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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    It’s enough for Workman to simply assemble a patchwork of Welles in his myriad incarnations (as the hearty Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight; as an arched-eyebrow spokesman for Paul Masson wine; as The Third Man’s cynical Harry Lime; as a sharp, vital youth and a sharp, frail elder) and allow the many faces to confirm, contradict, and, ultimately, speak for themselves.
  2. The Pyramid
    In the end, The Pyramid seems designed not for horror, adventure, or action but to provide every possible answer to the question of its found-footage bona fides—yes, no, or maybe, depending on who’s asking. It spends most of its running time hedging uncertainly between trend and backlash, explanations and excuses.
  3. Panic 5 Bravo
    The only thing worse than useless trash is useless trash with delusions of grandeur.
  4. Dying of the Light
    Not to say that the movie is a mess. Instead, it plays out as a more or less conventional direct-to-video-style thriller, distinguished by a handful of subtexts and images that might have been developed in a different version, but here register as mere quirks.
  5. Remote Area Medical
    The camera tracks every emotional up and down, through tests and surgery, with an unfussy precision that allows the themes to arise naturally.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Concerning Violence
    In other words, Concerning Violence isn’t out to soothe its audience with platitudes about peace, love, and understanding. Its exploration of an entrenched system that breeds generations of oppression and violence is extremely upsetting yet still highly rewarding.
  7. Life Partners
    If this all sounds more than a little familiar, it’s probably because similar material about young-ish women growing up and maybe apart has been staged recently and on a variety of scales, from the scrappy intimacy of "Frances Ha" to the broader comedy of "Bridesmaids." Life Partners isn’t as ebullient as the former or laugh-out-loud funny as the latter, but it maintains a sharp specificity about both of its lead characters’ lives.
  8. Still Alice
    Though shot in the stolidly inconspicuous style of a low-rated cable drama, Still Alice is rarely anything short of compelling, in part because its sense of progression and scale offers such a distinctively unsentimental take on the terminal-countdown tearjerker.
  9. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    It’s the cathartic, even meditative qualities of metal that are explored in A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a new documentary whatsit that frequently resembles nothing so much as an adaptation of some imaginary black-metal record.
  10. Wild
    People tend to equate great acting with demonstrative emoting, but knowing when not to telegraph what a character is feeling is just as crucial. Sometimes, walking from point A to point Z — simply, without fuss — is all that’s required.
  11. Zero Motivation
    Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny.
  12. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Building to an emotional wallop that’s almost on par with anything found in one of Miyazaki’s or Takahata’s films, The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness is pornographically interesting for Studio Ghibli fans; as a delicate depiction of the artistic spirit, it’s equally essential viewing for everyone else.
  13. The Imitation Game
    The Imitation Game is at its best when it focuses on the collision between cryptography and proto-programming. (No individual can truly be said to have invented the computer, but Turing comes close.)
  14. The Babadook
    Believe it or not, though, the real horror of this superb Aussie monster movie has almost nothing to do with the title fiend and everything to do with the unspoken, unspeakable impulses he represents. Remove the Babadook from The Babadook, in other words, and something plenty terrifying remains.
  15. Before I Disappear
    The result is predictably, frustratingly bloated and meandering, even as the short’s charms remain largely intact.
  16. Penguins of Madagascar
    Frenetic and frequently funny, Penguins Of Madagascar represents the DreamWorks Animation franchise style — which boils down to self-aware, but naïve, talking animals who learn kid-friendly life lessons — at its most palatable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Immortalists
    Would that the film encouraged some deeper thought on the matter instead of inviting viewers to gawk at the subjects as if they were freak-show attractions.
  18. Horrible Bosses 2
    The laughs don't linger, even within individual scenes. What remains, reinforced by a set of end-credit outtakes, is the sense that Sudeikis, Day, Bateman, and Pine had a really good time making a sort of okay movie.
  19. Late Phases
    Fails to deliver either shocks or real drama.
  20. Extraterrestrial
    Even the downer ending plays like an unconscious nod to the over-familiarity of the material, with one character declaring that it’s “the same thing we do every time.”
  21. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    It’s good for business but bad for drama, and the inelegantly titled Mockingjay—Part 1 suffers from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. It doesn’t build to an ending so much as just eventually grind to a halt, like a video game demanding more quarters to continue playing.
