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. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Fighting misery means having fun, which is what filmmaking is supposed to be, and, despite its lengths and scope, Arabian Nights always feels handmade.
  2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    On a production of this magnitude, few actors have the presence to assert themselves above the cacophony, but Crowe carries the film with the rare combination of charisma and brute masculinity that has made him a star.
  3. Godzilla Minus One
    When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
  4. Top Five
    A disorganized, dawdling mess of a movie that is rarely anything less than charming.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Simple Plan
    Both simplifies and brings into focus the already simple and effective thriller.
  6. Katyn
    Wajda makes the murders look horrific and jangled, like something out of "Hostel," then ends Katyn with extended darkness and silence, allowing the audience to mourn for the death of a nation.
  7. Klute
    Nearly 50 years since it premiered, Klute still offers relevant feminist considerations about what it means to want to be an object of desire while also lashing out against the people and the patriarchal system that only values you as such.
  8. Coming Home
    It’s a less pointed and implicitly feminist work than such classics as "Raise The Red Lantern" and "The Story Of Qiu Ju" —one could even call it a shameless weepie. Still, it’s a welcome throwback to one of the most emotionally wrenching actor-director partnerships in film history.
  9. Coco
    One might argue that Coco could stand to be weirder and more self-indulgent; the alternate reality it creates is entertaining and expansive. But then it wouldn’t be a Pixar film. It is impeccable, time-tested craftsmanship, not experimentation, that drives Coco, both in its most familiar beats and in its most moving moments.
  10. My Joy
    Those schooled in Eastern European history may have better luck deciphering it, but what keeps it compelling throughout is Loznitsa's direction, which favors sophisticated long takes and particularly suspenseful use of foreground and background action. His next film should be a doozy.
  11. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    Little Richard: I Am Everything manages to find the proper balance between grace and respect towards Richard’s legacy and valid criticism of his more unsavory views or ill-conceived exploits.
  12. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.
  13. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    The lack of dialogue makes Shaun The Sheep easy for younger children all over the world to understand, and the film is undeniably intended for that demographic.
  14. Invisible Life
    Much of this is relentlessly bleak and hopeless—true to reality, perhaps, but also repetitious and dramatically inert.
  15. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.
  16. White Material
    Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film's consuming madness.
  17. The Station Agent
    McCarthy's characters make for good company even in their story's awkward patches, and in a film so unabashedly about the value of friendship, good company goes a long way.
  18. Foxcatcher
    The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.
  19. Bamako
    The film feels oddly slack and inert, livened only by testimony better suited to another forum.
  20. Beginners
    Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.
  21. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.
  22. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Timberlake himself is a stunner, whether he’s smoothly pirouetting his way through “Suit & Tie” or he’s choking back tears during his stirring set closer “Mirrors.” But his team is well-matched by Demme’s.
  23. Captains Courageous
    On either end of Harvey’s adventure, Captains Courageous goes on a bit too long; the circumstances of his boarding-school transgressions are needlessly overcomplicated, and the emotional denouement is less than concise. But the seafaring section that makes up the majority of the film is well-crafted and gives way to surprising emotion.
  24. Bright Star
    It’s a studied movie that gives itself over to bursts of intensity, and between them sometimes threatens to become as spellbound by its subjects as they become with each other.
  25. MLK/FBI
    It’s a useful reminder not just that this American hero was a widely vilified figure during his lifetime but also that he accomplished everything he did despite nonstop resistance from intelligence agencies, the media, and the public alike.
  26. The Headless Woman
    A remarkably nuanced, ever-evolving performance (María Onetto).
  27. Wait Until Dark
    Hepburn's blend of pluckiness and self-pity and Arkin's cool cunning give Wait Until Dark emotional weight, but their final tussle is what most fans of the film remember.
  28. Jackie
    Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame.
  29. Tropical Malady
    In light of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's young career, it's fitting that his beguiling, transfixing romantic fable Tropical Malady splits down the middle into two radically different halves.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Weekend
    Bittersweet, achingly authentic, and so intimate it almost feels invasive.
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