The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. On the Count of Three
    On The Count Of Three is not didactic, and thank goodness the filmmakers at least have the good sense to recognize that preachiness helps no one and solves nothing. But the film dumbs down a complex and taboo topic by placing blame squarely on bogeymen like bullies and abusers.
  2. Montana Story
    This is a deeply felt work anchored by two earthy performances that stay small-scaled no matter how melodramatic the slowly revealed secrets become.
  3. Homebound
    A film that leans on withheld information to drive a mystery but lacks anything for viewers to latch onto emotionally.
  4. Men
    To put it in a way the kids do: Men is vibes.
  5. Operation Mincemeat
    It’s also shot through with a humanizing sense of uncertainty, moral complication, and even wistfulness about the manner in which this work weighs upon its practitioners, for an altogether rewarding experience even for those viewers who traditionally eschew wartime dramas.
  6. Happening
    The real reason Happening manages to be so persuasive is because it tells such a vivid, intimate and relatable story, whether as a viewer it has happened to you or someone in your life, or your biggest fear is that it will.
  7. The Twin
    Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.
  8. The Ravine
    The Ravine spends more than an hour telegraphing that this is a story about the perplexing feelings that arise from a close friend’s dark and sudden turn. Then it swiftly brushes aside those layers in favor of a mystically clean explanation, and the result is narratively dull, emotionally ungratifying, and intellectually insulting.
  9. Vortex
    Vortex looks unsparingly at characters at the end of life, and finds their experiences as scary as any traditional horror tale.
  10. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    The film feels like a collection of ideas that never add up.
  11. The Aviary
    Writer-directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite give us two unreliable narrators to follow on a similar, intertwined path to personal, earth-shattering discovery in The Aviary—and the results make for a visually striking, sonically spooky, and deeply unnerving picture.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hatching
    Hatching is an efficiently told fable, the moral of which is multilayered, making the ending a puzzling emotional experience that both begs for resolution and feels like a confident choice for a first time filmmaker.
  13. Memory
    It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.
  14. Firebird
    Prior and Zagorodnii have a fair amount of chemistry, although both are so Fashion Week gorgeous that it edges Firebird near soft-core territory.
  15. Anaïs in Love
    While this is hardly Exhibit A in any catalogue of feminist films, it is very much told through the young woman exploring romantic possibility, rather than spotlighting her.
  16. The Bad Guys
    Like the Despicable Me series, The Bad Guys may find ever-diminishing returns once the villain protagonists no longer qualify as despicable or bad. For now, at least, that mixed morality is not just part of the fun, but the primary selling point.
  17. 9 Bullets
    It’s a dud, yet one made semi-palatable thanks to a decent performance from leading lady Lena Headey, and of all things, a soulful ballad written by Diane Warren.
  18. The Duke
    If the film isn’t quite as complicated as one might sometimes wish it to be, that isn’t to say that this unassuming version of its decidedly strange true tale is anything other than agreeable on its own terms.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Cellar
    Like Cuthbert, The Cellar oozes with potential but isn’t given enough—or doesn’t do enough—with what’s there, creating a subdued experience for viewers.
  20. Chariot
    From the cast to its odd, intriguing locations, Sigal was successful in assembling many of the right ingredients. Unfortunately, they lack a chef who knows how to properly combine them, whether that’s to create a meaningful sense of cohesion or to truly create the kind of beautiful chaos that makes Lynch such a mesmerizing source of inspiration.
  21. Father Stu
    Distilled, it is a fairly well-sketched portrait of self-care — spiritual, yes, but also psychological and physical — and the outwardly rippling effects of healing that can flow from that single choice.
  22. The Northman
    At least from an ambition standpoint, Eggers’ devotion pays off in heaps. The Northman offers a lot to enjoy in what is a lot of movie. It features both see-it-to-believe-it “fuck yeah!” gruesomeness in its 10th Century tale and the kind of historical and mythical attention to detail to be expected from Eggers
  23. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    If the movie were just meme-able moments, it might run out of steam, even with Cage delivering them practically nonstop. Thankfully, there’s an actual plot, which allows everyone else (and the film as a whole) to spoof less Cage-specific tropes.
  24. Paris, 13th District
    Unfolding at a relaxed pace and richly enhanced by DP Paul Guilhaume’s silky black and white images, Paris, 13th District is a candid, intimate, and authentic examination of the obstacles that keep young urbanites from connecting.
