The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Blue Ruin
    Blue Ruin rarely resembles anything but itself. Much of the singularity can be attributed to the film’s atypical hero, surely one of the year’s great characters.
  2. Carol
    Haynes has pulled off something remarkable here, without a trace of winking or archness. It’s been a long time since the movies have seen a fuse of pure ardor burn this slowly and steadily, leading to such an unexpectedly moving explosion of resolve.
  3. Midnight Special
    Shannon, best known for playing weirdos and crazies, is uniquely good at playing restrained everymen, and he inhabits the role of Roy as a man of unspoken internal conflicts and complicated feelings.
  4. The Hateful Eight
    This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.
  5. The Babadook
    Believe it or not, though, the real horror of this superb Aussie monster movie has almost nothing to do with the title fiend and everything to do with the unspoken, unspeakable impulses he represents. Remove the Babadook from The Babadook, in other words, and something plenty terrifying remains.
  6. The Overnighters
    In examining the man’s selfless service, Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he’s made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.
  7. Starred Up
    It’s a credit to both Mackenzie’s talent as a director of actors and to the underlying humaneness of his vision that he argues that the right option is the more difficult and less predictable one — and that he does so without relying on sentimentality, unearned sympathy, or a happy ending.
  8. The Dance of Reality
    As a close look at Jodorowsky’s work reveals, the line between “cult artist” and “cult leader” can be blurry. The line only gets blurrier with The Dance Of Reality, Jodorowsky’s first movie in 23 years, and the best thing he’s done, film-wise, since "The Holy Mountain."
  9. Foreign Correspondent
    Foreign Correspondent seems a sterling example of how the director could help the war effort by using current events as a launching point for his signature brand of suspense.
  10. Fort Tilden
    For all its exquisite theater-of-cruelty viciousness, Fort Tilden is finally a work of empathy about people whose own supplies are running on empty.
  11. Policeman
    Like its narrative, this gripping film rarely veers in the expected directions — and is never easy to pin down.
  12. Goodbye to Language 3D
    What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.
  13. Bird People
    It’s also just magnificently goofy, unafraid to court ridicule and confident enough to take captivating detours.
  14. Force Majeure
    If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending — one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually — and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.
  15. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.
  16. The Strange Little Cat
    Ramon Zürcher’s miniature debut, The Strange Little Cat, is one of the most confident and unusual first features in recent memory.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wetlands
    Wetlands makes the internal external; the secret, scary bits of female anatomy are on display in a way that isn’t meant to be particularly titillating to the male gaze.
  18. Last Days in Vietnam
    It’s not a documentary that reinvents the form or will alter anyone’s perception of the war, but sometimes a rich, exhaustive chronicle is more than enough.
  19. All That Jazz
    Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts.
  20. Beloved Sisters
    The result is immersive and intelligent, but not what one would call difficult. Graf’s knack for no-nonsense storytelling means that Beloved Sisters seems to fly past.
  21. Citizenfour
    Citizenfour offers a remarkably intimate look at history as it happened. In fact, the immediacy of Poitras’ film is so remarkable that, at least for the immediate future, her craft is likely to be overshadowed by her access, her storytelling overshadowed by her opportunity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Mekons
    The film's strength lies in just how far it's willing to go-and to not go-in the pursuit of mythologizing its subject, a group of aging but unrepentant punks who treat the very idea of mythology like a bad joke.
  23. Logan
    What’s special about Logan is that it manages to deliver the visceral goods, all the hardcore Wolverine action its fans could desire, while still functioning as a surprisingly thoughtful, even poignant drama—a terrific movie, no “comic-book” qualifier required.
  24. About Elly (2009)
    This is clearly the work of a master in the making, an artist on the cusp of greatness. Farhadi may be fixated on fibbers, but there’s almost no one working today who makes films so emotionally honest.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ballet 422
    “Art isn’t easy,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, and in Jody Lee Lipes’ bleak beauty of a documentary, the act of creation is a resolutely joyless one — a tedious grind with little lasting reward.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Concerning Violence
    In other words, Concerning Violence isn’t out to soothe its audience with platitudes about peace, love, and understanding. Its exploration of an entrenched system that breeds generations of oppression and violence is extremely upsetting yet still highly rewarding.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    It’s enough for Workman to simply assemble a patchwork of Welles in his myriad incarnations (as the hearty Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight; as an arched-eyebrow spokesman for Paul Masson wine; as The Third Man’s cynical Harry Lime; as a sharp, vital youth and a sharp, frail elder) and allow the many faces to confirm, contradict, and, ultimately, speak for themselves.
  28. Hard to Be a God
    It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?
  29. The End of the Tour
    The result is less portrait of an artist than snapshot of a brief, meaningful encounter, shared between two men enjoying different stages of professional success. That one of these men happens to be a modern literary hero is almost, if not quite, incidental.
  30. James White
    So James White’s title character is an entitled, self-centered a--hole. But the movie about him is still a marvel: an honest, moving, and occasionally even funny portrait of what happens when a cripplingly immature young man gets hit with one reality check after another.
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