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. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    No Restraint misses a lot of opportunities, like the chance to contrast Barney's work with artists working on a lower budget, or to examine his positive and negative influence on modern art, or to break down an economic model based on selling off the pieces Barney discards along the way.
  2. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    This is a fascinating, underreported piece of recent world history, but Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan's documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story doesn't do it full justice.
  3. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
    The film ends so beautifully that it's easy to forgive the dead passages that preceded it and hope it carries over into his next movie.
  4. The Boss of It All
    The Boss Of It All, though clever as a piece of genre deconstruction, isn't terribly funny.
  5. Lights in the Dusk
    Without Kaurismäki to introduce these lonely, forgotten souls to audiences, who's going to be his friend?
  6. Macbeth
    It's Macbeth by way of “The Covenant,” all brooding pretty-boys with emo eyes and hipster hair, standing around in gauzily decorated rich-kid boudoirs in the dead of night, and at times, it's too overblown to take seriously.
  7. Love for Sale
    A tough-minded story about how to define self-worth.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    There's incredible feeling behind Steal A Pencil For Me--enough to sustain two lives throughout unimaginable hardship--but the film doesn't bring much of it to the surface.
  9. Protagonist
    Offers four fairly interesting monologues, undercut by ominous music, stylistic frippery, and a structure that all but guarantees the audience will be able to predict where the stories will go.
  10. CJ7
    C7J isn't as cutesy as "Batteries Not Included" or "Short Circuit," or as grim as "Gremlins," though it resembles them all in its jerky, semi-comic look at the havoc and helpfulness of weirdo artificial life.
  11. Girls Rock!
    Girls Rock! is cutesy and quick-cut, emphasizing the absurd while trying to keep the audience's interest with animated interludes and footage from corny old industrial films.
  12. Boarding Gate
    Boarding Gate's surfaces are often so staggeringly beautiful that its superficiality becomes forgivable, with the pleasant distractions of Assayas' multi-layered frames, Argento's sinewy allure, and snippets of Brian Eno ambience on the soundtrack. Why can't all movies this inane be this accomplished?
  13. Love Songs
    Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against grief.
  14. Smart People
    Dennis Quaid could stand in for Jeff Daniels' similarly toxic snob in "The Squid And The Whale," if only he were a little smarter and a little better-dressed.
  15. Stuff and Dough
    There's no question of the mood Puiu means to capture, the sullen anomie of a rootless generation, but too often, he's just spinning his wheels.
  16. Finding Amanda
    It's amusing but facile, reasonably clever but hopelessly glib.
  17. Before I Forget
    It's hardly a rosy picture of what it's like to be gay and 60 in Paris. But it's an engrossing picture.
  18. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Even when Midnight Kiss is sputtering, viewers can tune the dialogue out and just watch the scenery in one of the most "there"-y L.A. movies ever made.
  19. Year of the Fish
    To some degree, it's trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are cringe-inducing and problematic.
  20. August Evening
    The unforced ease of the performances make August Evening an intermittent pleasure, but its images aren't strong enough to sustain its undisciplined length.
  21. Theater of War
    Though Theater Of War is informative--both about Brecht and about the effort it takes to mount a big New York production--Walter overreaches in trying to connect Brecht’s anti-war sentiment with contemporary protest movements, and doesn't do more than dabble with the themes of truth and representation in documentary filmmaking.
  22. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Much like the recent "remember when" documentary "Man On Wire," Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 builds strong momentum in its home stretch, and sends the audience out on a high.
  23. Guest of Cindy Sherman
    It all begins to feel tawdry, especially since Paul H-O never seems to realize that even though he wants everyone to know who he is, he’s never given a good reason why we should.
  24. Shall We Kiss?
    The very definition of "breezy." It's a featherweight romantic comedy.
  25. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Love looks and sounds great, but in depicting N’Dour as a lofty symbol for music’s power to bridge worlds and inspire, it sometimes loses sight of the man.
  26. Art & Copy
    The film is essentially a skillful advertising-industry infomercial that speaks its subject’s slick aesthetic language.
  27. At the Edge of the World
    Plays like an extended episode of "Deadliest Catch" with eco-warriors as the stars--in fact, the Animal Planet show "Whale Wars," now in its second season, follows Sea Shepherd’s exploits--and it’s frequently a rousing adventure.
  28. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.
  29. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    It’s a fascinating story, it doesn’t always make for a fascinating documentary.
  30. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Raises the question of whether Krasinski made this movie because he really loves Wallace’s work, or because just he wanted to show Hollywood that the loveable doof from The Office can actually act.
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