potiche
    Funny, twisty, and sometimes bittersweet, Potiche is a fluffy good time, but not entirely insubstantial.
  24. Circo
    Though Circo is pretty bleak, Schock doesn't skimp on the exotic wonder of a life on the road, surrounded by color and danger.
  25. City of Life and Death
    The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.
  26. Premium Rush
    He's Premium Rush's villain, but Shannon doesn't attempt anything like the austere derangement of a Hans Gruber type, even though he specializes in playing terrifying nutjobs. Instead, he's a buffoon of the first order, and his hapless tomfoolery sets the tone for a light, fast, frequently hilarious 90 minutes.
  27. Nostalgia for the Light
    It's also poetic and meditative in a way that never feels pretentious.
  28. Bill Cunningham New York
    It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.
  29. My Perestroika
    My Perestroika is fairly foursquare as documentary filmmaking goes; it isn't stylistically snazzy, nor doggedly vérité. Its closest kin in the genre is Michael Apted's "Up" films, which are similarly focused on how people change over time.
  30. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    It's a remote location, but Frammartino's canny eye, wry humor, and careful sense of rhythm make it feel like the best possible spot to observe the workings of the world, from ashes to ashes.
  31. Blank City
    In the end, Blank City becomes not just a salute to the artistic adventurousness of a bygone New York, but a reminder that new strains of creativity keep emerging, just when the scene looks stalest.
  32. Prometheus
    Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.
  33. Thunder Soul
    Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.
  34. The Elephant in the Living Room
    Gripping, maddening, well-told stories.
  35. The Princess of Montpensier
    Tavernier turns a tale of courtly duty and manners into a tense, twisty drama.
  36. Terri
    deWitt's script is much better than anything Jacobs has worked on before, with a story that gets richer as it goes.
  37. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    It's a film where the feelings and experiences of young people are highly specific in detail, yet fundamentally universal and timeless.
  38. Road to Nowhere
    The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.
  39. The Five-Year Engagement
    A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.
  40. The Artist
    It's a beautifully shot, beautifully acted piece of fluff.
  41. Take Shelter
    Writer-director Jeff Nichols re-teams with his "Shotgun Stories" star Michael Shannon for his second feature, Take Shelter, which has a similar setting, but a different mood. Nichols is still concerned with family legacies, and the ways people in smaller communities relate to each other, but Take Shelter is slower and smoother, deliberately developing a mood of creeping dread.
  42. Battle for Brooklyn
    Most viewers should find the documentary Battle For Brooklyn gripping and provocative, no matter their opinions about eminent domain, historic preservation, or public dollars going to support private development.
  43. Attack the Block
    Attack The Block turns its modest budget into a virtue by focusing on character, especially the surprisingly charged, complicated dynamic between enemies-turned-allies Whittaker and Boyega.
  44. Crime After Crime
    Through the ceaseless efforts of two dedicated pro bono lawyers-both with personal reasons to keep up the fight for five or six grueling years-director Yoav Potash follows every revelation and setback with an urgency most fiction films can't muster.
  45. Aurora
    Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.
  46. Rapt
    While the back-and-forth between various parties grows tiresome through repetition, Rapt rallies with a lengthy epilogue in which the aftermath of Attal's ordeal proves more draining than the physical privation that preceded it.
  47. The Interrupters
    Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive.
  48. This Is 40
    A few broadly comic moments aside, This Is 40 also captures the rhythms and concerns of real life in ways that slicker Hollywood comedies don't.
  49. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    The Woman With The 5 Elephants isn't flawless; as articulate and fascinating as Geier could be, she was also dry at times. But Jendreyko cleverly parcels out her personal history, and he isn't afraid to break up the talkiness with long silences and luminous images.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Khodorkovsky
    It's unlikely to enflame American audiences with less of a stake in Russia's political goings-on, but works as a persuasive portrait of a politically toxic situation. As one of Khodorkovsky's advocates admits to the camera, even capitalists are entitled to human rights.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Young Adult
    Reitman lets the pop-culture references (oh hi, 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up") accessorize the story rather than guide it, and in its uncompromising treatment of a character who's troubled but also a stone-cold bitch, Young Adult offers compassion for rather than revenge on the "psycho prom queen" who has nothing left in life but a warped mix-tape from an ex who moved on long ago.
