The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Sleeping with Other People
    The small miracle of Leslye Headland’s second film as writer-director is not that it sidesteps its influences or shuns its genre. It’s that it somehow makes the lusty undercurrents of its male/female friendship unironically romantic and, at times, unapologetically sexy.
  2. Brooklyn
    It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.
  3. The Forbidden Room
    For those attuned to Maddin’s goofy sense of humor, it’s easily the funniest movie he’s ever made—a series of several dozen comic shorts strung together on a ludicrous clothesline. The only downside is that the experience, at just shy of two hours, can be a trifle exhausting.
  4. Poltergeist
    Make no mistake: Poltergeist is a Spielberg film, no matter what the credits say. His stylistic fingerprints are all over the movie, never more so than in the opening third, which turns a suburban haunting into an occasion for Spielbergian movie magic before the ghosts get down to business.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    All the performers are superb, though as the title suggests, this is Viviane’s show, and Ronit makes for an exceptional martyr (she gets a Passion Of Joan Of Arc-worthy close-up or two) who never loses her very human shadings.
  6. Approaching the Elephant
    The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dior and I
    Dior And I isn’t any kind of hard-hitting exposé. Tcheng — who previously co-directed another style doc, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" — is seduced by this exclusive world, and he communicates that allure with undeniable flair.
  8. Krisha
    At just 82 minutes, Krisha wouldn’t have hurt for a little more meat on its bones; the last act blows through a shitstorm of confrontation almost too abruptly.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    As expressionistic as it is journalistic, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten triumphs as both an objective record and a poetic lament: It’s a film that’s every bit as entrancing and haunting as the lost music it celebrates.
  10. La La Land
    What the two actors lack in vocal polish they make up for in commitment — and chemistry. La La Land is the third film to romantically pair Gosling and Stone, after "Crazy, Stupid, Love" and "Gangster Squad," and that history of onscreen relationships fortifies their playful rapport:
  11. Louder Than Bombs
    These stylistic tricks open windows into the hearts and minds of the characters. They also make a movie about people grappling privately with their emotions feel energetic, even thrilling, in its own melancholic way.
  12. Green Room
    Green Room is a rare gift from the genre gods: a nasty, punk-as-f..k midnight movie made by a genuine artist, a filmmaker with a great eye and a true understanding of the people and places he’s splattering in viscera.
  13. The Assassin
    Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling.
  14. Son of Saul
    No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.
  15. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    The toxic paranoia poisoning American life is on display in 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, a fine and timely documentary about the 2012 killing of black youth Jordan Davis.
  16. Baby Driver
    Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.
  17. Barbie
    The world-building in Barbie is exceptional.
  18. Anomalisa
    Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.
  19. (T)error
    (T)error moves forward chronologically, and features enough astonishing twists to rival any episode of "Homeland."
  20. The Magnificent Seven
    Well-crafted, star-driven entertainment doesn't come much better.
  21. Only Yesterday (1991)
    Only Yesterday is animated, but rarely cartoony, in either its design or its storytelling.
  22. Sully
    Clint Eastwood’s Sully is not a perfect film, but it comes close to being a great one as it turns the real-life emergency landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River into a meditation on duty and crisis that’s more Bertolt Brecht than “based on a true story.”
  23. Dunkirk
    Christopher Nolan’s terrific new film, Dunkirk, is powered by an engine of combusting contradictions: it’s at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine.
  24. American Honey
    American Honey doesn’t rise and fall on the strength of its love story, if that’s even what happens between Star and Jake. Arnold touches on a lot—rural poverty in America, class divisions, the impulsiveness and recklessness of youth—but never tames her film into a strict polemic.
  25. River of Grass
    If one were to watch this jagged, restless movie with no knowledge of who made it, guessing that it sprung from the same mind that created "Old Joy" or "Meek’s Cutoff" would be impossible. Intuiting that this gifted novice filmmaker would go on to bigger and better things, however, would be child’s play.
  26. The Fits
    Without ever saying exactly what her heroine is thinking, Holmer captures a lot of what she’s feeling. And what Toni’s going through should be familiar to anyone who had an awkward puberty — which is to say, nearly everyone.
  27. Weiner
    This film doesn’t lionize Weiner or justify anything he did. What it does is capture the frenzy of politics, the iron-clad egos of politicians, and the failure of the media to cover the parts of campaigning and government that actually matter.
  28. The Handmaiden
    A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.
  29. A Quiet Passion
    What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.
  30. April and the Extraordinary World
    This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.
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