The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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: 5,578 out of 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. For Colored Girls
    There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.
  2. Fair Game
    It's ultimately a tale of heroism in the face of fearsome, powerful opposition, but as stubborn pride masquerading as ideological purity proves Wilson's Achilles heel, the film's heroes reveal themselves as flawed to an almost fatal extent, and messily, fascinatingly human.
  3. 127 Hours
    Worse still, all that introspection adds up to a disappointingly shallow accumulation of regrets and life lessons, none of them surprising. After the adrenaline rush, 127 Hours turns to vapor.
  4. The Kids Grow Up
    By experiencing Block's films, we aren't merely witnessing his neurosis, we're abetting and validating it.
  5. Waste Land
    Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.
  6. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    Most fan-docs are fairly remedial, but Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields is more sophisticated than the norm, in keeping with its subject.
  7. Welcome to the Rileys
    The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.
  8. Monsters
    Gareth Edwards' low-budget science-fiction film Monsters is both a testament to what the latest technologies allow filmmakers to do, and-on the downside-a testament to the enduring importance of a good script.
  9. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    It's rarely tedious, but it's also rarely insightful or propulsive, and since there's nothing new to discover about the characters or their world, much of the film feels like a protracted, contrived pause, as everyone waits for Rapace to finally get back into the game.
  10. Paranormal Activity 2
    What was scary once is scary twice, like a carnival funhouse remodeled with a few new mirrors and spring-loaded spooks.
  11. The Taqwacores
    Deepens as it plays out, and rewards viewers who stick with it through the clumsier passages. The film is moving and thought-provoking.
  12. Boxing Gym
    Viewers' interest in Boxing Gym will likely wax and wane, depending on their interest in martial arts.
  13. Inhale
    It's neither remotely convincing as true-to-life drama or lurid and propulsive enough to work as exploitation. It's just bad.
  14. Kalamity
    A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.
  15. Conviction
    Conviction is like "Erin Brockovich" meets "Rudy."
  16. Hereafter
    Just because a film takes place entirely in the long shadow of death doesn't mean it has to be this relentlessly dour.
  17. Tamara Drewe
    While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.
  18. Stone
    At its best, the film works as a morally freighted film noir, with Jovovich particularly good as a breathy femme fatale who seduces De Niro with a mere change in inflection.
  19. Forbidden Fruits
    If you don’t worry about the story and just immerse yourself in the gags, Alloway’s film is a must-watch for the Venn diagram overlap between Shudder subscribers and the slumber party crowd.
  20. Air Doll (2009)
    The film is a little too cute and scattershot to achieve real profundity, with the doll-woman too often coming across like a playfully erotic version of Being There’s Chance the Gardener, defined entirely by her absence of guile.
  21. Nomadland
    Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.
  22. The Grand Bizarre
    It’s just a constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.
  23. Police Story 2 (1988)
    Opens with a montage of thrilling clips from its predecessor, then hits all the same notes, harder and duller.
  24. Piercing
    After a briefly discombobulating fake-out twist, Piercing can’t seem to figure out how to advance or complicate its sick-joke premise.
  25. Bodied
    It’s so thickly packed with technical and verbal dazzle that whatever biting point it might have had to make ends up completely lost.
  26. Wildlife
    It’s a very accomplished debut, with strong performances (Mulligan, especially, is magnificent, lowering her voice to a smoky purr and letting desperation nip at the edges of her confidence) and an elegantly straightforward style that’s miles removed from the flashiness of most American indie debuts.
  27. Private Life
    The film’s dramatic core, its vision of what this kind of experience can do to a marriage, is rock solid, because Jenkins explores it with a high degree of specificity, precisely dramatizing her own difficult experiences.
  28. Lizzie
    [An] unconvincing, oppressively somber take on the Lizzie Borden story.
  29. Mandy
    It’s a fetish object, a juvenile art-installation stunt. It panders wildly, but also skillfully and effectively, to its demographic—and you probably know if you belong to it.
  30. Euthanizer
    Nikki, who appears to be making the most of an extremely limited budget, has attempted to make something like a modern-day take on the creepy, kinky, deeply personal B-movie, studiously avoiding anything that would smack of revivalism; after all, no authentic B-movie ever set out to look like a B-movie. The surrealists would have liked this film.
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