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. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.
  2. No Other Choice
    No Other Choice ends up a laudable mixed bag, a lot of morbid fun with committed performances and beautiful composition that meanders long enough that its rage peters out.
  3. My Father's Shadow
    As the memory fades into history, My Father’s Shadow blurs into documentary footage, which then blurs with wishful thinking. It’s formally ambitious for such a contained film, but grants this small-scale story the well-considered gravity of something held close to the heart.
  4. A Real Pain
    There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material.
  5. Walkabout
    Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.
  6. Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
  7. The Green Knight
    Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.
  8. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Damon's minimalist style is key to why the Bourne movies have become an oasis from other blockbuster action fare.
  9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    This is the most epic of the Harry Potter movies, the one that finally dispenses with side-quests and open-ended plotlines and offers up all the final payoffs.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 14, 2011
  10. Take Shelter
    Writer-director Jeff Nichols re-teams with his "Shotgun Stories" star Michael Shannon for his second feature, Take Shelter, which has a similar setting, but a different mood. Nichols is still concerned with family legacies, and the ways people in smaller communities relate to each other, but Take Shelter is slower and smoother, deliberately developing a mood of creeping dread.
  11. The Salesman
    "Death Of A Salesman" does indeed figure into the story, as the film’s main characters, a married couple, are playing Willy and Linda Loman in an amateur production. On the whole, however, this starkly confrontational melodrama has more in common with the Charles Bronson classic "Death Wish," even if it’s angry words rather than bullets that go whizzing across the screen.
  12. The Pianist
    Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great director's imagination.
  13. Dahomey
    Assessing this move from the perspective of the pieces themselves—including an elaborate carved throne, a towering statue of King Ghézo, and metallic markers of death—as well as the recipients of these revenants, Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.
  14. Get Out
    Wildly entertaining.
  15. City of Life and Death
    The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.
  16. West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
  17. California Split
    Robert Altman’s most overlooked gem.
  18. Amy
    Winehouse was a complicated artist who deserved a nuanced, honest look at her life. In lesser hands, Amy could be a feature-length E! True Hollywood Story, but Kapadia treats his subject with respect and heart.
  19. The Edge of Heaven
    Akin divides The Edge Of Heaven into thirds, and ends the first two sections with emotionally devastating scenes of violence, before easing into a third section that deals with the repercussions and lessons learned.
  20. The Savages
    The frequent outbursts of comedy help alleviate a tone that's appropriately muted and sad, and Jenkins should be credited for refusing to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation.
  21. Birds of Passage
    Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote.
  22. An Education
    An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.
  23. Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
  24. To the Ends of the Earth
    Beginning as an offbeat, fish-out-of-water travelogue, To The Ends Of The Earth gradually incorporates elements of an adventure movie, self-reflexive film shoot, and even musical melodrama. By the end, it’s no less than one of the most moving films Kurosawa has ever made.
  25. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.
  26. The Treasure
    Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.
  27. The Rider
    More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.
  28. Varda by Agnès
    As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.
  29. Out of the Past
    Quintessential noir.
  30. Close Your Eyes
    Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.
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