  52. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    In its best sequences, Ramsay puts her duress in dazzlingly visual terms, collapsing the past and present in an associative rush of red-streaked images and piercingly vivid moments out of time.
  53. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Mysteries Of Lisbon is an odd kind of epic: It's digressive and even trifling at times, and though a large cast wanders through the frame, the individual scenes tend to be focused on just two or three people, having winding conversations about political intrigue and affairs of the heart.
  54. Gravity
    If nothing else, Gravity makes the case for throwing immense resources at true visionaries; the blockbuster craftsman as adventurer, Cuarón expertly blends the epic with the intimate. For every stunning 3-D setpiece involving a dangerous hailstorm of metallic debris, there’s a moment of small tenderness.
  55. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    The moral to Clash's story? It's surprisingly easy being red.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Silent Souls
    While the pace and the dour, meditative tone of Silent Souls can sometimes verge on parodically arthouse-esque, the sincerity of the film's thoughts on loss and longing, on the burdens of grief, and on reawakened awareness of existence, is always painfully heartfelt.
  57. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Most likely, The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu will mean the most to actual Romanians, who will recognize the locations and fashions, and may even know what the government's documentarians left out of the picture. But the movie offers plenty to captivate even outsiders.
  58. Shame
    McQueen is a showy director, but his bravura long takes have the effect of heightened attentiveness, allowing scenes to build in intensity without the relief of a cut.
  59. Hope Springs
    Taylor and Frankel go too broad when they try for comic relief - and the on-the-nose soundtrack is borderline criminal - but Hope Springs handles marriage and advanced-age sexuality with a refreshing, down-to-earth candor. In today's Hollywood, that counts as radical.
  60. The Raid: Redemption
    Gareth Evans' Indonesian martial-arts throwback The Raid: Redemption has a look and feel that resembles the best of '80s cult action movies: half John Carpenter, half John Woo.
  61. The Catechism Cataclysm
    If The Catechism Cataclysm does have something to say, it's that it's possible to enjoy a trip even when it isn't really going anywhere.
  62. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    Perhaps it's a tribute to the breadth of Goodman's life that even after 90 minutes, it feels as if we've just scratched the surface.
  63. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    Côté and Henriquez err in pressing their case too hard on occasion, especially when they cut to reaction shots of Khadr supporters watching footage of his agony; there's a line between providing context and manipulating the audience that they don't care to acknowledge. Then again, subtlety isn't likely the goal: You Don't Like The Truth beats the drum, and beats it loudly.
  64. Argo
    Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.
  65. Boy
    In its third act, this funny, bittersweet, tonally assured coming-of-age story grows unexpectedly poignant as Rolleston comes to realize he doesn't need a super-cool buddy or co-conspirator in his misadventures. He needs a father, and Waititi's stunted man-child is fatally unsuited and unqualified for that role.
  66. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Beautifully shot by Amélie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis is instantly recognizable as the work of its sibling auteurs. But it’s also something of a departure — looser and more rambling than the average Coen concoction, with a lovingly recreated period setting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Silver Bullets
    The line between "highly personal" and "navel-gazing" varies depending on one's feelings toward the person offering up the serving of self-contemplation, but Silver Bullets' introspection feels earned.
  68. Into the Abyss
    His film powerfully suggests that violent death of any kind, whether personal or state-mandated, transforms everyone in its vicinity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Innkeepers
    The two amateur ghost-hunters hope to document evidence of the spirit of Madeline O'Malley in their last days of employment, though they get far more than they bargained for when she starts actually showing up.
  70. The Love We Make
    Mostly, though, the pleasure of The Love We Make comes from watching one of the most famous musicians in the world looking totally chill, whether he's rehearsing with his band or casually chatting with Bill Clinton.
  71. Tomboy
    It's so much fun that as Tomboy moves toward its conclusion, the inevitable end of Héran's days as Mikael feels like watching someone die.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    Most people wouldn't expect a film that's inherently about death (and, to a lesser extent, the Holocaust) to be uplifting, but the gentle, tender documentary In Heaven, Underground ultimately achieves it.
  73. In Darkness
    While In Darkness sticks to formula, it brings across that formula effectively.
  74. Silver Linings Playbook
    It's the perfect material for Russell, who not only deals perceptively with the dizzying swings of manic depression, but makes it the fabric of a big, generous, happy-making ensemble comedy.
