The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,440 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: 5,581 out of 10440
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10440
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10440
10440 movie reviews
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  1. The BFG
    There’s no doubt that Spielberg has made The BFG his own, drowning everything in the tinkle of a familiar John Williams score and even managing to incorporate a kid in a red coat. But maybe this is one story that didn’t need to become his own, or really anyone else’s. State-of-the-art special effects are no substitute for Dahl’s inviting prose, for the dreams he blew into adolescent imaginations.
  2. The Kid Who Would Be King
    Might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script.
  3. Diggers
    As befits a heartfelt ode to working-class values, Diggers puts in lots of hard, honest work that finally pays off in a wholly predictable yet unexpectedly moving conclusion.
  4. Crash
    Haggis, who wrote the fine adapted screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby," embeds Crash's script so deeply in allegory that every revelation feels manipulative and programmatic, in spite of some terrific individual scenes and performances.
  5. Tommy
    For all that Tommy bungles or overdoes, it’s still a powerful experience, musically and visually.
  6. The Danish Girl
    There’s an irony that a movie about a trans individual who needs to live and be accepted as a woman should have some of the worst symptoms of a very straight and very male gaze.
  7. Game Night
    This tame but fitfully funny goof on suspense cinema at least assembles an agreeable guest list.... As with any real game night, the company is more important than the game.
  8. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    The Woman With The 5 Elephants isn't flawless; as articulate and fascinating as Geier could be, she was also dry at times. But Jendreyko cleverly parcels out her personal history, and he isn't afraid to break up the talkiness with long silences and luminous images.
  9. Don Jon
    To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Palace
    White Palace is more than a romance or a bedroom romp or human comedy. It is a lesson in judgments and values, and a glimpse at emotional roulette.
  11. So Close
    This sort of film lives or dies by its promise of bullet-dodging, stylishly clad women throwing themselves into impossible feats of daring, and when the time comes for action, Yuen displays a rare gift.
  12. The Eye
    For a while, it's a dark, insubstantial treat.
  13. Bend It Like Beckham
    Like the rest of the film, Beckham's climax is surprisingly satisfying, however, in large part because director Gurinder Chadha films the competing big game and big fat Indian wedding of Nagra's sister with equivalently bursting levels of color, panache, and verve.
  14. El bonaerense
    As a morality play, it's a one-sided contest, because the question of whether power corrupts is never a question at all. As a queasily thrilling tour of a dirty little corner of the world, however, Trapero's film offers a memorable ride.
  15. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    Barking Dogs Never Bite is uneven, unnecessarily provocative, and exhausts its central premise long before the closing credits, but it’s invigorating to watch regardless. After all, Bong is just doing what New Wave artists do: experimenting, breaking rules, showing off.
  16. The Prestige
    For all its surface dazzle, The Prestige shares with this year's earlier "The Illusionist" a certain core hollowness. Maybe that's a natural consequence of even the best magic shows: You can't help but feel duped.
  17. The Driller Killer
    Darkly fascinating, as much a document of the late-'70s New York punk and pop-art scenes as it is a grindhouse plugger.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Kelly
    King Kelly is a broad indictment of the emptier side of self-documentation and a more nuanced one of the Internet as a source of affirmation.
  19. Double Take
    Any 15-minute stretch of Double Take proves as enlightening as any other--more like a museum installation than a movie.
  20. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    The results are scattershot but entertaining, and occasionally eye-opening.
  21. Judy
    It’s an intriguing idea that results in a painfully by-the-books biopic. That being said, a gusty, heartbreaking turn from Renée Zellweger makes the exercise worth sitting through.
  22. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    This silly, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, but the irony of its banality is more recoiling than provocative.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Restoration
    Downey seems subdued in the film's central role, as if he's out of his league when it comes to dramatically stretching as an actor. Even when all decked out in foppish finery, looking absolutely ridiculous to the objective eye, he can't find a way to focus your attention on him. Instead, in looking at him, all you can do is wonder: How much did those duds cost?
  24. Wonka
    In King and company’s capable hands, the care package delivered is a soul-warming cup of cocoa. Sweet yet never saccharine, cute yet never cloying, their hyper-stylized portrait of an iconic literary and cinematic figure is not only powered by the pure imagination that inspires the songs’ spectacle, but it’s also filled with audacious flourishes of charm, whimsy and poignancy.
  25. 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.
  26. 306 Hollywood
    The result feels like an experiment to determine whether sheer creativity can transform the mundane into the magical, and qualifies as a partial success. If nothing else, you have to concede that they tried.
  27. Truth
    That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.
  28. Disorder
    The trick of Disorder is that it plays right to the audience’s suspicions and desires.
  29. Family Law
    While Family Law is well-shot, it's not spectacularly well-shot, or involving in any conventional cinematic way.
  30. Parents
    The mark of a great horror comedy is the degree to which it delivers the two generally incompatible genres in equal measure. By that metric, the 1989 horror comedy Parents is an abject failure. Sure, the film has elements of both horror and comedy, but overall, the film falls firmly in the horror category. The laughs are few and far between, and once the dread starts creeping in, it intensifies until the final shot.
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