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. There Will Be Blood
    Anderson's uncompromising masterpiece will continue to resonate as a harrowing cautionary warning to a country with oil pumping through its veins, clouding its judgment and coarsening its soul.
  2. Hard to Be a God
    It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?
  3. 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.
  4. Brother's Keeper
    A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing. It explores, with mercy and compassion, the paradoxes inherent to the concept of mercy killing, a crime of love rather than hate.
  5. Spotlight
    Like "All The President’s Men," it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.
  6. Late Spring (1949)
    Each shot in Late Spring is striking on its own; the mature Ozu belongs to that rare category of filmmakers whose work can be recognized from a single frame. But together—with all their abrupt shifts in visual perspective and time—they become a mosaic, deeply poignant and ultimately mysterious in the way it envisions a relationship between two people trapped by how much they care for one another.
  7. One More Time with Feeling
    As a documentary, One More Time hesitates to say anything too neatly or directly. In that way, it is a uniquely effective meditation on grief.
  8. Ride the High Country
    Some of the hallmarks of Peckinpah's style—most notably the moving POV shots, quick cuts, and off-center close-ups—manifest even in the colorful, smooth High Country.
  9. Memoria
    There’s something uniquely intense about hearing an entire audience remain utterly still during a movie’s transporting final minutes, afraid to cough or squeak their seat’s rusty springs or even breathe too loud, for fear of breaking the spell. Memoria inspires that kind of rapture. Experience its full dynamic range.
  10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself.
  11. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    The film plays just as easily as a stand-in for the mob mentality that let Joseph McCarthy run amok in his attempt to sniff out every last American with communist sympathies—past, present, and future—until all had conformed to a rigid definition of the right thinking.
  12. Close-Up
    From the outset, the director lets us know that this won’t be some sensationalistic crime story. Close-Up is more about the power of images, and how what’s on the screen at any given moment can hold our attention completely, even if it has nothing to do with “the story.”
  13. The Class
    The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.
  14. No Country for Old Men
    The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.
  15. 35 Shots of Rum
    The film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads.
  16. Secrets & Lies
    There's not a weak performance in Secrets And Lies, a fact made more notable by the seeming ease with which the cast performs as an ensemble.
  17. The Florida Project
    There’s great integrity to showing life as it is really is, warts and all. But sometimes showing it as it should be has value, too.
  18. Timbuktu
    In essence, Timbuktu is about how farce turns into terror.
  19. Days
    To watch Days in the context of this long-running creative partnership is to bring memories of the men, all more similar than not, that Lee has played before for Tsai; his weariness here carries the weight of a lifetime of relevant roles, almost a franchise arc of alienation and regret.
  20. Brief Encounter
    Encounter remains the definition of timeless, a beautifully shot, heartbreakingly acted, minutely detailed illustration of thoroughly recognizable human frailty.
  21. The Act of Killing
    By tackling one man’s sense of right and wrong (or lack thereof), Oppenheimer is ultimately tackling human nature.
  22. Maborosi
    The 33-year-old Koreeda, who began his career in documentary, has a gift for observing life as it's lived, accumulating simple, seemingly banal scenes into an unforgettable reflection on the frustration and helplessness of trying to explain the ineffable.
  23. Apocalypse Now Redux
    In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.
  24. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Hittman isn’t really a polemicist. She expresses her empathy and political conscience through a refined version of what’s become her signature style, zeroing in on details of place and behavior, both magnified by the reliably involving scenario of two kids from the sticks navigating the hustle, bustle, and bright lights of the city. And moments of startling, unaffected tenderness peak through the grimness of the circumstances.
  25. The Zone of Interest
    As a piece of observational cinema that borrows from the very visual grammar of nonfiction films, The Zone Of Interest is an instant classic, a masterpiece whose every gorgeously framed shot aims to stun you into silence. And into forceful remembrance as well.
  26. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    The film never loses its intensity from the first moment Leatherface's sledgehammer drops. It's horror without a safety net: Survival isn't guaranteed for anyone, heroism and struggle are often futile, and as the old adage says, you can never come home again.
