The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,427 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: 5,576 out of 10427
  2. Mixed: 3,741 out of 10427
  3. Negative: 1,110 out of 10427
10427 movie reviews
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  1. The End of Love
    Shot with tiny digital cameras to minimize the sense of intrusion, The End Of Love sometimes feels like a home movie, but that’s also the source of its strength.
  2. The Sweeney
    From its lone-wolf mythology to the high, pealing guitar wails in its score, The Sweeney plays like a forgotten ’80s action movie recently discovered in a dusty vault. A treat, perhaps, for those who prefer their cop thrillers pre-meta, but tiresomely plodding for everyone else.
  3. A Place at the Table
    It makes a persuasive argument — which it makes easier by not allowing any counterargument — but it’s unpersuasive as a piece of filmmaking. In laying out its case, it’s manipulative and dull by turns.
  4. Phantom
    Though pitched as a thriller, Robinson’s woefully underbudgeted film plays instead like a chamber drama, so simple and unadorned that it could just as easily be staged as an off-off-Broadway play without anyone telling the difference. And that isn’t entirely to the film’s detriment, either: With a cast choked with great character actors like Ed Harris, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, less is sometimes more.
  5. Stoker
    Anyone already planning on seeing Stoker, the English-language film debut of Oldboy and Thirst director Park Chan-wook, shouldn’t read this review. Or watch a trailer. Or read anything about it at all, really...It’s best taken one tense, exhilarating moment at a time, without anticipation or expectation.
  6. Leviathan
    Anyone who enjoys overpowering cinematic sensation and watching people do a job will be predisposed to like Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s avant-garde documentary about life aboard a commercial fishing vessel. Leviathan is an immersive experience, plunging viewers into darkness and chaos, amid a rush of vivid color and rapid movement.
  7. Future Weather
    First-time writer-director Jenny Deller has assembled a superb cast, with Madigan in particular making the most of her character’s no-nonsense flintiness.
  8. Dark Skies
    Good horror films are imprinted by the fears and anxieties of the day, converting real-life atrocities into abstracted scares; mediocre ones are imprinted, too, but with trends and commercial formulas. If Dark Skies resurfaced on TV or brain implant 20 or 30 years from now, horror fans would be able to carbon-date the film almost to the month.
  9. Rubberneck
    The entire story hinges on a thinly calibrated twist ending that’s meant to provide emotional weight to Karpovsky’s actions, but instead clarifies them to the point of utter banality. There’s no mystery left to linger.
  10. Red Flag
    Modest, personal, and nicely proportioned, Red Flag resembles one of Hong Sang-soo’s self-reflexive doodles about relationships and filmmaking — "Oki’s Movie," in particular — and it wisely doesn’t take too big a bite.
  11. Inescapable
    It’s a deeply confused movie, sometimes productively so.
  12. Bless Me, Ultima
    The movie is at its best when it’s at its smallest: when Ganalon quietly watches Colon coax a dying young man into vomiting up his “curse,” or when Ganalon is getting laughed out of his classroom because he has a burrito in his lunchbox instead of a sandwich.
  13. Snitch
    Snitch toys with moral ambiguity and fatalism before losing its nerve and delivering the action-movie goods in a climax that hews closer to fantasy than the keenly observed realism of the film’s solid center.
  14. Escape from Planet Earth
    It’s unchallenging fun for a younger crowd, but adults might feel like they’re staring down a colorful 24-piece board puzzle, trying to figure out how such a simple activity could be drawn out over 90 minutes.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    No
    The result is the most unexpectedly riotous comedy in years — one with more bite than usual.
  16. Like Someone in Love
    Is this the stuff of gripping drama? Not at all. But like nearly all of Kiarostami’s films, it’s the stuff of good conversation.
  17. The Bitter Buddha
    The Bitter Buddha closes with Pepitone pondering whether he’s wasted his life by focusing on comedy rather than family, but everything that’s come before suggests that decision has led to a life that’s a triumph rather than a tragedy.
  18. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.
  19. Safe Haven
    The cutaways to this cop-on-the-edge plot are jarring and lacking in conviction, and when the whole tortured mess comes together in a twist-filled third act, Safe Haven becomes a full-blown calamity.
  20. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Until now, the sequels have gotten away with the cynical franchising of John McClane, but A Good Day To Die Hard, the worst entry in the series by far, exposes the hollowness and stupidity of McClane 2.0.
  21. Would You Rather
    Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in "Re-Animator."
  22. The Playroom
    More than anything, The Playroom feels like an excuse to explore this retro house from a child’s point of view—which is perfectly okay, provided no one breaks the spell by talking.
  23. Lore
    If nothing else, Shortland gives Rosendahl a star-making platform on par with Cornish’s in "Somersault": She’s a magnetic screen presence who subtly conveys not only the struggle and guilt inherent to her situation, but also a residue of hate that’s carried over from her parents. The actor, like her character, shoulders a heavy burden.
  24. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.
  25. Caesar Must Die
    In Caesar Must Die, the characters are both actor and audience, looking at themselves through the lens of a centuries-old fictionalization of history.
  26. Identity Thief
    Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
  27. Side Effects
    Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.
  28. Stand Up Guys
    The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.
  29. Koch
    Neil Barsky's Koch doesn't try to do anything radical as a piece of filmmaking, but Barsky - a former newspaper reporter - covers Koch's story magnificently as a journalist.
  30. Girls Against Boys
    LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.
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