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. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Favors unforgettable images over in-depth storytelling, and prioritizing electrifying moments over narrative arcs.
  2. Putty Hill
    This is a movie about the casual ways people know each other, even when their relationships are hard to explain-or perhaps even justify.
  3. Breathe
    Breathe, the second feature directed by French actress Mélanie Laurent (best known for playing the vengeful Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), tackles the subject from a refreshingly novel angle, depicting a platonic friendship that quickly grows toxic.
  4. Predator: Killer of Killers
    There’s little to no fat to be found in this film; it’s a lean, mean action-thriller that threads the needle between speculative storytelling and brutal sci-fi carnage.
  5. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.
  6. The Grief of Others
    It’s every bit as human-scaled as the filmmaker’s other work — but also, in its noble restraint, a little less involving.
  7. Shuffle
    It’s 81 damning minutes of tight filmmaking, great storytelling, and riveting investigation.
  8. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    In terms of celebrating his life by letting us soak in his impassioned, inspiring presence one more time, the film is successful. But viewers should take one more note from the man himself and not fall for easy scapegoats and trite narratives, whether they concern countries or a person who devoted his life to exploring them.
  9. Amanda Knox
    Amanda Knox serves as a corrective—a simple, brutal look at the dangers of hype, hysteria, and rushed prosecution.
  10. High Flying Bird
    High Flying Bird turns out to be a kind of shaggy heist movie, with a grand design (and payout) that’s only fully clear in retrospect.
  11. The Humans
    The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.
  12. The Card Counter
    The grace notes—including a final shot that could, potentially, be Schrader’s most sublime—are lost among the inconsistencies, incomplete subplots, and airlessness. It shouldn’t take an expert to figure out what a film is trying to articulate. Unfortunately, in this case, it does.
  13. Babette's Feast
    The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    5 Broken Cameras
    That intertwining of Burnat's home life and his political one make 5 Broken Cameras an unusual, moving work about a much-explored topic.
  15. One of Us
    The film does little to explain the history behind the dynamic between their men and women, which is based, it seems, at least partly on a blinding fear of lust.
  16. How to Draw a Bunny
    The opportunity to dig into the trove of Johnson's art is an ultimate reward beyond all offbeat attempts to understand the artist himself. At its best, How To Draw A Bunny amounts to a shadow history of the American avant-garde.
  17. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    In Amandla!, history doesn't just come alive--it sings, dances, and issues a passionate plea for justice and equality. The film joyously celebrates music as both a means to an end and an end unto itself.
  18. Dirty Pretty Things
    Frears has directed a surprisingly sturdy hybrid of thriller and social melodrama, even if the thrills turn ludicrous and the social critique grows a little pat.
  19. Punch-Drunk Love
    It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.
  20. O'Horten
    O’Horten feels like a waking dream. It's a film of subtle, insinuating charm, a character study about an eminently sane, reasonable man unsteadily navigating an increasingly insane, unreasonable world.
  21. In Between
    In Between suffers when cross-cutting among its three similar yet disparate storylines, and is strongest during moments that see righteous anger get complicated by human nature.
  22. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Overly conventional as a documentary, but it's inspiring as a rebuttal to the declining state of the world at large. It's encouraging to know that the endurance of institutions like marriage and family could hold the key to keeping civilization intact.
  23. Wings
    Wings is primarily a grand spectacle, with an ingenious piece of visual storytelling rolling along every few minutes.
  24. The Chronology of Water
    Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.
  25. The Thin Red Line
    Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing.
  26. Trouble in Mind
    Rudolph remains one of American’s film’s most unabashed romantics: Trouble In Mind is so sweetly, smartly, transcendently romantic that Kristofferson’s desperate need to get laid following years of nothing but male company comes off as a soulful man’s spiritual hunger for meaningful human connection, rather than mere horniness.
  27. After Dark, My Sweet
    It’s a pungently atmospheric little sleeper, and one of relatively few genre flicks to portray a mentally unsound protagonist as a recognizable human being—someone who really just has one particular screw loose, such that you might not notice unless you happened to stumble against that particular joint.
  28. A Passage to India
    While it isn't as brilliant as his The Bridge On The River Kwai or Lawrence Of Arabia, Lean's final film is just as meticulously designed, because more than any other filmmaker of his era, he understood how the right hat could say as much about a character —and a society—as any line of dialogue.
  29. I, Daniel Blake
    The movie is plenty affecting when it sticks to credible, low-key difficulties faced with weary decency; there was no need to crank the pathos up to 11 and throw a full-scale pity party.
  30. The Counterfeiters
    Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.
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