The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    A haunting, expressionistic portrait of two lonely souls who have reached out for companionship and instead found themselves on a proving ground, where they are mercilessly denuded of their protective lies and self-deception.
  2. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Hugh Grant’s face is perpetually locked in a concerned grimace as Bayfield, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere when he’s not doting on his wife.
  3. 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.
  4. The Farewell Party
    The Farewell Party leaves no doubt as to where it stands on the right to die with dignity when facing terminal illness, but it’s so clumsily made that it serves only to exasperate.
  5. Francofonia
    Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.
  6. The Great Escaper
    A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.
  7. Drinking Buddies
    The entire film unfolds in a recognizable register of ominous hesitation; the results are a bit schematic but nevertheless hit on something real.
  8. 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.
  9. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    The trilogy's conclusion, 71 Fragments, doesn't quite fit the glaciation theme, but it does show Haneke's willingness to experiment with the form and challenge the way audiences receive information. The film's radical deconstruction of various narrative strands questions the way such information is delivered and received.
  10. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.
  11. The Descent
    The Descent sustains a level of intensity that most horror films can barely muster for five minutes.
  12. Rana's Wedding
    Agreeably soft at heart, a fun and progressive entertainment that above all wants to give love a wide berth, no matter what imposing obstacles have to be cleared from the aisle first.
  13. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Given the duo’s withering take on capitalism, it’s ironic that their stumbling second feature feels throughout like an infomercial for a shtick whose expiration date is rapidly approaching.
  14. A Perfect World
    It’s material primed for mushiness, yet Eastwood shrewdly marries sentimentality to both self-deprecating humor (including a late bullhorn gag) and darker, more desolate undercurrents.
  15. Dogman
    The lead performance, from the mostly unknown Fonte, is a small symphony of crumbling ingratiation: the portrait of a good man trying to cling to his principles in the face of stubborn, selfish immorality.
  16. The Road
    Moving fluidly between gory sight gags and implied, insinuating terror, The Road is a movie made to be seen after midnight, preferably in a mildly dilapidated theater with a full house.
  17. Cam
    Mazzei’s script and Goldhaber’s direction complement each other beautifully, with true-to-life details like the tacky dollar-store carpet that decorates Alice’s camming room and the pink taser she keeps in her car playing off of—and enhancing—the naturalistic dialogue.
  18. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.
  19. Rain
    Rain lays so much portent on every scene that it becomes ungenerous and morally forbidding, as if each bummed cigarette or leisurely cocktail will lead the family that much closer to oblivion. In this case, the punishment is far greater than the crime.
  20. 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.
  21. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.
  22. Get On Up
    Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.
  23. Blitz
    Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.
  24. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The result feels like a DVD or Blu-ray special feature with a celebrity pedigree, rather than a movie that can stand on its own two feet.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Gazer
    There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more compelling.
  26. The Brink
    The inherent risk of this vérité approach is that your subject won’t prove to be all that fascinating, and The Brink, while far more openly critical of Bannon than "American Dharma," ultimately offers little justification for spending an hour and a half in his company.
  27. The Boys of Baraka
    Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.
  28. Shazam!
    What is often the most businesslike part of a superhero origin story—establishing the hero’s powers — ends up becoming the most entertaining part of Shazam!, carried along by Levi’s fidgety, boyish charm. (Similarly, the inevitable climactic light-show showdown — a reliably butt-numbing staple of the genre—is surprisingly zippy.)
  29. The Evil Dead
    Then the carnage comes, and when it does, it delivers on all promises and more, with a parade of gushing wounds, demonic howls, and oceans of gore which approach the line of good taste, toe it, then gleefully dance across. [22 Sept 2010]
  30. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Rosner works for famed Democratic strategist James Carville, who stops just short of dry-humping the camera lens in his hunger for the spotlight here. Our Brand Is Crisis is full of strangely resonant parallels to American politics.
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