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. One Child Nation
    As wide-ranging in scope as it is horrifying in its particulars, the film does the necessary work of illuminating, for a large audience, a dark chapter of Chinese history.
  2. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    A must-watch for anyone looking for a thrilling summer blockbuster.
  3. Fourteen
    Medel and Kuhling both give remarkably even-keeled performances, making their differences clear without a lot of voice-raising.
  4. Ghost Town Anthology
    The gradual, matter-of-fact way that Côté transforms Ghost Town Anthology into an actual ghost story is quite impressive.
  5. Varda by Agnès
    As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.
  6. 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.
  7. The Tin Drum
    Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling.
  8. Dune: Part One
    However inconclusive as a story, the resulting film is a rarity among the overlong effects-heavy blockbusters of the last decade: One actually wishes it didn’t have to end so soon.
  9. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    This is a film that takes big swing after big swing, and leaves us filled up with spectacle, warmth, and a sense that the wait was probably worth it.
  10. Body at Brighton Rock
    While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.
  11. Extra Ordinary
    Some jokes may dissipate quickly, but its unusual warmth lingers in the air like a friendly ghost.
  12. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    Although the documentary is a brisk 74 minutes, filmmaker Elizabeth Carroll seems to so fully capture Kennedy’s unfiltered personality that Nothing Fancy becomes not just a portrayal of a world-famous authority on how various communities within Mexico farm, prepare, and eat their traditional dishes, but also a commentary on how we view or judge places through their food. Kennedy has complaints, and Nothing Fancy lets her air them.
  13. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    Gottsagen is too lively to be completely pinned down by feel-good clichés, and his unpredictability brings out the best in LaBeouf. As in most buddy pictures, so long as the chemistry works, all else is forgivable.
  14. Saint Frances
    Saint Frances goes down easy. It’s refreshingly small and intimate, and is specific on the lives of very particular women without overreaching to look more politically salient or strike zeitgeist concerns. Bridget’s personal growth is understated, and so, for the most part, are the pleasures of Saint Frances.
  15. Roustabout
    Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.
  16. Django
    The action that follows doesn't stray too far from formula, nor does it come close to Leone's film, but it's stylishly entertaining enough to serve as a passable time-filler, particularly when its second-rate hero takes to wielding an oversized (and anachronistic) handheld machine gun.
  17. Midnight Traveler
    If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.
  18. Loro
    Servillo—who previously embodied another former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, in Sorrentino’s Il Divo—never fails to deliver a memorably offbeat take on an outsize figure. Loro loses a bit of momentum once Berlusconi finally becomes its central figure, but it also gains some much-needed complexity.
  19. Low Tide
    Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.
  20. Swallow
    Although it’s a reductive statement, calling Swallow a high-class version of "My Strange Addiction" isn’t entirely inaccurate.
  21. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Ultimately, the copious, unmanipulated (one hopes!) footage of Dylan himself is what will endure.
  22. Plus One
    Plus One isn’t much more than consistently amusing and sweetly romantic, but in the right hands, those qualities can still feel like a lot.
  23. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    Frequently, Morrison punctuates her points and her recollections with a warm chuckle, expressing the same embrace of life’s fullness that informs even her bleakest stories.
  24. Atlantics
    For Diop as much as for her lead character, Atlantics resounds with the promise of great things to come.
  25. Bacurau
    As a statement on American entitlement and the intersection between capitalism and colonial terror, it’s a frying pan to the back of the skull: clunky but powerful.
  26. Pain and Glory
    Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.
  27. Frankie
    The whole thing struck me as pleasant, nicely judged, and unremarkable, right up to a final shot so graceful and moving that it sent waves of poignancy backwards through the movie.
  28. Les Misérables
    It’s not subtle, and it’s not pleasant. It’s angry, and it’s honest. Hugo would approve.
  29. Sibyl
    Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.
  30. The Whistlers
    Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.
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