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. Knuckleball!
    Some of Knuckleball!'s best scenes show Dickey and Wakefield hanging out with Hough and Phil Niekro (the latter the rare knuckleballer who threw the pitch his whole career rather than turning to it out of desperation), talking about the mechanics and the mojo of the knuckler.
  2. Admission
    Admission ultimately can’t quite figure out what kind of a film it wants to be, so like a lot of promising but unfocused contenders, it never quite lives up to its potential. But there’s value to be found in its meandering.
  3. The Place Beyond the Pines
    Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action.
  4. The Central Park Five
    This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless.
  5. The Big Picture
    For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
  6. Tai Chi Zero
    The story's fundamentals remain solid, and the battle between the village of kung-fu experts and an army of 19th century technophiles is so cleverly staged and exciting that the inevitable sequel (already in the works) will be welcome, as will any future martial-arts movies that Tai Chi Zero may inspire.
  7. Ant-Man
    It still makes for an enjoyable, intermittently inspired effects-driven comedy and a welcome antidote to the over-burdened world-saving that seems to define big-screen superhero stories.
  8. Closed Circuit
    Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.
  9. Any Day Now
    Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.
  10. Save the Date
    Save The Date's achievements are modest - it could be funnier and more affecting, and it ends with a shrug - but the film is wise about sibling relationships, the uncertainty of youth, and smaller matters, like the way people relate to each other after a break-up.
  11. Miami Connection (1987)
    Hits the sweet spot between stunning ineptitude, hilariously dated period touchstones, and a touching naïveté that gives it an odd distinction. As with the other so-bad-it's-good sensations that have toured the midnight circuit over the last few years - "The Room," "Birdemic," "Troll 2" - its awkwardness comes partly from a foreign-born auteur making an American film, and the culture clash plays out for all to see.
  12. The Law in These Parts
    But while the facts cherry-picked by Alexandrowicz won't surprise anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to what's been going on in the Middle East for the last four decades, the direct inquiries into who should be classified as a "soldier" and who a "terrorist" is still bracing (and relevant to more than just the Israelis).
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hitler's Children
    The subjects of Hitler's Children all speak about the actions of their infamous forebears with shame, shock, or disgust, but they also make it clear this isn't true of everyone in their families.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Kelly
    King Kelly is a broad indictment of the emptier side of self-documentation and a more nuanced one of the Internet as a source of affirmation.
  15. 56 Up
    However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.
  16. Tchoupitoulas
    A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
  17. Consuming Spirits
    The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.
  18. Welcome to the Punch
    Writer-director Eran Creevy demonstrates little facility for kineticism — one of the movie’s best scenes gets flat-out ruined when he abruptly shifts to hackneyed slo-mo — and his cynical plot gets so convoluted that one of the bad guys has to break it down for the audience in a climactic monologue-at-gunpoint.
  19. John Dies at the End
    It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.
  20. Mud
    Mud unfortunately begins to develop a sour aftertaste in the handful of minor subplots.
  21. Machete Kills
    Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them.
  22. Resolution
    Benson and Moorhead have made a horror film for jaded aficionados, deconstructing and reconstructing tired elements into a gnarled, distinctive Frankenstein's monster. This monster might ransack a village, but it would have to think about it first.
  23. The Counselor
    No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor’s grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature.
  24. Lore
    If nothing else, Shortland gives Rosendahl a star-making platform on par with Cornish’s in "Somersault": She’s a magnetic screen presence who subtly conveys not only the struggle and guilt inherent to her situation, but also a residue of hate that’s carried over from her parents. The actor, like her character, shoulders a heavy burden.
  25. Trance
    Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.
  26. Bless Me, Ultima
    The movie is at its best when it’s at its smallest: when Ganalon quietly watches Colon coax a dying young man into vomiting up his “curse,” or when Ganalon is getting laughed out of his classroom because he has a burrito in his lunchbox instead of a sandwich.
  27. The Maze Runner
    If you’re going to treat your audience like a rat in a maze, it’s best to offer a tastier reward than the promise of more maze to come.
  28. The Lords of Salem
    For a rock star and old-movie buff like Rob Zombie, The Lords Of Salem offers a chance to riff on the notion of rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music, while recreating scenes from old Hammer witch pictures. Zombie does both of these things—just not always as expected.
  29. Sweetgrass
    The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.
  30. Simon Killer
    Simon Killer is a sensual experience that asks the audience to question what it sees and hears. In that way, Campos takes all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation, and shows how they can shade into madness.
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