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. To Catch a Thief
    Thief is giddy with eye candy, but the scenery is always secondary to the screenplay, which well serves the blinding star-power on display.
  2. The Lobster
    Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.
  3. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.
  4. Breaking the Waves
    What Von Trier arrives at is a complex, contemporary, and deeply moving exploration of faith.
  5. The Squid and the Whale
    It's an unflinchingly raw and honest look at a family splitting apart, and it seldom strikes an unconvincing or inauthentic note. Though it surveys rocky adolescent emotional terrain from the safe distance of adulthood, The Squid And The Whale still resonates with the sting of a fresh wound.
  6. Winged Migration
    Settles into pleasant monotony and repetition, without any narrative arc or purpose. Seasoned bird-watchers, however, may find that the sensory overload leaves them close to spiritual nirvana.
  7. Rebels of the Neon God
    Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.
  8. School of Rock
    Though tagged as the director's bid for commercial success, School Of Rock is as philosophical in its own way as "Slacker" or "Waking Life." It was made by people who not only know the music well enough to create magnificent flowcharts around it, but also understand how a simple, soul-stirring rock song can seem revolutionary.
  9. Star Trek
    Gripping action and vulnerable heroes writ large. It boldly goes somewhere different and makes it hard to leave the film not hoping for a return voyage soon.
  10. They Live by Night
    It's a strikingly poetic first feature, more about the naïve romance between young hoodlum Granger and his reluctant nursemaid Cathy O'Donnell than it is about robbing banks and dodging cops.
  11. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is an entertaining and crowd-pleasing monster movie, one that leaves you wanting more—and once you get over wondering what a subtler and more accomplished director might have done with this material, it’s not hard to let yourself be won over by its charms.
  12. The Namesake
    It's well-acted and filled with striking compositions, but director Mira Nair has trouble with a different kind of balance.
  13. Frances Ha
    Above all, Frances Ha is a wry and moving portrait of friendship, highlighting the way that two people who know everything about each other can nevertheless grow apart as their needs change.
  14. C'mon C'mon
    Mills’ core insight remains the same in every film: We’re all screwed up to some degree, all constantly improvising, all doing the best we can with relatively few guidelines. That’s not especially innovative or profound, perhaps, but seeing it refracted through a connection that movies tend to ignore lends it a certain sparkle.
  15. Hunger
    Hunger may be criticized for being willfully arty, or for reducing a complex political situation to a broadly allegorical vision of martyrdom, but it's never less than visually stunning.
  16. Howl's Moving Castle
    Miyazaki's animated adaptation of Jones' book is a charming and thoroughly absorbing treat.
  17. A Hijacking
    While the improvisatory movement of the camera helps create a sense of ambiguous tension in the scenes where the crew interacts with the pirates, it also undercuts several more overtly dramatic moments. However, this shortcoming of filmmaking imagination is largely redeemed by the pessimistic wallop of the movie’s ending.
  18. Black Sabbath
    There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.
  19. Crimson Gold
    Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.
  20. Small Things Like These
    Small Things Like These instead functions as a parable about how minor acts of kindness can be the strongest defense against powerlessness in the face of corruption. It’s a moral poignant in its simplicity, if also a bit lacking in how utterly uncomplicated and even expected it is.
  21. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Yet in his despair, there's something Kudlow misses, and it's what makes Anvil! as moving as it is hilarious.
  22. The Trip
    Make no mistake: The Trip is a fine, funny movie. But there's no reason why it couldn't have been even finer and funnier.
  23. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    With shades of Carrie, Harry's magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy.
  24. Michael Clayton
    In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.
  25. Downfall
    Downfall's overstuffed melodrama juggles countless subplots and a small army of characters who manage to make an impression in spite of limited screen time.
  26. 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.
  27. The Spectacular Now
    If Ponsoldt can step beyond the 12 steps, he might make something truly spectacular.
  28. My Man Godfrey
    One of the first and still among the best of the '30s screwball comedies, My Man Godfrey serves up absurdist romance and light social commentary in a fizzy mix that benefits from director Gregory La Cava's willingness to indulge improvisation, a trait he acquired from friend and frequent collaborator W.C. Fields.
  29. Sator
    Sator is an effective exercise in what the horror genre does best, underscoring awful truths—in this case, dementia and generational trauma—by making them explicitly monstrous. What Graham understands is that there are few things scarier than the ultimate fragility of the human brain and everything contained within
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    It's a sweetly queasy film that suggests the spirit that sustains us, the demons we hide from the world, and the monsters that prey upon us in the dark might all be variations on the same beast.
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