The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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 2.5 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. First Love
    While the film is kinetic, colorful, and frantically paced, it’s also not quite as outrageous as Miike’s gonzo ‘90s yakuza movies.
  2. Get Low
    Get Low is meant to be funny, heartwarming, and wise, and it is, for the most part--but in an overly familiar way.
  3. Jauja
    Everything signals birth—of Argentina, cinema, the nuclear family—until Dinesen descends into a womb-like cave and Jauja takes a hard left turn into enigma. Even the title is a mystery, the Spanish byword for a land of plenty.
  4. Blue Collar
    Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.
  5. The Immigrant
    The visual and thematic palette immediately brings to mind Michael Cimino’s once-maligned "Heaven’s Gate" — except that The Immigrant accomplishes more in two hours than Heaven’s Gate did in nearly four.
  6. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Jones directs with all the grit that's associated with his onscreen persona, but Peckinpah would never allow this degree of sentimentality to slip into one of his Westerns. A better comparison might be to Clint Eastwood, another tough-guy actor whose work as a director is often a little soft at the center.
  7. The Amusement Park
    The Amusement Park passes in a deranged blur; it’s a glorified PSA made with the means (and in the spirit of) antagonistic outsider art.
  8. Detroit
    It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished.
  9. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    Ocelot’s joyous mashup is a work of uncommonly vivid imagination, sharing space with Yellow Submarine, Fantastic Planet, and The Triplets Of Belleville in the omnivorous grade-schooler’s alt-canon.
  10. The Edge of Seventeen
    Despite its upstart distributor and relatively low-key cast, it’s an unabashedly mainstream movie; compared with edgier, more indie versions of onscreen American youth, it might even look a little pat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Brooklyn Castle
    Indifferently structured but centered around charming characters, the documentary starts off as a chronicle of the scholastic chess year, but becomes a compelling plea on behalf of the importance of afterschool programs.
  12. Logan
    What’s special about Logan is that it manages to deliver the visceral goods, all the hardcore Wolverine action its fans could desire, while still functioning as a surprisingly thoughtful, even poignant drama—a terrific movie, no “comic-book” qualifier required.
  13. Circo
    Though Circo is pretty bleak, Schock doesn't skimp on the exotic wonder of a life on the road, surrounded by color and danger.
  14. 28 Years Later
    A blistering adventure filled with dread and wonder, there’s a macabre classicism to the film—a sense that, even if life as we know it falls apart, some essential elements persevere.
  15. Water
    Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.
  16. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    It’s a small, offbeat movie, punctuated by bursts of terrible violence but also infused with a winning strain of deadpan humor that’s not too far removed from Jim Jarmusch.
  17. Italian for Beginners
    Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.
  18. Bukowski: Born into This
    Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.
  19. Monsoon Wedding
    A sight worth seeing.
  20. Home of the Brave
    Di Florio loses her grip on Liuzzo's story whenever she lapses into generalities. But when Di Florio gets into the specifics of her subject's legacy, Home Of The Brave stands out as both relevant and moving.
  21. Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe
    Best of all, Candace Against The Universe plays up the heart of the relationship among Candace, Phineas, and Ferb: For all her schemes, the show often revealed that Candace really does love her brothers. But this new movie makes a point to show how much they appreciate her as well.
  22. Gerald's Game
    Perhaps because he’s had a couple of decades to think about it, Flanagan’s vision for the film is assured, full of intimate closeups that allow Gugino’s multi-layered performance to shine.
  23. Louder Than a Bomb
    Louder Than A Bomb is a different kind of high-school movie, brimming with life and hope instead of social-climbing, bullying, and furtive first kisses.
  24. I Stand Alone
    I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.
  25. Code Black
    Far too much time is spent on McGarry and his colleagues talking to the camera about how little they’re motivated by money or status and how much they just want to help people. That’s laudable, but it’s not compelling.
  26. The Wife
    It’s Close’s wonderfully subtle characterization of Joan that lifts The Wife above its cliché setups and neat role reversals, which is really rather ironic. Once again, it’s the wife doing all the hard work. At least this time, she gets top billing.
  27. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    There aren’t just more dragons, but more characters, more plot, more everything. The trade-off is that the charm of the original gets a little lost, a casualty of rapid-franchise expansion.
  28. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard’s misbegotten Palme D’Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a "Taxi Driver" for today’s Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between "Death Wish" and Ken Loach.
  29. The Disaster Artist
    Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.
  30. Bill Cunningham New York
    It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.
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