The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,411 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: 5,570 out of 10411
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10411
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10411
10411 movie reviews
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  1. Fighter
    Far from the solemn earnestness of most Holocaust documentaries, Fighter addresses the war and its oft-toxic reverberations with refreshing impudence and candor.
  2. Apocalypse Now Redux
    In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.
  3. The Fast and the Furious
    Better equipped to deal with the workings of nitro-injection systems than human emotions, director Rob Cohen's film grows less assured the more time it spends with its characters, particularly through its dull middle section. It does earn points for trying, however, and while Walker is a cipher, Diesel has enough personality for both of them.
  4. Chain Camera
    By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.
  5. Life and Debt
    Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.
  6. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    Barking Dogs Never Bite is uneven, unnecessarily provocative, and exhausts its central premise long before the closing credits, but it’s invigorating to watch regardless. After all, Bong is just doing what New Wave artists do: experimenting, breaking rules, showing off.
  7. Deuces Wild
    A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.
  8. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.
  9. Glamour
    Major characters drop in and out of sight, WWII begins and ends without much fanfare, and full decades pass in the space of a few cuts.
  10. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    The domestic humor is often too culture-specific to play for a non-Japanese audience, but Yamadas does have its accessible moments, particularly in the sweet extended opening flight of fantasy.
  11. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    Ocelot’s joyous mashup is a work of uncommonly vivid imagination, sharing space with Yellow Submarine, Fantastic Planet, and The Triplets Of Belleville in the omnivorous grade-schooler’s alt-canon.
  12. Hellraiser: Inferno
    The first of several low points in the series. At this point Kirsty’s out of the picture (at least temporarily), the original rules of Cenobite engagement are discarded, and Pinhead’s ultimate fate is sealed. So what’s left? You guessed it—a Gritty! Contemporary! Reboot!
  13. The Original Kings of Comedy
    As a testament to the vitality of—and sense of community engendered by—black comedy, The Original Kings Of Comedy is a success. As a comedy, however, it's sluggishly paced and not nearly funny enough to justify its two-hour running time.
  14. Gladiator
    In the end, Gladiator is overdrawn and too insubstantial for its own good, just like the old days, but it satisfies as entertainment on a grand scale.
  15. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    García apparently prefers ambiguity, implying all sorts of heavy backstory for each of his leads but leaving the details vague, and he lets his actresses carry the baggage in their performances alone.
  16. The Boondock Saints
    As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.
  17. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    This caper film possesses Miyazaki's usual good-hearted charm, but he injects a manically energetic humor that his more sedate children's films never quite achieve.
  18. Close-Up
    From the outset, the director lets us know that this won’t be some sensationalistic crime story. Close-Up is more about the power of images, and how what’s on the screen at any given moment can hold our attention completely, even if it has nothing to do with “the story.”
  19. The Suburbans
    Made without the faintest spark of inspiration, The Suburbans feels like a buried, unholy relic from the era it's purportedly satirizing.
  20. Perfect Blue
    With its fluidly changeable surfaces, animation may be the ideal medium for confronting the public's growing uncertainty with reality, but Perfect Blue is a missed opportunity, too shallow and exploitative to be taken seriously.
  21. Brokedown Palace
    The once-reliable Danes is a particular detriment, but it's really hard to care whether either character escapes from what looks like a really unappealing summer camp.
  22. Detroit Rock City
    Such a stupid, painfully obvious, gratingly unfunny dud that it's unlikely to please even the most gullible and easy-to-please members of the Kiss army.
  23. Better Than Chocolate
    The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.
  24. Mystery Men
    The characters are funny and the cast's characterizations right on, but the movie repeatedly lets them down.
  25. The Acid House
    The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.
  26. The Sixth Sense
    Teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone.
  27. Runaway Bride
    Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.
  28. Deep Blue Sea
    It's every bit as silly as it sounds, sillier really.
  29. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    It's like a cross between "Heathers" and "Waiting For Guffman," had those movies been made by morons, for morons, and the cinematic equivalent of cow-tipping, only less graceful.
  30. Inspector Gadget
    Anyone older than eight is likely to find it a ridiculously extravagant exercise in stupidity.
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