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. Bloody Sunday
    At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos.
  2. Punch-Drunk Love
    It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.
  3. Spartan
    Using simplicity as another form of deception, Mamet lays out a hand of three-card monte for the audience to see, then tricks it into guessing falsely. In this case, it's worth getting fooled out of a little cash.
  4. Katakuri-ke no kôfuku
    A joyously demented musical-comedy built on a macabre foundation, like "The Sound Of Music" with a kickline of corpses.
  5. The Full Monty
    A winning mix of humor and poignant character examination, and a satisfying film.
  6. 24 Hour Party People
    A funny, unexpectedly inspiring story of excess, poor choices, and unwavering high-mindedness, all tied to that quintessential bit of rock wisdom: Icarus did fall, but first he flew.
  7. Raising Victor Vargas
    What makes Raising Victor Vargas so special, beyond its irresistible charisma, is how Sollett and his cast capture the thrill of first love.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In & Out
    Screenwriter Paul Rudnick could be the closest thing 1990s Hollywood has to Preston Sturges, and in this era of Jim Carrey's slapstick seizures and Adam Sandler's deliberate anti-cleverness, it's a welcome thing. His In & Out is a smoothly paced, often wildly funny tale.
  9. Serpico
    Director Sidney Lumet (working from a screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler) chooses not to press the superheroic aspect of his protagonist. Serpico is more street-level, tracing a decade of NYPD change--and refusal to change--through an episodic, often elliptical structure.
  10. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    MC5's mix of showmanship, hippie idealism, and brawling Detroit muscle makes it tough to categorize, and A True Testimonial carefully moves through each step of the progression.
  11. Undercover Brother
    The rare popcorn movie that delivers. High-spirited and kinetic, it's the most endearingly goofy low comedy since "How High."
  12. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    The documentary was shot on film, and Moormann's snappy editing and subtly moving camera match the energy of the jump-blues and roots-rock that Dowd loved.
  13. Matchstick Men
    A combination of criminal smoothness and overloaded neuroses, Cage pulls off the lead role better than any actor imaginable.
  14. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The family's few lines of dialogue are so integral to advancing the story that they may well have been scripted, but it's not that important whether The Story Of The Weeping Camel is more fiction than objective ethnography. If anything, the contrast between what's real and what may have been faked only adds to the tension between the natural world and encroaching modernism.
  15. Dahmer
    Uses the serial killer's life as the starting point for a hypnotic examination of the farthest reaches of loneliness and alienation.
  16. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.
  17. Millennium Mambo
    Millennium Mambo is a resolutely minor work, so enveloped in ennui that it never gets past the surface of things. But those surfaces are remarkable.
  18. The Holy Land
    One of its great strengths lies in its surprising universality.
  19. The Station Agent
    McCarthy's characters make for good company even in their story's awkward patches, and in a film so unabashedly about the value of friendship, good company goes a long way.
  20. Goyangileul butaghae
    Jeong's movie is at its best when it forgets about everything but the interactions of its cast, whether they're together or communicating via one of Cat's cleverly orchestrated cell-phone scenes.
  21. 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.
  22. Y Tu Mamá También
    In the wild and consistently surprising Y Tu Mamá También, anything isn't the half of it.
  23. Swiri
    An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.
  24. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
    Compare any of this to the grinding series of vicious gags from, say, pretty much any Ben Stiller movie post-Flirting With Disaster, and Fast Times starts looking like a tame jokefest even grandma can enjoy. There's no crotch damage, no humorously dead animals, no pie-fucking, and no menstrual-blood-on-the-pants jokes, either. At its most graphic, it's got a little good-natured pot humor...It's just pure, lighthearted, relatively respectful fun. With boobs.
  25. Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    It's absorbing stuff, with some of the dishy quality of Andy Warhol's diaries and an almost humorous single-mindedness whenever Nijinsky returns, yet again, to the subjects of his vegetarianism, or how much he loves Russia (and France, and England, and just about everywhere he's ever been).
  26. What Alice Found
    In the end, the camper-lot prostitution serves as trapping for a weirdly touching coming-of-age film that leaves its heroine sadder but wiser.
  27. Shakespeare in Love
    Delivers the goods, if the goods you're in the market for happen to be a clever romance concerning William Shakespeare that's unlikely to cause anyone to reassess their notions of Shakespeare, romance, or enjoyment.
  28. American Splendor
    With a lovably cantankerous sense of humor and an honest strain of hard realism and pathos, the film thrives on the tension that comes from an artist who devotes himself to the truth, but watches his image get away from him.
  29. Two Girls and a Guy
    Some of the points seem too easy, some of the revelations practically announce themselves in advance, and there's never any sense of excitement or suspense as to where the whole thing is heading. But it still works, most of the time.
  30. Snake Eyes
    Snake Eyes can't sustain its masterful first hour, but it's better than just about any action movie this year.
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