  25. All the Old Knives
    All The Old Knives is compelling moment by moment, but afterward viewers may have some lingering questions about what characters hoped to accomplish, or why they were involved at all.
  26. The Girl and the Spider
    It pays off in a work of gorgeous stylistic precision where cautious glances and wistful anecdotes melt together to form a melancholy arthouse jewel about the tearing down of one woman’s identity.
  27. Ambulance
    Ambulance is boilerplate Michael Bay, a thrill ride full of muscle and testosterone and style.
  28. Cow
    Its observational shooting style is simple yet rich in quotidian detail. Its storytelling is morally neutral, yet charged with moments that obligate the viewer to question our treatment of farm animals.
  29. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    Working with what feels like a larger budget and fewer origin-story obligations, returning screenwriters Pat Casey, Josh Miller, along with franchise newcomer John Whittington, create a globe-trotting adventure that touches on fun ideas for viewers of all ages, even if the film is too long and jarring to stick the landing.
  30. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    The most bewildering thing about The Secrets Of Dumbledore is how superfluous each of its ideas feel in relationship to one another. There are countless globe-trotting international characters, worlds-within-worlds, and constantly competing historical, political, and mythological references, but they all fizzle because their ill-considered stakes never seem fully realized.
  31. a-ha: the Movie
    It’s a compelling tale of three perfectionists who consider music to be their bond, but don’t work together very well unless they have to.
  32. The Bubble
    Even if the characters on screen didn’t become better artists during the pandemic, then Apatow at least should have. With The Bubble, he seems to have mistaken jokes about moviemaking for moviemaking that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
  33. Morbius
    Director Daniel Espinoza stacks vampire cliches with horror classic visuals in a lackluster, but hardly disastrous, Spider-Man spinoff.
  34. You Won't Be Alone
    Stolevski ably balances art-house and horror tones to a degree that fans of both will appreciate, but like the film’s pointedly empathetic point of view, his emphasis on each helps fans of one style understand and appreciate the other.
  35. The Contractor
    Even moderately seasoned viewers will find few surprises in its twists and turns, and little to excite them on a purely visceral level. That leaves Pine and Foster as the constant—and a reliable one—in this emerging cinematic universe of theirs, but even they might not be enough in this to earn another installment this time around.
  36. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    An essentially plotless but engaging and enriching recollection of childhood steeped in warmth, grace, honesty, and crystalline specificity.
  37. Infinite Storm
    What sustains a viewer’s interest in Infinite Storm is Watts’ controlled performance, and the film’s direction.
  38. 7 Days
    As a romantic comedy, 7 Days hardly circumvents a cinematic lexicon of time-honored tropes, but its skill in dismantling stereotypes, sexist beliefs, and even the process of falling in love offers a fresh and charming rejoinder to the cynicism of both its own genre and the emerging repetition of pandemic-set films.
  39. The Lost City
    The Lost City is a big studio release playing in theaters, and for any kind of “date night,” it is a solid base hit. But should you find yourself on an airplane a few months from now and this is a viewing option, that’s when it becomes a home run. It’s not a knock to admit we all desire comforting movies in uncomfortable situations.
  40. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The film, which uses the gimmick of jumping between parallel universes to explore, essentially, how to be your best self, is awash in zany sci fi culs-du-sac, sly movie references, and a deranged high fructose attitude that scoffs at the idea of everything but the kitchen sink. The Daniels want infinite kitchen sinks.
  41. 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.
  42. Umma
    Until we’re a bit further removed from the current wave of anti-Asian hate crimes, Shim’s film underplays the potential nuance that might come from a proper exploration of that idea, instead reinforcing the idea that nonwhite language, imagery, and faces are to be feared—worst of all, to the people bearing them.
  43. Deep Water
    Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, both terrific in their roles, play the couple around whom the film’s meditation on modern sexual relationships revolves, while Lyne proves not only that he can film hot scenes unlike almost anyone in the business, but inject them with a psychological sophistication that complicates their (and our) postcoital bliss.
  44. The Outfit
    Filled with twists and reversals that, for the most part, are motivated by character not plot, The Outfit is a nifty little period thriller that provides a showcase role for the always-amazing Mark Rylance.
