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. Spellbound
    Can't help but be deeply engrossing, as it taps into a highly charged atmosphere that one parent dubs "a different form of child abuse."
  2. White God
    As a curious hodgepodge of ideas, White God gets by. But the releasing-of-the-hounds at the start is a bad omen. The film, like the dogs, mostly goes downhill.
  3. Freaks
    Much of what makes Freaks so unsettling comes from its refusal to treat its stars as, well, freaks.
  4. Whale Rider
    Though there's a formula at the film's core, Whale Rider still has the good taste to make that formula go down easy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    While it's far from easy going, The Mill And The Cross is worth attempting for its stunning visuals alone.
  6. Lean on Pete
    Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles.
  7. Sunset Story
    Has its share of look-at-these-cute-old-commies laughs… But Gabbert mostly avoids making her subjects into hobbling punch lines, or even turning them into one-dimensional heroes.
  8. Claire's Camera
    Serves as a thoroughly engaging divertissement. That it comes across as more than a little half-assed is part of its unruly charm.
  9. Bergman Island
    In its strongest, most evocative scenes, Bergman Island feels like peering in someone else’s window, sensing an echo of your own experiences, and marveling at all the ways a stranger could remind you of yourself.
  10. Resolution
    Benson and Moorhead have made a horror film for jaded aficionados, deconstructing and reconstructing tired elements into a gnarled, distinctive Frankenstein's monster. This monster might ransack a village, but it would have to think about it first.
  11. Barbie
    The world-building in Barbie is exceptional.
  12. Minority Report
    Few directors are capable of marrying ideas and entertainment—one is often sacrificed for the other—but Spielberg peppers one gripping action setpiece after another with trenchant details about a near-future robbed of the most basic freedoms and privacy.
  13. We the Animals
    Unlike Sean Baker, who grounded his "Florida Project" in a firm but never condescending viewpoint on the milieu, Zagar seems to lack a coherent directorial perspective on Torres’ story; he mistakes vérité-style handheld and frequent close-ups (mostly captured with wide-angle lenses) for genuine intimacy and engagement.
  14. Wild Rose
    As a show-business fairytale, Wild Rose is pretty standard. But as a character study, it’s something special. That’s due largely to Buckley’s star-making performance as Rose-Lynn.
  15. The Simpsons Movie
    Though it never regains the inspiration or comic density of its brilliant first 20 minutes, The Simpsons Movie keeps the laughs coming from start to finish, a feat as rare and wonderful in film as it has been through 18 years of television.
  16. Riding Giants
    It's a film hopelessly in thrall to the thrill of big-wave surfing, and for all its rambling shapelessness, it conveys that excitement in an infectious, conspiratorial manner.
  17. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The honesty behind Garcia's queasiest moments gives the film its pull.
  18. Boy and the World
    As with the movie as a whole, the message those scenes deliver is a heady mix of uplifting and devastating.
  19. Room 237
    The effect of Room 237 is intense. It’s a deep dive into the rabbit hole of semiotics, designed to train viewers to become alert to what they’re really seeing.
  20. The Eternal Daughter
    What Hogg accomplishes here—an acutely emotional parable—is something to truly cherish. The Eternal Daughter, sincere yet artful, is quite surprisingly the most relatable movie of the season.
  21. The Beast
    The Beast is a monster of a movie, one that will sink its claws into you, then ask you to contemplate the wounds it leaves. It’s not an easy watch, but it is a deeply rewarding one that you’ll be thinking about for days.
  22. Lady Chatterley
    This might be pleasant to watch, in a floaty '70s-movie kind of way, if not for the film's groaning 168-minute length and abrupt thudder of an ending.
  23. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    There’s something tidy and even schematic about the story of redemption and forgiveness A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood ultimately tells.
  24. 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.
  25. Take Out
    The movie took a long time to get distribution, but there's no expiration date on filmmaking this strong.
  26. Lucky
    It’s a remarkable gift to fans and cinephiles that Lucky serves as a first-rate showcase for its star as well as an ideal swan song. The man couldn’t have gone out any better.
  27. Irma Vep
    The film is a true torchbearer of the French New Wave—playful, restless, full of invention, and born of an overwhelming discontent for the status quo.
  28. The Band's Visit
    Tonally, The Band's Visit steps gingerly on the line between “sweetly humane” and “cloyingly quirky.”
  29. Anne at 13,000 ft
    That Radwanski so expertly navigates the fraught subject of mental illness, avoiding most pitfalls, makes it at once harder to understand and easier to forgive the lack of subtlety in Anne At 13,000 Feet’s titular controlling metaphor.
  30. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
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