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. The Russian Woodpecker
    The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever.
  2. Tales of Halloween
    Anthology films are known for being inconsistent, and after the wild mood swings of recent horror anthologies like the "V/H/S" and "ABCs Of Death" movies, it’s a relief to report that despite consisting of 10 segments directed by 11 people, Tales Of Halloween is remarkably cohesive.
  3. Experimenter
    The film bears the subtitle The Stanley Milgram Story, but it’s most effective when it strenuously avoids biopic conventions, focusing intently on the man’s controversial professional life.
  4. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
  5. The Assassin
    Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling.
  6. Room
    On their own, each segment of Room is tense and emotional. But they’re even better placed back-to-back.
  7. Truth
    That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.
  8. Goosebumps
    Though it revives at least a dozen of Stine’s most popular beasts and fiends, the new Goosebumps movie rarely recalls the old preteen page-turners for which it’s named.
  9. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.
  10. Junun
    Barely a feature at 54 minutes, it’s the closest Anderson has come to just kind of goofing around behind the camera — though, obviously, his version of goofing around is more dynamic than an ambitious effort from the average contemporary.
  11. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Though Farahani takes care to pose her project as both a portrait of and an intervention in Mohasses’ life, it winds up being considerably less interesting as the latter.
  12. All Things Must Pass
    If the homilies eventually feel a bit repetitive, the warmth and goodwill generated by the landmark company are conveyed by this earnest and affectionate documentary.
  13. Crimson Peak
    Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.
  14. Victoria
    Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.
  15. Trash
    But while once upon a time Daldry made a very good movie like "Billy Elliot", here he lets what should’ve been an efficient little thriller get stymied by an excess of style, and the weight of self-importance.
  16. Yakuza Apocalypse
    His latest, the deranged and frequently funny Yakuza Apocalypse, is in many ways a return to both his early years in the wilds of V-Cinema — Japan’s direct-to-video industry — and to the kind of midnight-movie fodder that first made his reputation abroad, albeit done on a much larger scale and with fewer quirks of style.
  17. Big Stone Gap
    The result is at once labor of love and cautionary tale: Apparently too close to the story to recognize how ill suited she was to translating its charms to the screen, Trigiani has emerged with nothing but corny, stilted Americana, like something Garrison Keillor might burp out on a really off day.
  18. The Final Girls
    This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.
  19. Knock Knock
    It’s the kind of vanity-free, dignity-be-damned performance that Nicolas Cage regularly delivers, and by the time Keanu is bellowing hysterically about free pizza, the urge to surrender becomes difficult to resist.
  20. Steve Jobs
    The tension between Boyle’s restless energy and Sorkin’s tendency to run in place drives the movie.
  21. Pan
    At once thinly conceived and maddeningly over-designed, irreverent and over-serious, and chock-full of strained references (to World War II, environmentalism, and drugs, among other things) and creepy violence, Pan is an elaborate flight of fancy with no vision — which makes it strangely compelling in spots.
  22. (T)error
    (T)error moves forward chronologically, and features enough astonishing twists to rival any episode of "Homeland."
  23. The Forbidden Room
    For those attuned to Maddin’s goofy sense of humor, it’s easily the funniest movie he’s ever made—a series of several dozen comic shorts strung together on a ludicrous clothesline. The only downside is that the experience, at just shy of two hours, can be a trifle exhausting.
  24. Freeheld
    Nowhere the film goes is unexpected... but the plainspoken Freeheld charts a mostly admirable course there.
  25. Shanghai
    Pulp without style: Shanghai has many of the staples of noir—back alleys, shadowy figures, hard-boiled narration, and more femmes fatales than a viewer could keep track of—but none of the atmosphere or cool.
  26. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Every new movie by Jafar Panahi is a miniature coup, an act of fearless political defiance.
  27. He Named Me Malala
    A puff piece for someone who doesn’t need one, Malala wraps Yousafzai’s life in media-circuit testimonials and fairy-tale-like animated sequences that stop just short of drawing an aureola of fire around her.
  28. Partisan
    That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.
  29. The Martian
    At its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of our ability, as a species, to solve even the most daunting problems via rational thought, step by step by step. It’s basically "Human Ingenuity: The Movie."
  30. Prophet's Prey
    The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.
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