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. Bloody Birthday
    Timeless message: Kids: They’re the worst.
  2. Atlantic City
    This is a gentle, warm, well-acted movie, and easy to like.
  3. Thief
    Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the most confident directorial debuts of its era, the product of an unprecedented amount of research and preparation.
  4. The Final Conflict
    Director Graham Baker has little gift for atmosphere, and apart from one inspired sequence, I suspect I'll forget every aspect of this movie in a couple of days.
  5. The Funhouse
    Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.
  6. American Pop
    All that aside, American Pop is still worth watching. Bakshi may not have perfectly captured eight decades of American music history, but his attempt to do so is often thrilling for reasons other than ambition.
  7. My Bloody Valentine
    There's a masked killer, an abundance of ready victims, and a series of elaborate, implausible deaths. But for those willing to look past the surface similarities, Valentine has its own distinctive charm.
  8. 9 to 5
    The movie is surprisingly smart about the politics of the glass ceiling, which keeps Tomlin in a pink-collar supervisor position while every man she trains gets promoted past her. The way Coleman asserts his masculinity with phrases like "cut the balls off the competition," and the way our heroic trio works together to sculpt a worker's paradise—complete with flex-time and day-care facilities—serves as an effective summary of the era's hot-button issues.
  9. Inside Moves
    As an attempt to cash in on the inspirational-underdog-sports-movie model popularized a few years earlier by Rocky, Inside Moves is rather transparent: Morse’s Jerry Maxwell is an even longer shot for stardom than the Italian Stallion. But what’s affecting here is the relationship between Jerry and Roary (John Savage), who is the film’s true protagonist.
  10. Tess
    Not as radically stylized as Polanki’s violent Macbeth, Tess is literature rendered in consummately classical terms.
  11. The Apple
    The line for The Apple cult officially starts here. I humbly propose this as the ultimate midnight movie.
  12. Heaven's Gate
    It's a film of rare beauty and scope, a feast for the eyes and a harrowing, unflinching meditation on the cruelty of capitalism. It rivals William Friedkin's Sorceror in its bone-deep cynicism and eviscerating take on the free market's coal-black heart of darkness.
  13. Kagemusha
    Though the story's Shakespearean underpinnings give Kagemusha the weight of classic tragedy–in this case, the tragedy of a man rendered helpless by larger historical forces–the film astonishes mostly as pure spectacle.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Gloria is the rare Cassavetes film to expand its scope beyond an insular community.
  15. My Bodyguard
    It’s all riveting enough, the kind of youth film that still has parables for adults and moves along at a quick and witty clip for kids—never a prat fall into sticky sweetness. My Bodyguard offers a charming take on what could have been a generic after-school-special tale, and couldn’t have picked a better backdrop to do it in.
  16. Battle Beyond the Stars
    Battle Beyond The Stars has a charm that belies its low budget and opportunistic origins.
  17. Scum
    A straightforward prison flick, basically, honoring all of the genre’s many conventions, from the sadistic screws to the wars between rival cell blocks to the innocent who gets brutally gang-raped.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Octagon
    Even if it’s not a good movie, it’s an important one, culturally and within the history of action movies. Along with Eric Van Lustbader’s novel The Ninja and the miniseries Shogun, both of which also came out in 1980, this was the first time the idea of the ninja, the shadowy mystical assassin figure, really permeated Western pop-culture consciousness.
  19. Dressed to Kill
    It’s easy to see why people hated a movie as arch, violent, and glib as Dressed To Kill, and equally clear that this is exactly what De Palma was going for with all the gusto he could muster.
  20. The Big Red One
    In some respects a less tidy film than before, particularly when it veers off into a subplot involving a Nazi soldier played by Siegfried Rauch, the new cut mostly retains the original's virtues while adding details and episodes that make it more recognizably a Fuller film.
  21. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    Cheech And Chong’s Next Movie was Cheech and Chong’s next movie, their dogged lack of imagination seldom as amusing as in the self-reflexive title. Already they had begun to lose steam, recycling a joke in which one character tricks another into railing a line of powdered laundry soap.
  22. Used Cars
    Savagely funny...taken as a rancid, festering slice of Americana, it seems more potent than ever.
  23. Airplane!
    The hits outnumber the misses well enough in Airplane!, especially in the first half, when the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (writer-directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) are layering jokes in the foreground and background. There are parodies of popular favorites like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever, wacky stock footage on back-screen projection, slapstick violence against various religious solicitors, and plenty of silly wordplay.
  24. The Stunt Man
    The Stunt Man still thrills as a witty, sly, action-packed mind game.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Urban Cowboy
    Unapologetically trashy, Urban Cowboy is a virtual pageant of high redneck style—there are lots of bootleg trousers, halter tops, shag haircuts, and feather-brimmed Stetsons—and Winger is fun as the unapologetically trashy gal who just wants to bag herself a real cowboy. Unfortunately, Urban Cowboy is dull one time too often to qualify as entertaining kitsch.
  26. The Hollywood Knights
    Powered by a soundtrack featuring many of classic-rock radio's most comically overplayed songs, The Hollywood Knights has almost nothing going for it aside from a surplus of enthusiastic vulgarity.
  27. Carny
    Carny feels like a throwback to the ’70s. It’s an evocative character study with a firm grasp on its subject matter that may be traced back to Robertson, an ex-carny who also produced and co-wrote the story.
  28. The Tin Drum
    Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling.
  29. Inferno
    The writing is clumsy, with information packed crudely into the dialogue, and his attention to the performances is inversely proportional to his attention to style. Yet his “New York” has an eerie, deserted, otherworldly quality—much as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would later—and some of the individual setpieces are spectacularly vibrant.
  30. The Changeling
    An underrated entry in the horror subgenre, generating consistent unease through long, ominous pans—up and down staircases, through hallways—that assume the perspective of its searching-for-peace specter.
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