The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,410 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 2.7 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: 5,569 out of 10410
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10410
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10410
10410 movie reviews
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  1. City Heat
    Even at its best, film noir dialogue teeters on the verge of self-parody and City Heat all too often crosses the thin line separating crackling from cornball.
  2. Supergirl
    Slater not only makes for a dull Supergirl, but she's stuck in a clumsy, silly film that tries for the light touch of Richard Lester's Superman II and fails decisively.
  3. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    In nearly every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night is as run-of-the-mill a slasher film as the ’80s produced, enjoyable today primarily for its kitsch value.
  4. The Razor's Edge
    The Razor's Edge never quite reaches its destination but there are all manner of minor pleasures to be gleaned along the way.
  5. Irreconcilable Differences
    Differences would have benefited from a more cerebral lead actor, but O’Neal does a good job of capturing Bogdanovich’s ingratiating passion for cinema and his fatal hubris, and the script scores some clever jabs at the vapid self-absorption of show-biz types.
  6. Threads
    Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?
  7. The Brother from Another Planet
    The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.
  8. Amadeus
    The superbly edited original version of Amadeus used overlapping sound cues for a lively flow between scenes, and the new version breaks up some of that flow with lengthy, talky interludes. Still, Ondricek's breathtaking images and Forman's essential craft are best appreciated on the big screen, and another theatrical run for Amadeus is a welcome gift, no matter how much this edition unnecessarily gilds what's already a near-perfect lily. [2002 Director's Cut]
  9. C.H.U.D.
    Perfect for bleary-eyed late-night viewing and pretty much unwatchable at any other hour, it does make for an oddly appropriate refresher course for life under a Republican president.
  10. Red Dawn
    As an action movie, Red Dawn is a repetitive headache, and anyone with Blue State sympathies will be appalled at its manipulations and exaggerations. But there's smart subtext beneath the big dumb explosions.
  11. Stranger Than Paradise
    There's more going on in the film's mundane moments than the excitement its heroes imagine is waiting beyond the horizon. They never find the postcard America they were promised, but there's a lot of beauty, and a lot of America, in the way they keep searching for it, never quite saying what's on their mind as they go.
  12. Best Defense
    Not even a young Eddie Murphy is capable of generating hilarity out of thin air and Best Defense gives him nothing to work with. Even with Murphy inside the tank the film sorely lacks urgency and momentum.
  13. Electric Dreams
    For all the liberties it takes with what the computers of that era could really do, Electric Dreams offers a portrait of our relationship to technology that’s fairly prescient—while still being silly in that early-’80s Radio Shack kind of way, of course.
  14. The Muppets Take Manhattan
    A rehash of The Muppet Movie that has the gang jumping over shorter hurdles to achieve the less-grand goal of mounting a Broadway musical. Of the first three Muppet movies, The Muppets Take Manhattan feels like the one aimed most directly at kids. In spite of its shortcomings, The Muppets Take Manhattan at least retains the spirit and message espoused by the first two entries in the series.
  15. The Last Starfighter
    A sweet, unabashedly corny, matinee-friendly science-fiction adventure starring Lance Guest as a trailer-park videogame prodigy, and Robert Preston as the alien who recruits him to save the day from some space-baddies.
  16. Conan the Destroyer
    Destroyer makes all the mistakes Barbarian avoided. Dropping the first movie’s grim approach to achieve an audience-friendly rating, the sequel goes for a lighter, more overtly humorous tone, with multiple characters serving as increasingly unnecessary comic relief.
  17. Rhinestone
    For all its cornball charm Rhinestone ultimately does little to disprove the widespread notion that the "funny Sylvester Stallone comedy" remains a pop-culture oxymoron.
  18. Under the Volcano
    It falls upon Finney to dramatize the inner workings of a man gradually, unmistakably succumbing to oblivion. Finney is up to the task: The pungent poetry of Lowry's prose comes through in his pitch-perfect performance, with its exquisite turns of phrase, boozy bravado, and theatrical panache.
  19. Top Secret!
    Top Secret! replaces the scattershot-parody approach with a more precise re-creation of the dopey simplicity of WWII romances and Elvis pictures.
  20. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    One of the better aspects of Search is that with Spock out of the action, the rest of the crew gets a chance to fill up the vacuum of his absence, and we get a much stronger sense of Kirk, Uhura, Chekov, McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu as a family unit, and not just a bunch of people who work together.
  21. Once Upon a Time in America
    A film of fatally flawed heroes, oversized passions, nation-building, and, inevitably, violence, America follows its characters from childhood to old age by way of the kind of grand-scale filmmaking that wouldn't be seen again until Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. [2014 re-release]
  22. The Element of Crime
    Crime's dreamlike tone and fantastic visuals make it impossible to forget, like an absurd nightmare that overshadows the following day. Even if Von Trier never made another movie, viewers would still watch and admire this debut.
  23. The Natural
    It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.
  24. Suburbia
    Suburbia has the attitude and exploitation kicks of other films about youth rebellion, including more than a few Cormans, but Spheeris’ fidelity to the real L.A. scene—including performances by non-actors and musicians like Flea, who appears with a pet rat—compensates for some contrivances in the writing.
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