The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Flags of Our Fathers
    What begins as a sophisticated meditation on the meaning of heroism gradually slumps into leaden repetition in the second half, as the point gets watered down and belabored. After such provocative beginnings, the film finally, dutifully raises its hand in salute.
  2. Reprise
    Like many debut features, Reprise is a foremost a statement of purpose, and in that respect, at least, Trier shows limitless promise.
  3. Bright Leaves
    Under his (McElwee's) watch, the possibilities of a documentary seem to expand by the minute, incorporating not only journalistic truths, but also personal insights and philosophy, unique regional textures, and unexposed pockets of humanity.
  4. Feels Good Man
    Pretty darn entertaining.
  5. The Winslow Boy
    If The Winslow Boy has a flaw, it's that Mamet's style is impeccable to a fault, too cool and remote to have much of an emotional payoff. But since few directors can even approach his level of precision, that's a very minor complaint.
  6. What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai's latest, What Time Is It There?, runs his usual themes and obsessions through a whimsical premise worthy of Wong Kar-Wai, striking such an exquisite balance between humor and despair that the moods comfortably coexist, just as they do in real life.
  7. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    Carlo Collodi’s serialized story for kids may have inspired it, but del Toro isn’t going for fealty. He very much has a take, and if he creeps you out with it, so much the better.
  8. La Llorona
    What stands out about the film is the pain that lies underneath Bustamante’s placid compositions—an anguished desire for justice that, like the Weeping Woman herself, still cries out to be heard.
  9. Night Comes On
    Fishback and Hall move confidently between the obvious ironies and foreshadowings of Spiro’s kitchen sink (as in, “everything but the ______”) realism.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Aug 1, 2018
  10. Look at Me
    The film satisfies in much the same way Allen's movie-a-year comedies used to satisfy.
  11. Dune: Part Two
    As blockbuster movies go, Dune: Part Two is a thrilling ride that totally earns its two-and-a-half-hour running time. The filmmakers add much-needed heft to their display of virtuoso filmmaking by adding serious real-life themes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lone Star
    A strange and thoughtful story, told in unhurried conversations and artful flashbacks. The things people keep from themselves are just as important to this mystery as the things they keep from each other, and that transforms Lone Star from a mere mystery into something much richer.
  13. Judy Blume Forever
    This is a reaffirmation of the author’s impact and importance to an audience that already agrees with that assessment, leaving the film as unchallenging as it is pleasant.
  14. Drive
    The film is little more than an exercise in style, but it's dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.
  15. The American Friend
    Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
  16. The Fighter
    Bale's live-wire performance typifies the many major and minor elements that elevate The Fighter from the deeply conventional sports movie it might have been into the endearingly offbeat sports movie it turns out to be.
  17. Jodorowsky's Dune
    While it’s heartbreaking that the movie never got made (son Brontis Jodorowsky, who would have played Paul Atreides, is particularly poignant imagining his alternate life as a superstar), Jodorowsky’s Dune posits that the raw materials nevertheless left an enduring mark on cinematic sci-fi, providing the basis for famous aspects of "Alien," "Star Wars," and "Contact."
  18. The Five Obstructions
    The film is also valuable for raising awareness about Leth, whose work hasn't been as widely recognized as that of his European contemporaries, but who now makes an impressive case for his skills, five times over.
  19. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
  20. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    An essentially plotless but engaging and enriching recollection of childhood steeped in warmth, grace, honesty, and crystalline specificity.
  21. Wings of Desire
    Though Wings Of Desire has a classic look, its mood and style is New Wave in every sense of the term. The synthesis of deep thought, leisurely pacing, and stunning visuals is in the spirit of work by the young European filmmakers of the '60s and '70s. (Reviewed in 2003 for DVD Release)
  22. Look Into My Eyes
    All of the psychics are sensitive, artistic, outcasted people, who are more empathetic to the feelings of others than the average person might be. It makes their readings a space not just for potential supernatural experience, but one in which someone who is vulnerable and emotionally in need is being heard by someone who’s willing to receive them.
  23. Tu Dors Nicole
    Shot on gorgeous black-and-white 35 mm that only seems to enhance the melancholic drabness of the events it depicts, Tu Dors Nicole is an especially wispy, French-Canadian addition to an irresistible genre.
  24. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    They run a gamut of conventions, proving just how much landscape—geographic and narrative—the Western really covers. What they all convey, some more comically than others, is how short and pitiless life could be in this heavily mythologized era.
  25. Godzilla
    Why it works is anyone's guess. It's fair to argue--and the film makes this argument itself, with no great subtlety--that Godzilla embodies Japan's nuclear anxieties in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  26. Fourteen
    Medel and Kuhling both give remarkably even-keeled performances, making their differences clear without a lot of voice-raising.
  27. The Visitor
    Like few of his filmmaking peers, McCarthy understands and respects the power of quiet, and how a whisper can be as explosive as a shout.
  28. Green Room
    Green Room is a rare gift from the genre gods: a nasty, punk-as-f..k midnight movie made by a genuine artist, a filmmaker with a great eye and a true understanding of the people and places he’s splattering in viscera.
  29. The Plague
    Aside from these shallow moments of over-explanation and a kinetic ending that lifts whole cloth from the aforementioned Beau Travail, this exciting debut boasts some honest and cutting commentary around these angry, confused little boys.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    As expressionistic as it is journalistic, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten triumphs as both an objective record and a poetic lament: It’s a film that’s every bit as entrancing and haunting as the lost music it celebrates.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »