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. Iron Man 3
    Here, it’s hard not to wish Downey were sparring with his costumed comrades again, instead of trading barbs with the far-less-colorful cast members — old and new — of this busy, sporadically diverting sequel.
  2. The Big Wedding
    It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.
  3. At Any Price
    This time out, Bahrani’s push to make a point wins out over the strong sense of character he’s cultivated in his earlier films.
  4. Sun Don't Shine
    Like "Upstream Color," Sun Don’t Shine owes a sizable debt to the philosophical lyricism of Terrence Malick. Working wonders on a tight budget, Seimetz uses handheld cameras and tight compositions to create an air of claustrophobic intensity interspersed with moments of ragged beauty.
  5. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    Terence Nance’s playfully experimental feature An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is both stunning and stymieing — a film so effusive that it’s hard to separate its signal from its noise.
  6. Paradise: Love
    For better and for worse—often simultaneously—few movies have been as unflinching about the ugly, heartbreaking ways human beings can mutually exploit one another for fun and/or profit.
  7. Kon-Tiki
    Kon-Tiki, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s modern dramatization, while well-acted and smartly filmed, rarely musters any actual sense of excitement.
  8. Mud
    Mud unfortunately begins to develop a sour aftertaste in the handful of minor subplots.
  9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    This might be the best week for The Reluctant Fundamentalist to open or the worst, but the timing doesn’t matter when the powder is damp.
  10. Pain & Gain
    Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.
  11. Arthur Newman
    Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it’s all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path.
  12. Graceland
    It’s a dark, grim, suffocating story that only missteps by overplaying its hand, making the larger message about prostitution increasingly overt.
  13. The Numbers Station
    In The Numbers Station, a joyless sins-of-the-government thriller, Cusack sinks to new depths of meditative glumness to play a black-ops agent nursing a guilty conscience.
  14. Unmade in China
    As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.
  15. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    The film never even attempts to peer behind the curtain of Jay’s colorful existence; it’s content that the show in front of it is spectacle enough. But Deceptive Practices would be a richer, deeper experience if the filmmakers had penetrated Jay’s fierce boundaries even a little.
  16. In the House
    All the way up to the stunning final shot, Ozon urgently asks whether, for storytellers, it’s better to be on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out.
  17. 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Oblivion
    Oblivion is a terrific-looking movie, alternating spare, sterile environments with homey organic ones, and making both look tremendously pretty. Kosinski also handles his action well, with cut-and-dried clarity and edge-of-seat energy.
  19. Scary Movie 5
    Scary Movie 5 aspires to timeliness, but its comic sensibility is so groaningly retro that the film features a series of tributes to The Benny Hill Show and its signature ditty, “Yakety Sax.”
  20. To the Wonder
    Still, there’s no doubt that To The Wonder is a fans-only proposition, continuing Malick’s evolution (or devolution, for some) from the narrative grounding of "Badlands" to much more abstract, poeticized notions of the human condition.
  21. Antiviral
    For all its preoccupation with disease, Antiviral isn’t especially visceral. The movie can be repulsive at times, but Cronenberg is more interested in ideas than in blood and guts.
  22. It's a Disaster
    It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.
  23. The Angels' Share
    The cast is immensely appealing, the heist is ingenious, and the collision of hardscrabble working-class kids and Sideways-style alcohol snobs generates steady laughs, though somewhat predictable ones.
  24. 42
    The Jackie Robinson biopic 42 operates in a box inside of a box—and not the batter’s box, either, because that would imply it has some freedom to swing away. It’s thoroughly embalmed in the glossy lacquer of conventional baseball movies, and limited further by trying to deal with the horrors of racism in that context.
  25. No Place on Earth
    This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.
  26. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    Beneath the surface outrageousness lies a surprisingly, satisfyingly dark little fable about the essentially cannibalistic nature of artistic inspiration.
  27. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    Gregory’s wife, Cindy Kleine, is a skilled filmmaker, but she’s no Louis Malle, and her documentary Andre Gregory: Before And After Dinner is nowhere near as elegant as "My Dinner With Andre" or "Vanya On 42nd Street." Mainly, the movie lacks focus.
  28. The Brass Teapot
    Its comedic side never bites, and its moral side is painfully one-dimensional. A little to the left and The Brass Teapot might’ve been mean-spirited fun; a little to the right and it could play on The Hallmark Channel. For a movie with such an outlandish premise, it’s remarkably dull.
  29. 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.
  30. Upstream Color
    It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.
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