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. Russian Dolls
    These characters are still rich, and their potential growth still compelling. Here's hoping we meet them again in another five years.
  2. Bolt
    For the first time in years, it feels like Disney has done its namesake proud.
  3. The Righteous
    It’s steeped in a grave sense of portentousness that burrows under your skin. The issue is the weighty script, bleak and heavy with apocalyptic consequence, which contains undeniably intriguing notions that are often not satisfactorily explored or don’t quite cohere.
  4. T2 Trainspotting
    It teeters on the edge of relapse, aimless and at a loss as to how it can motivate its returning ensemble of former and current lowlifes, who only ever needed one thing to get them from scene to scene.
  5. This Is the End
    Funny is funny, and it would be truly dishonest to deny the big laughs—the spikes of gut-busting inspiration—that the film sporadically delivers.
  6. My Old School
    Cumming is magnificent in this role, mastering the exact rhythm of Brandon’s speech while also interpreting his emotions with a naturalism that blends seamlessly with testimonials from former students and instructors.
  7. The Door in the Floor
    Bridges turns in another remarkable performance, and he's well-matched by Foster.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    Like "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Sound Of My Voice plausibly demonstrates how someone's sense of self and certainty can be eroded, and like "Another Earth," it was co-written by actress Brit Marling, a melancholy, luminous presence as the group's leader.
  9. The Blood of a Poet
    Few drug-induced visions, however, can match the playful ingenuity of this freewheeling assault on the senses, which eschews conventional narrative in favor of one mesmerizingly bizarre image after another.
  10. Steel City
    For the most part, they live life convincingly, in a refreshingly inward-looking, well-made film that's smart enough to stay small, and leave the car crashes to the big summer action movies.
  11. Mondovino
    For all its pervasive irritations and lack of discipline, succeeds in using below-the-belt tactics to get its message across, especially for those unschooled in the rarified world of oenophilia.
  12. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed.
  13. Fahrenheit 9/11
    As much as the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival insisted that the Palme D'Or was awarded to the best film in competition, it was a sign of the times that they chose to honor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, marking a clear and decisive victory for ideology over aesthetics.
  14. Berlin Babylon
    The film's deep, precise colors, which look like they belong in a Peter Greenaway movie, are Berlin Babylon's first major surprise. The second is how watchable it is, given its obsessive focus on buildings.
  15. Hellaware
    Even with a runtime just barely over an hour, the shock comedy of Hellaware grows a bit numbing after a while.
  16. The Wall
    Haushofer’s book may be a classic, but this is the least imaginative way of filming it imaginable, short of simply pointing the camera at a copy and rapidly flipping the pages.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    It’s enough for Workman to simply assemble a patchwork of Welles in his myriad incarnations (as the hearty Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight; as an arched-eyebrow spokesman for Paul Masson wine; as The Third Man’s cynical Harry Lime; as a sharp, vital youth and a sharp, frail elder) and allow the many faces to confirm, contradict, and, ultimately, speak for themselves.
  18. Halloween
    Halloween isn’t explicitly a horror-comedy, but it does have the destructive habit of undercutting its scares with broad laughs, Green and McBride deflating the tension at every turn with goofball asides.
  19. Synecdoche, New York
    For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Edge of Seventeen
    While Edge Of Seventeen was marketed largely toward gay audiences, it’ll resonate with anyone who remembers the awkwardness and elation of their first sexual experiences, because it captures those experiences better and more honestly than practically any other film.
  21. Charlie Wilson's War
    Nichols succeeds in spinning an entertaining yarn, but the cautionary aspects feel fatally undernourished.
  22. The Iran Job
    The sports drama gives The Iran Job a strong hook, while the cultural context enriches the movie's real story, which is less about Sheppard's life in Iran than about the people he meets.
  23. Alive Inside
    Alive Inside runs a brisk 78 minutes, but that’s still far more time than it requires to make its point; once you’ve seen a couple of old people suddenly come to life upon hearing “I Get Around” or “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” there’s not much to be gained by being presented with half a dozen more instances.
  24. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.
  25. The Little Stranger
    In truth, The Little Stranger is barely a horror movie at all. It’s more of an impeccably crafted chamber drama with a supernatural bent, like Edith Wharton by way of Shirley Jackson.
  26. The Armstrong Lie
    Those who want to see Armstrong sweat may leave disappointed. Calm and seemingly well rehearsed in interviews, Armstrong shrugs off years of public statements without ever seeming truly remorseful.
  27. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    Like Miranda himself, We Are Freestyle Love Supreme has an exuberant theater-kid earnestness that will either prove endearing or grating depending on how you feel about backstage warm-up games and spontaneous sidewalk performances.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ambassador
    The film's tone and structure seem a little strained by the danger in which the filmmaker increasingly puts himself, and the indifference to human life exuded by some of those he meets. By the end, Brügger himself seems to be having trouble finding any of this funny.
  29. The Idea of You
    It’s a warm, approachable movie that you’ll get blissfully lost in.
  30. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.
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