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. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair can best be described as expertly depressing—a subcategory of art cinema that seems worth the punishment only when the gloom is counterbalanced by at least a few transcendent moments. No such moments ever surface here, however, apart from a brief fantasy during the closing credits.
  2. Dumb and Dumber To
    Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Butter on the Latch
    The different techniques Decker uses — the improvised dialogue that feels like listening to one side of a phone conversation, the woozy cinematography and sound design, the disorienting editing — create a sense of claustrophobia. The film’s world is beautiful and scary, but also as intimate as a childhood sleepover.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    The masculine posturing between the two men and uncomfortable sexual tension between Akin and Sarah move the story along nicely, but the editorial techniques that made "Butter’s" loosey-goosey narrative work so well undermine Thou Wast Mild.
  5. Penance
    The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.
  6. Bad Turn Worse
    Had the film not been so open about its ambition, maybe its mediocrity wouldn’t seem quite so galling.
  7. Miss Meadows
    What makes Miss Meadows egregiously awful is that it has no perspective whatsoever on vigilante justice. As an ostensible work of satire, it lacks bite, never truly questioning or complicating its heroine’s actions; the film isn’t even outrageous enough to be appalling (which paradoxically makes it appalling).
  8. Rosewater
    All well and good — and, again, damn near unquestionably sincere — except that Rosewater isn’t much of a film.
  9. Foxcatcher
    The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.
  10. The Homesman
    Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman. Tommy Lee Jones’ off-beat minor-key Western has plenty of virtues, but straightness isn’t one of them.
  11. Red Army
    If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond the Lights
    This is feel-good populist entertainment at heart.
  13. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6’s considerable graces as an animated film — its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion — are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick.
  14. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Way He Looks
    Ribeiro captures the experiential awkwardness of young love pitch-perfectly.
  16. The Better Angels
    As an impression of a Terrence Malick film, The Better Angels is technically faultless, unimprovable. All that’s missing is the soul.
  17. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Those who already admire the director may not find a stunning level of insight, and the curious but unindoctrinated would be better served by starting with one his actual films rather than a rundown of them. But there’s a certain satisfaction in a rundown of a career as rich and varied as Linklater’s, not unlike the pleasure of watching a well-edited Oscar tribute reel.
  18. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.
  19. Actress
    Alternately candid and cagey, Robert Greene’s documentary turns the chores and frustrations of a modern-day homemaker into a study in roles — social and personal, conscious and unintentional, on-camera and off. It isn’t, by any means, a difficult movie, but neither does it take any easy routes.
  20. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  21. Open Windows
    Open Windows attempts to disguise a revenge movie by cloaking it in the flash of a voyeuristic techno-thriller, but the combined concepts are so high that the film resolves as Vigalondo reaches his Icarus moment, the corpse so mangled and unpleasant the project’s ambition can only be identified via dental records.
  22. Jessabelle
    There isn’t a single jump scare in this thing. On the other hand, it would be nice if Jessabelle tried a little harder.
  23. National Gallery
    Unlike Wiseman’s greatest films, National Gallery never quite finds an overarching theme. There’s a fair amount of material regarding the art/commerce divide, but many scenes have no bearing whatsoever on that subject, and the film generally lacks urgency.
  24. Interstellar
    It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.
  25. Before I Go to Sleep
    Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.
  26. Horns
    Horns fumbles with its own powers, too. If its moments of Aja-ian archness blended better with the macabre sincerity that presumably comes from the source material, it might have provided a real autumnal chill. Instead, it’s more ambitious and complex than the horror movies that dutifully clock in to haunt multiplexes around Halloween—without actually being better.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ABCs of Death 2
    Omnibus features are by their nature uneven, so it’s to the benefit of the ABCs Of Death series that the creative constraints (26 short horror films, each one pegged to a specific letter of the alphabet) encourage brevity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Point and Shoot
    The more straightforward Point And Shoot seems, the more slippery it becomes.
  29. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler is a portrait of an amoral opportunist who stumbles upon his horrible calling, and the film’s chief pleasure is watching Gyllenhaal portray what it might be like if Rushmore’s Max Fischer grew up to become Chuck Tatum, the unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Ace In The Hole. It’s adolescent solipsism gone grotesquely rancid.
  30. Goodbye to Language 3D
    What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.
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