The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. I Saw the TV Glow
    I Saw The TV Glow is a remarkable portrait of pop-culture obsession—how it can unite us, change us, and ripple down through our entire lives in ways both uplifting and unsettling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Different Man
    A Different Man prioritizes laughs over proselytizing. There is inherent humor in the absurdity of the situation—which takes a momentary detour near sci-fi territory during Edward’s transformation—but Schimberg wrings laughs out of deftly staged awkwardness (though, thankfully, not cringe).
  4. Eno
    More than a biographical documentary, Eno emerges as a brilliant and endlessly inspiring creative manifesto.
  5. Thelma
    How often does a film come along that you can comfortably recommend to literally everyone in your life? Not often enough. For that reason alone, Thelma deserves to be celebrated.
  6. Monkey Man
    Patel’s film may have found its greatest success in the way it seamlessly, powerfully translates the director’s pure, kinetic love of cinema into something bold, new, and unforgettable.
  7. Longlegs
    Everything about it, from the performances to the production design to the sickly quality of the light in scene after scene, is designed to make us not just question what we’re seeing, but stand at a remove from it, like we’ve just seen a wild animal behaving strangely. Like that wild animal might just lash out and bite us if we get too close.
  8. I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is still propaganda of the first order, a beautiful and sensually overwhelming tribute to the land and its people.
  9. Magnificent Obsession
    It's one wacked-out melodrama, but it's wildly entertaining.
  10. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Nyoni’s direction is brilliant, contrasting the chaos of Uncle Fred’s multi-day funeral with the stillness and solace Shula finds in her cousins’ company.
  11. I Am: Celine Dion
    The documentary, taking its cue from Dion, is not merely looking backward; there’s a path ahead. What exactly that looks like is, as it turns out, being negotiated as the documentary unfolds.
  12. Babygirl
    Reijn has crafted a feature-length homage to the early rush of attraction–one that the director knows can strike unprovoked, regardless of relationship status. Within the film’s 114-minute runtime, that ephemeral spark between Romy and Samuel is bottled, smashed, and left seeping across the screen, leaving an intriguing pattern in its wake.
  13. House
    Watching this film is like jamming fistfuls of delicious candy into your mouth for 90 minutes. It’s a rush chasing a rush.
    • The A.V. Club
  14. Manon of the Spring
    The pacing is expansive rather than draggy; Berri is in no rush to tear through his story, but the dialogue is generally meaningful and story-critical, and very little goes on that isn't directly relevant to the story's ultimate ends.
  15. The Mastermind
    A film so pure in its simplicity, relatable in its banality, quiet in its captivation, that it pulls off a nearly impossible feat: It’s a heist film that can’t be called a thriller.
  16. Die My Love
    Ramsay lets her film, and her characters, exhale just a little. But there is a lot of earned wisdom and lived-in pain in that exhale, and in the entirety of Ramsay’s masterwork.
  17. Hard Boiled
    Plenty of entertaining action movies have been made since John Woo's 1992 Hard Boiled, but really, what's the point?
  18. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
    Lavish with cultural references and fresh imagination, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is a revelry of comedy, murder, intellectualism, sexual awakening, queerness, and more.
  19. All of a Sudden
    Hamaguchi’s screenplay for his first French film (co-written with Léa Le Dimna) overflows with insight and discernment at such great depth that it’s more like the Tao Te Ching than a script, more like a film by the Dalai Lama than an internationally beloved auteur.
  20. Shutter Island
    There’s a purpose to all this madness--though to talk about the primary reason the film succeeds would be giving the game away--but it should be appreciated first as a vivid, waking nightmare.
  21. An Education
    An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.
  22. The Hurt Locker
    For the first hour or more, The Hurt Locker boldly forsakes any conventional narrative hook beyond the ongoing tensions between these men and the terrifying grind of defusing bombs day after day.
  23. A Single Man
    It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.
  24. A Serious Man
    WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.
  25. Broken Embraces
    Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.
  26. Where the Wild Things Are
    Spike Jonze has recently said in interviews that his chief goal ...was to try to capture the feeling of being 9. By that measure--by just about any measure, really--he succeeded wildly.
  27. Pan's Labyrinth
    After two hours of dazzlingly fantastical images and stomach-turning gore, del Toro winds around, and finds his story's center.
  28. The Informant!
    The Informant! chooses to earn its exclamation point with giggles as well as shock, and the results are thoroughly entertaining.
  29. In the Loop
    In The Loop floats above its chaotic world on wave after wave of beautifully profane dialogue.
  30. The Class
    The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.
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