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. Whose Streets?
    What this film is not, in any way, is comprehensive. Very intentionally, Folayan and company don’t concern themselves with the bigger picture. This is ground-level journalism.
  2. Planet of the Apes
    Its social conscience and deep concern with what it means to be human remains unspoiled.
  3. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    A Piece of Work is the antithesis of Jerry Seinfeld's engaging but superficial 2002 documentary "Comedian": where the innately private Seinfeld holds nearly everything back, Rivers loudly broadcasts the kind of fears, anxieties, and ambitions most people would do anything to hide.
  4. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    Stanley Nelson’s absorbing, provocative documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution measures how much and how little has changed since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Panthers in Oakland in 1966.
  5. Coriolanus
    As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.
  6. Counting
    His film is vivid and yet elusive. He shoots first so that we might ask questions later.
  7. Bad Education
    The strength of Jackman’s performance is that he hoodwinks us with his decency.
  8. A Most Violent Year
    There are a couple of exciting set pieces, including a superb chase sequence in which Abel pursues one of the hijackers along some train tracks, but A Most Violent Year is primarily interested in detailing the ways in which moral gray areas inevitably shade into true darkness.
  9. I Am Love
    What keeps the story fresh isn't so much Guadagnino's swooning sense-reveries, which sometimes flow with dreamlike wonder and sometimes just drag; instead, most of the power comes from Swinton, who always makes the most of characters imbued by passion, but straitjacketed by expectations.
  10. Gone Girl
    The movie’s most tantalizing mystery is the question of what’s really going on in their heads. It remains unanswered.
  11. The Central Park Five
    This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless.
  12. Mountains May Depart
    Sentimental, and plotted with the elegance of a silent film, Mountains is nearly hamstrung in its futuristic final section by one very bad performance and a whole lot of tin-eared English dialogue.
  13. Kinsey
    For a film about man who spent half his life defying staid convention, Kinsey remains as timid as a choirboy.
  14. Good Luck
    The first part is terrific and transfixing. Working in transportive long takes, Russell achieves some nearly miraculous effects—notably, a shot that prowls down a sloe-black mine tunnel to land in close-up on a jackhammer—as he blends the plutonic and the Platonic: the underworld and the allegory of the cave.
  15. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet is very much a “not for everyone” type of movie, but even people unwilling or unable to connect with it must recognize that it isn’t simply weird for weirdnesses sake. Beyond the obvious theme of the artist’s eternal struggle with those who offer patronage only to start shortening the leash, there’s a frank look at just how strange it is for people to come together to make art in the first place.
  16. Gabrielle
    In Chéreau's hands, Gabrielle has an operatic quality that throws the repressive environment into sharp relief; the film works like a pressure cooker, seething with bottled passions that intermittently burst through with startling cruelty and violence.
  17. War Photographer
    The scenes of death, starvation, and destruction are affecting, but they don't say much about the actual subject of the film.
  18. Policeman
    Like its narrative, this gripping film rarely veers in the expected directions — and is never easy to pin down.
  19. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Much like the recent "remember when" documentary "Man On Wire," Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 builds strong momentum in its home stretch, and sends the audience out on a high.
  20. Dear White People
    Identity is the film’s true subject: As much as he pokes fun at the foibles of a privileged white America, Simien is more interested in the ways his protagonists conform, or refuse to conform, to society’s idea of them.
  21. Ahed's Knee
    If it sounds flamboyantly colorful to call Ahed’s Knee the cinematic equivalent of an echoing regurgitative scream, it’s also accurate. The film is a highly personal work that becomes trapped in its own feedback loop, making the same point over and over.
  22. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.
  23. Broken Flowers
    Murray and Jarmusch, two modern masters of minimalism, triumphantly join forces in Broken Flowers, a bittersweet tour de force about a wealthy, deeply depressed lothario.
  24. Loving
    While one would have to be an unabashed bigot not to be moved by the Lovings’ plight, concluding that it’s not so easily dramatized requires no such prejudice. Quiet dignity in the face of adversity doesn’t make for an enthralling couple of hours.
  25. Silence
    It is slow and solemn in stretches and often remote, but it rewards patience with a transcendent epilogue that departs from the main character’s point-of-view to find a glimmer of meaning.
  26. I've Loved You So Long
    The film deftly sketches a sibling relationship complicated by obligation, guilt, mistrust, and, not least, an abiding love.
  27. The Crash Reel
    The film also applies a deft touch as it addresses the morality of violent sports, like snowboarding and football, that entertain the many who watch while endangering the few who play. Rather than cast the athletes as pure victims, Walker acknowledges their agency, depicting them as prideful competitors who choose to risk their well-being — or even insist on doing so, as Pearce does.
  28. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Though smarter visually than its TV-ready format would suggest (the camera team includes ace cinematographers Eric Gautier and Mihai Mălaimare Jr.), Hitchcock/Truffaut doesn’t offer a whole lot more than the opportunity to watch and hear very smart people talk about something they know very well.
  29. The Order of Myths
    So The Order Of Myths' central question remains tantalizingly unanswered: When a society respects its old-growth trees so much that they let the roots crack the sidewalks, are they being noble or ignorant?
  30. Hotel by the River
    But despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself.
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