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. The Network
    The result is an uncritical, drama-free documentary that comes uncomfortably close to resembling a business-magazine puff piece.
  2. The Secret Lives of Dorks
    It’s arguable that the jocks and cheerleaders are this movie’s true heroes, without whom those pathetic dorks would never be able to find one another.
  3. Shepard & Dark
    [The] aesthetic structure creates a haunting sense of the simultaneously wonderful and sad feelings both men have about lives and loves now gone, never to be recaptured.
  4. Haute Cuisine
    Narrowness of focus keeps the movie from becoming bloated with self-importance, but it also leaves it feeling a little inconsequential.
  5. Insidious: Chapter 2
    The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.
  6. Battle of the Year
    Too incompetent to work as an underdog dance flick, but not nearly weird enough to qualify as howling camp, Battle Of The Year is destined to please only bad movie buffs desperate for a fix of awful dialogue, blatant product placement, and clunky exposition.
  7. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.
  8. After Tiller
    After Tiller is an hour and a half of folks on their best behavior, presented as a candid portrait.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    A Single Shot
    It’s largely just an opportunity for the actors to try on Ozark-y mannerisms, swig moonshine, and hock loogies. And like most exercises in authenticity, it couldn’t be more inauthentic if it tried.
  10. C.O.G.
    There are some who have complained that C.O.G. ends too abruptly, but it has the bracing, devastating punctuation of a fine short story.
  11. Thanks for Sharing
    Oddly, counterintuitively even, what’s most endearing about the film is how middle-of-the-road it is. While 2011’s "Shame" treated the same subject with too much seriousness, and next week’s "Don Jon" treats it with too little, Thanks For Sharing acknowledges that sex addiction, like most other problems in life, can be a source of both suffering and humor.
  12. Rush
    Rush, in other words, is a foursquare sportsmanship movie, offering little in the way of surprises but plenty of earnest, satisfying thrills.
  13. Prisoners
    It makes for a compelling viewing experience, thanks to Villeneuve’s formal chops and the uniformly strong performances.
  14. Newlyweeds
    At times, it’s surprisingly compelling, thanks to King’s surefooted direction of actors and well-honed formal sense; while the movie’s execution never quite makes up for its conception, it does elevate it above, well, just being the sort of movie that would be called Newlyweeds.
  15. Enough Said
    Sharp as the dialogue is, it’s hard to imagine any of this working as well without the late, great Gandolfini.
  16. The Family
    It’s at its best in the brief moments when Besson plunges into complete, comic-book-panel unreality, as in an early shot where a hitman in a black trenchcoat, black trilby hat, and black gloves emerges silencer-first from behind a wall of smoke. It's the rare occasion when you might wish a director were more over-indulgent.
  17. Blue Caprice
    Blue Caprice otherwise proves a deft mood piece, one that probes its characters’ states of mind while remaining wholly unmoved by their grievances and hang-ups.
  18. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Characters scream, throw glasses, screw, and strip nude for the self-gratifying viewing pleasure of others, but Jayne Mansfield’s Car never musters up even the faintest trace of Tennessee Williams-style hothouse drama.
  19. Mother of George
    Mother Of George is rarely boring to look at, but it might still have been better served by a starker, less showy aesthetic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Informant
    Meanwhile, there’s a potentially fascinating theme imbedded in Darby’s story that goes largely unexplored: the idea that modern protest is little more than theater, and that the participants on both sides are just actors playing roles.
  21. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    As a ruminative travelogue-cum-dissertation, Rodrigues and Guerra Da Mata’s film is often haunting, and its portentous and mournful atmospherics ultimately help compensate for the nagging impression that it’s a work almost too personal for an outside viewer to fully penetrate.
  22. And While We Were Here
    A committed Bosworth gives herself over to the role. Yet, there’s ultimately no real role for her to play.
  23. Riddick
    In an era of high-falutin’ tentpole sci-fi, there’s something to be said for a filmmaker still devoted to crafting plain old genre pleasures.
  24. Salinger
    When Salinger succeeds, it’s in spite of Salerno’s heavy hand and because of the implicit intrigue of J.D. Salinger’s life story. For a director who clearly reveres his subject’s work, he doesn’t grasp how the flashy, eardrum-busting pomp and circumstance of his film is exactly the kind of thing Salinger abhorred.
  25. Red Obsession
    Steeped in centuries of custom and dependent on the ever-fickle relationship between soil, weather, and human craftsmanship, the work is likened by Francis Ford Coppola to a “miracle,” and one that tells a story about the time, place, and circumstances that gave each vintage its birth.
  26. Good Ol' Freda
    The impression left is that of a movie bending over backward to not let its subject tell her life story.
  27. Populaire
    A candy-coated French throwback to the Hollywood rom-coms of the ’50s — especially the ones starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day — Populaire is old-fashioned in more than just its pastel color scheme.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Winnie Mandela
    Poor Hudson tries to live up to both the character and the clothes, but she isn’t anywhere near assertive enough a screen presence; whenever she’s supposed to be rallying a crowd or shouting down her oppressors she looks painfully aware of her own inadequacy.
  29. Adore
    The setup promises more intrigue than the film ultimately delivers.
  30. A Teacher
    By continually deferring dramatic tension, the filmmaker puts more weight on the movie’s closing scenes — which are abrupt but true to life — than they can handle.
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