  27. Threads
    Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?
  28. Leviathan
    In his three previous films (The Return, The Banishment, Elena), Zvyagintsev frequently pushed past sober into dour, leaning too heavily on a characteristically Soviet sense of gloom and doom... Leviathan is another downer, but it’s considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.
  29. Toy Story 3
    The film never lets banter, visual gags, or the usual manic kid-flick running about interfere with its more delicately handled thoughts on loyalty, longing, broken relationships, and generational continuity. It honestly earns its emotion, moment by painstakingly executed moment.
  30. The Souvenir
    There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.
  31. The Look of Silence
    The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.
  32. Tower
    Maitland sticks close to the ground, providing a harrowing moment-to-moment account that foregrounds multiple acts of genuine heroism. The result comes as close to being a feel-good movie about senseless violence as anyone is likely to get.
  33. The Secret Agent
    By delicately weaving the veracity of archive, the reverie induced by celluloid, and the inevitability of corruption into its narrative, The Secret Agent becomes a career-spanning treatise that cozily situates itself amid the staggering cinematic epics that Mendonça pays respect to.
  34. Burning
    Burning actually justifies its running time by slowly building paranoid atmosphere before an explosive, hauntingly ambiguous finale.
  35. Drive My Car
    Drive My Car effectively captures the double-edged nature of storytelling as a means of both processing and deflecting emotions; Uncle Vanya can be used to work through pain or to postpone it. Hamaguchi clearly recognizes film’s similar power.
  36. Moolaadé
    Though Moolaadé doesn't shy away from the task of educating its viewers about the brutality of "purification," it works equally well as a tribute to righteous defiance wherever it surfaces.
  37. It Was Just an Accident
    By narrativizing the collective mistreatment of political dissidents—both those he personally forged bonds with and the countless others persecuted by the Iranian state—the fearless filmmaker crafts his most radical condemnation of the forces that have long attempted to silence him.
  38. Saint Omer
    This is a rich text, bracing for the minutiae it includes and for what it excises. Its power comes from a director who knows exactly what story they want to tell and how to tell it well.
  39. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    Director Zacharias Kunuk captures that feeling well, but he never quite develops it into a theme epic enough to fill Atanarjuat's scope. His film is by turns mesmerizing and trying, with enough of the former to make the latter worthwhile.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    L.A. Confidential
    As the story unfolds, carefully and elaborately, what develops is not just a remarkably intricate crime tale but a brilliant and compassionate story of people who struggle to rise above their flawed nature. This may be the best movie of the year; it's definitely one of the greatest crime films of all time.
  41. Time
    Bradley, who’s worked mainly in narrative cinema, lends a sharp eye for composition and a poet’s sensibility. This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end.
  42. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    For Wang, the strictly personal is the building block for everything else—whether it’s the well-worn groove of a long-term relationship or a Chekhov pastiche performed by a woman wearing a samovar as a hat.
  43. The Killing
    From the heroes’ complicated planning to the story’s cruel twist ending, The Killing illustrates how human beings have a bad habit of getting in their own way.
  44. Swing Time
    It's not quite as charming as Top Hat or Shall We Dance, and the plotting drags heavily in spots, but whenever it gets free from the demands of farce, it's a dizzy delight.
  45. Lost in Translation
    Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Toyko a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening, Lost In Translation washes away memories of "Godfather III," establishing Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    After Life
    The film, and the films within the film, are like a dream with a message about savoring existence: Learn to love in life, or risk leaving it without leaving an impression.
  47. Son of Saul
    No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.
  48. Frankenstein
    Frankenstein works as a fast-moving thriller and, even now, a stylish, frighteningly atmospheric horror film, but also as a sad outcast parable. Frankenstein's creature may be a monstrosity, but he's also instantly sympathetic to anyone who's ever felt like a misfit.
  49. Her
    Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.
  50. Little Women
    Little Women is the best kind of Hollywood film: thoughtful yet escapist, sophisticated yet accessible, expertly crafted and deeply felt. The performances are all top notch—Ronan and Pugh, especially, breathe new life into their characters. Gerwig’s direction is also first rate.
