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. First Reformed
    The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role.
  2. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.
  3. Zama
    In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.
  4. Lean on Pete
    Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles.
  5. Good Luck
    The first part is terrific and transfixing. Working in transportive long takes, Russell achieves some nearly miraculous effects—notably, a shot that prowls down a sloe-black mine tunnel to land in close-up on a jackhammer—as he blends the plutonic and the Platonic: the underworld and the allegory of the cave.
  6. The Death of Stalin
    The Death Of Stalin isn’t quite as pointed or rat-a-tat funny as In The Loop (or Veep at its best), but its application of [Iannucci's] signature barbed comic voice to such grim history (executions are a constant source of gallows humor) packs its own punch.
  7. Police Story (1985)
    Action geeks who rented Police Story on VHS back in the early ’90s could tell when the good parts were going to start, because that’s when the tracking would get fuzzy, from all the previous renters rewinding and re-watching the same scenes, over and over.
  8. RED
    Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.
  9. Down Terrace
    When Down Terrace gets in a good groove, Wheatley and Hill's dialogue is both funny and pointed.
  10. Jackass 3-D
    It's easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn't criticism so much as high praise.
  11. Carlos
    Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.
  12. Samson and Delilah
    Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.
  13. Gerrymandering
    At the start of Gerrymandering, Reichert quotes Thomas Pynchon, writing, "Nothing will produce bad history more directly nor brutally than drawing a line." The same could be said of documentaries.
  14. The Two Escobars
    Finds connections deeply embedded in a soccer culture fueled by the country's thieving cocaine trade.
  15. Secretariat
    The film ultimately feels like a well-trod journey to a familiar destination with not enough wonder along the way.
  16. I Spit on Your Grave
    Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.
  17. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    Galifianakis' magnetic performance suggests murky psychological depths the film doesn't have the substance to plumb.
  18. Life as We Know It
    Pity any poor kid stuck in a house like that. Pity, too, anyone who has to stop by for a visit.
  19. Nowhere Boy
    It's a tender, but sometimes untended, portrait of the artist as a young man-and occasionally as a young asshole-that's handsome, dutiful, and finally, a little dull.
  20. My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
  21. Inside Job
    From an emotional standpoint, it's enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson "nail" some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.
  22. Marwencol
    Jeff Malmberg's documentary Marwencol is at its best when it focuses on Hogancamp's little world, and lets the artist walk the viewer through his town's increasingly dense mythology.
  23. Case 39
    Zellweger has come an awful long way since Matthew McConaughey terrorized her in "Texas Chainsaw Masscare": The Next Generation, but not quite as far as she might like to imagine.
  24. The Social Network
    Zuckerberg's story ends up feeling bigger than his own life.
  25. Let Me In
    Let Me In is a beautiful redundancy.
  26. Freakonomics
    Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.
  27. Barry Munday
    This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.
  28. Douchebag
    At 70 minutes, Douchebag feels both rushed and way too slack, but the bigger problem is that the kind of characters and humor this movie traffics in can be found in a more compact, amusing package on the average FX show.
  29. Hatchet II
    Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.
  30. Ip Man
    As a slice of history, Ip Man is disappointingly simplistic. Yip, Wong, and Yen never develop any real tension between Ip's true story and the exaggerated myth-making of a martial-arts movie. But as an exaggerated, myth-making martial-arts movie, Ip Man is often thrilling.
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