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. Post Tenebras Lux
    The film is never less than fascinating, but it appears to be so intensely personal as to be all but indecipherable to viewers not personally acquainted with the filmmaker, or at least in possession of the press kit.
  2. The Hunt
    None of the complexity of that initial interaction between teacher and lovestruck little girl carries over into the town’s reaction, which closely resembles that of the villagers in "Frankenstein." It’s like watching a deer run from shotguns for two hours — it evokes some sympathy, but that’s about all.
  3. Unmade in China
    As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.
  4. Cutie and the Boxer
    Unfortunately, Cutie And The Boxer feels the need to contextualize — and possibly valorize — the Shinoharas as artists, which detracts from its portrayal of them as a couple.
  5. In a World...
    The movie actually does feature a world — the insular voiceover world — and whenever it strays, it falters.
  6. Europa Report
    As directed by Ecuadorian filmmaker Sebastián Cordero (Chronicles, Rage), Europa Report manages a few striking and intense sequences — most notably, a fatal drift into the endless vacuum of nothingness, filmed from the perspective of the disappearing spaceman.
  7. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6’s considerable graces as an animated film — its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion — are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick.
  8. Augustine
    It’s ironic that a movie about social restrictions is at its best when it restrains itself—that is, when it treats its characters as characters rather than figures, and its plot as drama rather than statement.
  9. Hannah Arendt
    Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.
  10. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    Lian Lunson’s camera allows the music to take center stage via straightforward, graceful compositions—close-ups and medium shots dominate, and edits are kept to a relative minimum—that allow for long, unbroken views of the artists at forceful, mournful work.
  11. Israel: A Home Movie
    Israel’s most interesting — and revealing — footage tends to be the most candid: beach-goers in the ’30s, scenes from family gatherings and celebrations, a coke-fueled celebrity wedding in the ’70s. The commentary gimmick justifies itself in these stretches.
  12. Lone Survivor
    For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.
  13. The Best Man Holiday
    While The Best Man Holiday doesn’t have anything especially original to say on the subject, it’s still refreshing to see a reunion movie set aside the usual themes of aging and reconciliation to focus on how a group deals with death.
  14. Heli
    The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.
  15. Metallica: Through the Never
    This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.
  16. Borgman
    Van Warmerdam keeps things engrossingly ominous throughout, and Bijvoet has a lot of fun with his passive-aggressive creepazoid, but Borgman is both too self-consciously odd and too bluntly punitive to draw real blood.
  17. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    This is a much drier, more reserved affair, though it can be quite powerful on the rare occasions when it allows raw emotion to make its way to the surface.
  18. Dirty Wars
    As a polemic, Dirty Wars is provocative and productively depressing, raising doubts about the effectiveness of military missions that have the potential to create ideological enemies, as well as the degree to which elected officials can—or are willing to—place checks on secret ops. (Obama gets no more points than Bush in any of the matters discussed.)
  19. Wish You Were Here
    A pervasive mood of paranoia and unease overwhelms any immediate understanding of what’s going on. It’s fun to feel lost, at least for a spell.
  20. Blackfish
    Blackfish’s strongest argument against the existence of parks like SeaWorld is how much more gorgeous orcas look in the open ocean than leaping about an oversized swimming pool. And the audience won’t get soaking wet watching them frolic in movies, either.
  21. Kill Your Darlings
    The saving grace of Kill Your Darlings is its sordid romantic angle, a narrative thread that pulls the film away from wink-wink allusions and into more serious emotional territory.
  22. Grabbers
    Once the battle is joined in earnest, what began as sharp-edged parody starts to feel more like a cheap imitation, even if it’s still shot through with a few priceless zingers. The tough thing about genre hybrids is that they have to fulfill both genres, and Grabbers only nails one of them.
  23. The Book of Life
    The characters move around in a thoroughly realized universe full of imaginative and beautifully rendered detail. Too bad the rest of it isn’t more interesting.
  24. Pandora's Promise
    The most counterintuitive enviro-doc of the year, Pandora’s Promise makes the case that nuclear power may be the closest thing Earth has to a sustainable, realistic supply of energy.
  25. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    How to Make Money Selling Drugs is breezy fun, even when it eventually turns openly cynical.
  26. Some Girl(s)
    The title’s parenthetical plural sums up the problem with Some Girl(s): Five slow-cook dialogues that reveal the nice-guy protagonist as a super-tool is four too many.
  27. Stretch
    Puerile, demented, and often funny.
  28. Terminator Genisys
    This new Terminator, the first since the dreadfully dreary and Arnold-less "Salvation," is engineered to feel at once eerily familiar and raise-the-stakes fresh.
  29. The Book Thief
    "Life Is Beautiful" may or may not have set a benchmark for tackiness in Holocaust cinema, but The Book Thief offers a hypothetical way in which the former might have been worse: At least it wasn’t narrated by Death.
  30. Hell Baby
    Functions exactly like a sketch movie, using its meager, essentially irrelevant plot as a clothesline upon which to string a series of self-contained bits. At least half of the bits are pretty damn funny, though, and that’s arguably all that matters.
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