The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,423 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10423
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10423
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10423
10423 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. The D Train
    It’s a mess, but it’s a commendable mess. Bonus points for ambition and nerve.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Welcome to Me
    The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.
  15. Iris
    It’s a happily modest movie that, while frequently edging toward boredom, is never actively off-putting.
  16. 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.
  17. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  18. 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.
  19. Little Boy
    A colossal miscalculation in audience uplift.
  20. Misery Loves Comedy
    To a person, these comedians are looking for a connection, some attention, and appreciation — which makes them, as Penn Jillette points out toward the end, just like everybody else, only they have microphones and spotlights.
  21. Adult Beginners
    Adult Beginners, by contrast, is mostly just… nice. Neither dramatic enough to qualify as drama nor amusing enough to completely succeed as comedy, it’s the kind of movie that coasts on pleasantness, content to elicit a few smiles before disappearing from memory banks.
  22. 24 Days
    24 Days is neither subtle nor particularly sophisticated as filmmaking, but its refusal to reduce lived reality to generic tropes is admirable.
  23. The Water Diviner
    His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.
  24. The Age of Adaline
    For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    As expressionistic as it is journalistic, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten triumphs as both an objective record and a poetic lament: It’s a film that’s every bit as entrancing and haunting as the lost music it celebrates.
  26. Child 44
    Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.
  27. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.
  28. Unfriended
    The filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format.
  29. True Story
    The meat of the movie is the behind-bars rendezvous between Finkel and Longo, whose interactions raise questions of journalistic responsibility and the banality of evil. But when a closing block of text announces that the two men still talk on a semi-regular basis — a surprise, given the finality of their last on-screen meeting — it’s hard to shake the feeling that a truly complex liaison has been reduced to an acting exercise for a couple of moonlighting funnymen.
  30. Tangerines
    The shift from philosophical parrying to actual combat doesn’t make Tangerines more compelling; on the contrary, it suggests that the filmmakers didn’t have the confidence to tell their story without falling back on genre tropes.
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