  51. I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is still propaganda of the first order, a beautiful and sensually overwhelming tribute to the land and its people.
  52. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
    Lavish with cultural references and fresh imagination, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is a revelry of comedy, murder, intellectualism, sexual awakening, queerness, and more.
  53. The Triplets of Belleville
    The film is best treated as a one-of-a-kind wonder: an ingenious contraption that dazzles, teases, attracts, and repels with all the mystery and sublimity of a miniature world.
  54. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Milestone’s visual style lacks the flourish of Wellman’s Wings, but it’s no less explicit, as the camera pans across battlefields where dismembered body parts hang from barbed wire.
  55. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Maybe a little longer and more scattered than it needs to be, with one too many scenes that just plant the camera in front of a gabbing speaker. His early movies were more urgent, in part because they kept their focus narrower
  56. Young Mr. Lincoln
    Exuding nobility, modesty, and down-home wit, Henry Fonda assumes the iconic top hat as America’s 16th president in Young Mr. Lincoln. Far from a traditional decades-spanning biopic, John Ford’s drama instead provides a snapshot of a moment in Lincoln’s life.
    • The A.V. Club
  57. Stories We Tell
    Polley’s fledgling foray into documentary filmmaking is also an investigative mystery, a real-life soap opera, and — most compellingly, perhaps — a searching “interrogation” (the director’s word) of the hows and whys of storytelling itself.
  58. Nickel Boys
    Ross’ formal dedication sometimes stands in the way of story and emotion, prioritizing visuals over earned moments of expressive, swelling feelings. And so this critic did wonder if Nickel Boys should have dialed up its narrative ambitions from time to time, stepping just a bit away from its creative non-fiction temperaments.
  59. The Boy and the Heron
    If The Boy And The Heron is indeed Miyazaki’s final film, it can serve as both a victory lap and a plea for a successor to arrive and take up the mantle of trying to make the world a better place through art.
  60. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.
  61. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Every new movie by Jafar Panahi is a miniature coup, an act of fearless political defiance.
  62. Ida
    Over an efficient 80 minutes, no shot feels wasted, and no one says much that couldn’t be better communicated through their placement in the artfully arranged frame.
  63. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    It is extremely clever and deeply moving, and winningly gets at the essence of Goldin’s current and past work, without straining too hard to ape her style.
  64. Waltz with Bashir
    The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.
  65. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
    There are longueurs where Mosese’s approach shows its limits, as the film’s rhythms go from stately to stultifying. More often, though, Mosese manages to fuse his film’s stylistic tensions with Mantoa’s struggles of expression, her efforts to carry on in both word and deed.
  66. An Autumn Afternoon
    Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.
  67. Anora
    This heroic journey is Ani’s story through and through. It’s a brilliant role, written with such range that it takes Madison’s strong performance to bring her to life without succumbing to archness. She makes us believe every second.
  68. The Favourite
    So it’s bit disconcerting, the unfamiliar sensation provoked by his new movie, The Favourite: Is this the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that can be called genuinely fun?
  69. Halloween
    A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.
  70. The Sweet Hereafter
    It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year.
  71. Bambi
    More than any self-declared masterpiece in the Disney catalog, Bambi has earned the right to be called timeless, because its concerns are transcendent and universal.
  72. Bringing Up Baby
    As Hawks admits, Bringing Up Baby isn’t a perfect film. But there’s an undeniable, ephemeral magic that comes from watching him, Hepburn, and Grant all work together on such a madcap story.
  73. Nostalgia for the Light
    It's also poetic and meditative in a way that never feels pretentious.
  74. The Gatekeepers
    The six men have different personalities that suggest varying styles of leadership, but what's remarkable about The Gatekeepers is how they speak in one voice about the moral complexities of their former jobs and their extreme pessimism about the future.
  75. The Brutalist
    The Brutalist is operating in the shadow of a tradition of cinematic epics, there is an expected journey the film has the opportunity to stray from, and it doesn’t nearly enough.
