The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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: 5,578 out of 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. Night School
    Night School takes the human-interest route instead, and while that doesn’t allow for the most complete vision of the program, it does put a touchingly human face on the movie’s opening statistic—as well as grant a sliver of hope for those 1.2 million American kids who abandon their education every year.
  2. Last Flag Flying
    Linklater, for all his gifts in directing ruminative, digressive gab, isn’t exactly the king of dramatic structure. There are clumsy, didactic, and sentimental moments scattered through the film; at 124 minutes, it’s too long and episodic for its own good. But his sensibility—sympathetic, politically skeptical—strikes through at simple, important truths.
  3. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    It’s a subject that should appeal to anyone who doesn’t wield the words “the media” as an insult.
  4. My Journey Through French Cinema
    This focus on minutiae doesn’t paint a complete picture, nor is it meant to. But it underlines a point too rarely made: Every film is an accumulation of things the average person wouldn’t notice. If there’s a real educational function to criticism, it isn’t to inform, but to teach an audience how to look.
  5. In Transit
    For better and worse, Maysles and his team don’t impose any sort of grand philosophical thesis on these random encounters. The notion of wanting to pick up stakes and restart your life in a new location recurs throughout, but the film (which runs a brisk 76 minutes) is mostly content just to sample the populace, trusting in humanity itself to hold the viewer’s interest.
  6. Three Amigos!
    Martin’s script—co-written with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and songwriter Randy Newman—is full of inspired bits of comic business, such as Martin making a “lookuphere!” bird call to get his chums’ attention, Chase pouring water all over his face while his mates’ canteens are dry, and the Amigos summoning an invisible swordsman whom Chase accidentally shoots.
  7. Molly's Game
    The same fundamental strengths and weaknesses — the former usually outweighing the latter, happily — are evident in all of his movies, no matter who’s in charge. A master like Fincher can add some visual zing, but the song remains the same.
  8. The Crazies
    Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.
  9. Day of the Dead
    Day Of The Dead is more like Romero's scorching 1973 satire The Crazies, in which anarchy reigns and the very concept of heroes dissolves. The action at the end is lurid, made giddily disgusting by Tom Savini's amazing gore effects, and made gripping by Romero's gift for the cold logic of systemic breakdown. Still, some audiences may give up early, fed up with the shrill claustrophobia.
  10. Brad's Status
    Intentionally exasperating.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Money Pit
    It’s not high art or sophisticated humor, but there are just enough clever turns in its physical comedy and insight into relationships to give it a bit of cult status.
  12. Top Secret!
    Top Secret! replaces the scattershot-parody approach with a more precise re-creation of the dopey simplicity of WWII romances and Elvis pictures.
  13. Mommie Dearest
    There's something unnerving about the cult infamy of Mommie Dearest, a harrowing fact-based account of horrific child abuse that has developed a reputation as a camp giggle-fest of the so-bad-it's-good variety.
  14. Annihilation
    If "Ex Machina" was a mess of provocative, half-formed thoughts on gender, creation, and desire, Annihilation locates something closer to a clear, cogent thesis: that there’s nothing scarier than looking at those closest to you, or even yourself, and not recognizing the person staring back.
  15. Human Flow
    Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.
  16. The Death of Stalin
    The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.
  17. River's Edge
    It’s sloppily written, heavy-handed, and tonally inconsistent—but it remains striking for its bleakness and a smattering of bizarre, unhinged performances from Crispin Glover, Daniel Roebuck, and Dennis Hopper.
  18. Strong Island
    The effect is stark, expressionistic, and powerful. It creates the sense that what’s being said is important.
  19. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two does a nice job getting way behind the scenes of a non-stop, sometimes grotesquely glamorous life.
  20. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Maybe a little longer and more scattered than it needs to be, with one too many scenes that just plant the camera in front of a gabbing speaker. His early movies were more urgent, in part because they kept their focus narrower
  21. Everybody Knows
    Quintessentially, and maybe to a fault, this is a Farhadi movie: another of the writer-director’s gripping studies of a family torn asunder by a compounding mess of deception and revelation.
  22. Bodied
    Simultaneously entertaining, overwhelming, compelling, and grating, Bodied raises its hand and talks until words mean nothing and everything.
  23. Custody
    Custody doesn’t do much more than plunge the audience into this hellish situation, but it shrewdly understands the bad dad’s pathetic pathology, and the film may resonate for anyone who’s grown up under the unhealthy supervision of a mean bastard. Take that as a sobering recommendation.
  24. Disobedience
    Plotting has never been a strong suit for Lelio, who made his name with character studies of unconventional women. Here, he tries his hand at something akin to classicism, and ends up mounting a compelling drama. Curiously, its main shortcoming parallels the human flaw that is its main theme: our yearning to leave often loses out to our inability to let go.
  25. Euthanizer
    Nikki, who appears to be making the most of an extremely limited budget, has attempted to make something like a modern-day take on the creepy, kinky, deeply personal B-movie, studiously avoiding anything that would smack of revivalism; after all, no authentic B-movie ever set out to look like a B-movie. The surrealists would have liked this film.
  26. I, Tonya
    I, Tonya may be more of a pop-biographical exercise than a deep interrogation, but there’s a resonance to the synergy between its star and its subject: one famous female artist reclaiming her professional narrative by playing another who never quite could.
  27. On Chesil Beach
    On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nico, 1988
    Like Gus Van Sant’s "Last Days," Nico, 1988 is at its best in these liminal moments, its creation of a cognitive space to ponder an artist’s legacy, as well as literal spaces that reflect it: faded ballrooms, twilit monuments, bleary countrysides. Unlike that movie, though, Nico, 1988 occasionally succumbs to hoary biopic clichés, awkwardly imposing narrative beats.
  29. Jane
    Jane boasts one thing that its predecessors did not: a treasure trove of truly stunning 16mm footage shot in the early 1960s by famed nature photographer Hugo Van Lawick (who would become Goodall’s first husband).
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