The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,442 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: 5,583 out of 10442
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10442
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10442
10442 movie reviews
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  1. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Well-acted yet strangely inert, Fire explores the messy human emotions of grief, but it'd be a lot more resonant if the guy everyone's mourning weren't so fatally perfect, so unforgivably superhuman.
  2. City of Men
    City Of Men has its share of problems, but being too entertaining isn't one of them.
  3. Freaks
    The film shrewdly keeps us inside Chloe’s head, filtered through her very limited comprehension of her burgeoning and truly awesome abilities.
  4. 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.
  5. Maria
    The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.
  6. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Despite some compelling performances, this R-rated but genial dramedy is a lot like its protagonist: unconventional, yet playing it safe.
  7. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Doesn't rise to the level of Bujalski's breakthrough feature "Mutual Appreciation," mainly because Swanberg doesn't have Bujalski's eye.
  8. The Foot Fist Way
    Trouble is, the gags just keep finding new ways to make McBride's strip-mall sensei seem pathetic, and the few scattered laughs never justify the cruelty.
  9. Aurora
    Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.
  10. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Based on true events, À Tout De Suite reveals the seductions of criminal life to be something like Stockholm Syndrome for Le Besco.
  11. Split
    Split is funnier, campier, and more freewheeling than anything its writer-director has done — slightly overlong, but reminiscent of Brian De Palma films like "The Fury" and "Femme Fatale" in its refusal to be boring.
  12. Normal
    If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.
  13. Mayor Pete
    Moss spends the better part of a year just trying to get his subject to betray some raw emotion, even going so far as to have Chasten pose interview questions at one point. It’s not as if Buttigieg stonewalls the camera, either. He’s just not, at heart, a very demonstrative guy.
  14. Suddenly
    Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.
  15. I Capture the Castle
    Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.
  16. Blue My Mind
    In many ways, the film is reminiscent of last year’s arthouse horror hit Raw, using monstrous transformation as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening. It’s not as extreme as Raw in its content, though, nor as skillful in its technique.
  17. Alpha
    Alpha has been sold, to some degree, as a family-friendly film, and while it’s too violent and perhaps too heavily subtitled for young kids (or, for that matter, some adults, who may notice how superfluous much of the dialogue is), it’s easy to picture some 10-year-olds taking to its exciting, cornball charms.
  18. Life
    Sluggish, laugh-free comedy (or is it an ineffectual drama?).
  19. The Hole in the Ground
    Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.
  20. L'amour fou
    Like a well-crafted garment, it's seamless. There's plenty of amour, but not enough fou.
  21. The Crazies
    Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.
  22. The Upside of Anger
    The film's outsized ambitions are deceptive: Everything here is less than meets the eye.
  23. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is a universal story, one that captures the thrill of discovering culture, sex, and politics, and the painful twinge of learning that those worlds aren't enough.
  24. Faces of Death
    It’s a straightforward slasher with a tech-savvy twist, ironically not outlandish enough to stand out from the formerly forbidden footage filling our feeds every single day.
  25. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    By the time it reaches an action-packed finale that's choreographed like an ancient Keystone Kops short, Kit Kittredge has cornered the market on bland.
  26. This Christmas
    "Christmas" won't wow anyone with its audacity or originality, but it's bound to make plenty of people happy with its slick, crowd-pleasing familiarity.
  27. Laggies
    Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.
  28. By Design
    It’s a pointedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes unexpectedly crushing, but all enjoyably kooky depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.
  29. The Rip
    Despite the story bloat, Carnahan spins a tight web for the first two-thirds of his movie.
  30. Another Thin Man
    For the first time, the formula feels strained, due to excessive baby/dog humor and not enough Powell/Loy interaction.
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