The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Things to Come
    If Things To Come doesn’t completely fulfill Hansen-Løve’s career mission of elevating minor incidents to major themes, it still rings with her clarity and personality. She conveys in single sentences what less confident filmmakers might expound on in a monologue, and makes small gestures more poignant by tossing them off casually or making an unexpected cut.
  2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Anderson’s latest invention, The Grand Budapest Hotel, may be his most meticulously realized, beginning with the towering, fictional building for which it’s named.
  3. Train Dreams
    Train Dreams, at just 95 minutes before credits, is as efficient, accessible, and poignant as a good short story.
  4. Winter Sleep
    Epics tend to get extra respect — bonus points for ambition, one might say — and while Ceylan’s film is a decidedly intimate example of the genre, it was clearly perceived, in advance, as an important work just by virtue of its sheer heft.
  5. A Star Is Born
    Cooper keeps both the camera and his dramatic focus tightly locked on the characters, and on Lady Gaga’s face, expressing the full ecstasy and agony of what this timeless tale throws at her. Like Jackson, he can recognize a natural, brilliant talent when he sees one. And he knows, too, when to get out of the way and cede the spotlight.
  6. 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.
  7. Time Out
    Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline.
  8. Away from Her
    Has its heartbreaking moments and its surprise giggles, particularly thanks to Ron Hewat's minor role as a former hockey play-by-play announcer now narrating his nursing-home life.
  9. The Father
    Hopkins methodically strips away every quality we’ve come to expect from him—the refinement, the silver tongue, the imposing intensity he lent Lecter and Nixon and Titus—until there’s nothing left but frailty and distress. In doing so, he helps convey the full tragedy and horror of dementia: the way it can make someone almost unrecognizable to themselves and their loved ones.
  10. Foxtrot
    Heavy with horror though it may be, Foxtrot turns out to be too conceptually and stylistically audacious to be called a slog; it keeps throwing curveballs, some crueler than others.
  11. The Innocents
    A ravishing neo-romantic takedown of Victorian repression, spooky and scathing in equal measure.
  12. Inside Job
    From an emotional standpoint, it's enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson "nail" some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.
  13. Sweet Country
    Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.
  14. Leave No Trace
    Moving, perhaps inevitably, toward a final fork in the woods, Leave No Trace condenses big questions into something simple and quietly powerful: two people bonded by blood and shared history, discovering how their needs align and diverge.
  15. The King's Speech
    The King's Speech is admirably free of easy answers and simple, happy endings; it's a skewed, awards-ready version of history, but one polished to a fine, satisfying shine.
  16. Parallel Mothers
    The film is at its most powerful, however, when Almodóvar relies on his muse and intensely fixates on her character as Janis silently absorbs waves of devastation or allows herself to confess, the words rapidly, cathartically tumbling out of her. In those moments, Parallel Mothers becomes a beautiful tribute to their enduring, working relationship and the trust the director regularly puts in Cruz, whose performance he never surrounds with flashy flourishes.
  17. Hell or High Water
    Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation.
  18. Up
    Up is challenging, emotionally and narratively, but it trusts viewers to keep up; Pixar has never been interested in talking down to children or their parents.
  19. Shirkers
    The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mildred Pierce
    A masterful weepie adapted from a James M. Cain novel.
  21. Poor Things
    Poor Things is such a rare combination of talented collaborators working in perfect concert that it’s hard to consider the film anything short of masterful.
  22. Marooned in Iraq
    Ends with horrific revelations that are made all the more powerful by the lightness that precedes them. Simultaneously sad and hopeful, Ghobadi suggests the resiliency of a culture in which war is part of the fabric of everyday life.
  23. Aquarius
    So it’s marvelous to see Braga setting the big screen ablaze — speaking her native language, for once — in Aquarius, a Brazilian drama constructed entirely around her.
  24. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    More damningly prosaic than the overwhelming chaos of a war movie’s climactic assault, 2000 Meters To Andriivka marches through death by a thousand unknowns. There’s still heartstopping terror and momentary poetry in this toil.
  25. Slow Machine
    A general menace permeates the film in the form of paranoid intrigue and clandestine government forces, but it’s always offset with plenty of offhand irony and snarky one-liners.
  26. Black Panther
    There are hiccups in its ambition, but it’s hard not to get swept up in all the technologies, characters, and politics crammed into the movie’s compelling dramatic conflict, which casts the charismatic Michael B. Jordan—the star of Creed and Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station—as the most complex villain in the post-Dark Knight cycle of superhero blockbusters.
  27. Brooklyn
    It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.
  28. Nobody Knows
    Loosely structured around four seasons, Nobody Knows unfolds in a long series of episodes that slowly progress from lightly comic to bracingly sad as the situation deteriorates.
  29. Apollo 11
    Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.
  30. Faces
    Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.
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