  75. Evil Dead
    While Raimi’s Stooges aesthetic — which was really more prominently displayed in the sequels than in 1981’s The Evil Dead — isn’t played up here, there’s enough outrageous unreality to make the brutality go down a little easier. It isn’t quite a cartoon, but it’s close enough.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    El Sicario: Room 164
    El Sicario: Room 164 is an almost laughably simple, aggressively drab-looking film, but it packs a wallop.
  77. The Hunter
    Though The Hunter maintains the same even tone after it turns into a chase thriller, the look begins to resemble the work of William Friedkin and Walter Hill in its clean, elemental approach to action.
  78. Last Days Here
    The fact that Last Days Here cares more about Liebling's personal redemption than his professional triumph is ultimately a saving grace, a telling demonstration of the film's well-ordered priorities.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    Like "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Sound Of My Voice plausibly demonstrates how someone's sense of self and certainty can be eroded, and like "Another Earth," it was co-written by actress Brit Marling, a melancholy, luminous presence as the group's leader.
  80. Chronicle
    Chronicle becomes what "Hancock" wanted to be - a dark superhero story with firm footing in the everyday. Perhaps now the found-footage gimmick has been fully exploited; let us never speak of it again.
  81. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In a timid comic world, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie feels genuinely dangerous and transgressive: it makes a virtue of going way too far because other comedies don't go far enough.
  82. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    David Gelb's documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi shows what a meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro is like: each morsel prepared simply and perfectly, then replaced by another as soon as the previous piece is consumed, with no repetition of courses. Once an item is gone, it doesn't come back. That's why each one has to be memorable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    First Position
    Fortunately, first-time filmmaker Bess Kargman has selected a diverse array of competitors from different backgrounds who have significant talent in common.
  84. Crazy Horse
    Anyone could make a film about a theater full of naked women; only Wiseman would take equal interest in the person who handles the ticket-ordering, and the one who makes sure there's a bottle of champagne on every table.
  85. Return
    Return is unusually attuned to its protagonist's alienation, which is especially painful because its source isn't some horrendous event she witnessed, but the hundreds of annoying aspects of everyday life.
  86. Sinister
    It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    On the Ice
    The performances, all from non-professional local actors, are noticeably uneven, but the film is as much a portrait of a place as it is a narrative, and cinematographer Lol Crawley shoots the white-on-white polar expanses like they're vistas stretching to the ends of the earth-which in a way, they are.
  88. Killing Them Softly
    For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Beyond The Black Rainbow is more surface than substance, but those surfaces are gleamingly polished enough to make for a hypnotic experiment that goes beyond genre pastiche or art-school wankery to seem formally daring.
  90. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Better Than Something doesn't really try to resolve the mystery of how someone could be simultaneously so productive and destructive.
  91. For a Good Time, Call...
    The notion of a love story that's really about two women becoming friends is gimmicky, I'll grant, but Graynor and Miller are so charming together, and the movie is so focused and funny.
  92. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Just as a document of the sheer physical labor that goes into covering a giant canvas with color, Gerhard Richter Painting is never less than absorbing.
  93. Blue Like Jazz
    For all its low-key charms, the coming-of-age story risks being too Christian for secular audiences and too secular and colorful for Christian audiences: Like its spiritual seeker of a protagonist, it's caught between worlds.
  94. Post Mortem
    Larrain crafts Post Mortem as a slow, quiet character study, narrowing in on Castro in his home and office while the world outside descends into madness.
  95. Whores' Glory
    Glawogger studiously avoids explicitness until he gets to Mexico, where he finally goes past the bartering stage and behind closed doors as business is conducted. Pleasure isn't part of the transaction.
  96. Headhunters
    Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.
  97. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."
  98. Oki's Movie
    As always with Hong's films, Oki's Movie goes through stretches where it seems aimless and self-indulgent, followed by stretches where it's sharp, funny, and poetic.
  99. The Day He Arrives
    The Day He Arrives is a talky movie, full of long, boozy scenes and cosmic coincidences - and in that it echoes Allen, as well as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the best of British kitchen-sink drama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The LEGO Movie
    Effervescent in style, conveying a substantive message without ever devolving into saccharine preachiness.
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