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. Summertime
    Everything onscreen still feels credible, but forbidden-love stories are as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Summertime had briefly seemed to promise something more mercurial.
  2. 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.
  3. Is This Thing On?
    Is This Thing On? might come to its healing from an appropriately modest place, but there’s still a bit of actorly grandiosity under its skin.
  4. Shame
    McQueen is a showy director, but his bravura long takes have the effect of heightened attentiveness, allowing scenes to build in intensity without the relief of a cut.
  5. Akeelah and the Bee
    As the conceptually similar documentary "Spellbound" proved, spelling bees are innately dramatic. But that doesn't keep Atchison from constantly pushing the film toward theatrical moments instead of letting the drama arise organically from the story.
  6. Crazy Horse
    Anyone could make a film about a theater full of naked women; only Wiseman would take equal interest in the person who handles the ticket-ordering, and the one who makes sure there's a bottle of champagne on every table.
  7. Brick
    Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet."
  8. Doctor Strange
    “Cool enough” doesn’t do justice to this blockbuster’s city - and reality-bending set pieces. “Awe-inspiring” is closer.
  9. Death and the Maiden
    Weaver's overacting and Dorfman's bold-faced dialogue oversell the scenario. Only Kingsley's sly turn gives Death And The Maiden any real feeling of disquiet.
  10. Watcher
    Without spoiling, this is one movie where it’d be extremely interesting to know what happens five minutes after the final scene. But while the subsequent events may be up for vigorous debate, the film’s message is crystal clear: Screw you if you ever doubted a woman afraid for her safety.
  11. The Suicide Squad
    Now that superhero movies have gone from disreputable entertainment for children to global events ushered in with awed reverence, it was time for someone to come along and pop the balloon. Pulpy and outrageous, irreverent and ultraviolent, The Suicide Squad does so with a smile.
  12. Ghost Town
    Though the plot contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often missing from movies about people falling in love.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Heart Machine
    The Heart Machine’s denouement is ultimately disappointing, but the film is still one of the more successful cinematic portrayals of online intimacy.
  14. The Day After
    A lazy shoulder shrug of a movie that never bothers to work out who its characters are, what they want, or why their ostensible problems should be of interest to anyone else.
  15. Tiny Furniture
    Tiny Furniture offers a 21st-century, East Coast spin on "The Graduate," but with comedy-writer-ish dialogue and a mannered style that never fully gels.
  16. The Sheep Detectives
    Jokes may fall flat, and the movie might get a bit treacly, but The Sheep Detectives‘ big heart is never in question.
  17. Mostly Martha
    Becomes precisely the sort of film its elements demand. As tearful goodbyes and joyful montage sequences set to lite-jazz saxophoning take over, "neatly winsome" trumps "messy drama" yet again.
  18. Walk the Line
    Ends up being another one of those life-of-an-entertainer films that reduces an artist to his most embarrassing moments.
  19. When Marnie Was There
    As a children’s movie, it’s uncommonly sensitive and complicated, rooted in relationships rather than dazzling action. But adults may notice its simple poetry turning, after a while, to suds.
  20. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    The gut-churningly nasty Pusher III practically justifies the whole series, as it digs deep into the angst of a drug kingpin—a junkie himself—nagged by a thousand little business details and taunted by all the young, carefree libertines he sees enjoying themselves at his drug dens.
  21. Control
    Nimród Antal's terrific feature debut Kontroll takes some time to get up to speed--but once it's fully underway, it develops a heady momentum and a devastating impact.
  22. Terri
    deWitt's script is much better than anything Jacobs has worked on before, with a story that gets richer as it goes.
  23. Dormant Beauty
    Though the movie eschews facile sloganeering, few of its characters or narrative threads are able to develop beyond their function as metaphors.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    One9 applies enough emotion and visual flourishes to steer clear of hacky Behind The Music territory.
  25. Match Point
    Just when the seemingly endless scenes of Johansson's nagging threaten to sink Match Point for good, the movie becomes the thriller that early reports promised.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
    The movie is so unrelievedly pessimistic that only the most dedicated misanthrope could love it. But there’s something oddly bracing—noble, even—about a Hollywood picture that’s willing to say, without even a hint of soft-pedaling, that life isn’t worth living, and that it’s squalid, unfair, and disappointing.
  27. Still Alice
    Though shot in the stolidly inconspicuous style of a low-rated cable drama, Still Alice is rarely anything short of compelling, in part because its sense of progression and scale offers such a distinctively unsentimental take on the terminal-countdown tearjerker.
  28. Late Night with the Devil
    Late Night With The Devil achieves that rare feat of feeling like something we were never supposed to see. But once we’ve seen it, we can’t look away.
  29. Sound of Noise
    What binds the entertaining crime movie to its YouTube-ready musical interludes is the unspoken yearning of its two leads: he for the world of silence in which he'd rather live, and she for all the sounds that slip by every second, uncontrolled and unappreciated.
  30. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    This handmade approach is a big part of the film’s DIY charm. It’s also a perfect match for the story, which seems to have been pulled, too, from the messy locker of teen-boy imagination.
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