The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 4,789 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score:
Amour
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Transylmania
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,329 out of 4789
  2. Mixed: 1,771 out of 4789
  3. Negative: 689 out of 4789
4,789 movie reviews
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  1. Drive
    The film is little more than an exercise in style, but it's dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    Weekend
    Bittersweet, achingly authentic, and so intimate it almost feels invasive.
  3. War Horse
    To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.
  4. A Separation
    Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.
  5. The Turin Horse
    The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice.
  6. The Deep Blue Sea
    There's a suffocating air to The Deep Blue Sea that makes it harder to access than other period romances of its kind, but Davies aligns himself wholly with Hester.
  7. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.
  8. The Master
    It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 100
    Holy Motors
    It's a glorious dream-epitaph.
  10. The Loneliest Planet
    The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
  11. Wreck-It Ralph
    It's a wildly exciting ride, the fastest-moving, most enthusiastically kinetic kids' action film since "The Incredibles."
  12. The Rabbi's Cat
    While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.
  13. Zero Dark Thirty
    Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.
  14. Amour
    A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.
  15. Barbara
    Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.
  16. Days of Heaven
    It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]
  17. Funny Games (2008)
    A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.
  18. Funny Games
    The audience is indicted for its bloodlust. There's perversity in paying admission to get harshly scolded, and Funny Games is not for the squeamish, but this may be one time to step up and take the licking you deserve.
  19. Upstream Color
    It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.
  20. Before Midnight
    Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment — the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade. In the process of justifying its own existence, Before Midnight redeems the very notion of sequels.
  21. Fateless
    Fateless is a strangely beautiful film, enhanced by a typically lyrical Ennio Morricone score and by Koltai's hazy, grayed-out images.
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  22. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Like "The Aristocrats," Looking succeeds smashingly both as a comedy and as a savvy deconstruction of comedy.
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  23. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    For the most part, Willmott succeeds thrillingly.
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  24. Brick
    Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet."
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  25. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    By the time Feuerzeig gets to his final shot--an artful portrait of Johnston's parents, with their son looming over them like a curse--he's emerged with the most harrowing and aesthetically keen portrait of madness and artistic inspiration since "Crumb."
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  26. Friends with Money
    Holofcener possesses a genius for creating exquisitely realized characters who seem to have led full, rich, complicated lives before the film's first scene takes place, and will go on living complex, idiosyncratic existences long after they disappear from the screen. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she has four of the best actresses in Hollywood as the leads, especially Keener.
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  27. Mountain Patrol
    Filmed in long, quiet takes across gorgeous, all-but-empty landscapes, Mountain Patrol feels more like Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" than like the cops-and-robbers thriller its plotline suggests.
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  28. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    An intoxicating performance piece in which skilled actors pinball off each other with such energy and nuance that the audience almost forgets about the dying man on the edge of the frame. The style alone makes the movie's point.
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  29. Down in the Valley
    It's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.
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  30. Over the Hedge
    Over The Hedge stands out as genuinely witty and even a little barbed. Its chipper, sneering outsider's look at suburban sprawl and conformity isn't going to change the world, but it's still self-aware enough to be reasonably smart.
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