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. Threads
    Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    2010
    2010 is an essential text of the late Cold War.
  3. The Jerk
    Sweet, lighthearted, occasionally hilarious.
  4. Bleak Moments
    The ability to find performers who never seem for a moment to be performing is also here, giving Bleak Moments, like all of Leigh's films, an almost voyeuristic feel.
  5. Castle in the Sky
    On the lighthearted end of the Miyazaki spectrum, but it features more dashing adventure.
  6. Mean Streets
    A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.
  7. Harold and Maude
    In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brainstorm
    As provocative as all this is, Trumbull keeps things grounded, interested to an almost baffling degree in the technical and logistical sides of this theoretical technology, as well as the emotional arcs of the humans creating it.
  9. Lady and the Tramp
    As in all things, Lady And The Tramp is far more interested in raising complicated questions than in providing easy answers.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zorro: The Gay Blade
    A delightful, campy spoof not only of the old Zorro films but of swashbuckling Hollywood heroics in general. George Hamilton is hilarious in his double role. [3 Aug 1981]
    • The A.V. Club
  11. El Dorado
    It’s not that Hawks’ style rescues El Dorado; it’s that it integrates all of these problems, producing a movie that feels effortlessly complete and consistent, despite being, frankly, all over the place.
  12. The Stunt Man
    The Stunt Man still thrills as a witty, sly, action-packed mind game.
  13. Lord of the Flies
    Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Palace
    White Palace is more than a romance or a bedroom romp or human comedy. It is a lesson in judgments and values, and a glimpse at emotional roulette.
  15. Rebecca
    Shot like a horror film and featuring Olivier as one of the least sympathetic heroes in the Hitchcock canon, Rebecca's smart extrapolation on themes inherited from gothic thrillers and Brontë novels allows the director to begin with a suspenseful romance that barely keeps its subtext under the surface, and smuggle in a story of one woman's immersion into the sexual expectations of her era.
  16. The Heartbreak Kid
    Not especially gag-driven, May's deadpan style clears the way for some remarkable performances by Jeannie Berlin, Eddie Albert, and especially Grodin, who has to remain likable even while doing stupid, mean things.
  17. Ridicule
    Ridicule convincingly establishes a sense of dread that comes with living in constant fear of public humiliation. And, though it's set in the past, its depiction of wealth-bloated politicians who maintain a wide gulf between actions and rhetoric seems timeless.
  18. The Blood of a Poet
    Few drug-induced visions, however, can match the playful ingenuity of this freewheeling assault on the senses, which eschews conventional narrative in favor of one mesmerizingly bizarre image after another.
  19. Burden of Dreams
    Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
  20. Invictus
    It’s a simplistic, superficial approach to a real-life story that marginalizes most historical details not involving scrums and tackles. It’s also pretty effective, in spite of the gloss.
  21. The Book of Eli
    Its hero may be on a mission from above, but in a refreshing twist, the fate of mankind rests with the literate.
  22. Up in the Air
    What Up In The Air lacks in surprises--apart from an elusive final scene--it compensates for by conveying the pleasures of living from landing to landing, and the terror of floating away.
  23. Frozen River
    If the role brings her more recognition and work, all the better, but Leo certainly isn't lobbying for it. She doesn't show off. She just does what she's always done: Reveals a character for who she is, nothing more, nothing less.
  24. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.
  25. Sherlock Holmes
    This is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era.
  26. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much abuse on a heroine. And yet, on its own melodramatic, tear-jerking terms, Precious works.
  27. The Invention of Lying
    The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.
  28. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort, even though it already looks sadly out of touch with the times.
  29. Funny People
    It's refreshingly unformulaic, but a rambling mess. It's also tremendously funny.
  30. Watchmen
    Snyder's Watchmen keeps moving so assuredly, it's nearly impossible not to get swept along.
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