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. Christine
    While the film does depict the suicide, that moment isn’t nearly as memorable as a pitch-perfect coda involving a fairly minor character, which combines generosity, poignance, and rueful irony in unnerving proportions.
  2. Newtown
    From a filmmaking standpoint, Newtown is neither adventurous nor unconventional. It doesn’t need to be; no documentary this emotionally direct, this emotionally draining, requires bells and whistles.
  3. Southside with You
    The first feature from writer-director Richard Tanne is sweetly speculative historical fiction — a date movie with some very recognizable lovebirds.
  4. Jim: The James Foley Story
    Jim: The James Foley Story is more than just a tribute to a fallen journalist. It’s a deeply moving testament to a man who dared to face the worst of humanity and somehow managed to maintain his sense of empathy in spite of it all.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Funny or Die Presents: Donald Trump's the Art of the Deal: The Movie
    Like the real Trump, [Depp] delivers a bizarrely magnetic performance, and that magnetism is enough to hold the whole enterprise together, even as the intentional incompetence of the film-within-the-film threatens to sink the final act.
  6. Nuts!
    Ultimately, this isn’t a film about goat balls at all, but the willingness of millions to believe that some slick-talking demagogue knows more about what’s good for them and their families than someone with actual qualifications.
  7. Blade Runner 2049
    This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.
  8. John Wick: Chapter 2
    Lavishly expanding on the first film’s comic-book-esque internal mythology and its sense of the absurd, it’s less of a pure genre movie than its predecessor—more gothic, more narratively stylized, its superlative stuntwork sometimes taking a back seat to visual gags and vignettes of deadpan comedy.
  9. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Fireworks Wednesday carefully, organically introduces its characters, then lets the audience try to discern what they’re withholding.
  10. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.
  11. Afternoon
    Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.
  12. Don't Breathe
    Half a century after "Wait Until Dark" pitted a blind Audrey Hepburn against the three crooks trying to get into her apartment, along comes Don’t Breathe to successfully invert its scenario.
  13. Kill Zone 2
    Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.
  14. Kaili Blues
    Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.
  15. Aquarius
    So it’s marvelous to see Braga setting the big screen ablaze — speaking her native language, for once — in Aquarius, a Brazilian drama constructed entirely around her.
  16. The Salesman
    "Death Of A Salesman" does indeed figure into the story, as the film’s main characters, a married couple, are playing Willy and Linda Loman in an amateur production. On the whole, however, this starkly confrontational melodrama has more in common with the Charles Bronson classic "Death Wish," even if it’s angry words rather than bullets that go whizzing across the screen.
  17. Neruda
    Despite those superficial similarities, though, Neruda is ultimately a very different film than "Jackie," and arguably the bolder of the two. Its palette is darker, even as its sensibility is less somber, more playful.
  18. Pervert Park
    Pervert Park never demands forgiveness, only an attempt to understand and to maybe see where these dark impulses come from.
  19. Divines
    Divines, written and directed by French-Moroccan filmmaker Houda Benyamina, rivals "Girlhood" as a portrait of combustible banlieue femininity, emanating raw energy and scrappy good humor even as it builds to an unexpectedly tragic and horrifying finale.
  20. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    It’s more of a gently comic character sketch in boxing trunks.
  21. The Wailing
    The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time.
  22. Cosmos
    Made 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, Cosmos makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown.
  23. Life, Animated
    On the list of Disney-related 2016 releases about child-rearing and handicaps, this one goes just above "Finding Dory." What it lacks in wacky hijinks, it makes up in hard truths.
  24. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.
  25. Arrival
    Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts.
  26. Three
    To is one of the purest directors working today, and he flourishes within Three’s self-imposed limits, folding and reorienting the space of the hospital using privacy curtains, swinging doors, and a constantly moving camera — in the process producing a rollickingly entertaining movie.
  27. Under the Sun
    The truths revealed in this film have more to do with the North Korean government’s self-consciousness about how they’re perceived by foreigners. Here, they seem desperate to appear productive, congenial, devoted, and above all, happy.
  28. Miss Sharon Jones!
    While that may sound like a downer, the film itself is anything but, offering a genuinely uplifting testament to one woman’s resilience.
  29. The Alchemist Cookbook
    It’s difficult to imagine what a script for all of this would even look like. Whatever The Alchemist Cookbook has to express, it expresses through scenes that feel as though someone were dared to do something while a camera rolled, in the near-extinct tradition of the transgressive underground movie.
  30. Homo Sapiens
    The fact that movies are a technology of motion makes them uniquely suited to capturing stillness; Geyrhalter takes full advantage, using vivid sound design and his own eye for striking static compositions to create haunting tableaux.
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