The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Top Hat
    The dialogue is witty and piquant, and the supporting players droll, but the labored farce of madcap marital misunderstandings are as flatfooted as the dance numbers are memorably airy.
  2. Downhill Racer
    Nobody can accuse Downhill Racer of lacking artistic integrity. Trouble is, artistic integrity is all it has to offer.
  3. The Quiet Girl
    The Quiet Girl has a meaningful message on nurturing. But with so little of consequence going on, it’s crucial to get the emotions precisely right. Without voiceover narration tying everything together, some scenes feel out of place, random, or offer little beyond aesthetics.
  4. Diane
    In all this, there remains a purposeful if haphazardly realized design. As Diane’s relatives and friends continue to fall away with the passage of time, Jones intensifies the film’s discombobulating rhythms, taking Diane from hard-edged physicality to a more interiorized, subtly dreamlike haze.
  5. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Still, the respectful thing to do, it seems, is to treat An Elephant Sitting Still like any other film, imagining how it would look were Hu already hard at work on his next project. A lot depends on just how much sustained misery one likes to endure.
  6. Nebraska
    Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.
  7. Little Men
    The younger characters are so full of life, and the older ones so full of trenchant but predictable talking-point issues, that it sometimes feels like a middling movie encroaching on a good one.
  8. Of Gods and Men
    Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.
  9. Birds of Passage
    Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote.
  10. Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
  11. The Ornithologist
    Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.
  12. Passing
    As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive.
  13. The Sacrifice
    Though bookended by extraordinarily powerful scenes that play off a potent religious metaphor, the middle section sinks into a morass of ill-defined relationships and uneven performances, which may be blamed in part on culture clash.
  14. In the Shadow of the Moon
    There's none of the poetry of "For All Mankind," just visual support for a meat-and-potatoes recap of events that have already been chewed over plenty.
  15. Sing Sing
    The strength of the cast alone can’t elevate Sing Sing to the realm of truly socially conscious cinema.
  16. The Cave
    It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.
  17. Avatar
    Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films: the leaden voiceover from "Terminator 2" here, the military/civilian conflict from "Aliens" there, even a Jack-and-Rose-style forbidden love story cued to adult-contempo soundtrack.
  18. The Post
    A pile of muck (old muck, too) with no rake, Steven Spielberg’s National Board Of Review-approved Nixon-era newspaper drama The Post lacks the exact thing it glorifies: a reporter’s instinct for story.
  19. Locke
    Locke, as fascinating as it is in theory, never evolves into anything more than a glorified acting exercise.
  20. Dear Comrades!
    Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction.
  21. Hundreds of Beavers
    Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was.
  22. Winged Migration
    Settles into pleasant monotony and repetition, without any narrative arc or purpose. Seasoned bird-watchers, however, may find that the sensory overload leaves them close to spiritual nirvana.
  23. Araby
    The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.
  24. Da 5 Bloods
    Spike Lee’s cultural messaging for once fails him in the politically muddled Da 5 Bloods. With the film, Lee offers his submission to a history of bloodied, masculine Vietnam War movies. Sadly, he’s more concerned with making a Vietnam movie that looks Black than one that actually takes on the complexities of Blackness, war, and global imperialism.
  25. No Home Movie
    Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.
  26. Step
    Over and over, it pitches us reasons to care about these young women—an all-too-perfect example of a documentary that exists to make people feel good for watching it.
  27. 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.
  28. Bamako
    The film feels oddly slack and inert, livened only by testimony better suited to another forum.
  29. Wrinkles
    Ultimately, though, Wrinkles doesn’t offer the aesthetic rewards necessary to make its sad material compelling.
  30. Riders of Justice
    A scattered but likable jumble, the film has a thoughtful manner more than it has actual thoughts, much like the trio of quasi-intellectuals joining forces with Markus.
  31. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    For much of the movie, nothing happens, and it’s not the rigorous, locked-in nothing of the long-take art film, but the slow-motion, music-montage nothing of the artsy American indie.
  32. The Edge of Democracy
    The documentary’s scope is so vast, and its subject so dense, that it ends up skimping on details that a lengthy written article would likely lay out more clearly.
  33. Memoir of a Snail
    Though crafted with wry care and a captivatingly scuzzy aesthetic, the bittersweet biography is so miserable that the “sweet” ends up as a cloying chaser to old escargot.
  34. Come See Me in the Good Light
    Learning about Gibson’s ‘roid rage from their treatment, and Falley’s acceptance of it, is a more moving example of their care for one another than much of what the film finds in their shared profession.
  35. The Guardians
    What starts out as a testament to female fortitude, reminding us that sacrifices were also made on the home front, gradually turns into high-toned soap opera.
