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. Wild Style
    The story of a much-admired graffiti artist who is tempted by the possibility of mainstream success, Wild Style is extremely clumsy as a drama, with awkward dialogue and even more awkward acting. However, as a showcase for many aspects of the incredible outpouring of creativity that took place in New York during the late '70s and early '80s, it can't be beat.
  2. Piece By Piece
    Rather than blazing a new trail for Lego cartoons, this may be the first one to feel like it’s adhering too closely to its instruction booklet.
  3. The Merchant of Venice
    When the halves of the film collide in the courtroom climax, it looks like a misbegotten pilot for Law & Order: Usury Victims Unit.
  4. Nyad
    If, at the end of the day, Nyad feels like a well-oiled crowd-pleasing sports drama with a heartwarming (if slightly insidious) message about never giving up, that doesn’t blunt its impact.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    As a filmic love letter to Sheffield, the resulting doc is full of small delights for serious Pulp fans.
  6. Kingdom of Heaven
    Massoud plays Saladin magnetically, and his arrival only illustrates how many opportunities Kingdom misses. Another, better movie would have made him the focus.
  7. Ash
    True to its inspirations, Ash offers up a formal mix between traditional sci-fi filmmaking and frequent first-person segments (either through pseudo-body cam footage or more explicitly video game-like bouts of point-of-view panic) that gives the familiarity a bit more energy than your average knock-off.
  8. A Common Thread
    Ultimately heads into a standard mismatched-buddy drama that would nestle nicely into a Hallmark movie of the week.
  9. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    Though Silverman's edginess never quite crosses into social consequence, she's a brilliant craftswoman on stage, blessed with crack timing and an ability to massage each line to maximum effect.
  10. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    The more Electrical Life conforms to what one would expect of a Louis Wain biography, the less idiosyncratically compelling it becomes. An entirely fictional story loosely inspired by the man and his wife, but beholden to nothing, might have been genuinely electrifying.
  11. Chronicles
    It's daring and it's different.
  12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Not every moment works, particularly in the draggy middle section, but the spirit of the thing still carries it along.
  13. Home Alone
    Even though Macaulay Culkin's alternately muggy and inexpressive lead performance hasn't worn well, the supporting turns by Catherine O'Hara and John Candy are especially crackerjack, as is John Williams' buoyantly cartoony score.
  14. A Cat in Paris
    It's stylish, pretty fun, but not the kind of ambitious effort that should make the world sit up and take notice.
  15. Denial
    Intentionally or not, Denial is perfectly timed to a season of insane conspiracy theories and feelings-based readings of facts.
  16. The Other Son
    The Other Son's setup is too contrived, carried along by conversations that are either confrontational or artificially elusive.
  17. The Way Home
    It's telling that this slice of milquetoast is the first to get picked up by a major studio boutique. Put in the most euphemistic terms possible, the film's banal premise contains "universal themes," meaning that its sentimental clichés translate readily to all continents and cultures.
  18. Dahmer
    Uses the serial killer's life as the starting point for a hypnotic examination of the farthest reaches of loneliness and alienation.
  19. The Blonds
    Grapples with tough subject matter, and earns a little leeway in its approach.
  20. Out of the Furnace
    Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.
  21. Cheap Thrills
    Even if Cheap Thrills isn’t always plausible, though, it’s still a fair amount of twisted fun, thanks mostly to a surprisingly, effectively low-key turn by Koechner as the game’s emcee.
  22. Buster's Mal Heart
    Buster’s Mal Heart is indie sci-fi at its most abstract, taking elements of more populist, influential films like "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" and filtering them through philosophical exchanges and coolly stylized compositions to produce something that’s somehow simultaneously more weighty and more slight.
  23. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant offers marginal entertainment value. It’s a film that seems afraid to offer any ideas about its setting and characters beyond the minimum.
  24. Pitch Perfect 2
    It’s at once an encore, a postscript, and a fresh start.
  25. 100 Bloody Acres
    At its best, though not often enough, 100 Bloody Acres is as mercurial as its central character, breezily offbeat one moment, spattered in gonzo gore the next. It’s as if the filmmakers ground the bits of other movies fine enough that it made a rich foundation for their own.
  26. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    At its most powerful, Adamma Ebo’s film is an empathetic indictment of a culture that has evolved—and perhaps mutated— from intercommunity support toward the asphyxiating glorification of gaudy figureheads.
  27. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Downtonians will likely feel all too happy to visit this cast of characters again, and here Fellowes reminds us how we got so invested in their lives in the first place.
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