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. Caged Heat
    Caged Heat is inspired from start to finish.
  2. Long Shot
    At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.
  3. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.
  4. Freaky
    This is a fast-paced, likable, and silly romp arriving at a time where a horror movie’s memorability tends to correlate with its evocative doominess. Even when Freaky doesn’t live up to its full potential, there’s still something oddly satisfying about unmasking a slasher movie to reveal the ’80s comedy lurking underneath.
  5. The Legend of Ochi
    Yet for all of its imaginative inspirations, The Legend Of Ochi feels under-conceptualized: It’s a fairytale without much stirring under the studiously designed surface.
  6. Schultze Gets the Blues
    With dialogue as spare as its harsh landscapes, the film is so tonally dry that it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like the Farrelly brothers--it begins at a snail's pace before speeding up to a turtle's drowsy crawl.
  7. Girl Asleep
    Never betraying an iota of lived experience, it trots out tropes seen in dozens of movies and sitcom episodes (the embarrassing dad, the big party, the fictional rock star crush, etc.), which can ring true only because they’ve been in circulation for decades.
  8. Furious 7
    The series will doubtless continue on with Diesel, Rodriguez, Johnson, and the rest, but in the meantime, Furious 7 comes to the most conclusive and emotionally satisfying ending since, fittingly, the very first film.
  9. Upgrade
    Whannell strikes out on his own with his first truly original concept as a writer-director...in a film whose production is as ambitious as its story is formulaic. Thankfully, the former mostly compensates for the latter, making Upgrade a genre-bending summer treat for those who don’t mind a little (okay, a lot) of blood with their popcorn.
  10. Brothers of the Head
    Brothers isn't nearly as haunting and singular as "Last Days," because the faux-documentary format too closely mirrors the Behind The Music trajectory of a thousand other rock-band flameouts.
  11. Patti Cake$
    There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.
  12. Death at a Funeral
    Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Surfer
    The Surfer slowly follows the threads of its hero’s unraveling neuroses, and Cage walks right up to the line of sanity as each strand comes undone. It is a marvelous pushback against expectations that he stays on the other side of that line.
  14. Misunderstood
    The ostensible boldness of Misunderstood is undermined by the sense that it’s also pandering—that its view of childhood as a bourgeois horror-show is at least as salable on the art-house circuit as it is authentic to its creator’s experiences.
  15. Ma
    The result is decidedly uneven, but the film’s sheer creative ambition is invigorating.
  16. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    To some degree, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is a more offbeat film than the original, with better gags, better (and more cartoonish) action, and more visual variety.
  17. Farewell, My Queen
    Working from Chantal Thomas' novel, Jacquot doesn't entirely scrape the gloss off this love triangle, which plays neither as a florid bodice-ripper nor as emotionally complex as it might have been. It stays on the surface, but at least that surface is gorgeous.
  18. Deep Cover
    As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.
  19. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Larger Than Life provides a look back at a time of show business and stardom that no longer exists.
  21. Jealousy
    Jealousy — arguably the slightest film Garrel has produced since the 1980s — may not add up to a whole lot, but its sense of life and the medium is, as always, substantial and accomplished.
  22. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Ultimately, this is a movie to appreciate in isolated bits and pieces.
  23. Reality Bites
    Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie's portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow...No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct.
  24. Rosewater
    All well and good — and, again, damn near unquestionably sincere — except that Rosewater isn’t much of a film.
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