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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Putin's Kiss maintains a wry distance that unnecessarily trivializes the shocking act that finalizes Drokova's parting of ways with Nashi, but the melancholy of her disillusionment remains. Underneath all this heated discussion of democracy in Russia, it becomes clear, there may not be much actual democracy at work.
  2. Cirkus Columbia
    Like its characters, who can't believe their stable nation could be threatened by ethnic unrest, Cirkus Columbia looks to the past, evoking the kind of unreal, vaguely politicized tales that were once the lifeblood of arthouse cinema.
  3. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    For a documentary supposedly focused on fans-it's right there in the title-Comic-Con Episode IV gets awfully distracted by the star power of professional smartasses like Smith and industry titans like Lee.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Free Men
    It's an uplifting tale, if one that gets to a slow start and muddles through scenes of exposition for longer than seems necessary before finally getting to its sequences of action and suspense.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Elles
    Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger.
  6. Payback
    Payback attempts something impressively difficult, but it succeeds primarily in its individual moments.
  7. Delicacy
    The movie is caught between the poignancy of the everyday and the exaggerations of fiction.
  8. Bel Ami
    This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.
  9. Here
    There's a weary soul to HERE, embodied by Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal as two loners who meet in a café and impulsively decide to travel the country together, prompted more by mutual intuition than any meaningful exchange of words.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Late Bloomers
    As a portrait of aging, Late Bloomers is a little too easy, but its cast makes it worth a look, even so.
  11. Noah
    The result is a monolithic slab of Biblical fan fiction, at once deeply serious and seriously silly. It’s a mess, but at least it’s the mess its creators wanted.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Citizen Gangster
    It feels like Morlando is juggling two movies at a time. And only one of them works really well-the one about a disaffected workaday vet avenging himself on the banality of his daily grind.
  13. Death of a Superhero
    Fitzgibbon and McCarten have succeeded in integrating cancer into a slick teen love story, but in the process, they've robbed it of some of its necessary pain.
  14. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.
  15. This Is the End
    Funny is funny, and it would be truly dishonest to deny the big laughs—the spikes of gut-busting inspiration—that the film sporadically delivers.
  16. A Bag of Hammers
    The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.
  17. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.
  18. Union Square
    There isn't much to Union Square, but the movie does understand how people want to love their families on their own terms, forgetting that their families may be the only ones who really know who they are.
  19. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Yet for all the heart and soul the actor pours into his role, watching Dawn still feels a bit like seeing massive, expensive wheels spin in place.
  20. Paul Williams Still Alive
    The footage in Paul Williams Still Alive - old and new - is highly entertaining, even moving. But it's as though Kessler recorded the DVD commentary track first, then made the movie.
  21. Stella Days
    Stella Days' strongest asset is Sheen.
  22. Hello I Must Be Going
    The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.
  23. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Anyone who doesn't already know and care a little about these characters might find the movie a bit thin.
  24. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Its insights are modest, but modesty is a virtue for a low-key comedy this doggedly unpretentious.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Alps
    Lanthimos' skill at orchestrating these tense, creepy, shockingly funny setpieces is just as evident here as it was in "Dogtooth," but too much of Alps is left vague.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    With its slim runtime, the film feels like it should have gone broader or closed in and been just a portrait of the talented, goofy Sano.
  27. Need For Speed
    Need For Speed’s dialogue-centric scenes are often clunky, and its comic relief is at times embarrassingly unfunny, but whenever Waugh shifts his focus to figuring out how to best convey an ingenious practical stunt with the camera, the movie comes alive.
  28. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    It’s good for business but bad for drama, and the inelegantly titled Mockingjay—Part 1 suffers from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. It doesn’t build to an ending so much as just eventually grind to a halt, like a video game demanding more quarters to continue playing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    The true magnitude of this band no longer existing is felt most strongly in these moments, when Shut Up is at its most uplifting and danceable. It's a party Shut Up And Play The Hits decides to leave far too often.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Awakening
    The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.
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