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. Seconds
    Seconds is certainly a flawed film, and it's easy to see why it flopped during its initial release: It's a relentlessly depressing, claustrophobic movie that offers no sense of catharsis whatsoever. Nevertheless, it's strangely touching, and as a portrayal of identity and alienation in suburban America, it's about a hundred times as creepy and sincere as David Lynch's thematically similar Lost Highway.
  2. Au hasard Balthazar
    If one were looking for a perfectly realized film, Au Hasard Balthazar would be as likely a candidate as any. For every convention of film grammar and narrative that this 50-year-old masterpiece utilizes, it uses strictly on its own terms, discarding many more.
  3. Torn Curtain
    Despite some weaknesses, the film remains a bold and challenging work, one that flies in the face of the conventional spy thrillers of its day.
  4. A Fine Madness
    Madness lacks sympathetic characters and a well-structured plot, but its manic energy takes it far.
  5. The Naked Prey
    The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.
  6. Band of Outsiders
    Behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that’s more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.
  7. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    It walks a fascinating line between morbid humor and outright horror, and it consistently defies expectations by resetting them at every possible step.
  8. Variety Lights
    A moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.
  9. Roustabout
    Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.
  10. Marnie
    It's a must for those already enthralled by Rear Window, Vertigo, and the like, but a bit of a slog for anyone else.
  11. The Killers
    Though Siegel's The Killers dispatches Hemingway after six unfaithful minutes, its roundabout treatment seems truest to his spirit.
  12. An Autumn Afternoon
    Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.
  13. Black Sabbath
    There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.
  14. The Naked Kiss
    Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force.
  15. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    Shooting Dr. Strangelove as if it were Paths Of Glory makes its ridiculous elements at once funnier and more chilling, emphasizing the Cold War’s inherent insanity.
  16. America America
    It’s a crude, clunky piece of writing, hampered by variable performances and a leading man whose looks of silent resolve are more compelling than his line-readings. Yet the film has the elemental power of a classic immigrant story, revealing a young man’s single-minded, arduous journey to America through black-and-white images that evoke the country’s promise to the huddled masses.
  17. High and Low
    While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.
  18. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
    There are enough giddy highs that it’s had a strong cult following ever since its release in 1963.
  19. The Haunting
    Sound effects, disorienting camera work, expert editing, and Humphrey Searle's discomfiting score all suggest, without showing, a horrible presence waiting in the wings. Though parts of The Haunting are talky, even that works in the film's favor, as Tamblyn's glib dismissals and Johnson's calm professorial tone are unable to clear up the mystery at its core. After all, the specters that can't be seen, classified, or otherwise contained are the scariest of all.
  20. Lord of the Flies
    Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.
  21. The Great Escape
    McQueen speeding across the German countryside and leaping over the first of two barbed-wire fences leading into Switzerland may be the film's most iconic and enduring image. Dubious or not, it's a triumph of sorts that a tale that ends in war crimes could have such a rousing conclusion.
  22. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    It's a black-and-white shocker, a crazed psycho-melodrama, a pitch-black show-biz satire, a warped meditation on the traumatizing effects of child stardom, and a gothic tale of familial dysfunction as its dysfunctioniest.
  23. The Manchurian Candidate
    The Manchurian Candidate tweaks our collective fear that the enemy looks exactly like us in much the same way that the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers does, but with a political doomsday scenario foregrounded rather than (as in Siegel’s film) merely implied.
  24. Cléo from 5 to 7
    An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.
  25. Tales of Terror
    Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.
  26. Lolita
    Where the book peers directly into despair and tragedy, the film looks away and dials up the comedy.
  27. Ride the High Country
    Some of the hallmarks of Peckinpah's style—most notably the moving POV shots, quick cuts, and off-center close-ups—manifest even in the colorful, smooth High Country.
  28. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    A bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range.
  29. Testament of Orpheus
    A self-crafted elegy starring Cocteau as himself, an artist at the end of his life wandering through a symbolic landscape filled with his own creations (and guest stars Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso). In the end, Cocteau takes comfort in the immortality of art, and therefore his own immortality, a sentiment that would seem far less moving and far more egotistical if it weren't true.
  30. Good Morning
    A knowing comedy, Good Morning isn't one of Ozu's indisputable masterpieces, but it serves as a fine example of everything he does well.
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