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. F for Fake
    A loving tribute to chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. It is, in other words, a valentine to filmmaking in general, and its larger-than-life creator in particular.
  2. Cléo from 5 to 7
    An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.
  3. Grizzly Man
    Herzog is still the only person who could have made Grizzly Man. His admiration for Treadwell has its limits, but he understands, better than most directors, what it means to follow dreams into the belly of the beast.
  4. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    It’s important to note that there would not even be a show to admire without the trailblazing career of Ma Rainey, which Davis recognizes and honors with her otherworldly portrayal. Still, this is undoubtedly Boseman’s show and will likely live on as his greatest work.
  5. Robot Dreams
    With Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger has crafted an aesthetically gentle but emotionally hardened New York City. Operating under the belief that there is little one can control in a city of that size, Berger allows his film to take flights of fancy that loop around back to companionship.
  6. 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).
  7. Jaws
    Spielberg balances terror on the water with a rich portrait of an island police chief (Roy Scheider) torn between public-safety concerns and a community that thrives on the tourist dollar.
  8. We Are the Best!
    The film’s surface is as spiky as its protagonists’ hair and wardrobe, but the overall effect can only be described as downright endearing.
  9. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Ultimately, the copious, unmanipulated (one hopes!) footage of Dylan himself is what will endure.
  10. About Endlessness
    While Andersson has continued in his signature style for this coda, erecting pallid beige-and-grey backlot dioramas with a painterly eye for crowded composition, he repurposes the technique toward a newfound elegiac, gentle register.
  11. Nomadland
    Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.
  12. 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.
  13. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    The humor edges against absurdism, but stays self-aware and witty, with that mild-mannered optimism presiding.
  14. About Elly (2009)
    This is clearly the work of a master in the making, an artist on the cusp of greatness. Farhadi may be fixated on fibbers, but there’s almost no one working today who makes films so emotionally honest.
  15. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The movie’s dedication to girls everywhere is unnecessary; it already feels so specific and true without it.
  16. Lincoln
    Lincoln is built around a magnetic Day-Lewis turn, and the film is a memorable, sometimes stirring look at how even the most righteous bill must struggle, and even cheat, to become a law. It demands a bigger stage than the one it's given here.
  17. Elena
    It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.
  18. All Is Lost
    Arguably, the performance is too single-minded to achieve real greatness, but its utter lack of showmanship is precisely what the movie requires; at its best, All Is Lost could almost be a documentary about survival at sea, though it’s more starkly elemental than even nature documentaries usually get.
  19. The Banshees of Inisherin
    Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s soulful masterpiece offers a a windswept elegy on a camaraderie that has reached its inexplicable expiration, as well as melancholic rumination on mortality.
  20. Love & Friendship
    It does offer a very amusing portrait of guile and idiocy. Think of it as a divertissement. Both Austen and Stillman would surely approve.
  21. Hereditary
    It’s a supremely effective gauntlet of supernatural horror that’s also, at blackened heart, a grueling domestic drama about how trauma, resentment, and guilt can seep into the roots of a family tree, rotting it from the inside out.
  22. Listen to Me Marlon
    Listen To Me Marlon suffers from an atrocious score that frequently sounds like it belongs in a useless Oscar montage, and it doesn’t reveal much about Brando that cinephiles don’t already know. But the man himself is endlessly fascinating, so it’s hard to fault a movie that ditches anything extraneous (especially talking-head testimonials) in order to let him tell his own story in his own words.
  23. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Nyoni’s direction is brilliant, contrasting the chaos of Uncle Fred’s multi-day funeral with the stillness and solace Shula finds in her cousins’ company.
  24. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    An intoxicating performance piece in which skilled actors pinball off each other with such energy and nuance that the audience almost forgets about the dying man on the edge of the frame. The style alone makes the movie's point.
  25. Maria Full of Grace
    Grim but never gratuitous.
  26. Shakespeare in Love
    Delivers the goods, if the goods you're in the market for happen to be a clever romance concerning William Shakespeare that's unlikely to cause anyone to reassess their notions of Shakespeare, romance, or enjoyment.
  27. Fateless
    Fateless is a strangely beautiful film, enhanced by a typically lyrical Ennio Morricone score and by Koltai's hazy, grayed-out images.
  28. Happy as Lazzaro
    Though gently outraged in its portrait of class divisions, Happy As Lazzaro mostly takes its tonal cues from the eponymous character’s comically gentle, trusting nature.
  29. Caught by the Tides
    It goes without saying that much of it will feel familiar to those already well-versed in the Jia filmography: there’s a yearning, a search, and, finally, a return.
  30. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Revisits the past with an eye on the present and future, hoping as McNamara does that his "lessons" are instructive and might keep history from repeating itself.
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