  36. The World
    The World's dull weave of frustrated romances and worker exploitation is far too obvious, and Jia can only relieve the tedium so many times.
  37. Waves
    The good news is that the director’s ambitions, no matter how inadvisable, have attracted a strong cast and occasioned some of their best work.
  38. Junebug
    The drama loses shape before it really develops, but the sense of place--all wood paneling and animal knick-knacks--and the memorable performances keep it worth watching.
  39. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
  40. Monrovia, Indiana
    Much of what Wiseman captures here is so resolutely ordinary that it threatens to cross the line into outright dull.
  41. A Hidden Life
    There’s no mystery here, no narrator wrestling with the limits of his own generosity and tolerance. Just a lot of stunning scenery and exemplary rectitude.
  42. White God
    As a curious hodgepodge of ideas, White God gets by. But the releasing-of-the-hounds at the start is a bad omen. The film, like the dogs, mostly goes downhill.
  43. We the Animals
    Unlike Sean Baker, who grounded his "Florida Project" in a firm but never condescending viewpoint on the milieu, Zagar seems to lack a coherent directorial perspective on Torres’ story; he mistakes vérité-style handheld and frequent close-ups (mostly captured with wide-angle lenses) for genuine intimacy and engagement.
  44. Lady Chatterley
    This might be pleasant to watch, in a floaty '70s-movie kind of way, if not for the film's groaning 168-minute length and abrupt thudder of an ending.
  45. Call Me Kuchu
    Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.
  46. Tarzan
    The main problem with Tarzan is its story, which, after a strong start, finds a steady groove and stays with it, offering no particular highs or lows.
  47. Wildlife
    From moment to moment, the direction is unimpeachably competent, but its surface elegance masks a core hollowness.
  48. Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    Plenty of the film feels vital—its observations of a nation’s shifting attitude towards war, towards hate, is crushing and familiar.
  49. Mank
    The problem is that Mank never transcends its borrowed cornball arc, depicting its title character as a genius in eternal conflict with villains and phonies like Hearst (Charles Dance, terrific), Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard, even better), and Welles (Tom Burke, blood-curdlingly bad).
  50. El Cid
    It's tough to dismiss a film that succeeds so well at producing spectacle, and it's hard to miss the contemporary parallels in its simple, tortuously protracted story.
  51. War Photographer
    The scenes of death, starvation, and destruction are affecting, but they don't say much about the actual subject of the film.
  52. Ahed's Knee
    If it sounds flamboyantly colorful to call Ahed’s Knee the cinematic equivalent of an echoing regurgitative scream, it’s also accurate. The film is a highly personal work that becomes trapped in its own feedback loop, making the same point over and over.
  53. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Underground
    The same message could have been delivered in half the time, at half the volume.
  55. Affliction
    Schrader has always been better as a writer and a critic than as a dramatist, which is why his most successful work has either been published in film journals or directed by Martin Scorsese. His flat, awkward staging diminishes some good performances -- particularly those of Nolte and a welcome Sissy Spacek.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Run Lola Run
    May be all Eurotrash flash, but it's not often that a film packs this much visceral punch.
  57. Starting Out in the Evening
    Wagner and company fail to follow Langella's primary rule of storytelling: "Follow the characters around until they do something interesting."
  58. The Innocents
    Like many historical dramas, unfortunately, this one depicts gripping events without bothering to craft a coherent viewpoint that lends them meaning.
  59. Painted Fire
    In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.
  60. The Card Counter
    The grace notes—including a final shot that could, potentially, be Schrader’s most sublime—are lost among the inconsistencies, incomplete subplots, and airlessness. It shouldn’t take an expert to figure out what a film is trying to articulate. Unfortunately, in this case, it does.
  61. Babette's Feast
    The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.
  62. The Chronology of Water
    Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.
  63. Blind Shaft
    A little slow for a crime story, and a little obvious with its anti-capitalism message.
  64. Innocence
    The more overtly allegorical Innocence becomes, the duller it gets.
  65. Up and Down
    Sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama.
  66. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer’s trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion. He doesn’t have the footage to make Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? come together as an investigation narrative, and his insistence on a quasi-chronological structure means that it doesn’t work as an essay, either.
  67. Beach Rats
    Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom.
  68. Tracks
    Rendered in the over-polished, pre-packed prestige style of director John Curran (The Painted Veil, Stone), Davidson’s journey appears meaningless, little more than a succession of pretty vistas for the dirt-caked trekker to squint at while having flashbacks of her childhood.
  69. Sorry to Bother You
    There’s a messy, first-draft quality to how the film fits said ideas together, and a general sloppiness to the execution, with Riley botching the timing on too many jokes.
