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. Meet Me in St. Louis
    An ambitious nostalgia piece with a broad emotional palette.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet uses an accessible medium to show the evils of propaganda and express the need for individuality. Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well.
  3. The Mack
    From its inception, The Mack had more on its mind than delivering a blaxploitation film, a label director Michael Campus always resisted. He shouldn’t have. His film is one of the finest examples of the genre, a smartly executed and deeply ambitious story of crime, corruption, and prostitution, shot on location in Oakland, California.
  4. The Three Musketeers
    The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.
  5. The Element of Crime
    Crime's dreamlike tone and fantastic visuals make it impossible to forget, like an absurd nightmare that overshadows the following day. Even if Von Trier never made another movie, viewers would still watch and admire this debut.
  6. Bitter Moon
    Widely reviled a decade ago, Bitter Moon now plays as a visionary bridging of Brian De Palma's cinematic perversity and Takashi Miike's literal perversity, in addition to being another uncompromising Polanski study of the ways people torture each other.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    A haunting, expressionistic portrait of two lonely souls who have reached out for companionship and instead found themselves on a proving ground, where they are mercilessly denuded of their protective lies and self-deception.
  8. Censor
    Censor’s meticulous, insidious structure sticks to the subconscious; this is an auspicious debut in modern genre cinema.
  9. John and the Hole
    John And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts.
  10. Pleasure
    “Shocking” is a word that gets thrown around too frequently. But it’s all too fitting for Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, a graphic, gripping, and unflinching drama charting the rocky rise of an ambitious newcomer to the adult film industry.
  11. Hive
    This is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.
  12. Sator
    Sator is an effective exercise in what the horror genre does best, underscoring awful truths—in this case, dementia and generational trauma—by making them explicitly monstrous. What Graham understands is that there are few things scarier than the ultimate fragility of the human brain and everything contained within
  13. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    Without a doubt, Wallace was more comfortable with his boys, and Biggie serves as an origin story on how his rise to hip-hop stardom took not just him but also his people out of the projects.
  14. I'm Your Man
    This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama.
  15. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    If the movie were just meme-able moments, it might run out of steam, even with Cage delivering them practically nonstop. Thankfully, there’s an actual plot, which allows everyone else (and the film as a whole) to spoof less Cage-specific tropes.
  16. Sonatine
    Like the character he plays, Kitano directs the film in a style that alternates between tenderness and brutality, making it a relentlessly tense suspense film one minute and a gentle character study the next. Either half would make Sonatine worth seeing. But taken together as the story of a man who regains his soul but whose face remains permeated with the knowledge of its inevitable loss, it becomes an artful gangster film, Yakuza poetry, and essential viewing.
  17. Oklahoma!
    Both State Fair and Oklahoma! exemplify the composers' re-imagining of the musical form, which relied on more subtle vocal techniques, and songs that were catchy without always being hooky. The movies also catch the pair's unique version of nostalgia, which salutes provincial values while suggesting that they may not be enough to satisfy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Edge of Seventeen
    While Edge Of Seventeen was marketed largely toward gay audiences, it’ll resonate with anyone who remembers the awkwardness and elation of their first sexual experiences, because it captures those experiences better and more honestly than practically any other film.
  19. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.
  20. No Sudden Move
    Movies routinely place characters in desperate, life-or-death situations, but rarely do we see them behave in a genuinely desperate way. No Sudden Move, a period crime drama written by Ed Solomon and directed by Steven Soderbergh, corrects this oversight in a way that’s at once hilarious and distressing.
  21. a-ha: the Movie
    It’s a compelling tale of three perfectionists who consider music to be their bond, but don’t work together very well unless they have to.
  22. Catch the Fair One
    Although Wladyka foregrounds the movie’s razor-sharp edge—there’s a torture scene midway through that’s especially shocking—there’s a political undercurrent to the story, as well as an emotional one, that give Catch The Fair One uncommon resonance.
  23. Italian Studies
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
  24. 7 Days
    As a romantic comedy, 7 Days hardly circumvents a cinematic lexicon of time-honored tropes, but its skill in dismantling stereotypes, sexist beliefs, and even the process of falling in love offers a fresh and charming rejoinder to the cynicism of both its own genre and the emerging repetition of pandemic-set films.
  25. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    Quippy, zippy, and punchy, this teen-focused take on everyone’s favorite pizza-loving vigilantes is a refreshing reappraisal of a property that could very well have felt stale in 2023.
  26. Tenebrae
    Franciosa and John Saxon (as his agent) turn in amusing performances, and Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch.
  27. Bergman Island
    In its strongest, most evocative scenes, Bergman Island feels like peering in someone else’s window, sensing an echo of your own experiences, and marveling at all the ways a stranger could remind you of yourself.
  28. Belle
    Individual moments in Belle are frequently magical: Many of the real-world scenes are beautifully staged and illustrated, with characters moving quietly and slowly through outdoor spaces while sunlight dapples across the water and birds flit by.
  29. tick, tick...Boom!
    In joyfully embracing just about every tool in the movie-musical toolbox, Miranda crafts a fitting tribute to the act of artistic creation. And he might just make some musical converts in the process.
  30. The Meaning of Life
    The Meaning Of Life is unsparing and elaborate in its vision of humanity at its foulest.
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