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. Phoenix
    For what it sets out to accomplish, across a brisk 98 minutes, Petzold’s film feels perfectly judged. And it builds to an ending that’s just plain perfect.
  2. Pixels
    Even on its own silly terms, Pixels is not a very good movie; it’s painted up like a Ghostbusters-style fantasy-comedy but plays like so many slapdash Happy Madison productions before it.
  3. Southpaw
    Physically speaking, the transformation is as impressive as the one Gyllenhaal underwent a year ago to embody the gaunt, wiry sociopath of "Nightcrawler." But was this character, a boxer battling the myriad conventions of his genre, really worth the training regimen that brought him to life?
  4. The Vatican Tapes
    In nearly every way—from how the movie’s being released to the way it approaches the whole satanic possession subgenre — The Vatican Tapes is dispiritingly ordinary. It’s the rote B-movie that Neveldine up to now has tried so hard not to make.
  5. Alléluia
    Was there a pressing need for yet another rendition of this story? Should it come around again (and it likely will), a unique perspective on the events would be welcome.
  6. Lila & Eve
    Pitched somewhere between indie domestic drama and direct-to-video exploitation, Lila & Eve is the kind of film in which a sturdy, unsensational piece of acting can take the spotlight.
  7. The Look of Silence
    The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.
  8. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.
  9. Trainwreck
    Unlike many comic vehicles and just as many big-city romances, it’s a real, and ultimately rewarding, piece of work. A big-studio romantic comedy infused with actual human feeling is just as rare an accomplishment as the perfect comedy sketch.
  10. Irrational Man
    Though Irrational Man’s existentialist moral crisis is mostly hokum, the movie still has a whiff of charm, thanks to a handful of good one-liners, a little misdirection, and Phoenix’s off-kilter performance, which completely ignores the rhythm of Allen’s speech in favor of naturalistic mojo.
  11. Mr. Holmes
    Mr. Holmes has moments of palpable regret and loss, but visually speaking, it looks like a blandly touching movie about a lonely old man who befriends a scrappy kid and learns about the magic of storytelling. Eventually, that’s the unexciting destiny it fulfills.
  12. 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.
  13. Court
    For the most part, Tamhane improbably succeeds in creating a damning courtroom drama that derives much of its power from observing the cogs in the machinery when the machine is switched off.
  14. What We Did on Our Holiday
    What We Did On Our Holiday sets up a sturdy comic scenario and then proceeds to head in another direction altogether—one that’s nearly impossible to anticipate, making the film much more of a goofy delight than would have seemed likely at the outset.
  15. Stations of the Cross
    Formally, Stations Of The Cross is a rigorous achievement; there’s a purity, cinematic if not spiritual, to the way Brüggemann carefully composes each static shot, as though they all really were paintings to be arranged in succession along a line of pews. It’s less successful on a dramatic level.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Do I Sound Gay?
    It’s a serious topic, but the resulting documentary isn’t an especially severe sit. Do I Sound Gay? is a briskly entertaining 77 minutes, and frequently as mouthy as its title.
  17. The Gallows
    Making audiences care about the characters is always a more effective fear-generating strategy than just knocking off a bunch of dimwits in the dark.
  18. Tangerine
    It’s the movie’s quietest, softest moments that register most strongly, be it Alexandra’s low-key performance of Victor Herbert’s “Toyland” to an almost empty bar, or the final scene, which finds her and Sin-Dee alone in a Laundromat at the end of a long, bad night.
  19. Strangerland
    Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.
  20. Boulevard
    It doesn’t help that Boulevard is a movie that feels at least a decade past its sell-by date, if not two.
  21. Self/less
    It probably shouldn’t star Ryan Reynolds, who is generally likable, but frequently miscast. Only Kingsley’s bizarre, severely mannered performance seems to be following the undercurrents of the material.
  22. Minions
    Minions has idiosyncratic roots, but it’s a franchise play all the way. Finally, even 5-year-olds have their own movie that mechanically cashes in on something they loved when they were younger.
  23. Amy
    Winehouse was a complicated artist who deserved a nuanced, honest look at her life. In lesser hands, Amy could be a feature-length E! True Hollywood Story, but Kapadia treats his subject with respect and heart.
  24. Stray Dog
    With stencil-typeface credits that can’t help but bring to mind the scrappy regional genre movies of the 1970s, and an opening sequence that finds Hall sampling moonshine with his buddies, Stray Dog announces itself as something homegrown—a verité look at a quintessentially American oddball, made with an eye for life in rural Southern Missouri.
  25. Jackie & Ryan
    The cross-cutting duet it builds to, with two people singing the same song separated by hundreds of miles, is a nice musical moment, but just that: a moment. Ideally, even a low-key romantic drama should have more than one.
  26. Stung
    Paul and Julia can rescue each other, but they need more help pulling Stung out of "Tremors" and "Party Down"’s combined shadow.
  27. Jimmy's Hall
    Jimmy’s Hall is one of [Loach's] clunkers: Footloose set in 1930s Ireland, basically, with jazz in lieu of Kenny Loggins.
  28. Cartel Land
    Whatever one’s moral qualms regarding the Autodefensas—and Heineman makes a point of showing that Mireles, who’s married, has a penchant for using his celebrity to seduce much younger women—there’s no denying the engrossing nature of the footage shown here, or that the people involved are fighting for their own lives.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    In Stereo
    This is a tedious modern romance that thinks it’s spouting universal truths when it’s actually as myopically narcissistic as the two leads.
  30. Faith of Our Fathers
    It’s obnoxious, to say the least, to use the Vietnam War as an excuse to affirm the importance of telling all and sundry about Jesus at all times (i.e., “testifying”), under all circumstances.
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