  70. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    The film is often unfocused, and—at a highly condensed 89 minutes—it makes only a cursory attempt to uncover aspects of this legend’s story not already included in her memoir. Maybe those interested should just read that instead.
  71. Nope
    What Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?
  72. Victoria
    Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.
  73. 51 Birch Street
    The joys of watching a man carry out his own therapy onscreen are fairly limited.
  74. Jockey
    Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.
  75. Notre musique
    A sophomore film major would be lucky to get a passing grade with such material.
  76. The Cockettes
    Makes a terrific case for the group's historical importance, even though its performances seem more fun to discuss than watch.
  77. The Messenger
    Foster and Harrelson always stick to the Army's orders about what to say and how to behave. After a while, The Messenger starts to feel equally dogged about following a pat script.
  78. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq, Lee’s modernized take on "Lysistrata," is mostly bad art; it’s about an hour too long, sometimes leadenly unfunny, and set in Chicago, a place the Brooklynite director has no feel for.
  79. The Heiresses
    Brun, who had never acted onscreen before (like almost the entire cast), won Berlin’s Best Actress prize, and her guarded yet tremulous performance is the film’s primary virtue. But she can’t singlehandedly bring depth to the superficial scenario that Martinessi has engineered for this intriguing character.
  80. Water
    Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.
  81. Bukowski: Born into This
    Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.
  82. Home of the Brave
    Di Florio loses her grip on Liuzzo's story whenever she lapses into generalities. But when Di Florio gets into the specifics of her subject's legacy, Home Of The Brave stands out as both relevant and moving.
  83. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard’s misbegotten Palme D’Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a "Taxi Driver" for today’s Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between "Death Wish" and Ken Loach.
  84. The Disaster Artist
    Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.
  85. Dig!
    By giving Taylor the last word, Dig! becomes little more than a self-serving, unconvincing infomercial for a musician who comes across as functional and bearable only when compared to his counterpart.
  86. Kneecap
    Writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s film has a harder time connecting its stylish music video silliness with drama that meanders and a political message that repeats like it’s stuck on a cheap turntable.
  87. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Father Mother Sister Brother depicts with earnest melancholy the things taken for granted in life that don’t become real until after death, but its stiffness keeps it from being a work of true emotional significance.
  88. Tramps
    The film itself is barely bluffing that it has any stakes; the caper is vague enough to be inconsequential. Tramps knows it’s small potatoes, but is it any better for it?
  89. Maggie's Plan
    A comedy that proves that an appealing cast (Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore) and a wonderful premise are no guarantee of big laughs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    There’s a good movie in Brittain’s story, but you wouldn’t know it from this lethargic, BBC-produced bore.
  91. A Prayer Before Dawn
    Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire (Johnny Mad Dog) makes some audacious, impressionistic choices, focusing on the nexus of sensual and brutal, but this is the rare true story that really could have used some creative embellishment.
  92. Jane Eyre
    Wasikowska doesn't seem much changed from her "Alice" role, and she trips through Jane's adulthood as though it were a fantasia instead of a moody suspense story.
  93. The White Tiger
    There’s little of the intimacy of Bahrani’s best work, and while the book has been described as dark-humored, the movie feels more like a typical prestige adaptation, hitting the key themes and scenes without finding an independent tone. Despite its obvious currency, it’s more yesterday than tomorrow.
  94. Intimate Stories
    Intimate Stories stays doggedly, purposefully minor, in part because director Carlos Sorin and screenwriter Pablo Solarz want to explore the casual interactions of people doing nothing.
  95. 99 Homes
    While its righteous rage is bracing, fans of the filmmaker Bahrani used to be will mourn the subtlety and careful character development of his early triumphs. His heart remains in the right place, but his head has gone hopelessly Hollywood.
  96. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    The Trial Of The Chicago 7 wants to bottle the revolutionary spirit of its setting—the take-to-the-streets idealism of the ’60s—but its snappy montage-glimpses of demonstrations verge on costume-party kitsch. The movie is at its best and most persuasive in the courtroom, when Sorkin can draw on the clashes of ideology and personality.
  97. A Cop Movie
    Aside from the Mexico City setting, it doesn’t really accomplish anything unique either. A Cop Movie feels in the end like, well, a cop movie, only with an eye for society instead of the unit. That’s not enough to separate it from the pack.
  98. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    The scattered insights in This So-Called Disaster aren't worth the sifting it takes to find them.
  99. A Very Long Engagement
    For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.
  100. The Death of Louis XIV
    It’s such a conceptually fertile film that one wishes that it weren’t also a bore.
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