The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Friday Night Lights
    When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.
  2. Manon of the Spring
    The pacing is expansive rather than draggy; Berri is in no rush to tear through his story, but the dialogue is generally meaningful and story-critical, and very little goes on that isn't directly relevant to the story's ultimate ends.
  3. Ordinary Love
    Despite their best efforts, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville can’t rescue Ordinary Love, a bland drama about a late-middle-aged couple grappling with a cancer diagnosis.
  4. The Bikeriders
    It is too conventional to be an outlaw, but Nichols and the cast have a blast pretending.
  5. Swimming Pool
    Swimming Pool returns Ozon to the psychological complexities of "Under The Sand" and his early mini-feature "See The Sea," and he again proves himself a master of building shocking moments from a series of seemingly insignificant gestures and throwaway lines.
  6. Narc
    Carnahan alternates gritty neo-realism with bursts of extreme stylization -- most notably in a breathless opening chase filmed with handheld cameras -- but thankfully, his stylistic flourishes are in the service of the film's story, not the other way around.
  7. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Once viewers adjust to the cognitive dissonance between intense Flemish dialogue and English performances of country and bluegrass songs,The Broken Circle Breakdown is a film that will likely stick with them long after the credits roll.
  8. 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.
  9. Catch-22
    It's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.
  10. Passione
    As an actor, Turturro brings wit and a healthy sense of absurdity to many of his roles, but his directorial efforts are notably lacking in self-awareness or restraint.
  11. Portrait of Wally
    Portrait Of Wally tells a gripping story, but the filmmakers should have been more forthright about their own part in it.
  12. All These Sleepless Nights
    It’s a film of nearly pure sensation: woozy, intoxicating, visually gorgeous… and maddeningly repetitive.
  13. Gabrielle
    Frequently charming. Marion-Rivard, who won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar earlier this year (the film itself won Best Picture), gives a strong, sophisticated performance, even as she’s disarmingly open in a way that would be almost impossible for an actor without Williams syndrome to fake.
  14. Rosewood
    Deliberately paced at the outset, the film slowly establishes a sense of hatred that makes the violent explosion of the film's second half as plausible and inevitable as the laws of physics.
  15. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Through it all, Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains unaccountably romantic, a confirmation that love, elusive and painful as it can be, is still worth pursuing.
  16. Public Enemies
    Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to the size of a standard police procedural. His refusal to mythologize Dillinger’s exploits is audacious, but too much of Public Enemies feels disappointingly smaller than life.
  17. Resurrection
    Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
  18. Tsotsi
    In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."
  19. Lost Embrace
    At its best, Lost Embrace conveys, with real warmth, the hopelessly intertwined pasts and shared futures of a community of outsiders and immigrants. At worst, it's a sitcom without a laugh track.
  20. Countdown to Zero
    Walker has something important to say with Countdown To Zero, but if this movie were standing on a doorstep with a petition, most reasonable people would sign it quickly and send it on its way, rather than inviting it in to chat.
  21. Her Smell
    Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.
  22. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Orson Welles famously called filmmaking “the biggest electric-train set any boy ever had,” and Raiders! captures that spirit without inviting the mockery that, say, American Movie does.
  23. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys is funny enough when it sticks to its heroes — whether pinned in a tight spot or bickering with each other — that its less-than-compelling intrigues and digressions come as an acceptable trade-off.
  24. The Little Prince
    Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.
  25. A Ciambra
    The result is busy, murky, and remote. It doesn’t have the leftie political clarity of Ken Loach, the purposeful intensity of the Dardenne brothers, or even the character development of Ramin Bahrani’s early features.
  26. Wilde
    There are many fine works by and about Wilde, and if you haven't read them, you should. Nearly all are preferable to this one.
  27. The Brother from Another Planet
    The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.
  28. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.
  29. Devils on the Doorstep
    Though shorn of 20 minutes for its U.S. debut, the film's wry comic portrait of the Japanese Occupation during WWII hasn't lost any of its incendiary brilliance, both as a political provocation and as a brusquely humane take on the horrors and absurdity of war.
  30. Owning Mahowny
    Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »