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. Citizen Ruth
    A deft, three-dimensional performance from Dern, playing an almost entirely unlikable character, aids incalculably in exposing what happens when political factions lose touch with the realities of the issues for which they claim to provide answers.
  2. The Wings of the Dove
    The Wings Of The Dove is thought-provoking in a full and lasting sense; it'll stay with you long after its dubious final scene.
  3. Wings of Desire
    Though Wings Of Desire has a classic look, its mood and style is New Wave in every sense of the term. The synthesis of deep thought, leisurely pacing, and stunning visuals is in the spirit of work by the young European filmmakers of the '60s and '70s. (Reviewed in 2003 for DVD Release)
  4. Afterglow
    Afterglow gets off to a weak start—and it's occasionally hampered by stilted dialogue and cutesy conceits; Nolte's character is named Lucky Mann—but it is nevertheless a strong, frequently touching film that benefits from a pair of brilliant performances by Nolte and Christie.
  5. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    While director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the stage production) often uses the opened-up space of the movie well, he doesn't always avoid some of the common pitfalls that come with adapting plays.
  6. Oscar and Lucinda
    It accumulates weight as it goes along, ultimately becoming as thoughtful and emotionally involving as it is beautiful to behold.
  7. Videodrome
    Its dense mysteries remain more tantalizing than distancing: No other director integrates the creepy with the cerebral quite like Cronenberg. (Review of DVD 9/13/04)
  8. Heavy
    Heavy is the kind of deliberately slow-paced character study that allows carefully realized performances to shine.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dead Man
    Jarmusch's trademark quiet irony, affinity for the outcast and oddball, and moonscape visuals suit the Western genre well.
  10. Emma
    While most literary adaptations look flat and pretty, the fine performances here set Emma apart.
  11. Empathy
    Somehow, all of these scattered pieces of film and video fit together, as do the ideas they represent.
  12. Raja
    Even without all the other complications, Doillon's handling of the language gap alone gives Raja a pungent dramatic edge.
  13. Karmen Gei
    The film offers plenty of powerful impressionism to make up for its lack of a coherent statement.
  14. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    By the time Lagaan climaxes with 90 minutes of remarkably riveting cricket, the stakes and the effects on the players have taken on a vivid clarity, and what might have started out as corny clichés have become the stuff of classic movie entertainment.
  15. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Stunning you-are-there account of a grand swindle in the making. Were the coup not such an outrageous and chilling affront to democracy, their documentary would be a gut-busting comedy along the lines of Woody Allen's "Bananas."
  16. My Name Is Nobody
    The definitive spaghetti Western parody.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Warriors
    The Warriors is a deeply silly movie. Its gangs are ridiculous comic-book figures. Still, director Walter Hill treats its world with total seriousness. Bleak synthesizer drones thrum and throb. The streets glow with slickly inky-black greasiness. Nobody smiles. It’s so awesome.
  18. Airplane!
    The hits outnumber the misses well enough in Airplane!, especially in the first half, when the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (writer-directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) are layering jokes in the foreground and background. There are parodies of popular favorites like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever, wacky stock footage on back-screen projection, slapstick violence against various religious solicitors, and plenty of silly wordplay.
  19. The Color of Money
    I happen to think the film is woefully underrated, but it’s hard to imagine even its most ardent critics being able to find much fault with the way Scorsese and screenwriter Richard Price ease us into Fast Eddie’s world, expanding our view bit by tantalizing bit while making us wonder what’s happening just outside the frame.
  20. Escape from New York
    Carpenter's grittily convincing New York-in-decay remains the film's best element. Never particularly suspenseful and hampered by a finale that almost literally steers the plot toward a dead end, Escape only intermittently finds Carpenter flexing his directorial muscles. But it may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past.
  21. Cat's Eye
    Despite a few nasty bits of violence, Cat’s Eye almost plays like an intro to King for younger viewers ready for some shocks but not yet prepared for full-on nightmares.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The General
    Credit director John Boorman with bringing a life like Cahill's to the screen with such acuity that it's easy to overlook the many familiar elements of his mobster movie.
  23. Eight Men Out
    Detailed and memorable, with attention given to the many personalities and agendas involved, but while it finds sympathy for the men who feel pushed to cheat for money, it offers just as much sympathy for the fans who love the sport, and can’t figure out why their beloved players would betray them.
  24. Martin
    Martin touches on any number of post-Vietnam ills (urban decay, drug addiction, crises in faith) without overstatement, allowing for a deeply considered exploration of horror's ability to comment on society, a sort of belated answer to Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. At the same time, Romero still forces Martin to work as strictly a horror film, albeit an eccentric one in which the violence has an uncomfortable plausibility, starkly contrasting Amplas' romanticized black-and-white vampiric fantasy life.
  25. Apocalypse Now Redux
    In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.
  26. The Haunting
    Sound effects, disorienting camera work, expert editing, and Humphrey Searle's discomfiting score all suggest, without showing, a horrible presence waiting in the wings. Though parts of The Haunting are talky, even that works in the film's favor, as Tamblyn's glib dismissals and Johnson's calm professorial tone are unable to clear up the mystery at its core. After all, the specters that can't be seen, classified, or otherwise contained are the scariest of all.
  27. Wait Until Dark
    Hepburn's blend of pluckiness and self-pity and Arkin's cool cunning give Wait Until Dark emotional weight, but their final tussle is what most fans of the film remember.
  28. Hellraiser
    Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the '80s.
  29. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    Here’s a film that opens with a man being smeared in excrement and closes with an even more horrifying act of revenge, yet it’s fevered, passionate, and occasionally erotic, at least by Greenaway standards. It’s a film awash in the color red, full of blood, sex, and rage, the rare Greenaway that feels alive as more than a formal or semiotic exercise. You may even catch him storytelling here and there.
  30. Running on Empty
    The film is first and foremost a family drama, where the politics that led to this predicament take a back seat to the people who find themselves in it.
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