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. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    It’s easy to see why Demme admires the man, but amiability doesn’t make for a great documentary subject. If anything, it tends to be something of a drawback, offering only warm fuzzies.
  2. Elvis
    Unfortunately, what audiences get from Luhrmann is simply excessive: his fast-cutting super-montage style overpowers the subject matter, and the result is an impressionistic, jumbled highlight reel of Presley’s many accomplishments, despite vivid recreations by actor Austin Butler as The King.
  3. Gypsy
    This isn't a film about abstract social ills, it's about specific people in a specific place, and how they get disturbingly comfortable with theft and violence as a way of life.
  4. Holy Hell
    Holy Hell has an undeniable car-crash fascination, especially once Allen reveals just how deeply this particular phony guru abused the trust of his faithfuls.
  5. Kaboom
    Kaboom is pure fantasy in every sense of the word: It's a riff on sexy, sassy teen movies and conspiracy thrillers that at times seems to exist only so Araki can get his beautiful young cast to strip off their clothes and pair off in every conceivable combination, just as he used to do in his earlier, more scandalous films.
  6. Identity
    Simultaneously a contrived piece of hokum and an absorbing, old-fashioned mystery.
  7. Intermission
    Like many stylish, whipcrack American and British indies made in the wake of Quentin Tarantino and "Trainspotting," the film gets off on the same anything-can-happen storytelling brio, which at least keeps things lively. But without any resonant characters or ideas, it's all empty calories.
  8. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Posed somewhere between a fairy tale and harsh reality, the film pulls off a daring feat by turning Blancan into an almost abstract monster as a way of getting into the deeply unhealthy situation that created him.
  9. Team America: World Police
    Years from now, Team America will better convey the political character of 2004 than a stack of Time magazines. Staying funny helps even more.
  10. Christmas in Connecticut
    A thoroughly wacky 1945 screwball comedy that also doubles as a fascinatingly subversive commentary on conventional gender roles. It’s a bit of a hidden gem in the Christmas canon.
  11. Chinese Puzzle
    It’s the best of the trilogy, though that’s not saying much; Xavier and his gal pals have mellowed somewhat with age, and Klapisch seems much more energized by New York than he was by his previous locales.
  12. Napoleon
    Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    You Kill Me
    The main pleasure lies in watching a cast filled with fine character actors like Kingsley, Farina, Hall, and Bill Pullman work their way around the salty, noir-inflected dialogue. It's just unfortunate that those lines add up to such piffle.
  14. Living Out Loud
    LaGravenese lets real-life messiness keep it off a straight track, coming up with an unexpected and touching portrait of platonic friendship.
  15. Killing Them Softly
    For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.
  16. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing is less a fully formed satire than a clever idea stuck in first draft and stretched uncomfortably to feature length.
  17. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    This kitschy, weirdo movie has such a bizarre clarity of vision about what it wants to do that a few biffed jokes are almost part of its charm, like its sketch-comedy accents and intentional defiance of logic.
  18. Brideshead Revisited
    It's rare to find a work that explores issues of faith without veering into religious fundamentalism or militant atheism, which is reason enough to revisit Brideshead one more time.
  19. Fifty-Fifty
    Though it's equally concerned with sensitive young criminals in squalid communities, Schizo is no "City Of God," for better and worse.
  20. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    Though it doesn't rise above the cut-and-paste aesthetic of other making-of documentaries, The Siberian Mammoth assembles many members of the disparate Cuban cast and crew, and unearths some rare production photos and footage.
  21. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.
  22. Cloverfield
    It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.
  23. Miles Ahead
    So give Don Cheadle credit for innovation, at least: His Miles Davis biopic (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in), Miles Ahead, tackles the problem head-on… by inventing cinematic things for Davis to do when he’s not playing music, including ludicrous car chases and gunfights.
  24. Fury
    It’s all very Peckinpah — or at least it could be, if Ayer had any sense of poetry.
  25. Tamara Drewe
    While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.
  26. To the Bone
    It’s snarkier and a little more self-conscious than the rest, but just as cornball.
  27. Fool for Love
    The perverse story of a randy cowboy (played by Shepard himself) and his sister/lover Kim Basinger needs the tension of live performance for its incest-as-metaphor diagram to pop out.
  28. The Young Victoria
    The film lays on its politics-as-chess-game metaphor a little thick, however, and its refusal to leave the corridors of power to see the impact of its developments on the country at large makes it feel stuffy after a while.
  29. The Road
    Aas grim as The Road gets, Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness.
  30. True Crime
    As disappointing-but-worthwhile films go, you could do a lot worse.
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