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. Glengarry Glen Ross
    Gets most of its legs from the acting and the dialogue, which has such a rhythmic grace that scenes from the movie can be played and replayed with no loss of thump.
  2. Sneakers
    Tobolowsky, anagrams, blind driving, a jazzy but tense James Horner score—this movie has everything, and it’s all deceptively well engineered.
  3. Brother's Keeper
    A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing. It explores, with mercy and compassion, the paradoxes inherent to the concept of mercy killing, a crime of love rather than hate.
  4. Europa
    Europa has been described as a Kafka-esque fever dream, and while that isn't inaccurate, it's also a cover for the film's confounding narrative, which wends through murky noir plotting, a polyglot of accents and performance styles, and surreal interludes. The best approach is not to puzzle too much over the details, and to marvel at von Trier's technical wizardry, which re-imagines the period through a patchwork of vivid impressions.
  5. Lethal Weapon 3
    The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.
  6. Deep Cover
    As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.
  7. Mississippi Masala
    A wholly original story written and directed by women that thoughtfully explores the complexities of interracial love between people of color.
  8. Porco Rosso
    Porco Rosso was initially conceived as a short film for Japan Airlines, and its roots show in its delight with aviation and the experience of flight, but also in its somewhat shapeless plot.
  9. Bugsy
    Bugsy is part tormented character study, part old-school Hollywood glitz. Its fabulist protagonist acts like he's stuck in a '30s gangster melodrama, but Levinson's lushly stylized film gives his story the A-list treatment.
  10. Night on Earth
    Almost unavoidably uneven, it gets off to a rough start in a segment that relies too heavily on Winona Ryder's charms as a pixieish grease monkey. But it improves as it goes, and in segment after segment, Jarmusch's characters strive, almost heroically, to make human connections, even ones that won't last beyond the moment when they pay their fares.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    My Girl
    It’s an introduction to adolescent viewers of some of life’s most painful events, even if those events aren’t always depicted in the most realistic ways. And therein lies My Girl’s effectiveness.
  12. The Double Life of Veronique
    The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.
  13. The People Under the Stairs
    It’s that intuitive fusion of whiplash-inducing plot twists and political anger that makes The People Under The Stairs so fascinating, even when the humor’s too blunt or the scares too soft.
  14. Homicide
    Television tends to trump movies when it comes to staging richly detailed cop dramas, but David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide is the rare big-screen policier that can stand up to The Shield, The Wire, Hill Street Blues, and Homicide: Life On The Street.
  15. A Better Tomorrow
    Superlative action scenes, particularly a bloody guns-grenades-and-swords finale with a body count to rival the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, help wash away many of the flaws. Action for its own sake may not have been the film's intended point, but it'll do.
  16. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.
  17. Regarding Henry
    It’s more a misguided, though occasionally retch-worthy, mediocrity elevated by its cast—Bening, as always, is particularly strong—and Nichols’ fluid camerawork. Those elements at times make it seem like a better movie than it really is, but it doesn’t benefit from scrutiny or thought.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Black powder and Christian Slater are cool and all, but real dramatic successes come when a film has both heart and a slate of talented actors who aren’t just leaning on their oversized patchwork capes to tell the story.
  19. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    There’s a hagiographic aspect to Truth Or Dare that’s disquieting even now, especially given that an honest movie about this genuinely groundbreaking tour—which became the model for ambitious pop-star concerts—and the high-school-play-like camaraderie of its personnel would’ve had more lasting value.
  20. Mortal Thoughts
    As a domestic melodrama, the film sometimes plays like The Honeymooners without the laughs, but the push and pull between the flashbacks and the interrogation scenes gain steadily in strength as the case gets harder to pin down. There’s more to these characters—and this movie—than initially meets the eye.
  21. Nothing But Trouble
    No matter how much care and thought went into it it's still disgusting and pointless.
  22. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    The Bonfire Of The Vanities gets a lot of things right but they're largely negated by the colossal things it gets wrong.
  23. Home Alone
    Even though Macaulay Culkin's alternately muggy and inexpressive lead performance hasn't worn well, the supporting turns by Catherine O'Hara and John Candy are especially crackerjack, as is John Williams' buoyantly cartoony score.
  24. The Rescuers Down Under
    It’s a gorgeous, visually ambitious film, full of show-offy setpieces reportedly inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki.
  25. Child's Play 2
    In every way, it hangs together less effectively than its predecessor, but Mancini’s script is smartly self-aware (a recurring theme in these films), and new director John Lafia creates some enjoyably gonzo moments.
  26. Graffiti Bridge
    It's a struggle with quasi-profound ramifications that crystallizes Prince's long-standing obsession with sin and salvation, sex and Godliness, the hungers of the body and the demands of the spirit. Or, at least, it should be. Instead it plays like a cartoon parody of Prince's soft-headed spiritual concerns.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Palace
    White Palace is more than a romance or a bedroom romp or human comedy. It is a lesson in judgments and values, and a glimpse at emotional roulette.
  28. King of New York
    Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.
  29. After Dark, My Sweet
    It’s a pungently atmospheric little sleeper, and one of relatively few genre flicks to portray a mentally unsound protagonist as a recognizable human being—someone who really just has one particular screw loose, such that you might not notice unless you happened to stumble against that particular joint.
  30. The Exorcist III
    Dread this thick stays with you, long after the shock of projectile vomit and masturbation by crucifix has worn off.
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