The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Our Daily Bread
    The non-sensationalized "this is what really happens" approach makes Our Daily Bread extra-creepy at times.
  2. The Master
    It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.
  3. The Wild Pear Tree
    At its best, The Wild Pear Tree captures not just the feeling, but also the process of coming to terms with one’s place in society — and that, if nothing else, requires patience.
  4. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
    The film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.
  5. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Dazzling cinema-essay.
  6. Sentimental Value
    Sentimental Value successfully synthesizes metaphor and nuanced character drama to convey the way suffering ripples outward—even if it’s hard to shake the feeling that, like its protagonist, it should let us in a little deeper.
  7. This Is England
    Taut, tense, and self-consciously stylish.
  8. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Hamaguchi’s deliberate disruptions of narrative flow are not crude storytelling gestures so much as attempts to create epiphanic moments out of time, where the rift between imagination and reality ceases to exist—at least until the wheel of fortune turns round once more.
  9. City of Ghosts
    There are many moving scenes in City Of Ghosts, but towards the end of the film one especially powerful sequence shows a RBSS member shaking uncontrollably as he thumbs through a stack of pictures of his friends, dead and alive.
  10. Springtime in a Small Town
    Has the suffocating intensity of great chamber drama.
  11. The Son
    The Dardennes sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final third of "In The Bedroom," only without the same dreadful inevitability.
  12. Sweet Sixteen
    With startling clarity and dreadful logic, Loach and Laverty make sense of every bad choice Compston makes until he runs out of options, locked into a destiny that he can't escape, mainly because his good intentions are clouded by tragic naivete.
  13. Ponyo
    It’s essentially a stroll through a fantastically detailed pastel world, in which the plot is little more than an excuse for Miyazaki to dive into a world teeming with colorful (and sometimes prehistoric) life.
  14. Strong Island
    The effect is stark, expressionistic, and powerful. It creates the sense that what’s being said is important.
  15. The Interrupters
    Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive.
  16. Ernest & Célestine
    Once upon a time, a movie like this would have seemed a minor pleasure, enjoyable, but unremarkable. Today, it looks more like a treasure.
  17. American Factory
    By telling their stories, entertainingly and persuasively, Bognar and Reichert make the case that they all deserve better.
  18. Only Angels Have Wings
    The film offers genuine intrigue and excitement.... But its ultimate power derives largely from its unusual ethos, which celebrates pragmatism at the expense of emotional behavior while simultaneously acknowledging just how profound a pragmatist’s emotions can be.
  19. First Reformed
    The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role.
  20. Z
    Like its spiritual predecessor The Battle Of Algiers, Z is as much a mini-revolution as it is a movie, actively engaging in a political battle as it was unfolding.
  21. Baby Driver
    Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.
  22. The Bad and the Beautiful
    This is studio-system product at its juiciest and most sophisticated, full of insights into the mess behind the art.
  23. Sabaya
    As a journalistic depiction of the rescue operations as they happen, Sabaya brims with heart-pounding tension and immediacy. But given the access obtained and Hirori’s connection to the people and the land where this grim chapter in modern history is unfolding, the superficial handling of pivotal aspects of the story is disappointing.
  24. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    It's undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
  25. Last Train Home
    Sometimes the story is so much like a fiction feature-complete with explosive family arguments and pointed cross-cutting between the free-spirited Qin and her beaten-down folks-that it feels exploitative, as though Lixin were turning real people into characters.
  26. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Fitting for a film backed by the groovy sounds of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, the biggest myth Crip Camp is out to bust is that disabled people aren’t sexual beings.
  27. Persona
    Persona doesn’t really benefit from too much thought. It’s a visceral experience that’s best felt, accepted, and left alone to rattle around in your subconscious for years to come. Rest assured that it will.
  28. One Fine Morning
    One Fine Morning is about people, family, friends, lovers, their disappointments, and their passions. It’s bitter and sweet, but mostly bitter. It’s lovely, but mostly not autobiographical.
  29. The Double Life of Veronique
    The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.
  30. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.
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