The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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 2.5 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. The Boy Next Door
    Plenty of credit is due to Barbara Curry’s deranged script, set in a suburban fantasyland of doofus bullies, junior proms, and middle-class sex fears; it probably isn’t meant to be a Verhoeven satire, but it sure moves like one.
  2. Spare Parts
    In its mad hurry, the movie denies itself its own genre pleasures—chiefly, the ways assembling a ragtag robotics team and an equally ragtag robot might add a little bit of Mission: Impossible or MacGyver dynamics into a sports-style narrative.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Veronika Decides to Die
    It’s hard to pick only one representatively ridiculous moment in this campy brew.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Medeas
    With limited dialogue and long takes, Medeas quietly builds to inevitable tragedy, exploring the darkest corners of desire, jealously, and unforgivable transgressions.
  5. The Wedding Ringer
    The Wedding Ringer has so many gay jokes that some of them apparently didn’t even make the final cut.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Accidents
    There’s nothing here that Green or his own cinematic forebear, Terrence Malick, haven’t done better elsewhere.
  7. Vice
    Bad doesn’t have to mean boring. Case in point: Vice, a bargain-bin high-concept sci-fi thriller full of Joel Schumacher-esque canted Steadicam moves, leaden expository dialogue, and cheap fluorescents-glued-to-the-wall sets.
  8. Still Life
    While Still Life remains relatively successful at sustaining its plainly downbeat atmosphere—and at conveying the deep silence and stifled yearning of days and nights spent profoundly alone—it brooks too little subtlety in navigating many of the plot’s larger-picture developments.
  9. Blackhat
    Mann’s first feature in nearly six years, the hacking thriller Blackhat is rough even by the standards of its director’s current creative period.
  10. Appropriate Behavior
    Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior works almost in spite of itself; so efficiently does the film explain why Shirin and Maxine split up that eventually it lags behind its own premise.
  11. Match
    Drama is driven by conflict, but in this particular case it’s the calm between the storms that captivates.
  12. Human Capital
    It’s the kind of sprawling, everything’s-connected moral tapestry that reached its nadir with Paul Haggis’ inexplicable Oscar winner Crash—not remotely as dire, thankfully, but with many of the same fundamental flaws.
  13. Paddington
    If the film seems head-and-shoulders above the average effects-driven family-matinee flick, it’s because it never gives the impression that it’s trying to be anything more (or less) than good-natured and fun to watch.
  14. Taken 3
    So what, exactly, is wrong with Taken 3? A lot of things, most of which can be attributed to the fact that director Olivier Megaton—who also helmed Taken 2—couldn’t mount an action scene if his life depended on it.
  15. Predestination
    Predestination, a superficially cerebral new thriller, plays almost exclusively to the diagram-drawing crowd.
  16. Beloved Sisters
    The result is immersive and intelligent, but not what one would call difficult. Graf’s knack for no-nonsense storytelling means that Beloved Sisters seems to fly past.
  17. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    At times, Porumboiu’s mix of repetition and resignation recalls Samuel Beckett, and if the overall result is more of a clever exercise than a proper movie, it’ll still have some dryly amusing appeal for those who appreciate intellectual absurdism.
  18. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.
  19. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    Boasts a handful of colorful, gonzo set pieces of the kind that made Tsui’s reputation at home and abroad.
  20. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    [REC] 4 is a tight, controlled film, not the explosive epic promised by the “Apocalypse” in its title.
  21. A Most Violent Year
    There are a couple of exciting set pieces, including a superb chase sequence in which Abel pursues one of the hijackers along some train tracks, but A Most Violent Year is primarily interested in detailing the ways in which moral gray areas inevitably shade into true darkness.
  22. The Interview
    The North Korea scenes are often very funny, with many of the jokes coming at the expense of the fish-out-of-water visitors.
  23. Leviathan
    In his three previous films (The Return, The Banishment, Elena), Zvyagintsev frequently pushed past sober into dour, leaning too heavily on a characteristically Soviet sense of gloom and doom... Leviathan is another downer, but it’s considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unbroken
    Moral and spiritual triumph lie at the end of this hellish gauntlet, but though Jolie is shooting for Christ-like passion and redemption, she only ends up slathering one man’s very real, very morbid struggles in the usual reductive “greatest generation” sentiment.
  25. Selma
    As cinema, Selma is commendable; as cultural barometer, it’s beyond reproach.
  26. American Sniper
    American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.
  27. Into the Woods
    Even if this Into The Woods lacks the exhilaration of the best movie musicals, it does capture the show’s emotional intimacy—no small task in a field that favors razzle dazzle.
  28. Big Eyes
    Big Eyes has plenty of surface pleasures, but there was reason to expect more than that from it.
  29. Two Days, One Night
    Two Days, One Night is a small miracle of a movie, a drama so purely humane that it makes most attempts at audience uplift look crass and calculated by comparison.
  30. Winter Sleep
    Epics tend to get extra respect — bonus points for ambition, one might say — and while Ceylan’s film is a decidedly intimate example of the genre, it was clearly perceived, in advance, as an important work just by virtue of its sheer heft.
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