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. Don't Look Now
    Singularly haunting.
  2. The Assistant
    The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure.
  3. Shadows
    Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.
  4. The French Dispatch
    The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.
  5. In My Room
    Written and directed by Ulrich Köhler (and co-produced by Köhler’s romantic partner, Maren Ade, a superb filmmaker in her own right), this droll yet poignant amalgam of the fantastic and the mundane ultimately suggests that while people can dramatically alter their behavior in response to extreme circumstances, on some fundamental level they don’t really change.
  6. One, Two, Three
    Although crafting a comedy about such world-altering topics was bound to be difficult, a master like Wilder could pull it off.
  7. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.
  8. Miracle on 34th Street
    In the battle of the classic Hollywood Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life feels charmingly ancient, fixed in an early-20th-century America that scarcely anyone today remembers first-hand. Miracle On 34th Street feels more modern, with slangy dialogue and naturalistic asides, and a general awareness of how Christmas has become about the intertwined stresses of shopping and selling.
  9. Black Christmas
    Much of the shtick used by Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore was later stolen both by countless hacks and at least one real artist (Halloween director John Carpenter), but few repeated Clark's most devious tactic, accompanying the violence with the sound of the killer's nerve-janglingly maniacal shouting.
  10. Pom Poko
    For all its goodhearted cheer, Pom Poko is a glum indictment of modern Japan's disjunction from the natural and spiritual world. But it strikes a positive final note by implying that those worlds still exist, just out of sight, waiting and flourishing.
  11. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Abortion stories are real, and they take place every day, often so quietly that no one but those closest to the people involved even know they’re happening. The power of Hittman’s film lies in that combination of ordinary suffering and extraordinary strength.
  12. Sneakers
    Tobolowsky, anagrams, blind driving, a jazzy but tense James Horner score—this movie has everything, and it’s all deceptively well engineered.
  13. West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
  14. The Nest
    The Nest’s true star is that cavernous 15th-century mansion, which provides Durkin and Erdély with endless opportunities to carve out sinister voids that threaten to swallow this nuclear family whole.
  15. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s a film comprised of snapshots, glimpses from a hazy evening. But the Ross Brothers understand that these are the moments that paint people in their best, most unguarded light.
  16. Charm City Kings
    Charm City Kings distinguishes itself from similar fare not just through its location and eye-popping bikes but also with the believably imperfect people that populate it.
  17. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It doesn’t offer perfect solutions, only a brand of humor and astute wisdom one might from someone who has lived the life.
  18. Welcome to Chechnya
    What’s perhaps most remarkable about Welcome To Chechnya is the level-headed perspective many of these subjects have about what’s happening to them.
  19. 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.
  20. A White, White Day
    The film’s true power is elemental, rooted in weather conditions that all but erase the distinction between land and sky, and in the inky darkness of a tunnel traversed by one haggard, trudging figure whose weary body intermittently blocks a sliver of light barely visible at its far end.
  21. After Yang
    Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.
  22. i'm thinking of ending things
    By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?
  23. The Souvenir: Part II
    It’s looser, wilder, funnier, and almost euphorically uplifting, rocketing at increasing speed towards a new life for its main character and directorial proxy that makes the starting premise look almost irrelevant.
  24. A Passage to India
    While it isn't as brilliant as his The Bridge On The River Kwai or Lawrence Of Arabia, Lean's final film is just as meticulously designed, because more than any other filmmaker of his era, he understood how the right hat could say as much about a character —and a society—as any line of dialogue.
  25. Twice in a Lifetime
    An unusually perceptive look at subjects seldom explored in American film—the emotional lives of working-class extended families and middle-aged sexuality—Twice In A Lifetime is especially poignant when documenting the collateral damage the central affair causes to Hackman's wife (a touching Ellen Burstyn) and bitter adult daughter (Amy Madigan).
  26. Trouble in Mind
    Rudolph remains one of American’s film’s most unabashed romantics: Trouble In Mind is so sweetly, smartly, transcendently romantic that Kristofferson’s desperate need to get laid following years of nothing but male company comes off as a soulful man’s spiritual hunger for meaningful human connection, rather than mere horniness.
  27. There Is No Evil
    The film’s as compassionate as it is unsettling, and as provocative as it is poignant.
  28. The Grand Bizarre
    It’s just a constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.
  29. Swing Time
    While the movie’s amusing comedy bits are a little too slow for vintage screwball or farce, its love story has no such limitations. Astaire and Rogers sell their whole relationship through movement, on and off the dance floor.
  30. Lady Snowblood
    A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born.
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