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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet uses an accessible medium to show the evils of propaganda and express the need for individuality. Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well.
  2. The Holy Mountain
    Witty, disgusting, eye-popping, and incomprehensible, The Holy Mountain is every bit as pop-philosophical as Jodorowsky's earlier work, but it also contains original visual ideas nearly every 30 seconds, from frogs in armor to crucifixes made out of painted bread.
  3. The Way We Were
    Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.
  4. Charley Varrick
    A low-key, tough little thriller punctuated by casual bursts of brutality and deadpan humor, Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a movie about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks.
  5. Badlands
    Critics don’t tend to talk about this much—it’s tantamount to a confession that we don’t always know what we’re doing—but it’s often the case that the most powerful, haunting aspects of a movie are those that we don’t fully understand.
  6. Mean Streets
    A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.
  7. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    It functions reasonably well as a straightforward, agonized melodrama, but it’s first and foremost a master class—co-taught by famed cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Quiz Show), who got his start with Fassbinder—in the dynamic visual use of a constricted space, and proof that a tiny budget is no excuse.
  8. The Mother and the Whore
    As in the best films of John Cassavetes, The Mother And The Whore transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Even though the movie was, in a lot of ways, a glorious mess, it turned out to be a huge success on just about every level.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jesus Christ Superstar
    However dated stylistically (everybody’s dressed, to put it baldly, like hippies) it remains immensely powerful.
  11. American Graffiti
    A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.
  12. The Day of the Jackal
    In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, Fox practices with his specially engineered rifle (which has been built into a pair of crutches), and as he takes his shots at a practice melon, he keeps tweaking the aim. It all looks very cool, until Fox finishes his adjustments, and fires a bullet that makes this stand-in for de Gaulle’s head explode.
  13. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    So much about The Friends Of Eddie Coyle feels locked into 1973—from Dave Grusin’s jazz-fusion score to the shaggy hair and wide collars—but the dialogue is almost David Mamet-like in its specificity and rhythm, and it remains bracing even now.
  14. Playtime
    Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.
  15. Battle for the Planet of the Apes
    The bloodiest of the Apes films, and one of the most despairing.
  16. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
    A dry, dour film where the moments of poetic Americana barely cohere.
  17. Soylent Green
    Though the mystery has been spoiled somewhat by an over-revealed twist ending, Soylent Green still succeeds thanks to director Richard Fleischer's sure command of one of the grimmest and most sadly plausible dystopias put to film.
  18. Paper Moon
    Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.
  19. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.
  20. The Mack
    The Mack certainly wasn't the first film to invite audiences to identify with a gleefully transgressive antihero, but its combustible take on sex, class, capitalism, and race made it an important touchstone not only for black film, but also for hip-hop culture.
  21. Sisters
    As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.
  22. Godspell
    Maybe the broad gestures, colorful costumes, and exaggerated acting worked in the theater. As a movie, it's actively, fascinatingly terrible, with a vision of Christ more likely to instill in viewers a fear of traveling bands of loony street performers than a desire to embrace the Holy Spirit.
  23. The Crazies
    Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.
  24. Walking Tall
    On one hand, it's an ultraviolent revenge fantasy, and on the other hand, it's a masterpiece of over-the-top unintentional hilarity—with a clenched-toothed performance by Baker serving as its centerpiece. It's in the latter capacity that Walking Tall can be highly recommended as an unconscionably good time.
  25. Tout Va Bien
    Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.
  26. Black Mama White Mama
    Black Mama, White Mama is a cheerfully sleazy romp made with the easily distractible drive-in audience in mind.
  27. The Heartbreak Kid
    Not especially gag-driven, May's deadpan style clears the way for some remarkable performances by Jeannie Berlin, Eddie Albert, and especially Grodin, who has to remain likable even while doing stupid, mean things.
  28. The Getaway
    Brutal but hugely entertaining.
  29. The Poseidon Adventure
    There's ample overacting by the likes of Stella Stevens, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, but the movie's one-obstacle-atop-another plot—and active meditation on faith—remain sharp and surprising.
  30. Asylum
    Asylum was written by Robert Bloch, the author of the original novel Psycho, and produced by the U.K.’s Amicus Productions, which was responsible for a series of horror anthologies during the ’60s and ’70s. Asylum remains, by far, their finest offering, in part because of its pitch-perfect gothic mood, and in part because its stories present varied perspectives on the depths of obsessive madness.
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