  22. V/H/S: Viral
    A sequel so slapdash and ineffectual that its army of directors — six of them total, counting the poor sucker whose contribution got axed — might well be accused of intentionally burying the franchise. More charitably, perhaps they were trying to put a nail in the coffin of all found-footage horror. Some good must come from this much bad.
  23. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    For much of the movie, nothing happens, and it’s not the rigorous, locked-in nothing of the long-take art film, but the slow-motion, music-montage nothing of the artsy American indie.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Homestretch
    In a moral sense, teen homelessness is very much a crime, and Chicago-based filmmakers Anne De Mare and Kirsten Kelly aim to shed a light on this nationwide epidemic in The Homestretch, using the Windy City as a test case.
  25. Reach Me
    There are great L.A. ensembles, like "Short Cuts" "Magnolia," or "Jackie Brown," but writer-director John Herzfeld is an expert in the bad kind, having made "2 Days In The Valley."
  26. The Circle
    Its fascinations compromised by its clunkiness, the film is a necessary niche history that serves well enough as a primer, placing it just a cut above coasting on good intentions.
  27. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
    Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    As a filmic love letter to Sheffield, the resulting doc is full of small delights for serious Pulp fans.
  29. Happy Valley
    Happy Valley’s interviews with figures directly related to the case—Paterno’s widow and sons; Sandusky’s adopted stepson, who suddenly declared himself another of Sandusky’s victims toward the end of the trial, after having previously denied having been abused—shed no light on the subject whatsoever, coming across like an obligatory waste of time.
  30. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair can best be described as expertly depressing—a subcategory of art cinema that seems worth the punishment only when the gloom is counterbalanced by at least a few transcendent moments. No such moments ever surface here, however, apart from a brief fantasy during the closing credits.
  31. Dumb and Dumber To
    Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Butter on the Latch
    The different techniques Decker uses — the improvised dialogue that feels like listening to one side of a phone conversation, the woozy cinematography and sound design, the disorienting editing — create a sense of claustrophobia. The film’s world is beautiful and scary, but also as intimate as a childhood sleepover.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    The masculine posturing between the two men and uncomfortable sexual tension between Akin and Sarah move the story along nicely, but the editorial techniques that made "Butter’s" loosey-goosey narrative work so well undermine Thou Wast Mild.
  34. Penance
    The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.
  35. Bad Turn Worse
    Had the film not been so open about its ambition, maybe its mediocrity wouldn’t seem quite so galling.
  36. Miss Meadows
    What makes Miss Meadows egregiously awful is that it has no perspective whatsoever on vigilante justice. As an ostensible work of satire, it lacks bite, never truly questioning or complicating its heroine’s actions; the film isn’t even outrageous enough to be appalling (which paradoxically makes it appalling).
  37. Rosewater
    All well and good — and, again, damn near unquestionably sincere — except that Rosewater isn’t much of a film.
  38. Foxcatcher
    The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.
  39. The Homesman
    Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman. Tommy Lee Jones’ off-beat minor-key Western has plenty of virtues, but straightness isn’t one of them.
  40. Red Army
    If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Lights
    This is feel-good populist entertainment at heart.
  42. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6’s considerable graces as an animated film — its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion — are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick.
  43. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Way He Looks
    Ribeiro captures the experiential awkwardness of young love pitch-perfectly.
  45. The Better Angels
    As an impression of a Terrence Malick film, The Better Angels is technically faultless, unimprovable. All that’s missing is the soul.
  46. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Those who already admire the director may not find a stunning level of insight, and the curious but unindoctrinated would be better served by starting with one his actual films rather than a rundown of them. But there’s a certain satisfaction in a rundown of a career as rich and varied as Linklater’s, not unlike the pleasure of watching a well-edited Oscar tribute reel.
  47. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.
  48. Actress
    Alternately candid and cagey, Robert Greene’s documentary turns the chores and frustrations of a modern-day homemaker into a study in roles — social and personal, conscious and unintentional, on-camera and off. It isn’t, by any means, a difficult movie, but neither does it take any easy routes.
  49. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  50. Open Windows
    Open Windows attempts to disguise a revenge movie by cloaking it in the flash of a voyeuristic techno-thriller, but the combined concepts are so high that the film resolves as Vigalondo reaches his Icarus moment, the corpse so mangled and unpleasant the project’s ambition can only be identified via dental records.