  76. Before Sunset
    In the spirit of the original, Linklater closes with one of the best endings of its kind since George Romero's "Martin."
  77. La Chimera
    La Chimera is a formal delight that holds no shortage of surprises. It calls for further viewings, asking us to unearth the mysteries buried long ago.
  78. The Worst Person in the World
    For all of Trier’s stylistic flair, the best scenes in The Worst Person In The World are unadorned conversations, little pockets of chemistry or conflict. The film peaks with a self-contained romantic episode, beautifully written and performed
  79. Saving Private Ryan
    An excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song.
  80. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.
  81. Only Yesterday (1991)
    Only Yesterday is animated, but rarely cartoony, in either its design or its storytelling.
  82. First Cow
    Just don’t mistake the lightness of step for a softness of philosophy. There’s a political dimension to all of Reichardt’s films, which almost invariably follow characters muscled to the margins of society.
  83. Mad Max: Fury Road
    For all the chaos erupting at all times, we never lose track of what’s going on, because it’s been staged not just with diabolical mischief, but also total clarity. What a movie.
  84. Le Samouraï
    Le Samouraï is a terrific film, at once a tense thriller and a fascinating character study, and only as cold as it looks until its unforgettable final scene.
  85. Winter's Bone
    Granik has no taste for noir archness, opting for a chilly, shot-on-decaying-locations naturalism that feels as lived-in as Lawrence's performance.
  86. The Queen
    Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    All the performers are superb, though as the title suggests, this is Viviane’s show, and Ronit makes for an exceptional martyr (she gets a Passion Of Joan Of Arc-worthy close-up or two) who never loses her very human shadings.
  88. I Called Him Morgan
    When it’s all done, More and Morgan remain ciphers, and not the type whose intangibility is evocative of something greater. All we have are the known facts, and that is all that I Called Him Morgan provides in the end.
  89. All of Us Strangers
    Ultimately All Of Us Strangers says that only a lucky few get to free themselves to accept love and redemption. It’s a heartbreaking and sad notion, but when delivered with as much sensitivity and visual panache as Haigh does, it becomes cathartic.
  90. The Hustler
    Like the best sports films, The Hustler makes the game look exciting even to outsiders, but Rossen's film is ultimately about a more universal subject than impossible breaks and the heavy spin of masse shots. Adapting Walter Tevis' novel, Rossen made a morality tale without the moralizing.
  91. Procession
    Greene, whose earliest documentaries were rooted in the cinéma vérité tradition and its portraits of ordinary American lives, has crafted a poignant group portrait with something to say about the crossed wires of pain and memory.
  92. Bloody Sunday
    At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos.
  93. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Explicit lesbian lovemaking aside, Blue is, at heart, a somewhat ordinary coming-of-age romance, pulled and stretched nearly to its breaking point.
  94. American Splendor
    With a lovably cantankerous sense of humor and an honest strain of hard realism and pathos, the film thrives on the tension that comes from an artist who devotes himself to the truth, but watches his image get away from him.
  95. Phantom Thread
    Anderson’s most diabolical trick is woven into the fabric of his style: He’s used perfectionist craft to celebrate the value of imperfection.
  96. My Perestroika
    My Perestroika is fairly foursquare as documentary filmmaking goes; it isn't stylistically snazzy, nor doggedly vérité. Its closest kin in the genre is Michael Apted's "Up" films, which are similarly focused on how people change over time.
  97. The Souvenir: Part II
    It’s looser, wilder, funnier, and almost euphorically uplifting, rocketing at increasing speed towards a new life for its main character and directorial proxy that makes the starting premise look almost irrelevant.
  98. This Is Not a Film
    Pleasing mainly just as a message-in-a-bottle from a restless, persecuted artist-that is, until the amazing closing shot, which brings the volatility of post-Green Revolution Iran home with unforgettable force.
  99. Finding Nemo
    What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code.
  100. Small Axe: Mangrove
    If Mangrove is contrived in the way lots of legal procedurals are, it also tackles its conventions with a conviction that makes you believe in them all over again.
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