  45. Jane by Charlotte
    Whether or not the film necessarily works as a narrative feature, Gainsbourg manages to peer inside her mother’s life and lifestyle with an honesty that should make audiences nervous and envious at the same time, seeking answers we may want from our parents but are afraid of enough to be reluctant to ask.
  46. X
    While you’re languishing in the performances and period detail, West is sneaking up to pull the rug out from beneath you, or to raze some outdated cliché. X is bloody, ballsy fun.
  47. The Adam Project
    With an overworked script that checks boxes rather than delivers compelling characters, this effort lands as perfectly bland.
  48. Gold
    Tension does build and there is a satisfying conclusion, but there is a significant stretch where, undeniably, a sizable amount of air comes out of the balloon.
  49. Turning Red
    We all need a little reassurance once in a while to stay true to ourselves, and Turning Red is speaking directly to generations of Asian women in the diaspora when they need to hear this the most.
  50. Lucy and Desi
    Anyone looking for a clear, concise explanation of how these two unlikely impresarios dominated American pop culture in the mid-20th century will find it here, supported by copious archival material and heartfelt testimony from the couple’s family, friends, and fans.
  51. Huda's Salon
    Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality.
  52. After Yang
    Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.
  53. Fresh
    Despite its bolder choices, however, Fresh doesn’t push the body horror as far as it could, and works better as an empowerment fable than as an actual thriller.
  54. The Batman
    Still, the film sustains its seductive atmosphere—its hushed pop-noir cool—even as the story fizzles into a string of reveals and a curiously perfunctory climax.
  55. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    Although marginally more woke than other Madea installments (the fam has an unexpected response when one of them publicly comes out), Homecoming is just more of the same. The characters are one-note, and the actors portray them that way.
  56. Hellbender
    If there’s a lesson to be taken from Hellbender, it’s this: Underestimate the small and unassuming at your own peril—whether that be the character of Izzy, the film’s real-life creators, or the movie itself.
  57. The Cursed
    Even when Ellis ramps up the suspense with crosscutting and monster mayhem in the final half-hour, The Cursed has trouble maintaining nail-biting intensity for very long
  58. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.
  59. Dog
    As a whole, Dog is credible as a small-scale drama with some moments of light, puppyish comedy, from the man and the mutt. Like Clooney before him, Tatum hasn’t quite made his own Soderbergh movie. He has, however, made a surprisingly good one.
  60. Strawberry Mansion
    There’s a lot to appreciate about Strawberry Mansion as an aesthetic object, a flight of imagination, and a sci-fi vision.
  61. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
    Downfall is effectively enraging—especially in its middle section, where the picture really packs the most punch.
  62. Uncharted
    Like text that’s been translated into another language and then re-translated back by someone else, Uncharted bears a clunky resemblance to any number of classic action-adventure movies.
  63. Playground
    Playground smartly complicates the situation by showing how Nora juggles her desperate concern for her brother with a fear that his plummeting social stock might drag her into the same boat. It’s hard to watch, but Wandel doesn’t blink.
  64. Bigbug
    Subtlety has never been one of Jeunet’s tools, and the comedy in Bigbug is enjoyably over-the-top, occasionally a bit too mannered, and often laugh-out-loud funny.
  65. Tall Girl 2
    There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.
  66. Marry Me
    It’s an absolutely outlandish rom-com premise, and though the film tries to lampshade it as such (#whatishappening pops up in the movie’s in-world social media), part of what keeps Marry Me watchable is the dangling question of what kind of hoops the movie is going to jump through to justify keeping up the matrimonial charade.
  67. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker defangs herself with The Sky Is Everywhere, which seems to aim for putting something broadly positive in the world but lands on inconsequential.
  68. Catch the Fair One
    Although Wladyka foregrounds the movie’s razor-sharp edge—there’s a torture scene midway through that’s especially shocking—there’s a political undercurrent to the story, as well as an emotional one, that give Catch The Fair One uncommon resonance.
  69. Blacklight
    Blacklight cuts corners everywhere.
  70. Kimi
    When this film is over, viewers with voice-activated smart TVs are liable to look around for the long-dormant physical remote.
  71. I Want You Back
    Everything from Peter and Emma’s inane backstories to their sweaty attempts to win back partners who were clearly not right for them in the first place mark this as a case of a creative team going through the motions. The ending hinges on a callback so obvious and manufactured that it provokes eye rolls, even as it slightly subverts expectations.