  51. Jessabelle
    There isn’t a single jump scare in this thing. On the other hand, it would be nice if Jessabelle tried a little harder.
  52. National Gallery
    Unlike Wiseman’s greatest films, National Gallery never quite finds an overarching theme. There’s a fair amount of material regarding the art/commerce divide, but many scenes have no bearing whatsoever on that subject, and the film generally lacks urgency.
  53. Interstellar
    It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.
  54. Before I Go to Sleep
    Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.
  55. Horns
    Horns fumbles with its own powers, too. If its moments of Aja-ian archness blended better with the macabre sincerity that presumably comes from the source material, it might have provided a real autumnal chill. Instead, it’s more ambitious and complex than the horror movies that dutifully clock in to haunt multiplexes around Halloween—without actually being better.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ABCs of Death 2
    Omnibus features are by their nature uneven, so it’s to the benefit of the ABCs Of Death series that the creative constraints (26 short horror films, each one pegged to a specific letter of the alphabet) encourage brevity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Point and Shoot
    The more straightforward Point And Shoot seems, the more slippery it becomes.
  58. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler is a portrait of an amoral opportunist who stumbles upon his horrible calling, and the film’s chief pleasure is watching Gyllenhaal portray what it might be like if Rushmore’s Max Fischer grew up to become Chuck Tatum, the unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Ace In The Hole. It’s adolescent solipsism gone grotesquely rancid.
  59. Goodbye to Language 3D
    What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.
  60. The Great Invisible
    It does put a human face on the suffering of those who lost jobs and/or loved ones, which has some value, but anyone hoping for a more nuanced take than “corporations are bad and regular folks are good” will be disappointed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Mekons
    The film's strength lies in just how far it's willing to go-and to not go-in the pursuit of mythologizing its subject, a group of aging but unrepentant punks who treat the very idea of mythology like a bad joke.
  62. Ouija
    It’s professionally produced but completely uninspired.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Heart Machine
    The Heart Machine’s denouement is ultimately disappointing, but the film is still one of the more successful cinematic portrayals of online intimacy.
  64. Laggies
    Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.
  65. Force Majeure
    If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending — one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually — and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.
  66. Stonehearst Asylum
    The presence of Kingsley — as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere — might suggest "Shutter Island," but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s "Freaks," with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy.
  67. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Turns out to be a disappointingly standard-issue addiction melodrama, this one the tearful case study of an adrenaline junkie whose compulsion threatens to push her family and loved ones away.
  68. Low Down
    Low Down keeps the histrionics to a minimum, but the inertia of a good man failing to be a good father isn’t enough to sustain nearly two hours of reflection, especially when Preiss consistently suggests that telling Amy’s story from Joe’s perspective would have made for a much better film.
  69. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Most of the pleasure in Green Dragons comes simply from the opportunity to watch some underused actors dig into meatier parts than they’re usually offered.
  70. 23 Blast
    It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exists
    It feels strange to be so dismissive about someone who once commanded wide attention (however much as a fluke) with an indie blockbuster that effectively birthed a lucrative mainstream genre. But Sánchez, sadly, is now a pretender to his own throne.
  72. White Bird in a Blizzard
    White Bird In A Blizzard, is another literary adaptation, gunning for respectability. It’s the most mainstream and accessible picture he’s (Araki) ever made, but this time his pendulum swung a bit too far in that direction.
  73. Citizenfour
    Citizenfour offers a remarkably intimate look at history as it happened. In fact, the immediacy of Poitras’ film is so remarkable that, at least for the immediate future, her craft is likely to be overshadowed by her access, her storytelling overshadowed by her opportunity.
  74. John Wick
    Their use of Kaleida’s sparse, slinky “Think” — one of the most effective and eccentric sound track choices in a recent action movie — underscores the sense that what the viewer is watching is essentially a very loud and bloody dance piece.
  75. Housebound
    Housebound, a horror comedy from New Zealand, tries another tack: Its protagonist doesn’t leave because she legally can’t. The movie doesn’t get nearly as much mileage from this concept as it might have, getting bogged down in an increasingly silly plot having nothing to do with house arrest, but the premise does at least justify a hilariously antisocial leading lady.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Young Ones
    Would that there were more beneath the surface of this strange brew, but it’s certainly compelling while it lasts.
