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. The Landlord
    The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.
  2. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side Of The Wind is ultimately about an artist’s fear of seeing a reflection of his own sublimated desires — the way that art hides as much as it reveals about its maker. We’ll be debating it, defending it, reappraising it for a long time to come.
  3. Being There
    Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.
  4. Breathless
    But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Wild Bunch
    While the movie may be a Western—one of the best Westerns ever made, in fact—it’s also an action movie, one that was crucial to action movies becoming what they would eventually be.
  6. The Price of Everything
    The master stroke of The Price Of Everything is that it asks the viewer, in Cappellazzo’s words, to see the intricacies of the art world and the way those two seemingly oppositional forces — the financial side and the creative side — are inextricably intertwined.
  7. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.
  8. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    For Wang, the strictly personal is the building block for everything else—whether it’s the well-worn groove of a long-term relationship or a Chekhov pastiche performed by a woman wearing a samovar as a hat.
  9. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    What’s so grand about Ruben Brandt isn’t its story or the characters, which are both abstractions. It’s the animation—the detailed artwork, so dense that it warrants repeat viewings.
  10. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    I discovered that not only is Girls Just Want To Have Fun a delightful party of a movie, it’s an absolutely bonkers party, like someone dosed the punch with ecstasy and mushrooms.
  11. Slut in a Good Way
    Lorain’s film ultimately doesn’t go especially deep in detailing its romantic relationships, its friendships, or any overarching storyline. But Slut In A Good Way is more than the sum of its entanglements; the actors and the camera work so well together that it feels, at times, like a musical.
  12. One Cut of the Dead
    It reinvents the zombie movie.
  13. Knives Out
    Far from empty sleight-of-hand, Knives Out twists its borrowed, rearranged mechanics into a timely, sincere, and ultimately moving celebration of decency in the face of moral failure. To paraphrase one of Blanc’s funnier musings, that’s the donut within the donut hole.
  14. Apollo 11
    Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.
  15. Give Me Liberty
    Mikhanovsky and Austen even allow for genuine budding romance to filter through the struggle, with love operating as a balm for beleaguered souls.
  16. Monos
    Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.
  17. American Factory
    By telling their stories, entertainingly and persuasively, Bognar and Reichert make the case that they all deserve better.
  18. Grand Prix
    Whenever the cars are running, Grand Prix is one of the best studio efforts of the '60s. The film only stalls when it's off the track, which is where more than half of this three-hour epic takes place.
  19. 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.
  20. Booksmart
    What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.
  21. Parasite
    Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.
  22. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.
  23. The Climb
    There are no sentimental easy answers or shortcuts to uplift in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, it just keeps peddling forward, in the hope that some kind of clarity might materialize at the top of the hill.
  24. Bringing Up Baby
    As Hawks admits, Bringing Up Baby isn’t a perfect film. But there’s an undeniable, ephemeral magic that comes from watching him, Hepburn, and Grant all work together on such a madcap story.
  25. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Milestone’s visual style lacks the flourish of Wellman’s Wings, but it’s no less explicit, as the camera pans across battlefields where dismembered body parts hang from barbed wire.
  26. My Dinner with Andre
    Their talk feels as unforced as it is intense, but even that’s an illusion piled on top of an illusion. The film keeps returning to questions about the nature of reality and the function of performance, whether in theater or in everyday life.
  27. Uncut Gems
    The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it's surprising—and ballsy—that De Palma makes Casualties Of War a full-on De Palma movie, with stylishly suspenseful action scenes, heightened performances, and plenty of moments where Fox takes on the role of a typically impotent De Palma voyeur.
  29. The Naked Prey
    The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.
  30. Black Sabbath
    There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.
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