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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  1. Caramel
    At its best, Caramel boasts a quietly engaging slice-of-slice casualness.
  2. Save the Green Planet!
    Has a free-ranging mood, mixing tragedy and comedy irregularly, but Jeong's film is equally free with genre, and entertains its audience openly before pouring on the astringent.
  3. Rampart
    Harrelson thrives amid the restlessness, and gives perhaps the peak performance of his increasingly distinguished career.
  4. The Poseidon Adventure
    There's ample overacting by the likes of Stella Stevens, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, but the movie's one-obstacle-atop-another plot—and active meditation on faith—remain sharp and surprising.
  5. Your Friends & Neighbors
    Savagely funny black comedy.
  6. Pure
    Pure loses a bit of its nerve in the home stretch, but Eden's unforgettable performance alone makes it a compelling portrait of a smart young boy forced to grow up way too fast.
  7. Alone
    There’s something deeply appealing about an already stripped-down cat-and-mouse scenario that becomes dirtier and more elemental as it goes along, tracing a devolutionary arc from the rules of the road to primeval combat.
  8. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    Beavis And Butt-head Do The Universe is pretty much what you expect—and it’s, uhhhhh, pretty cool.
  9. Late Night
    Late Night is admirably eager to address the messy problems of the comedy world, but it ultimately can’t stop cleaning up after itself.
  10. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Boasts a high enough hit-to-miss ratio in its gags to succeed as a comic biopic but can’t help milking the gags that hit until their freshness evaporates.
  11. Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    A peek behind the curtain of her private life during this tumultuous rise to international fame is the draw of the film, and The World’s A Little Blurry manages to deliver a compelling and intimate portrait of Billie Eilish without ever coming across as carefully PR-approved or evading knottier aspects of her life.
  12. The Duellists
    In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.
  13. Knife + Heart
    Knife + Heart sometimes feels as rough around the edges and inelegantly plotted as its pornos-within-the-movie, but maybe that’s just conceptual consistency.
  14. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    Ironic, given what a deeply personal filmmaker she could be, that the film that best shows her brilliant intellect and insight isn’t her own.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Regeneration
    It might, in fact, be the best straight-to-DVD action movie ever made. And the fact that there’s any competition for that title should tell you that times have changed.
  16. Cat's Eye
    Despite a few nasty bits of violence, Cat’s Eye almost plays like an intro to King for younger viewers ready for some shocks but not yet prepared for full-on nightmares.
  17. The Boys in the Band
    Mantello is the first to tell people he hasn’t had a lot of experience directing movies (his last feature was the 1997 adaptation of his Broadway hit Love! Valour! Compassion!), yet his version of Boys fights its stage roots far more than Friedkin’s film.
  18. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Across the extended, handsomely shot sit-down interviews (with Ma’s daughter and the three other writers), what emerges is a fragmentary oral history of Chinese rural life across several transformative decades of the 20th century: family stories, tragedies, remembered slogans, the particulars of trying to grow crops in alkaline soil or coming of age as the son of a declared “counterrevolutionary.”
  19. A Town Called Panic
    It's more clever than funny, but it's very clever.
  20. Hellbender
    If there’s a lesson to be taken from Hellbender, it’s this: Underestimate the small and unassuming at your own peril—whether that be the character of Izzy, the film’s real-life creators, or the movie itself.
  21. Under the Volcano
    It falls upon Finney to dramatize the inner workings of a man gradually, unmistakably succumbing to oblivion. Finney is up to the task: The pungent poetry of Lowry's prose comes through in his pitch-perfect performance, with its exquisite turns of phrase, boozy bravado, and theatrical panache.
  22. The Old Guard
    Greg Rucka pens the screenplay, refashioning his own graphic novel and doing as much to retain tone and character agency as Gillian Flynn did for her "Gone Girl" adaptation, for example.
  23. Contagion
    Soderbergh creates an unnerving mosaic from the smaller pieces, a vision of a world that's simultaneously tightly knit, delicately balanced, and prone to breakdown, whether due to disease, bad ideas, or unenlightened self-interest.
  24. Almost There
    Almost There, made under the banner of Windy City-based doc shop Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams), gives Anton’s kitschy-colorful portraiture the requisite close-up, but the film quickly becomes more compelling as a protracted intervention than as an act of advocacy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The School of Flesh
    Unfortunately, contrary to the provocative title, the results are not terribly interesting. While the acting is excellent and the filmmaking exquisite, The School Of Flesh itself is yet another dry example of l'amour fou.
  26. Pieces of April
    Though Pieces Of April comes together with improbable grace, Hedges evokes unearned tears from a premise that's already loaded from the start. Like Holmes, he serves up boxed stuffing and canned cranberries, then fishes for compliments to the chef.
  27. The Ugly Stepsister
    Blichfeldt’s film offers a R-rated counterpoint better than most “faithful” fairy tale adaptations.
  28. Faults
    He’s (Riley Stearns) fashioned a movie that undergoes a slow, captivating metamorphosis, scene by scene, though who’s the caterpillar and who’s the cocoon remains unclear until the very end.
  29. Bad Santa
    Much like "School Of Rock," Bad Santa salvages a tired, paint-by-numbers formula by resisting it every step of the way, stubbornly refusing to stop its juvenile fun until the last possible moment.
  30. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    A surprisingly intimate behind-the-scenes documentary.
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