The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,441 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: 5,582 out of 10441
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10441
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10441
10441 movie reviews
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  1. The Love We Make
    Mostly, though, the pleasure of The Love We Make comes from watching one of the most famous musicians in the world looking totally chill, whether he's rehearsing with his band or casually chatting with Bill Clinton.
  2. Camille Claudel 1915
    Whatever nuance the movie has, it owes to Binoche’s performance; despite the material and visual context, she’s able to convey a sense of contradiction and inner life.
  3. Godspell
    Maybe the broad gestures, colorful costumes, and exaggerated acting worked in the theater. As a movie, it's actively, fascinatingly terrible, with a vision of Christ more likely to instill in viewers a fear of traveling bands of loony street performers than a desire to embrace the Holy Spirit.
  4. Grace Is Gone
    Attempts to address grief frankly, gently, and without didacticism, and it largely succeeds.
  5. Spinning Plates
    As separate snapshots of three fascinating businesses, it’s vivid and engaging.
  6. Tigertail
    Where the film stands out from other dramas of its type is in its poignant exploration of the little-discussed emotional consequences of single-mindedly pursuing the American dream.
  7. Black Dynamite
    Sometimes feels like an all-time classic short film stretched to feature length, but it’s blissfully short, and it peaks at the end with a groovy cartoon during the closing credits.
  8. Bless Me, Ultima
    The movie is at its best when it’s at its smallest: when Ganalon quietly watches Colon coax a dying young man into vomiting up his “curse,” or when Ganalon is getting laughed out of his classroom because he has a burrito in his lunchbox instead of a sandwich.
  9. Body Snatchers
    Ferrara, a visual expressionist at heart, creates some really unsettling moments, though maybe the most impressive thing about the movie is that it manages to make what’s basically a happy ending seem soul-crushingly bleak.
  10. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    Though it might be unreasonable to expect Karel and Manera to succeed where others have failed, simply punting on the amount of autobiography in Roth’s novels seems like a cheat. Sticking to what’s on the page pays off, especially with regard to Roth’s undervalued late novels, but also means he has them just where he wants them.
  11. Paddington In Peru
    More of an awkward step down than a pratfall from grace, Paddington In Peru is messier than its forebears.
  12. Staying Vertical
    Staying Vertical is distinguished largely by its poker-faced playfulness. Bonnard is a wonderfully quizzical presence in the lead, expertly creating the impression of a person who has no idea what he wants but is nonetheless determined to get it.
  13. Birth of the Living Dead
    Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.
  14. Lemming
    The film is much more intriguing in its dread-inducing opening half, when Moll's assured direction keeps suggesting that something horrible will be happening soon, then, when it does, that something even more horrifying may follow.
  15. Ismael's Ghosts
    Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.
  16. Stars at Noon
    An occasionally seductive but muddled examination of a complex physical and emotional relationship.
  17. Before the Fall
    It's an emotionally chilly movie with a blank, inexpressive protagonist, but it gains cumulative force en route to a viscerally moving climax.
  18. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Flanagan has a couple of solid genre films on his résumé already; at this point in his career, it would have been surprising if Origin Of Evil wasn’t better than Ouija. It is better, though, in every conceivable way, from casting to story to atmosphere.
  19. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    As history, The Butler’s parade of famous moments and figures is superficial to the point of trivialization, reducing years of turmoil to glib sound bites. But in its square, melodramatic way, the movie has a serious point to make.
  20. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Sijie mostly adapts his own work dryly and literally—the footage of the Chinese mountainside is breathtaking, but it's the only thing in the film with much depth.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Life, Above All
    The ending, which offers a hint of relief, is unfiltered, frankly unbelievable melodrama, but something grimmer and more measured would be intolerable after everything that comes before.
  22. 11:14
    The best possible feeling that 11:14 could leave behind is that Marcks has pulled off something clever, but just bringing the puzzle pieces together isn't that impressive a feat. As "Memento" proves, it's the big picture that really counts.
  23. The Slaughter Rule
    Though some of Slaughter Rule's conclusions are overly tidy, the film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads, especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands.
  24. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    As documentary moviemaking, though, Ellis and Mueller's work falls a little flat.
  25. Closer
    Dramatically leaps through time, covering months or sometimes years in the span of a single cut. The effect is jarring and exhilarating, but it also bucks the common idea that relationships deepen over time.
  26. The Decomposition of the Soul
    Decomposition bears powerful, uncompromising witness to man's inhumanity to man, which is one of the most important things any documentary can do, though, it's also one of the most grueling.
  27. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.
  28. Foxes
    It’s not that great a movie, with a plodding pace that makes teenage wildlife look kind of dull, even as it wraps it in attractive packaging.
  29. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    Mark Hamill nails every one liner the writers throw at him (I tried to get as many as I could in Stray Observations, but I’m sure I missed some), and his signature Joker laugh is used to chilling effect throughout the film.
  30. Ex-Husbands
    Is it “funny,” really? No. Is it searingly dramatic in a way that pulls at your heartstrings? No. And yet it possesses an undeniable authenticity, wrapping its arms around a truth most movies avoid: there’s no such thing as absolute certainty in life.
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