The Associated Press' Scores

  • Movies
For 1,491 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Tootsie
Lowest review score: 0 The King's Daughter
Score distribution:
1491 movie reviews
  1. The film is a wonderful collaboration between [Byrne] and writer-director Bronstein, who drew inspiration from her own experiences with motherhood. It also has given Byrne, an actor of effortless appeal in lighter films, a chance to display versatility and grit in surely the toughest dramatic role of her career.
  2. As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.
  3. Though it may be a chaotic shamble, Chazelle’s film makes this one point brilliantly clear: Cinema will be tamed for only so long; the parade will go on.
  4. Baltimorons is one of those little movies you might stumble across and be surprised that it hooks you. It does so despite — or more likely because — of its complete lack of flashiness or any self-evident attempt to “hook you.” Instead, it manages that simply with low-key charm and a warm, unpretentious humanity.
  5. After a bit of a slow start, “Moonfall” gets absolutely trippy in the last third as it details a mind-blowing alternative history to mankind that spans millennia and distant planets and backs it all up with gorgeous, massive special effects. Logic is abandoned altogether but few will care.
  6. Huppert seems to be enjoying herself fully leaning into Greta’s insanity, so perhaps this one can get a pass. She helps elevate the film from its self-consciously B-movie roots to be something that’s actually pretty good.
  7. What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive.
  8. Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.
  9. Burton’s Dumbo, while inevitably lacking much of the magic of the original, has charms and melancholies of its own, starting, naturally, with the elephant in the room. Of all the CGI make-overs, this Dumbo is the most textured, sweetest and most soulful of creatures.
  10. Air
    Air coasts quite well on its compelling, funny and self-aware script (which even allows room for an amusing disagreement about who exactly came up with the name Air Jordan) and charismatic movie stars.
  11. Is it all a little much? Of course, but that’s kind of the point of Maria.
  12. Eisenberg, who has already proven himself to be a talented, unsparing writer, shows promise as a director. He has not made a flashy art film, but it’s a smart, biting and occasionally sweet character piece about unlikable characters that you still may want to root for, because, though it may be hard to admit, they’re not so different from us.
  13. The themes are obvious and a bit old fashioned and the trajectory is too. But that’s not a ding: It’s just a neatly constructed story that stays true to its genre and time. And hopefully, it’s not the last time Morgan and del Toro revive a hidden gem.
  14. While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.
  15. El Conde might stretch its gimmicky premise a little past its welcome, but it is an intoxicating, overwhelming and gruesome cinematic experience nonetheless, which would make a fitting double feature with last year’s great historical legal thriller “Argentina 1985.”
  16. Unsane, a pulpy psychological thriller, is an exercise in both genre and technology. It’s a B-movie iMovie. And it’s 98 minutes of proof that the laborious apparatus of filmmaking can be not only light on its feet, but fit snuggly inside your pocket.
  17. Good Boys mines that gulf between childhood and adolescence like few films have before.
  18. Ultimately it all rides on Robbie, who, along with her blond, color-dipped pigtails, brings an appealing blend of looniness and grit to the role, and a hint of something sadder and darker. Still, one gets the sense the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how far to go with the feminism thing. When she says sadly that “a harlequin’s nothing without a master,” you don’t immediately get the sense that this is a post #MeToo Harley Quinn.
  19. Blinded by the Light isn’t a new tune, but it’s sung with an infectious passion and it captures something sincere about the globe-spanning, life-changing influence of great pop music.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    While no movie can serve as the perfect replica of a transformative live music experience, Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) works an immersive magic.
  20. For a long, sun-addled stretch, Lorcan Finnegan’s beach-set “The Surfer” simmers as a deliciously punishing nightmare, driving Nicolas Cage into his most natural state: a boil.
  21. McAdams and Weisz are on fire in Disobedience showing sides to their talents that we’ve never seen before in this truly unique film. Disobedience might not look like it’s for everyone on the surface, but its specificity is what makes it worthy and, almost, great.
  22. Let’s offer up some praise for this sequel-to-a-movie-based-on-a-smartphone-game, for finding a way to actually improve on the 2016 original in a way that’s clever but not snarky, sweet but not syrupy.
  23. With a foot in the past, one in the future and one on the gas, Fast X is pure popcorn lunacy. Was that too many feet? Oh, excuse us, you wanted logic?
  24. Jones is truly marvelous in the role, showing Ginsburg’s burning desire to change societal unfairness and also, more intimately, coming to terms with her own daughter’s rebelliousness.
  25. Roberts has clearly been given a bigger budget and it shows in the nicely realized submerged city the poor young women must navigate. He’s saddled with a terrible film title — 47 meters was the depth of the ocean floor in the first film — but none of that matters once the air tanks and masks go on.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It is massive, but nothing could exactly recreate the decibel-bursting exhilaration of a live music performance, particularly one at this scale. But in this format, Swift gets as close as possible — and for her, being an exception to the rule is par for the course.
  26. Apparently even death is no respite from earthly puzzles like the love triangle. Sure it’s messy and confusing for those involved but it’s also one of the great storytelling setups for a screwball comedy. And this particular film, imaginative and shrewdly whimsical with an utterly charming cast, delivers on the promise. Lucky us.
  27. Hemsworth is re-joined here by Marvel Comic Universe–screenwriter Joe Russo and stunt-specialist-turned-director Sam Hargrave, but their ace-in-the-hole is cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. He creates impossibly long single takes of complicated fighting or driving scenes that put the viewer directly into the action like few other thrillers.
  28. You Won’t Be Alone enchants in its novel perspective and in its sharp-shifting protagonist’s unquenchable curiosity. The witch, once so set in stereotype, has never felt so enthrallingly elastic.

Top Trailers