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. Children of Paradise (1945)
    The film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance.
  2. The Long Day Closes
    What’s uniquely remarkable about The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies’ 1992 return to his own childhood, is how gloriously disorganized its story feels.
  3. The Master
    It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.
  4. Holy Motors
    It's a glorious dream-epitaph.
  5. The Loneliest Planet
    The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
  6. Amour
    A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.
  7. The Rabbi's Cat
    While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.
  8. Upstream Color
    It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.
  9. Barbara
    Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.
  10. Before Midnight
    Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment — the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade. In the process of justifying its own existence, Before Midnight redeems the very notion of sequels.
  11. Badlands
    Critics don’t tend to talk about this much—it’s tantamount to a confession that we don’t always know what we’re doing—but it’s often the case that the most powerful, haunting aspects of a movie are those that we don’t fully understand.
  12. The Act of Killing
    By tackling one man’s sense of right and wrong (or lack thereof), Oppenheimer is ultimately tackling human nature.
  13. Her
    Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.
  14. The Immigrant
    The visual and thematic palette immediately brings to mind Michael Cimino’s once-maligned "Heaven’s Gate" — except that The Immigrant accomplishes more in two hours than Heaven’s Gate did in nearly four.
  15. Thief
    Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the most confident directorial debuts of its era, the product of an unprecedented amount of research and preparation.
  16. At Berkeley
    An exhilarating, four-hour immersion in life at the University Of California campus.
  17. Narco Cultura
    If it weren’t for "The Act Of Killing," Narco Cultura would be the year’s queasiest documentary. The film — which counterposes Quintero’s day-to-day life with that of Richi Soto, a crime-scene investigator in Juarez — is both an unflinching record of Mexico’s drug war and an investigation of how violence becomes unreal and glamorized.
  18. Faust
    It manages to convey a desire for power in abstract terms, divorced from material gain or a need to be admired. What’s more, it manages to do it with energy and a good deal of weird humor.
  19. Inherent Vice
    In its graceful superimpositions and its use of water to evoke a more idyllic time (particularly in a rainy flashback set to Neil Young), Inherent Vice is very much a companion piece to "The Master."
  20. Boyhood
    There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.
  21. Two Days, One Night
    Two Days, One Night is a small miracle of a movie, a drama so purely humane that it makes most attempts at audience uplift look crass and calculated by comparison.
  22. Whiplash
    More "Full Metal Jacket" than "Dead Poet’s Society," the film is an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other.
  23. Listen Up Philip
    The thing is, Listen Up Philip is a comedy — a howlingly funny black comedy with really sharp teeth.
  24. It Follows
    Fans of early John Carpenter will immediately identify the master’s influence — on the voyeuristic slink of the camera, the synth pulse of Rich Vreeland’s throwback score, and the transformation of “safe,” warmly lit residential environments into landscapes of dread.
  25. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    A devastating and deceptively simple tale adapted from 10th-century folklore, Isao Takahata’s The Tale Of Princess Kaguya distills a millennium of Japanese storytelling into a timeless film that feels both ancient and alive in equal measure.
  26. The Look of Silence
    The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.
  27. The Duke of Burgundy
    At its core, this is one of the most incisive, penetrating, and empathetic films ever made about what it truly means to love another person, audaciously disguised as salacious midnight-movie fare. No better picture is likely to surface all year.
  28. Phoenix
    For what it sets out to accomplish, across a brisk 98 minutes, Petzold’s film feels perfectly judged. And it builds to an ending that’s just plain perfect.
  29. The Innocents
    A ravishing neo-romantic takedown of Victorian repression, spooky and scathing in equal measure.
  30. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Building to an emotional wallop that’s almost on par with anything found in one of Miyazaki’s or Takahata’s films, The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness is pornographically interesting for Studio Ghibli fans; as a delicate depiction of the artistic spirit, it’s equally essential viewing for everyone else.
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