The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 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: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. For a Good Time, Call...
    The notion of a love story that's really about two women becoming friends is gimmicky, I'll grant, but Graynor and Miller are so charming together, and the movie is so focused and funny.
  2. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Just as a document of the sheer physical labor that goes into covering a giant canvas with color, Gerhard Richter Painting is never less than absorbing.
  3. Blue Like Jazz
    For all its low-key charms, the coming-of-age story risks being too Christian for secular audiences and too secular and colorful for Christian audiences: Like its spiritual seeker of a protagonist, it's caught between worlds.
  4. Post Mortem
    Larrain crafts Post Mortem as a slow, quiet character study, narrowing in on Castro in his home and office while the world outside descends into madness.
  5. Whores' Glory
    Glawogger studiously avoids explicitness until he gets to Mexico, where he finally goes past the bartering stage and behind closed doors as business is conducted. Pleasure isn't part of the transaction.
  6. Headhunters
    Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.
  7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."
  8. Oki's Movie
    As always with Hong's films, Oki's Movie goes through stretches where it seems aimless and self-indulgent, followed by stretches where it's sharp, funny, and poetic.
  9. The Day He Arrives
    The Day He Arrives is a talky movie, full of long, boozy scenes and cosmic coincidences - and in that it echoes Allen, as well as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the best of British kitchen-sink drama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The LEGO Movie
    Effervescent in style, conveying a substantive message without ever devolving into saccharine preachiness.
  11. Side Effects
    Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.
  12. Patience (After Sebald)
    Patience reveals through images and tone as well as through the interviews how Sebald yearned for restorative meaning in the places he toured, only to end up lost in thought.
  13. How to Survive a Plague
    Drawing on a wealth of footage from inside ACT UP meetings and protests, David France's powerful documentary How To Survive A Plague pays tribute to their courage and relentlessness, but it's even better as a record of the tactics of effective activism.
  14. Oslo, August 31st
    Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.
  15. Wish Me Away
    While it's fascinating to observe the workings of the mammoth apparatus grafted onto an intensely personal decision, the movie's heart is the moments that take place in private (meaning, in this case, in front of only one camera).
  16. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    The documentary seems a little structureless and unfocused at times, as Akers moves from dramatic moment to dramatic moment, not always taking care to connect them.
  17. The Pact
    More horror movies set in the 21st century ought to integrate technology into their scares as well as Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact.
  18. The Imposter
    The Imposter strings the audience along, to get them to understand first-hand how easy it is to buy into a well-told story, even when there's no evidence to support it.
  19. Gypsy
    This isn't a film about abstract social ills, it's about specific people in a specific place, and how they get disturbingly comfortable with theft and violence as a way of life.
  20. You've Been Trumped
    Aside from the corny title, Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped is a fine, powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, using old-fashioned vérité techniques - and more than a little audience manipulation - to show how political influence and media savvy help the wealthy exert their will.
  21. Compliance
    The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.
  22. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Arriving on the heels of "13 Assassins," Miike's gloriously irreverent take on the samurai action genre, Hara-Kiri seems conventional by his standards, especially in a long middle section that occasionally dips into sentimentality.
  23. Stoker
    Anyone already planning on seeing Stoker, the English-language film debut of Oldboy and Thirst director Park Chan-wook, shouldn’t read this review. Or watch a trailer. Or read anything about it at all, really...It’s best taken one tense, exhilarating moment at a time, without anticipation or expectation.
  24. Killer Joe
    This is not some nostalgia-soaked throwback to the noir of old, but a rude, shit-kicking thriller that co-opts - and merrily defiles - a classic like "Double Indemnity." Whatever its shortcomings, at least they're never failures of nerve.
  25. The Impossible
    Like "The Orphanage," The Impossible confirms that Bayona is a major talent, with a skill for constructing sequences that build tension as masterfully as Steven Spielberg did in his '70s heyday.
  26. Chicken with Plums
    Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements-some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends-so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.
  27. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.
  28. The Conjuring
    As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be The Place practically dares viewers not to find it ridiculous, but few will accept the challenge.
  30. Side by Side
    What's most valuable about Side By Side is how comprehensive it is in documenting how the art form changed.
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