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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rescue Dawn
    Their bond lends this more or less conventional POW escape film resounding emotional depth.
  2. Human Flow
    Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.
  3. Happy Feet
    It's a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers, but in spite of its crowd-pleasing ploys, it holds onto its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story.
  4. The Weather Underground
    Serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.
  5. Facing the Music
    Uncompromising in her art, her teaching, and her professional relations, Boyd makes for a classic tough old bird of a character.
  6. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    David Gelb's documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi shows what a meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro is like: each morsel prepared simply and perfectly, then replaced by another as soon as the previous piece is consumed, with no repetition of courses. Once an item is gone, it doesn't come back. That's why each one has to be memorable.
  7. Longlegs
    Everything about it, from the performances to the production design to the sickly quality of the light in scene after scene, is designed to make us not just question what we’re seeing, but stand at a remove from it, like we’ve just seen a wild animal behaving strangely. Like that wild animal might just lash out and bite us if we get too close.
  8. The Dark Horse
    The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.
  9. Burden of Dreams
    Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
  10. The Gift
    Pivoting out of conventional horror-flick territory into the realm of psychodrama, and drastically blurring the lines separating its heroes from its villains, The Gift turns out to be much smarter and more troubling than it looks on the surface.
  11. Paper Moon
    Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.
  12. Victoria
    Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.
  13. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    It walks a fascinating line between morbid humor and outright horror, and it consistently defies expectations by resetting them at every possible step.
  14. Broker
    Though Kore-eda began his career as a documentarian, his positions on social issues are far from neutral. He reveres the resilience of those who have been dealt a bad hand in life, a sentiment that certainly shines through in Broker.
  15. Queen of Earth
    In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it.
  16. Paddington
    If the film seems head-and-shoulders above the average effects-driven family-matinee flick, it’s because it never gives the impression that it’s trying to be anything more (or less) than good-natured and fun to watch.
  17. Women Talking
    Women Talking is about as direct as cinema gets in portraying the complexities and nuances of the feminist struggle, and it achieves much with characters who wouldn’t likely consider themselves feminist or revolutionary.
  18. Mississippi Grind
    So long as the film focuses on that spiky rapport, and on the authentic, lived-in textures of the American Midwest, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Unfortunately, the grittiness and weary pathos ultimately gives way to a disappointingly pat finale, undermining everything that came before.
  19. Mother of George
    Mother Of George is rarely boring to look at, but it might still have been better served by a starker, less showy aesthetic.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wetlands
    Wetlands makes the internal external; the secret, scary bits of female anatomy are on display in a way that isn’t meant to be particularly titillating to the male gaze.
  21. Fly Away Home
    While Winged Migration asks the audience to empathize with birds, Fly Away Home asks us to take a closer look at the people who love them, and to understand what gives their lives meaning.
  22. Annie Get Your Gun (re-release)
    Though the film suffers from Sidney's point-and-shoot approach to the Robert Alton-staged musical numbers, it's buoyed nicely by the songs themselves, a clever script, crisp Technicolor cinematography, and Hutton's spirited performance.
  23. A Christmas Story
    The affection audiences feel for A Christmas Story is related to the holiday spirit, yes, but specifically to Clark and Shepherd's awareness of how the true meaning of Christmas manifests in the real world, where a warm meal on a cold, dark day—and a surprising moment of parental grace—can ease a troubled mind.
  24. 51 Birch Street
    The joys of watching a man carry out his own therapy onscreen are fairly limited.
  25. Alamar (To the Sea)
    There isn't much to Alamar--and González-Rubio sometimes seems to go out of his way to keep the film uncluttered by incident-but it's short and agreeable, and touching.
  26. Expedition to the End of the World
    The Expedition To The End Of The World courses with the zeal of Robert Flaherty, the fearlessness of Werner Herzog, and the fatalistic humor of Lars Von Trier. While individual moments echo with a familiarly mordant sense of alpha-male adventure, together they cohere into something wild and new.
  27. Wild Tales
    The filmmakers have cannily structured this crazed collection of shorts, using running time and general quality as organizational criteria. The best segments serve as bookends. The worst ones are buried in the middle.
  28. Corpus Christi
    It deviates enough from formula — especially in its arresting ending, which takes full advantage of Bielenia’s haunted visage — to be worth seeing.
  29. Best of Enemies
    Alternately entertaining and unsettling documentary.
  30. Buzzard
    Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.
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