The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,435 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 2.5 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: 5,578 out of 10435
  2. Mixed: 3,745 out of 10435
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10435
10435 movie reviews
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  1. My All American
    Move over, "Rudy." Hit the showers, "Brian’s Song." There’s a new tearjerking true story of gridiron triumph, one that combines those male-weepie favorites in a way no focus group could possibly resist.
  2. Love the Coopers
    A movie that should be punctuated like a Christmas card sign-off but instead, losing a comma, becomes an off-putting directive. How Robert De Niro didn’t make it to this set is a mystery for the ages.
  3. Miss You Already
    Tonally, Miss You Already is a slapdash mess of achingly sincere moments and tasteless jokes.
  4. Spotlight
    Like "All The President’s Men," it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.
  5. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Uniquely ambitious, Rivette’s film (technically a serial) spends nearly 13 hours stitching paranoia, loneliness, comedy, and mystical symbolism into a crazy quilt big enough to cover a generation.
  6. Brooklyn
    It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.
  7. Trumbo
    Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.
  8. The Peanuts Movie
    While it’s more technically elaborate treatment than the characters have ever received, it’s also gentler and more eye-pleasing than any of Blue Sky’s other features. It‘s also a neat extension of Schulz’s style—though, granted, no one needs to see Pig-Pen’s permanent cloud of filth rendered more vividly.
  9. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.
  10. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
  11. SPECTRE
    What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise.
  12. In Jackson Heights
    The sheer variety of humanity that Wiseman documents keeps the film lively, and he finds plenty of terrific subjects.
  13. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    On the plus side, the film is high energy and moves quickly. And some of the zombie gore effects are fun, reaching nearly Raimi-esque heights of splatter during the climactic battle. None of it is really scary, though, especially since it’s so predictable.
  14. Love
    Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.
  15. The Armor of Light
    The main reason to see The Armor Of Light is to spend more time with Schenck, and to get a sense of how deeply he’s thought about all of this.
  16. The Wonders
    If the film fails to deliver wonders, it does offer substantial pleasures.
  17. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It treats the complicated moves and countermoves of a major election as fodder for a broadly comic grudge match.
  18. Burnt
    Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.
  19. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    By making it so that everyone can see the evil coming, it also robs the franchise of one of its most potent pleasures: studying the frame for signs of trouble, little telltale hints that something is about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Sentient inkblots are a poor substitution for that sensation.
  20. Extraordinary Tales
    Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.
  21. Nasty Baby
    At long last, Nasty Baby decides what it wants to be: a complete mess.
  22. Jem and the Holograms
    Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.
  23. Suffragette
    Despite a top-shelf cast and strong subject matter, Suffragette feels like the product of limitations.
  24. I Smile Back
    Silverman tackles the role with total conviction, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her play a similarly unhinged character in "Take This Waltz" — or, for that matter, anyone who’s seen her perform live.
  25. The Last Witch Hunter
    It’s a shame that The Last Witch Hunter ends up crumbling into another generic showdown of murky fantasy effects and snatched artifacts, with a final shot that is literally framed around a door to possible sequels.
  26. Rock the Kasbah
    It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.
  27. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono’s hip-hop musical is a chiefly visual pleasure, in part because most of the cast can’t rap worth a damn; its warped frame bounces between shimmering neons and fluorescents, disco-ball samurai suits, living statues, and all kinds of things that have been painted gold for gold’s sake.
  28. Bone Tomahawk
    S. Craig Zahler’s horror-Western hybrid Bone Tomahawk is a strange movie, one that might take more than one watch to fully understand. Not that it’s deliberately obscure, or has a plot too complicated to follow the first time around. It’s actually a pretty straightforward film, albeit one filled with eccentric choices.
  29. The Pearl Button
    A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.
  30. Heart of a Dog
    Given the number of films nowadays that would be just as enjoyable with both sound and picture turned off, a superlative soundtrack is nothing to sneeze at.
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