The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Conviction
    Conviction is like "Erin Brockovich" meets "Rudy."
  2. Hereafter
    Just because a film takes place entirely in the long shadow of death doesn't mean it has to be this relentlessly dour.
  3. Tamara Drewe
    While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.
  4. Stone
    At its best, the film works as a morally freighted film noir, with Jovovich particularly good as a breathy femme fatale who seduces De Niro with a mere change in inflection.
  5. Forbidden Fruits
    If you don’t worry about the story and just immerse yourself in the gags, Alloway’s film is a must-watch for the Venn diagram overlap between Shudder subscribers and the slumber party crowd.
  6. Air Doll (2009)
    The film is a little too cute and scattershot to achieve real profundity, with the doll-woman too often coming across like a playfully erotic version of Being There’s Chance the Gardener, defined entirely by her absence of guile.
  7. Nomadland
    Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.
  8. The Grand Bizarre
    It’s just a constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.
  9. Police Story 2 (1988)
    Opens with a montage of thrilling clips from its predecessor, then hits all the same notes, harder and duller.
  10. Piercing
    After a briefly discombobulating fake-out twist, Piercing can’t seem to figure out how to advance or complicate its sick-joke premise.
  11. Bodied
    It’s so thickly packed with technical and verbal dazzle that whatever biting point it might have had to make ends up completely lost.
  12. Wildlife
    It’s a very accomplished debut, with strong performances (Mulligan, especially, is magnificent, lowering her voice to a smoky purr and letting desperation nip at the edges of her confidence) and an elegantly straightforward style that’s miles removed from the flashiness of most American indie debuts.
  13. Private Life
    The film’s dramatic core, its vision of what this kind of experience can do to a marriage, is rock solid, because Jenkins explores it with a high degree of specificity, precisely dramatizing her own difficult experiences.
  14. Lizzie
    [An] unconvincing, oppressively somber take on the Lizzie Borden story.
  15. Mandy
    It’s a fetish object, a juvenile art-installation stunt. It panders wildly, but also skillfully and effectively, to its demographic—and you probably know if you belong to it.
  16. Euthanizer
    Nikki, who appears to be making the most of an extremely limited budget, has attempted to make something like a modern-day take on the creepy, kinky, deeply personal B-movie, studiously avoiding anything that would smack of revivalism; after all, no authentic B-movie ever set out to look like a B-movie. The surrealists would have liked this film.
  17. Blindspotting
    The film’s messy mix of flavorful, sometimes over-the-top character comedy and sincere racial politics benefits from the voice of its stars, who also wrote the script.
  18. Eighth Grade
    What makes this coming-of-age film special is that it’s at once harsh and humanist: a perceptive, realistic comedy about tweenage life that’s also rich in compassion, that scarcest of junior-high commodities.
  19. Sorry to Bother You
    There’s a messy, first-draft quality to how the film fits said ideas together, and a general sloppiness to the execution, with Riley botching the timing on too many jokes.
  20. Custody
    Custody doesn’t do much more than plunge the audience into this hellish situation, but it shrewdly understands the bad dad’s pathetic pathology, and the film may resonate for anyone who’s grown up under the unhealthy supervision of a mean bastard. Take that as a sobering recommendation.
  21. Leave No Trace
    Moving, perhaps inevitably, toward a final fork in the woods, Leave No Trace condenses big questions into something simple and quietly powerful: two people bonded by blood and shared history, discovering how their needs align and diverge.
  22. Dark River
    Barnard, who made The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, has an impeccable sense of grubby pastoral space, and her performers locate some truth in cliché. But this is a kitchen-sink drag.
  23. Damsel
    With Damsel, the Zellners have made a kind of artisanal thrift-shop approximation of a Western.
  24. Hereditary
    It’s a supremely effective gauntlet of supernatural horror that’s also, at blackened heart, a grueling domestic drama about how trauma, resentment, and guilt can seep into the roots of a family tree, rotting it from the inside out.
  25. American Animals
    For all its mode-bending gamesmanship, American Animals is ultimately a fairly straightforward heist movie, albeit a stylish and engaging one.
  26. First Reformed
    The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role.
  27. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.
  28. Zama
    In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.
  29. Lean on Pete
    Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles.
  30. Good Luck
    The first part is terrific and transfixing. Working in transportive long takes, Russell achieves some nearly miraculous effects—notably, a shot that prowls down a sloe-black mine tunnel to land in close-up on a jackhammer—as he blends the plutonic and the Platonic: the underworld and the allegory of the cave.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »