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. Santosh
    In its most compelling stretches, Santosh operates as a kind of subverted procedural in which every aspect of the investigation is, at best, an informality of dubious legal standing.
  2. Spy
    Spy, similarly, doesn’t exactly send up James Bond or Jason Bourne espionage thrillers, but it places McCarthy in the middle of the action while subverting the traditionally male domination of that arena.
  3. Lilo & Stitch
    With its sharp wit and its portrayal of how broken families sometimes fit back together, Lilo would make a fine summer double feature alongside "About A Boy," another film that stays funny while dancing around a tiny abyss.
  4. A Chiara
    Though the path to its conclusions is at times more plodding than meditative, the finale is a subtle, emotional twist of the knife that makes the journey worth taking.
  5. An Unreasonable Man
    The film begins like a Frank Capra movie--pure-hearted idealist takes on corporate fat cats against impossible odds and triumphs--but ends like a Shakespearean tragedy.
  6. 24 City
    Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
  7. Night Moves
    There’s a certain muddled ambivalence to the movie; one gets the impression that Reichardt is more interested in these people than their ideas, but she never quite cracks Josh, who’s much more impenetrably aloof than the beleaguered travelers of "Meek’s Cutoff", her masterpiece. Night Moves is a portrait of outsiders that leaves its audience on the outside.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it's surprising—and ballsy—that De Palma makes Casualties Of War a full-on De Palma movie, with stylishly suspenseful action scenes, heightened performances, and plenty of moments where Fox takes on the role of a typically impotent De Palma voyeur.
  9. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Building to an emotional wallop that’s almost on par with anything found in one of Miyazaki’s or Takahata’s films, The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness is pornographically interesting for Studio Ghibli fans; as a delicate depiction of the artistic spirit, it’s equally essential viewing for everyone else.
  10. Crude
    Crude is so crammed with facts and figures that it can be a little dizzying, but what’s more important is what Berlinger records between all the talking-head interviews and vérité footage.
  11. 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.
  12. Send Help
    As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.
  13. Belfast
    This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.
  14. How to Train Your Dragon
    It’s a great-looking film--and an impressive use of 3D--but ultimately, the story makes it memorable.
  15. Civil War
    The film does not have easy answers, but rather than making it seem shallow, its lack of clear moral coding instead offers us something more primal and more powerful. It’s a film about the open-ended question of how much humanity we as a species have left in us, and that makes it a provocative, thrilling monster of a movie that will sear itself into your eyeballs.
  16. Side Effects
    Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.
  17. The Stunt Man
    The Stunt Man still thrills as a witty, sly, action-packed mind game.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Titanic
    That the familiar story of the Titanic disaster is told with suspense is not as surprising as Cameron's clear-headed balance of truth and fiction, spectacle and tragedy.
  19. Oceans
    It comes to American theaters saddled with narration by Pierce Brosnan, who purrs through the gratingly vague script like the world’s plummiest old half-drunken uncle.
  20. Blindspotting
    The film’s messy mix of flavorful, sometimes over-the-top character comedy and sincere racial politics benefits from the voice of its stars, who also wrote the script.
  21. The Invisible War
    Though Dick focuses heavily on just a few women, The Invisible War builds to a stunning montage of victim after victim telling their story to the camera without pseudonyms or silhouettes.
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