  77. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    For Michael Keaton, Birdman is some kind of gift from the movie gods, a license to have his cake and messily devour it too.
  78. Felony
    Unfortunately, Edgerton the writer creates a situation so thorny that he can’t find a way out of it.
  79. The Best of Me
    The Best Of Me is neither the best Sparks adaptation, nor the worst; it’s merely the most recent.
  80. Rudderless
    Rudderless accumulates puzzling details and goodwill in near-equal measure.
  81. Dear White People
    Identity is the film’s true subject: As much as he pokes fun at the foibles of a privileged white America, Simien is more interested in the ways his protagonists conform, or refuse to conform, to society’s idea of them.
  82. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    A devastating and deceptively simple tale adapted from 10th-century folklore, Isao Takahata’s The Tale Of Princess Kaguya distills a millennium of Japanese storytelling into a timeless film that feels both ancient and alive in equal measure.
  83. Camp X-Ray
    X-Ray is extremely dull, and unwisely trusting in the power of its talented central duo to carry the film.
  84. Listen Up Philip
    The thing is, Listen Up Philip is a comedy — a howlingly funny black comedy with really sharp teeth.
  85. The Book of Life
    The characters move around in a thoroughly realized universe full of imaginative and beautifully rendered detail. Too bad the rest of it isn’t more interesting.
  86. Addicted
    Addicted is basically a social-issue melodrama that, minus some curse words, thrusting, and frequent side nudity, could have emerged sometime in the ’50s.
  87. Fury
    It’s all very Peckinpah — or at least it could be, if Ayer had any sense of poetry.
  88. Diplomacy
    It’s a stagy setup whose theatrical roots are always front and center, yet it’s one that’s handled with aplomb by director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), whose latest has enough visual panache to compensate for the static, conversational nature of the work.
  89. You're Not You
    Here’s the frustrating thing about You’re Not You: Wolfe clearly knows what he’s doing and has the actors to pull it off, but he’s tasteful to a fault. Great melodramas achieve the sublime by risking ridicule, something which You’re Not You does only once.
  90. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    Derives almost all of its very modest power from its relationship with its better half. McAvoy, turning up the broody charm, isn’t to blame. The trouble is that Conor’s drama, set against the backdrop of a lonely Manhattan, looks even more generic than Eleanor’s.
  91. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    It’s little surprise that Her turns out to be the better of the two movies, mostly by virtue of prominently featuring Chastain, who conveys an interior life — shifting emotions, competing desires — the script doesn’t supply her.
  92. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    The first Dead Snow included a salute to the classic Sam Raimi gearing-up montage, with its quick cuts and abrupt zooms; it was a cute nod, but nothing more. Red Vs. Dead does the same thing, but concludes the montage with a long, static shot of the Zombie Squad watching as the cash register at the hardware store churns out an endless receipt for all the tools they’ve purchased. That’s an actual joke, which is what the first movie lacked.
  93. Autómata
    Once the film hits the desert, a little before the halfway point, Jacq has the energy sucked out of him and so does the film, limping along while he repeatedly throws histrionic fits.
  94. Stretch
    Puerile, demented, and often funny.
  95. The Overnighters
    In examining the man’s selfless service, Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he’s made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.
  96. Dracula Untold
    More sad dad and noble martyr than creature of the night, Evans’ dashing Prince Of Darkness inspires less fear than just about any incarnation of the famous character, save perhaps the one played by Leslie Nielsen.
  97. The Judge
    The movie isn’t without its pleasures, most of them related to performance. Farmiga, a perennially underrated actor, gives Samantha a measured confidence that sets Hank’s manic cockiness on edge, and Billy Bob Thornton does an effective variation on a slimy archetype as the prosecutor, Dwight Dickham.
  98. Kill the Messenger
    It’s an interesting approach to a fascinating story — yet it still can’t fully break free of its initial limitations.
  99. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    Alexander is a watchable, affable, pretty good, well-done kids’ movie buoyed by a humorous script and talented cast.
  100. St. Vincent
    St. Vincent goes down easier than it probably should. It helps that Lieberher, though saddled with some cutesy movie-kid dialogue, makes a sweet and empathetic sidekick for Murray (he calls him “sir” constantly, like Marcie in old Peanuts strips), and that McCarthy, like so many gifted comedians, proves capable of playing it straight as needed.
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