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. Changing Lanes
    Out of that clever setup, Changing Lanes pulls both the promised taut suspense and a much deeper film: an ethics thriller.
  2. Father and Son
    Less a story than a situation, the film contends with a difficult transitional period in the lives of its title characters, who face the growing necessity of getting some distance from each other.
  3. 'R Xmas
    A lean, well-contained slice-of-life at 83 minutes, 'R Xmas finds the director making a confident return to the hard-nosed realism on which he's staked his maverick reputation.
  4. Big Daddy
    Sandler's best movie, a surprisingly touching and consistent comedy that finds him reaching out to new audiences without abandoning the transgressive meanness that has enlivened his best work.
  5. Elephant
    Has a gentle, hypnotic tone that's insistently sweet and elegiac, in spite of the horrors that overwhelm the frame. In its juxtaposition of the serene and the violent, the beautiful and the brutal, the film achieves a balance that's exquisitely judged, tiptoeing artfully through a cultural minefield.
  6. The Sixth Sense
    Teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone.
  7. 21 Grams
    A nearly unparalleled actor's showcase, the film boasts performances of impressive quality and quantity...Their complexity matches the film's.
  8. Red Lights
    With ruthless efficiency and wit, Kahn ratchets up unbearable tension and releases it in startlingly visceral fashion, but his placid denouement is the most chilling scene of all.
  9. Fear and Trembling
    A feverishly compelling film that doesn't force-feed its ideals to its audience.
  10. Lightning in a Bottle
    When Lightning In A Bottle steps back and simply lets the old-timers ply their trade, the result is consistently riveting.
  11. Oasis
    In a sense, Oasis is an unabashed tearjerker, but Lee keeps knocking the melodrama off-balance, making all the big emotional payoffs a little discomforting, because they're not that far removed from something really disturbing.
  12. My Flesh and Blood
    Mostly content to observe with wary admiration, the film doesn't offer any answers, and life robs the story of any sort of resolution, leaving only footage of one remarkable example of charity in action.
  13. The Ring
    As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."
  14. Ali
    Ali becomes less the story of a boxer than the story of one man hanging onto his soul. With so many wrong ways to dramatize that process, Mann's approach seems all the more right.
  15. Purple Butterfly
    A sumptuously moody memory play.
  16. Enduring Love
    Enduring Love's plot inevitably drifts into “Fatal Attraction” territory, but its wholesale immersion in Craig's deteriorating condition render it a wrenching, uncompromising study of the human mind in freefall.
  17. Primary Colors
    One the truest-feeling political portraits in years, as well as a fine piece of drama.
  18. Tarnation
    Caouette's shattering Tarnation represents a landmark in personal filmmaking: It finally realizes the digital dream of a raw, unsanctioned glimpse into the soul.
  19. The Deserted Station
    Deserted Station plays out like a dream, but Raisian moves comfortably between fantasy and nightmare, real and surreal.
  20. Time of the Wolf
    At its best, the film sustains the heightened tension of great science fiction, dropping in on a frightening new world that's just this side of familiar.
  21. Cop Land
    Cop Land emerges as a first-rate morality play in the form of an effective, if occasionally unwieldy, crime drama.
  22. Promises
    "I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but.
  23. Super Size Me
    Spurlock's film proves yet again that the phrase "crowd-pleasing documentary" doesn't have to be an oxymoron.
  24. The Powerpuff Girls
    It's a good movie infused with moments of greatness.
  25. A Talking Picture
    De Oliveira wraps A Talking Picture with a simultaneous introduction and farewell--a bold curtain-dropper that's either a bleak joke or an imprecisely controlled scream of rage.
  26. Beijing Bicycle
    Even without its bleak and affecting story, Beijing Bicycle would work beautifully as a travelogue alone.
  27. The Big Red One
    In some respects a less tidy film than before, particularly when it veers off into a subplot involving a Nazi soldier played by Siegfried Rauch, the new cut mostly retains the original's virtues while adding details and episodes that make it more recognizably a Fuller film.
  28. Bowling for Columbine
    Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.
  29. Control Room
    Remarkable and timely film.
  30. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    At times, Goldsworthy's philosophy edges into fuzzy New Age-isms, but with an ever-widening gulf separating humans from their environment, his work demonstrates the enlightening pleasures of reconnecting.
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