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. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Way He Looks
    Ribeiro captures the experiential awkwardness of young love pitch-perfectly.
  3. The Better Angels
    As an impression of a Terrence Malick film, The Better Angels is technically faultless, unimprovable. All that’s missing is the soul.
  4. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Those who already admire the director may not find a stunning level of insight, and the curious but unindoctrinated would be better served by starting with one his actual films rather than a rundown of them. But there’s a certain satisfaction in a rundown of a career as rich and varied as Linklater’s, not unlike the pleasure of watching a well-edited Oscar tribute reel.
  5. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.
  6. Actress
    Alternately candid and cagey, Robert Greene’s documentary turns the chores and frustrations of a modern-day homemaker into a study in roles — social and personal, conscious and unintentional, on-camera and off. It isn’t, by any means, a difficult movie, but neither does it take any easy routes.
  7. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  8. Open Windows
    Open Windows attempts to disguise a revenge movie by cloaking it in the flash of a voyeuristic techno-thriller, but the combined concepts are so high that the film resolves as Vigalondo reaches his Icarus moment, the corpse so mangled and unpleasant the project’s ambition can only be identified via dental records.
  9. Jessabelle
    There isn’t a single jump scare in this thing. On the other hand, it would be nice if Jessabelle tried a little harder.
  10. National Gallery
    Unlike Wiseman’s greatest films, National Gallery never quite finds an overarching theme. There’s a fair amount of material regarding the art/commerce divide, but many scenes have no bearing whatsoever on that subject, and the film generally lacks urgency.
  11. Interstellar
    It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.
  12. Before I Go to Sleep
    Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.
  13. Horns
    Horns fumbles with its own powers, too. If its moments of Aja-ian archness blended better with the macabre sincerity that presumably comes from the source material, it might have provided a real autumnal chill. Instead, it’s more ambitious and complex than the horror movies that dutifully clock in to haunt multiplexes around Halloween—without actually being better.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ABCs of Death 2
    Omnibus features are by their nature uneven, so it’s to the benefit of the ABCs Of Death series that the creative constraints (26 short horror films, each one pegged to a specific letter of the alphabet) encourage brevity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Point and Shoot
    The more straightforward Point And Shoot seems, the more slippery it becomes.
  16. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler is a portrait of an amoral opportunist who stumbles upon his horrible calling, and the film’s chief pleasure is watching Gyllenhaal portray what it might be like if Rushmore’s Max Fischer grew up to become Chuck Tatum, the unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Ace In The Hole. It’s adolescent solipsism gone grotesquely rancid.
  17. Goodbye to Language 3D
    What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.
  18. The Great Invisible
    It does put a human face on the suffering of those who lost jobs and/or loved ones, which has some value, but anyone hoping for a more nuanced take than “corporations are bad and regular folks are good” will be disappointed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Mekons
    The film's strength lies in just how far it's willing to go-and to not go-in the pursuit of mythologizing its subject, a group of aging but unrepentant punks who treat the very idea of mythology like a bad joke.
  20. Ouija
    It’s professionally produced but completely uninspired.
    • 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.
  22. Laggies
    Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.
  23. Force Majeure
    If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending — one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually — and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.
  24. Stonehearst Asylum
    The presence of Kingsley — as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere — might suggest "Shutter Island," but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s "Freaks," with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy.
  25. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Turns out to be a disappointingly standard-issue addiction melodrama, this one the tearful case study of an adrenaline junkie whose compulsion threatens to push her family and loved ones away.
  26. Low Down
    Low Down keeps the histrionics to a minimum, but the inertia of a good man failing to be a good father isn’t enough to sustain nearly two hours of reflection, especially when Preiss consistently suggests that telling Amy’s story from Joe’s perspective would have made for a much better film.
  27. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Most of the pleasure in Green Dragons comes simply from the opportunity to watch some underused actors dig into meatier parts than they’re usually offered.
  28. 23 Blast
    It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exists
    It feels strange to be so dismissive about someone who once commanded wide attention (however much as a fluke) with an indie blockbuster that effectively birthed a lucrative mainstream genre. But Sánchez, sadly, is now a pretender to his own throne.
  30. White Bird in a Blizzard
    White Bird In A Blizzard, is another literary adaptation, gunning for respectability. It’s the most mainstream and accessible picture he’s (Araki) ever made, but this time his pendulum swung a bit too far in that direction.
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