The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Roma
    I reserve the right—as I do at every festival, where I tend to hedge my bets and temper my praise—to decide that, never mind, everyone’s right, this is a masterpiece. For now, what I see is staggering formal prowess that is maybe just a little at odds with the small, even modest character drama it’s supporting.
  2. Transit
    Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?
  3. Under the Silver Lake
    Enabling and mocking paranoid obsession at the same time might sound incoherent. In this hilariously demented spin on L.A. noir, it’s simply honest.
  4. Hereditary
    It’s a supremely effective gauntlet of supernatural horror that’s also, at blackened heart, a grueling domestic drama about how trauma, resentment, and guilt can seep into the roots of a family tree, rotting it from the inside out.
  5. Persona
    Persona doesn’t really benefit from too much thought. It’s a visceral experience that’s best felt, accepted, and left alone to rattle around in your subconscious for years to come. Rest assured that it will.
  6. The Irishman
    The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.
  7. Shirkers
    The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.
  8. Death Race 2000
    It’s all ridiculous and occasionally surreal, but Bartel never loses sight of the unpleasantness; when these cartoons explode, they don’t get to place any more orders with the Acme company. They just die.
  9. Meatballs
    The movie has a lumpy shape, and its jokes are often obvious and crude, but it’s a lot sweeter than the other raunchy comedies of the era.
  10. Miami Blues
    Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie.
  11. For a Few Dollars More
    While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.
  12. The Hit
    The script by Peter Prince occasionally errs too much on the side of opacity, but the few revelations that do come are deftly handled. It’s a meditation on death, and in the end, it belongs to Hurt.
  13. The China Syndrome
    Ultimately, Lemmon's performance is what makes The China Syndrome work: The script contains its share of technical jargon and clunky exposition, but his subtle transformation from complacency to anger to panic tells the story in raw emotional terms. The China Syndrome is ultimately a story about how the potential for human error can trump science and reason, and few actors have ever been as unmistakably human as Lemmon.
  14. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jesus Christ Superstar
    However dated stylistically (everybody’s dressed, to put it baldly, like hippies) it remains immensely powerful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Little Mermaid
    A fun, albeit unspectacular, animated movie, filled with Disney staples like cute animal characters, a scenery-chewing villainess, and a small-nosed pixie heroine who yearns to travel to distant lands and marry a large-nosed hunk prince.
  17. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The film's greatest achievement is transforming his supposed acts of deviancy into disease-of-the-week uplift, not to mention a moving love story, an irreverent black comedy, and an intellectually compelling study of an artist at work.
  18. Cold War
    Pawlikowski, who doesn’t waste a shot (nor compose one that isn’t a work of art on its lonesome), creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.
  19. Real Genius
    Martha Coolidge's bright, whimsical Real Genius can credit part of its substantial and richly deserved cult following to the fact that nothing has changed: Raunchy, lowbrow teen comedies are forever in vogue, and SDI is still an impossible, money-sucking political mirage.
  20. Climax
    There’s a spontaneity to Climax—a naturalistic immediacy born of its exceptional, energetic cast of unknowns, firing off entirely improvised jokes and insults and threats.
  21. Deliverance
    Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.
  22. Asako I & II
    This is a film that, through its deceptively mellow means, manages to plumb the depths of what it truly means to love amid the uncertainties of self, others, and everything else besides.
  23. Burning
    Burning actually justifies its running time by slowly building paranoid atmosphere before an explosive, hauntingly ambiguous finale.
  24. The Wicker Man
    The Wicker Man ultimately succeeds on the strength of its powerful imagery, its increasingly chilling tone, and its final, sudden shock.
    • The A.V. Club
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Even though the movie was, in a lot of ways, a glorious mess, it turned out to be a huge success on just about every level.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Regeneration
    It might, in fact, be the best straight-to-DVD action movie ever made. And the fact that there’s any competition for that title should tell you that times have changed.
  27. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.
  28. Paper Moon
    Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.
  29. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Throughout, the documentary offers glowing praise of Fonda that falls just short of fawning. Frankly, it’s difficult not to be impressed. Seventy-eight at the time of filming, the formidable Fonda personifies courage and strength in her interviews, even as she reveals tremendous vulnerabilities.
  30. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    With humor that cuts through a deep undercurrent of sadness, Baker Boys captures the rinky-dink milieu of second-rate lounges, where patron kibitzing threatens to drown out the piano-tinkling of the paid entertainment.
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