The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,425 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 2.6 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: 5,575 out of 10425
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10425
  3. Negative: 1,109 out of 10425
10425 movie reviews
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  1. A Hijacking
    While the improvisatory movement of the camera helps create a sense of ambiguous tension in the scenes where the crew interacts with the pirates, it also undercuts several more overtly dramatic moments. However, this shortcoming of filmmaking imagination is largely redeemed by the pessimistic wallop of the movie’s ending.
  2. The Attack
    All the same, as dramatized here, The Attack skirts perilously close to being an apologia for suicide bombing.
  3. World War Z
    World War Z bucks the current trend in summer blockbusters by feeling weirdly understuffed. It’s an episodic adventure without enough episodes.
  4. Rushlights
    Unabashedly pulpy, Rushlights brings to mind the noir cheapies churned out by the studios of Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early 1950s. It has a few of the better qualities of sub-B noir—above-average camerawork, a rogues gallery of bit players — and all of the flaws.
  5. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
  6. 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.
  7. The Guillotines
    The Guillotines expends most of its energy in its first 30 minutes, leaving the audience with roughly 90 minutes of soapy Qing Dynasty fan fiction.
  8. Berberian Sound Studio
    Not a drop of blood is spilled in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Even so, Italian-horror buffs may feel a flush of nostalgia watching this bewitching genre whatsit, which manages to evoke the crimson-splashed shockers of the 1970s without so much as a single frame of actual carnage.
  9. The Bling Ring
    The movie captures a moment when the lines separating anonymity, fame, and notoriety are finer than ever. And as Watson’s social climber prattles on to reporters about what a great “learning lesson” her criminal experience has been, it’s easy to see another star in the making.
  10. 20 Feet from Stardom
    Twenty Feet From Stardom touches on fascinating issues, but too often it does no more than that.
  11. Hatchet III
    A film that plays like a long, tedious inside joke for fanboys.
  12. More Than Honey
    It’s a film that wants to celebrate as much as doom-say.
  13. 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.
  14. Man of Steel
    Like Snyder’s Sucker Punch, it’s a confused but fascinating mishmash of religious, military, and sexual imagery.
  15. Hey Bartender
    While incapable of comprehensively contextualizing the craze and only somewhat convincing in its portrait of the power of cocktails to reenergize the traditional local-dive scene, the documentary remains a succinct and lively tribute to the art of the drink—not to mention a handy compendium for those seeking a prime NYC joint to quench their thirst.
  16. The Wall
    Haushofer’s book may be a classic, but this is the least imaginative way of filming it imaginable, short of simply pointing the camera at a copy and rapidly flipping the pages.
  17. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    Ironically for a movie about the ratings value of shock, Évocateur suffers from its own lack of red meat.
  18. Violet & Daisy
    Geoffrey Fletcher’s directorial debut, Violet & Daisy, has a lot of arch dialogue and very little depth. Talky and artificial, it moves like a sort of lobotomized Hal Hartley movie; it has plenty of Hartley-esque rhetorical devices — theatrical speech patterns, naïve characters, jokey plotting — but lacks Hartley’s sense of curiosity or engagement with the real world.
  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. 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.)
  21. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Resnais’ new film, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, is ostensibly an adaptation of two unrelated plays by Jean Anouilh: "Eurydice" (1941) and "Dear Antoine": Or, "The Love That Failed" (1971). However, Resnais’ methods of adaptation — placing one play within the other, and then refracting its dialogue across multiple characters and layers of reality — quickly eclipse the source material.
  22. Much Ado About Nothing
    So kudos to the cast of Much Ado About Nothing, Joss Whedon’s scrappy, snappy take of one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies. With little exception, the players assembled here — most of them veterans of the Whedonverse — pull off that difficult balancing act with gusto.
  23. The Internship
    The real star of The Internship is Google itself, and what a self-aggrandizing diva she is.
  24. The Purge
    The result is inchoate: not involving enough to work as a thriller, and too self-defeating to mean anything.
  25. American Mary
    Nonsensical and all-around third-rate, American Mary offers up Human Centipede-style surgical horror, except this time with endless absurd eroticism.
  26. 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Kings of Summer
    The Kings Of Summer doesn’t take itself seriously; short of having the actors break character, it’ll do anything for a laugh. It leans heavily on interminable improv scenes and interminable montages edited from improv scenes. In other words, much of it plays like the outtakes reel that would be shown at the wrap party of a better, more tightly structured film.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shadow Dancer
    If there’s a political edge to this story, it’s in the understanding — implicit from early on — that this is a situation with no satisfying solution; eventually, someone is going to have to die. To that end, director James Marsh, best known for his documentaries "Man On Wire" and "Project Nim," crafts an atmosphere of tenuous dread.
  29. The East
    It’s best, perhaps, to just accept the movie on its dramatic terms, as a reasonably gripping thriller about the dangers of deep cover, anchored by a terrific actress on the brink of stardom.
  30. Now You See Me
    Now You See Me, which is essentially an "Ocean’s" movie recast with illusionists, demands a kind of childlike fascination with swindles, and a willingness to be hoodwinked along with the characters. Walk in with those expectations and it won’t be hard to see the appeal of this ludicrous but spirited caper, which has nearly as many rug-pulls as game movie stars.
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