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 Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.
  2. As Above, So Below
    What’s the point in shooting a horror movie in the catacombs if it’s just going to end up looking like every horror movie not shot in the catacombs?
  3. The Notebook
    Not a shred of human decency is on display in The Notebook, a handsomely made, hard-to-endure World War II parable set in an unnamed Hungarian backwater during the Nazi occupation of 1944.
  4. The Last of Robin Hood
    On the sliding scale of low expectations associated with the “I (may or may not have) slept with a famous person” biopic genre, Robin Hood is more smoothly professional and tolerable than the lowly likes of "My Week With Marilyn" or the JFK-adultery-soap opera "An American Affair."
  5. Life of Crime
    Thing is, though, for anyone familiar with the Tarantino film, this less remarkable picture will totally seem like a prequel, peering back as it does on younger versions of characters audiences got to know in "Jackie Brown."
  6. The Congress
    It’s a folly of the first order, but one that many people will nonetheless want to see, if only because it’s so out there.
  7. Starred Up
    It’s a credit to both Mackenzie’s talent as a director of actors and to the underlying humaneness of his vision that he argues that the right option is the more difficult and less predictable one — and that he does so without relying on sentimentality, unearned sympathy, or a happy ending.
  8. The November Man
    Too frequently, the movie also treats its female characters as props to be shuffled in and out of danger as the screenplay requires — a nasty tendency that undermines its ongoing (and murkily argued) debate about whether a successful agent can maintain his humanity.
  9. Metro Manila
    The movie is a catalogue of Nolanisms translated into Tagalog and executed on a tight budget.
  10. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him?
  11. Love Is Strange
    Setting several scenes to the famously poignant plinks of pianist Frédéric Chopin, Love Is Strange never achieves the sheer emotional resonance of "Make Way For Tomorrow"; it’s gently affecting, not deeply heartbreaking — in part because Sachs builds to a less devastating punctuation than McCarey did.
  12. Are You Here
    As a film, though, it amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
  13. If I Stay
    Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.
  14. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  15. The One I Love
    The ending is intended to be ambiguous, but it’s not too hard to guess what happened in advance, as it’s the only dramatically satisfying option. What’s no longer at all certain is what it means.
  16. Abuse of Weakness
    Writer-director Catherine Breillat who adapted the film from her own roman à clef, seems content to let the story stand on its own two feet, as if it were something that she’d invented from whole cloth rather than experienced. It’s a laudable approach, in theory, but it backfires a bit in this particular instance, because what occurs is so psychologically inexplicable that Breillat’s alter ego comes across as terminally foolish.
  17. To Be Takei
    The technical, workmanlike production is made more irritating than necessary by Michael Hearst’s score, whose grating circus-comes-to-town sprightliness is routinely slathered over mundane footage.
  18. The Possession of Michael King
    After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.
  19. Winter in the Blood
    Cursed with a vague, rambling script and an equally indistinct lead performance, the film is a scattershot series of vignettes about self-definition that, ultimately, never coheres into a lucid whole.
  20. Expedition to the End of the World
    The Expedition To The End Of The World courses with the zeal of Robert Flaherty, the fearlessness of Werner Herzog, and the fatalistic humor of Lars Von Trier. While individual moments echo with a familiarly mordant sense of alpha-male adventure, together they cohere into something wild and new.
  21. The Expendables 3
    With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be.
  22. Dinosaur 13
    Dinosaur 13 reduces a complicated legal quagmire about paleontological ownership to something of a pity party. But hard luck is not the same as injustice.
  23. Jealousy
    Jealousy — arguably the slightest film Garrel has produced since the 1980s — may not add up to a whole lot, but its sense of life and the medium is, as always, substantial and accomplished.
  24. Septic Man
    As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.
  25. The Giver
    The ironic side effect is that this major influence on today’s new class of dystopian YA smashes now looks like just another greedy knockoff on-screen—a monochromatic "Divergent," or something similar.
  26. Moebius
    A viewer familiar with the filmmaker’s latter-day schtick can’t help but wonder: How can an artist be so persistent in his use of symbols, and yet never manage to develop them beyond a rudimentary metaphorical framework?
  27. The Trip to Italy
    It works reasonably well as a film, too, though, provided that one isn’t overly bothered by repetition and a general sense of diminishing returns.
  28. Frank
    Frank is never more endearing than when Fassbender has a mic to his mouth, spitting out the hilariously batshit lyrics of his “most likeable song ever,” or literally singing the praises of his cohorts during an affecting showstopper.
  29. Life After Beth
    Enjoy the wordplay in the title, because that’s as witty as the horror comedy Life After Beth ever gets.
  30. Let's Be Cops
    At times, the movie seems to exist for no other purpose than to collide these two personalities together, privileging their antagonistic banter above all else. But isn’t that the basic point of all buddy comedies?
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