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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    French drama Special Treatment draws a brazenly provocative parallel between the professions of psychiatry and prostitution.
  2. Bullet to the Head
    The X-factors tend to be the script and the performances, and those elements largely betray him in Bullet To The Head, which is a perfunctory exercise whenever Hill isn't busying himself with gun battles, ax fights, and other mano-a-mano confrontations. He can only do so much.
  3. Le Havre
    Kaurismäki has a narrow vision, disarming and sweet, yet utterly predictable, and there's little distinction between the films he's directing today and the films he directed 30 years ago. They have the wrong kind of timelessness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    It's a ride worth more for its journey than its destination. Resurrect Dead does offer a convincing but anticlimactic "solution" to the Toynbee tiles, but the elements along the way are what make it an engaging film.
  5. Pariah
    There are times when even its subtleties seem predictable, when it questions dramatic conventions that indie films have already questioned, like the temperament of movie-parents whose children fear coming out of the closet. Yet the film has an abiding sweetness that's ultimately irresistible.
  6. Les Miserables
    The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.
  7. Anna Karenina
    If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    The Man Nobody Knew is far better with matters of the public record than with matters of the home, which may sum up its subject better than any talking-head interview.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    American Teacher
    The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it's impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.
  10. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    Made with affection and access but not enough structure.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Klitschko
    The film acknowledges that the only great opponents left for the pair to face may be each other, but the question of whether they'd ever fight is rendered moot by the time it's actually addressed at the end.
  12. Pina
    It's also representative of Pina's major flaw: the inability of artists to get out of their own way.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    5 Star Day is a middling indie, but it offers evidence of how far a synthetic setup can get just by allowing characters to react and reflect.
  14. The Look
    There are very few light, casual moments in The Look; even when Rampling pops into a deli to buy a sandwich, we hear her in voiceover talking about her demons. An hour and a half of this is frankly exhausting.
  15. Ender's Game
    Though it can’t overcome the source material’s problematic themes — namely, Card’s intentionalist morality, which prizes a character’s ideals over their actions — or its all-too-convenient characterizations, the film manages a sustained sense of momentum and tone that is rare for a contemporary, big-budget movie.
  16. RED 2
    Like its predecessor, it’s a one-joke movie; the difference is that this time around, the joke is better.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Knuckle
    It's an involving but frustrating peek into a private culture involved in a self-defeating cycle of violence and mythologizing.
  18. Addiction Incorporated
    The heart of Addiction Incorporated is what happened after DeNoble was canned and later emerged as a key witness in news reports, courtrooms, and Congressional subcommittees. Bound by a non-disclosure agreement, DeNoble operated like a character in a real-life John Grisham thriller.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Perfect Sense
    The perseverance of McGregor's restaurant, in spite of its apparent inutility in the changing world, ends up having more poignancy than his parting and reuniting with the glowering Green.
  20. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Just as Marston's scrupulous attention to local custom and devotion to social realism recall the work of John Sayles (Lone Star), his occasionally enervating style also recalls Sayles at his worst.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lawless
    A thoroughly familiar-but flavorful and rousing-shoot-'em-up set among Prohibition bootleggers.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lads & Jockeys
    By giving the boys onscreen room to be goofy and immature, Marquet makes the film something warmer than a formal study in discipline and being made to grow up before their time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Larger Than Life provides a look back at a time of show business and stardom that no longer exists.
  24. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.
  25. Detachment
    For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
  26. Paranormal Activity 4
    The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
  27. The Island President
    The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.
  28. The Snowtown Murders
    The sense of enervation that creeps into the movie's second half is bothersome mainly because The Snowtown Murders is often brilliant in its depiction of the mundanity of evil.
  29. Keyhole
    Keyhole's flashes of actual B-movie coherence are enough to make longtime Maddin-watchers wonder if he could've played this material straighter, with more of a plot and fewer reveries.
  30. Peeples
    If Peeples had more bite, it might pass for an underhanded critique of its producer’s work.
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