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. Halloween
    A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.
  2. The Wiz
    The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.
  3. Midnight Express
    Midnight Express is at war with itself. Strong when it focuses on the psychological toll of prison, it falls apart when it turns the focus elsewhere, and its depictions of all Turks as swarthy, corrupt, and sadistic is pretty inexcusable.
  4. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.
  5. Paradise Alley
    Striking in the way it evokes fears of abandonment—children’s worries blown up to grown-up scale—and completely unlike any film Stallone has put his name on since.
  6. Days of Heaven
    It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]
  7. Piranha
    With Piranha, Dante delivers a superior Jaws rip-off with a light, goofy touch that anticipates the anarchic, gleeful mayhem of his later work.
  8. Interiors
    Much of the first half of Interiors feels like a stage play, though one in which characters walk in and out of frame. That, along with the overly symbolic breaking of a vase, have earned Interiors some criticism for being too on the nose, which isn’t entirely unfair. But the rest of the movie is so starkly bold that it renders those problems insignificant. It’s beautiful, affecting, and exactly as jarring as Allen probably intended it to be.
  9. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
    Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.
  10. Grease
    Grease is a pure pop construct, fueled by movie-star poses, hit songs, and persistent audience fantasies of being an acceptable kind of "bad." Barry Gibb-penned disco theme aside, Grease doesn't really belong to any one era. It's like it's always existed.
  11. Damien: Omen II
    The film could be subtitled A Portrait Of The Anti-Christ As A Young Man. The emphasis has been shifted from parental anxiety to the frustration of a boy struggling to identify—and then reconcile—his demonic birthright.
  12. Corvette Summer
    Corvette Summer was originally billed as "a fiberglass romance," and that about sums up its thematic ambitions. Robbins cares about the automobiles much more than the drivers. From the jargon-filled car talk to the repeated shots of tricked-out machines, Corvette Summer is about hot wheels, not what they mean.
  13. Martin
    Martin touches on any number of post-Vietnam ills (urban decay, drug addiction, crises in faith) without overstatement, allowing for a deeply considered exploration of horror's ability to comment on society, a sort of belated answer to Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. At the same time, Romero still forces Martin to work as strictly a horror film, albeit an eccentric one in which the violence has an uncomfortable plausibility, starkly contrasting Amplas' romanticized black-and-white vampiric fantasy life.
  14. The Manitou
    While Manitou does have its slower sections, the climax is a thing of beauty to be enjoyed forever, with crummy special effects, bad lightning, a star field, an Evil One symbolized by a cataract, and Tony Curtis struggling to maintain his dignity.
  15. The Fury
    The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.
  16. Blue Collar
    Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.
  17. Eraserhead
    See Eraserhead once and it’ll lodge itself firmly in some dank recess of your brain and refuse to vacate.
  18. The Duellists
    In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.
  19. High Anxiety
    Anxiety is nearly as obsessive in recreating Alfred Hitchcock's visual style as Gus Van Sant's Psycho was, but to much greater effect.
  20. 1900
    The story is almost too small for Bertolucci's sprawling approach, and the ungainliness of his international cast stifles both the dialogue and the performances.
  21. Damnation Alley
    Mostly the film just feels too skimpy. The first third is largely taken up in establishing the nuclear devastation of Damnation Alley’s world, leaving just an hour for the heroes’ perilous road trip across lands infested with what Peppard calls “killa cockroaches.” By the time the action really gets cranking, the movie is half-over.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  23. Bobby Deerfield
    Don't be fooled by the action-packed DVD cover: Pacino spends roughly five minutes of Deerfield racing, and two hours learning, from a woman facing death, how to embrace life.
  24. The American Friend
    Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
  25. House
    Watching this film is like jamming fistfuls of delicious candy into your mouth for 90 minutes. It’s a rush chasing a rush.
    • The A.V. Club
  26. Sorcerer
    Though there’s gunplay, and more than a few explosions, the focus of this grim jungle odyssey is on the prevention of carnage, the heart-in-throat attempts not to blow something up.
  27. The Rescuers
    While The Rescuers is at times a showcase for marvelously expressive art—especially in Kahl’s design for Madame Medusa, a sloppy, flailing disaster of a woman with a shapeless bust hanging to her waist and a face like a half-empty bag—the seams show throughout, and it’s all too easy to see the patchwork process that created it from foregrounds and backgrounds, and from animators of varying experience and talent.
  28. Exorcist II: The Heretic
    It would be a lot easier to buy Exorcist II: The Heretic as a mood piece if it was able to sustain a tone beyond clumsy exposition and hysterical camp for longer than a few minutes.
  29. For the Love of Benji
    An improvement on its predecessor insofar as it takes place in Athens rather than small-town Texas, meaning the scenery is better.
  30. Eaten Alive
    Lacking the eerie plausibility and stylishness of Chainsaw, yet filled with dead dogs, terrorized children, and bound women, it never transcends its Z-grade origins. It's an interesting footnote, and will likely be of interest to hardcore horror fans, but those looking for a lost masterpiece will likely come away disappointed.
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