The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    What’s perhaps most telling about the artist himself is a later-in-life project he builds in his cluttered backyard, a sort of funhouse ride through his own psyche.
  2. Animals
    It never pushes far enough into that territory to distinguish its beautiful losers from the many addiction-movie characters that precede them.
  3. Pitch Perfect 2
    It’s at once an encore, a postscript, and a fresh start.
  4. Slow West
    What it demonstrates most conclusively is that writer-director John Maclean, making his first feature after a career spent mostly as a musician (notably as a member of The Beta Band), knows how to tell a terrific yarn. Why he chose not to do so with the movie as a whole, then, is something of a mystery.
  5. Every Secret Thing
    Every Secret Thing doesn’t feel like it fell off an assembly line, but that’s not saying that it’s been skillfully engineered. By the end, its rickety narrative architecture collapses entirely, leaving a lot of good actors stranded in the rubble.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    I'll See You in My Dreams
    Every actor gives their all, even when the material is insultingly thin.
  7. In the Name of My Daughter
    Like any good prosecutor, Téchiné gives us enough information to render a verdict without bullying us into agreement. His gift to his viewers is the space to think for ourselves.
  8. The Connection
    Without a hair-trigger renegade like Popeye Doyle or a long-awaited De Niro-Pacino showdown at its center, this procedural account, running well over two hours, takes on a certain plodding, obligatory vibe.
  9. Mad Max: Fury Road
    For all the chaos erupting at all times, we never lose track of what’s going on, because it’s been staged not just with diabolical mischief, but also total clarity. What a movie.
  10. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The 100-Year-Old Man surely won’t conquer the U.S. box office, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a foreign film that isn’t deadly serious. We could use more subtitled belly laughs.
  11. Skin Trade
    These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.
  12. Noble
    The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.
  13. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Seven Five
    Dowd is the film’s main interviewee, telling his story with a hyped-up machismo that makes him seem like a Scorsese character come to life. The biggest issue with The Seven Five is that it often feels like it’s mimicking Saint Marty’s stylistic and thematic bag of tricks.
  15. 5 Flights Up
    If 5 Flights Up is worth seeing, it’s primarily for the pleasure of Keaton and Freeman’s company, plus maybe for some tips on buying and selling an apartment.
  16. The D Train
    It’s a mess, but it’s a commendable mess. Bonus points for ambition and nerve.
  17. Maggie
    The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.
  18. Hot Pursuit
    Witherspoon and Vergara are both experienced comedic actors with charisma to spare, and watching them pal around is a perfectly pleasant way to pass some time. But with material this uninspired, 87 minutes of riding shotgun is long enough.
  19. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.
  20. Reality
    A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.
  21. Far from the Madding Crowd
    To be fair, Far From The Madding Crowd isn’t the kind of novel that lends itself to adaptation; it was originally published as a monthly serial, and still reads that way.
  22. Hyena
    A few dreamy interludes aside, the film’s tone is cool, dispassionate, and matter-of-fact. All that’s missing is a reason to give a damn.
  23. Far From Men
    Nobody moseys like Viggo Mortensen. In "The Road," "Appaloosa," "Jauja," and the new French Western Far From Men, the erstwhile Aragorn masters the tricky art of being a figure in the landscape.
  24. Ride
    Hunt’s writing isn’t exactly knocking off Woody Allen (her characters do send text messages, after all), but it shares with Allen a peculiar, stylized imitation of how New Yorkers supposedly sound.
  25. Welcome to Me
    The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.
  26. Iris
    It’s a happily modest movie that, while frequently edging toward boredom, is never actively off-putting.
  27. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    There’s so much ground to cover here—so many introductions to make, so much story to churn through, so many gargantuan set pieces to mount—that the movie never really finds room to breathe.
  28. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  29. Kung Fu Killer
    Here, in this entertaining, preposterous goof of a kung fu movie, are all those values missing from the mainstream of American action filmmaking, not the least of which is a sense of the camera as a participant.
  30. Little Boy
    A colossal miscalculation in audience uplift.
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