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. Yves Saint Laurent
    Yet another biopic that feels as though it were made by an accountant, Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent epitomizes the mediocrity of a genre that often aspires to secondhand storytelling instead of first-rate art.
  2. The Last Sentence
    The continual wobbling of on-screen space, combined with some endearingly awkward attempts at humor (dog reaction shots abound), gives this tony biopic a smidgen of charm, though it doesn’t make it any less tedious.
  3. Norte, the End of History
    It feels as though wherever the camera might be—and however it might be moving—is exactly where it belongs.
  4. Venus in Fur
    Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.
  5. Third Person
    As schematic as Third Person is on a whole, it’s downright risible on a moment-to-moment basis.
  6. Coherence
    The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects — of which there are basically none — but on heavy doses of paranoia.
  7. Code Black
    Far too much time is spent on McGarry and his colleagues talking to the camera about how little they’re motivated by money or status and how much they just want to help people. That’s laudable, but it’s not compelling.
  8. Heli
    The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.
  9. Policeman
    Like its narrative, this gripping film rarely veers in the expected directions — and is never easy to pin down.
  10. Think Like a Man Too
    Think Like A Man was a memorably bad movie; the most eccentric thing about this sequel is its title.
  11. Jersey Boys
    The unfortunate trade-off of Eastwood’s efficient, real-deal classical direction is his stubborn commitment to the script.
  12. A Coffee In Berlin
    This understated indie deepens its portrait of growing up by suggesting, ultimately, that anyone who thinks wasting time is a reasonable course of action needs to wake up.
  13. Test
    Clumsy metaphors and contrived attempts to articulate Frankie’s fears—especially as he awaits the results of the titular test—diminish the emotional authenticity engendered by Daniel Marks’ hyper-real cinematography and the film’s incisively curated soundtrack.
  14. Hellion
    Occasionally, the viewer gets the sense that the camera’s jittery swaying is meant to draw attention from the film’s clunkiness. Fragrance is a poor substitute for depth.
  15. Violette
    A few excerpts of Leduc’s prose spoken in voiceover, expressing the same feelings poetically, can’t compensate for over two hours of maudlin self-pity. It’s so annoying that dull shots of Leduc writing serve as a welcome respite.
  16. Witching and Bitching
    Plenty of movies sympathize with outcasts, but only De La Iglesia’s sympathize with their ugliest feelings: envy, resentment, and self-loathing.
  17. Lullaby
    Lullaby is a small movie, but it slows down enough to accommodate plenty of self-indulgence.
  18. Ivory Tower
    Rossi’s scathing (yet seemingly fair) documentary doesn’t just illustrate the institutional ironies of modern education. It also strives to understand why tuition is at an all-time high when knowledge is practically free.
  19. Burning Bush
    On the whole, though, Burning Bush is an absorbing docudrama that maintains a gratifying equilibrium between hope and cynicism. You can fight City Hall. It just takes a while.
  20. The Rover
    At heart, The Rover is something of a buddy road movie, albeit one almost completely devoid of humor.
  21. The Signal
    The movie never becomes truly involving — mostly because it’s hard to get wrapped up in a narrative when you can’t shake the nagging feeling that the rug under your feet is being tugged.
  22. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    There aren’t just more dragons, but more characters, more plot, more everything. The trade-off is that the charm of the original gets a little lost, a casualty of rapid-franchise expansion.
  23. 22 Jump Street
    A comedy about sequels. Like its predecessor, the movie continually teeters on the edge of breaking through the fourth wall.
  24. Borgman
    Van Warmerdam keeps things engrossingly ominous throughout, and Bijvoet has a lot of fun with his passive-aggressive creepazoid, but Borgman is both too self-consciously odd and too bluntly punitive to draw real blood.
  25. Dormant Beauty
    Though the movie eschews facile sloganeering, few of its characters or narrative threads are able to develop beyond their function as metaphors.
  26. Trust Me
    Like a cocky insider, Trust Me touches success only to throw it away on a gamble.
  27. Citizen Koch
    What ultimately helps Citizen Koch rise above the dozens of other movies like it is a focus not just on recent developments in American politics, but also on the bedrock of what has made this country such an enduringly great, astoundingly troubled experiment: one person, one vote.
  28. Rigor Mortis
    Rigor Mortis functions best as an above-average fright flick, distinguished by its sense of supernatural folklore—scads more imaginative than its Western counterparts—and Mak’s eye for bizarre close-ups.
  29. Willow Creek
    Goldthwait is just having too much fun with his bantering couple and the eccentric, guitar-playing Bigfoot fanatics they encounter; the climax feels like an afterthought, the obligatory mayhem he had to provide as justification for making a shaggy romantic comedy about the cult of Sasquatch.
  30. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    As a result, this well-meaning puff piece sometimes appears to double as an extended video-dating profile: Generous sexagenarian seeks stable younger woman for procreation.
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