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. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back.
  2. L'Enfant (The Child)
    L'Enfant is intended as a pointed critique of pop culture's celebration of arrested adolescence. The title could refer to Renier's baby, Renier himself, or even the gang of schoolboy robbers that he's gathered around himself.
  3. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Throughout, the documentary offers glowing praise of Fonda that falls just short of fawning. Frankly, it’s difficult not to be impressed. Seventy-eight at the time of filming, the formidable Fonda personifies courage and strength in her interviews, even as she reveals tremendous vulnerabilities.
  4. Good Morning
    A knowing comedy, Good Morning isn't one of Ozu's indisputable masterpieces, but it serves as a fine example of everything he does well.
  5. Poetry
    Whenever all the pieces are in place, though, Lee reverts to the kind of storytelling he does best.
  6. Newtown
    From a filmmaking standpoint, Newtown is neither adventurous nor unconventional. It doesn’t need to be; no documentary this emotionally direct, this emotionally draining, requires bells and whistles.
  7. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The film fares best when Jenkins just trusts the expressive force of his filmmaking, when he uses his own tools to evoke, if not match, the magic of Baldwin’s writing.
  8. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    For Michael Keaton, Birdman is some kind of gift from the movie gods, a license to have his cake and messily devour it too.
  9. Shine
    Memorable, deeply affecting movie.
  10. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Uniquely ambitious, Rivette’s film (technically a serial) spends nearly 13 hours stitching paranoia, loneliness, comedy, and mystical symbolism into a crazy quilt big enough to cover a generation.
  11. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Maintaining an audience’s sympathy for a character through their most fumbling, frustrating lows requires compassion and clarity of purpose, both of which McCarthy amply demonstrates here. It’s a career-best performance, the kind of nuanced turn we all suspected she could deliver, if only someone would give her a chance to do it.
  12. Wolfwalkers
    A vibrant and expressive fantasy, magical and unyoked to realism without pulling any punches about the destructive folly of manifest destiny.
  13. It Happened One Night
    It’s every goddamn romantic comedy you’ve ever seen. They can all be traced back here, virtually without exception, for eight straight decades now. Technically, the film has never been remade, but that’s largely because, in spirit, it has never stopped being remade. Something so perfectly structured can support nearly endless variations. It’s timeless.
  14. My Neighbor Totoro
    Compared to the breathtaking action sequences and elaborate fantasy landscapes of Miyazaki's early features, the genteel, languid Totoro seems at first slight, and even soporific. Yet My Neighbor Totoro may be the most enduring entry in Miyazaki's impressive filmography, because it's so particular about the nuances of human behavior and emotion.
  15. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture might have felt academic, even coldly removed, were it not for its scathing narration, penned by Panh (with Christophe Bataille) and read by Randal Douc.
  16. Amadeus
    The superbly edited original version of Amadeus used overlapping sound cues for a lively flow between scenes, and the new version breaks up some of that flow with lengthy, talky interludes. Still, Ondricek's breathtaking images and Forman's essential craft are best appreciated on the big screen, and another theatrical run for Amadeus is a welcome gift, no matter how much this edition unnecessarily gilds what's already a near-perfect lily. [2002 Director's Cut]
  17. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon both dwell on the problems of leadership, balancing out a respect for classic American frontier virtues with a less generous assessment of how those virtues were applied.
  18. Pain and Glory
    Banderas’ performance is so rich, in fact (he won Best Actor at Cannes), that it creates the illusion of a narrative with real depth and texture—he keeps us invested in Salvador even as the film repeatedly declines to complicate the man’s life any further.
  19. Gomorrah
    Gomorrah takes place in a world where decency can't take root and we can only watch in horror as crime overwhelms society's most vulnerable-- women, children, law-abiding citizens, and the conscientious few who want to get out of the game.
  20. Familiar Touch
    As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.
  21. To Be and to Have
    An early shot of two turtles crawling through the classroom establishes the film's deliberate pace, and To Be And To Have benefits from the care.
  22. A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Because of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here.
  23. Eraserhead
    See Eraserhead once and it’ll lodge itself firmly in some dank recess of your brain and refuse to vacate.
  24. Withnail and I
    Withnail And I works as a comedy, but it's a comedy of desperation, and the ever-present specter of failure, overdose, and addiction haunting its leads lends it an aura of lyrical sadness.
  25. The Velvet Underground
    Haynes simply uses the tools at his disposal to get the job done. Ultimately, he captures the inspiring spirit of The Velvet Underground, a band built on the principle that marching to the beat of your own drum is a righteous, rebellious artistic act.
  26. Medium Cool
    Aside from the romance between Forster and Bloom—which gets in the way of the volatile Summer Of Love action, and ends in typically nihilistic '60s-youth-pic fashion—Medium Cool still has impact.
  27. Attica
    What’s been forgotten is that the prisoners’ dramatic seizure of Attica was intended to give them a platform for their legitimate grievances—to get the tax-paying citizens to understand what exactly their money was buying. If nothing else, Nelson’s Attica gives these men another opportunity to raise their voices.
  28. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
    The documentary combines interviews with original company members and archival footage with vérité-style training scenes from a college dance troupe’s reinterpretation of the piece. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an artist that simultaneously taps into the personal and political dimensions that inform the creation of art.
  29. Fire at Sea
    All of the film’s constituent parts are superb (with the exception of the DJ segments, which do seem extraneous). It’s the pointedly unpointed way they’ve been assembled that gives pause.
  30. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    Moving like the lit fuse that blazes brilliantly across the opening credits of both the original Mission: Impossible television series and its first big-screen adaptation, Fallout turns out to be a breathlessly exciting action spectacular: the blockbuster spy thriller as sustained endorphin rush.
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