The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. Radio Unnameable
    Radio Unnameable is at its best when it tries to find some visual analog to Fass' vibe, courtesy of cinematographer John Pirozzi, who takes beautiful snapshots of a sleepless city. It also, in the Fass way, does a little meandering.
  2. Holy Motors
    It's a glorious dream-epitaph.
  3. The Sessions
    It might just be the most poignant, moving film ever made about one man's surprisingly noble efforts to get laid.
  4. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.
  5. A Whisper to a Roar
    The film makes a convincing argument that, in spite of some recent setbacks, movements for democratic change are alive and well, but it glosses over the problems that arise once the people have to implement the power they've seized.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Everyone plays against type in 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom, none more so than Ron Perlman, who has a small role as a post-op transsexual hacker.
  7. Photographic Memory
    Photographic Memory is less wry and more melancholy than McElwee's earlier documentaries; it's a lot like his superb 2003 film "Bright Leaves," which was also concerned with family history and the shifting meaning of images.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    The use of a real war to give added emotional heft to this already potentially manipulative story make this film an act of callous calculation behind the beautiful shots of the French countryside.
  9. The Iran Job
    The sports drama gives The Iran Job a strong hook, while the cultural context enriches the movie's real story, which is less about Sheppard's life in Iran than about the people he meets.
  10. Middle of Nowhere
    The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations.
  11. The Big Picture
    For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
  12. Smiley
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
  13. The Other Dream Team
    Markevicius tells this incredible yarn through the significantly less exciting format of an ESPN-style documentary, which gets the job done with minimal flourish. Still, he employs former Lithuanian greats like Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis to serve as guides to the country's past and present, and the basketball culture that's thrived there under the best and worst of times.
  14. Smashed
    In spite of the out-of-place pregnancy subplot, Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions.
  15. Sinister
    It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.
  16. Here Comes the Boom
    Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.
  17. Seven Psychopaths
    While Seven Psychopaths sometimes hits the philosophical shallows, its pleasures still run deep.
  18. Argo
    Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.
  19. The Paperboy
    So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
  20. V/H/S
    It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation.
  21. Taken 2
    None of it is particularly novel or exciting.
  22. Butter
    A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.
  23. Sister
    In an unusually subtle performance by a child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein stars as a crafty ragamuffin.
  24. The House I Live In
    The result is a movie that jumps all over the place, but with the ultimate intention of showing how the public's attitudes and assumptions about drugs have changed over the past half-century, guided by politicians and businessmen with a stake in misinformation.
  25. The Oranges
    Overall, The Oranges appears to have been forcibly wrested into a conventional indie-dramedy package, rather than finding the length, style, structure, and perhaps medium that would best suit it.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Not only doesn't achieve empathy for the minor plights of its human noodle of a hero Toby Regbo, it might actually make audiences understand the urge to bully.
  27. Frankenweenie
    While Frankenweenie is pleasant enough as a curated tour through horror's past, it doesn't add much to its present.
  28. Wuthering Heights
    It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.
  29. Pitch Perfect
    Theoretically, the "Bring It On" model can be applied to any remotely performative art. All it takes is a certain level of sass, some eye-catching performance showcases, and a plot where a talented outsider livens up a moribund group with some fresh ideas. Pitch Perfect slaps that stencil onto college a cappella singing groups, with a smattering of success.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Headshot
    Headshot is, unfortunately, far better with ideas than with narrative.
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