The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Submarine
    Submarine is the film "Youth In Revolt" should have been, an achingly sad yet ribald account of a hyper-verbal oddball's ascent/descent into manhood.
  2. Coriolanus
    As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.
  3. Life of Pi
    The larger messages about spirituality often seem forced, and it's more compelling to focus on Lee's visceral cinematic experience than on the larger, fuzzier messages Martel's story conveys about humanity's connection with God.
  4. Beautiful Boy
    Like its fellow crowd-depressor "Blue Valentine," Beautiful Boy offers the antithesis of escapism: a claustrophobic, punishingly intense, beautifully measured exploration of the depths of human despair.
  5. Tyrannosaur
    Considine directs with the confidence of a veteran, giving his actors room to work while letting an ominous, overcast mood hang over almost every scene.
  6. Skyfall
    Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.
  7. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Even when making movies for small children, Studio Ghibli produces stories that are more emotionally sophisticated, and less philosophically polarized, than most adult fare.
  8. The Avengers
    Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.
  9. The Dark Knight Rises
    The miracle of Nolan's Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.
  10. Project Nim
    To an equal extent, Project Nim shows the human capacity for cruelty and narcissism as well as compassion and selflessness.
  11. The Arbor
    It helps that the actors' faces are so mesmerizing, particularly Manjinder Virk as Lorraine.
  12. Another Earth
    It's an ambitious premise and a risky approach, but Cahill and his cast execute it beautifully.
  13. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Because the movie plays on so many common fears - including fears of being in a remote house with big windows when intruders arrive - the confusion of Martha Marcy May Marlene proves effective, not sloppy.
  14. Tabloid
    McKinney may well be a madwoman, but Morris connects so deeply to her obsessions that the film's tone never seems exploitative or mocking.
  15. Louder Than a Bomb
    Louder Than A Bomb is a different kind of high-school movie, brimming with life and hope instead of social-climbing, bullying, and furtive first kisses.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    While it's far from easy going, The Mill And The Cross is worth attempting for its stunning visuals alone.
  17. Tuesday, After Christmas
    More about well-observed moments of everyday life than it is about heightened melodrama.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    One Lucky Elephant
    One Lucky Elephant would make an affecting pairing with James Marsh's upcoming "Project Nim," another film about an animal treated like a human until its essential wildness made that impossible.
  19. Django Unchained
    Tarantino simply isn't a good enough performer for his presence to be anything but a distraction in a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser this consistently great.
  20. Looper
    Looper is a remarkable feat of imagination and execution, entertaining from start to finish, even as it asks the audience to contemplate how and why humanity keeps making the same rotten mistakes.
  21. Leap Year
    Never to be confused for the rom-com starring Amy Adams - though that would be the mother of all video-store mix-ups - Leap Year lets actions speak louder than words, and the actions here are shockingly explicit.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Senna
    Senna is considered one of motorsporting's greats, but Asif Kapadia's film also makes it clear he was a sort of artist, his talent accompanied by an unquenchable thirst for excellence and a belief that racing offered him a connection to God.
  23. Miss Bala
    Miss Bala toes a delicate line between exploitation movie and movie about exploitation, but that's part of what gives the film its charge - this isn't some flaccid docudrama about how the cartels are poisoning the country, it's a lively, white-knuckle thriller where any such proselytizing is reduced to implication.
  24. Wuthering Heights
    It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.
  25. 12 Years a Slave
    If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread — the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Declaration of War
    Sprinting through hospital rooms, parties, sterile corridors, and grayish courtyards, Declaration Of War salutes its characters' capacity to step up and meet life's harshest unexpected demands.
  27. House of Pleasures
    Without soft-pedaling it in the least, Bonello nonetheless mourns the passing of a time where prostitutes didn't control their destinies, but at least had each other.
  28. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    It isn't just the fashions that date this documentary, or the subjects' shared experiences of the European turmoil of the mid-20th-century. It's also their work itself, which is like a relic of some ancient civilization.
  29. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    The body means different things for each of them, and Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Monsieur Lazhar
    More than a class full of convincing child actors and a genuinely affecting performance by Fellag, Falardeau offers a film as believably wrenching, and finally cathartic, as the grieving process itself.
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