  72. A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Because of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here.
  73. Death on the Nile
    Death On The Nile feels chintzier in every respect, with a much lower-wattage cast of potential murderers and a digitally summoned exotic locale about as immersive as a screensaver. If a viewer didn’t know better, they might assume they were seeing the fourth or fifth entry in a sputtering franchise, not the direct follow-up to a global box-office hit.
  74. 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
  75. Moonfall
    The film’s more or less a mashup of Emmerich’s two wheelhouses: alien contact (Stargate, Independence Day) and cataclysmic disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), with some Armageddon thrown in for good measure. You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.
  76. Jackass Forever
    It’s the group’s most joyous installment to date, even if the series itself is starting to show some wear and tear.
  77. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild
    It’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film.
  78. Clean
    This movie loves big, operatic gestures. At least visually, it lands them all.
  79. Futura
    Self-reflexiveness is no guarantee of value in a documentary, and Futura works perfectly well as cinematic reportage. Still, the film does at times feel slack and arbitrary—a bit like a census that no one could argue is unimportant but which nonetheless has the feel of a box-ticking exercise.
  80. The Fallout
    With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot.
  81. Sundown
    Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness.
  82. The King's Daughter
    If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.
  83. Redeeming Love
    Redeeming Love is a kinky power fantasy in the halfway convincing disguise of wholesome faith-based entertainment.
  84. The Pink Cloud
    Gerbase, making an impressive feature debut, proves herself a sensitive observer of human nature. The Pink Cloud joins a tradition of sci-fi films like Her that are less interested in their futuristic concepts than how they might affect people.
  85. Scream
    The script, from veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt and Castle Rock scribe Guy Busick, leans in to the franchise’s fidgety intelligence, swerving and ducking and winking at the camera like the “meta whodunit slasher” it proudly proclaims itself to be.
  86. Sansho the Bailiff
    Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.
  87. Belle
    Individual moments in Belle are frequently magical: Many of the real-world scenes are beautifully staged and illustrated, with characters moving quietly and slowly through outdoor spaces while sunlight dapples across the water and birds flit by.
  88. Italian Studies
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
  89. Ray Donovan: The Movie
    This is perfunctory storytelling, a rather artless and dull 100 minutes that does nothing but check off a few predictable narrative boxes.
  90. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.
  91. See for Me
    While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.
  92. The 355
    In a spy thriller, a woman who drinks her whiskey neat—girlbosses never dilute—and kicks men in the face wearing a stacked heel has become as much of a cliché as the womanizing secret agent. And The 355 does nothing to complicate, deconstruct, or refresh that cliché.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Beanie Mania
    Beanie Mania weaves an entertaining, fast-paced narrative that reveals the depths to which collective fanaticism, greed, and the influence of the internet, even in its earliest days, all combined to create an inflection point that led to an unprecedented and unsustainable investment bubble.
  94. Jockey
    Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Super Bob Einstein Movie
    A worthy tribute to a singular comedic voice. ... It shows why Bob Einstein could make audiences laugh for almost 50 years—but it also shows why he’ll be making them laugh for a lot longer.
  96. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    Just getting to see McDormand and Washington assay these famous parts makes this Macbeth worth preserving for posterity, alongside Fences in the Denzel Washington Giants Of Theatre section. But Coen’s equivalent of a solo album has its own virtuosic style.
  97. Parallel Mothers
    The film is at its most powerful, however, when Almodóvar relies on his muse and intensely fixates on her character as Janis silently absorbs waves of devastation or allows herself to confess, the words rapidly, cathartically tumbling out of her. In those moments, Parallel Mothers becomes a beautiful tribute to their enduring, working relationship and the trust the director regularly puts in Cruz, whose performance he never surrounds with flashy flourishes.
  98. The Matrix Resurrections
    Where Resurrections really disappoints is in the staging of the action. The Hong Kong-influenced long shots that made The Matrix so revolutionary are all but absent, replaced by rapid cuts that render the fight choreography less legible than in previous installments.
  99. A Journal for Jordan
    Adapted from a 2008 memoir by former New York Times writer and editor Dana Canedy, it trades in cloying sentimentality and romance, the gooey melodrama done no favors by Washington’s stiff, anonymous direction.
  100. Sing 2
    In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.
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