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. 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.
  2. Experimenter
    The film bears the subtitle The Stanley Milgram Story, but it’s most effective when it strenuously avoids biopic conventions, focusing intently on the man’s controversial professional life.
  3. Eden
    A viewer is always aware that they are being shown a place and an era, which helps explain why Eden manages the tricky business of being a movie that is overtly about lost time, but which unfolds chronologically, without as much as a flashback.
  4. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Stunning you-are-there account of a grand swindle in the making. Were the coup not such an outrageous and chilling affront to democracy, their documentary would be a gut-busting comedy along the lines of Woody Allen's "Bananas."
  5. A Mighty Wind
    The film's heart and soul belong to O'Hara and to Levy, whose folk-music burnout has the shell-shocked expression of someone who's been to hell and never quite made it back.
  6. The Damned United
    Meaney’s Flintstone-ian brute makes a terrific foil to Sheen’s prissy arrogance, but the other supporting players don’t make much of an impression. Ditto for this slice of history itself, though mileage may vary for soccer fans.
  7. The Woman Who Ran
    The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.
  8. Duel
    A slim Richard Matheson story that Spielberg padded into a 90-minute feature by artfully assembling a string of insert shots.
  9. Mass
    The cast carries the film; Dowd, as Linda, is especially terrific. Yet the feeling that one is watching a latter-day teleplay is hard to shake: The unvisual, periodically clumsy direction never finds a way around the confined space or the ugly lighting. One can applaud Kranz’s restraint.
  10. Western
    Although thoughtful and probing, this portrait of good intentions gone awry has been so thoroughly intellectualized that there’s not much juice to it. It’s a movie that’s busy analyzing itself while you watch.
  11. 13th
    That’s a lot of ground to cover, and the film can be as exhausting, in its flood of information, as it is exhaustive. But DuVernay keeps it all chugging and churning along, propelled by the force of her montage and the sheer volume of damning, gripping material.
  12. Arrival
    Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts.
  13. Juno
    It comes off as calculatedly irreverent at times, and its Wes Anderson-isms are too precious by half, but its sweetness is genuine and next-to-impossible to resist.
  14. Weapons
    Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it.
  15. 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.
  16. Blue Valentine
    It's an emotionally claustrophobic drama, played with frayed nerves and raw emotions, and it serves as an unrelenting glimpse into relationship hell. It could easily have devolved into sweaty, pretentious melodrama or ersatz John Cassavetes if Cianfrance and his actors didn't maintain perfect control over the material.
  17. Close
    Close is exquisite, tender, and bruising in equal measure, managing to feel both like an open wound and a balm.
  18. State Funeral
    With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.
  19. The Dissident
    For all its wealth of detail and thematic ambition, The Dissident is a good documentary that never quite becomes great. Because Fogel spends a lot of this film re-reporting a story that was in all the papers, all over the world, for months, watching The Dissident at times feels like hearing someone summarize a bestselling murder-mystery novel, while ominous “true crime” music plays incessantly on the soundtrack.
  20. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Fighting misery means having fun, which is what filmmaking is supposed to be, and, despite its lengths and scope, Arabian Nights always feels handmade.
  21. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    On a production of this magnitude, few actors have the presence to assert themselves above the cacophony, but Crowe carries the film with the rare combination of charisma and brute masculinity that has made him a star.
  22. Godzilla Minus One
    When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
  23. Top Five
    A disorganized, dawdling mess of a movie that is rarely anything less than charming.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Simple Plan
    Both simplifies and brings into focus the already simple and effective thriller.
  25. Katyn
    Wajda makes the murders look horrific and jangled, like something out of "Hostel," then ends Katyn with extended darkness and silence, allowing the audience to mourn for the death of a nation.
  26. Klute
    Nearly 50 years since it premiered, Klute still offers relevant feminist considerations about what it means to want to be an object of desire while also lashing out against the people and the patriarchal system that only values you as such.
  27. Coming Home
    It’s a less pointed and implicitly feminist work than such classics as "Raise The Red Lantern" and "The Story Of Qiu Ju" —one could even call it a shameless weepie. Still, it’s a welcome throwback to one of the most emotionally wrenching actor-director partnerships in film history.
  28. Coco
    One might argue that Coco could stand to be weirder and more self-indulgent; the alternate reality it creates is entertaining and expansive. But then it wouldn’t be a Pixar film. It is impeccable, time-tested craftsmanship, not experimentation, that drives Coco, both in its most familiar beats and in its most moving moments.
  29. My Joy
    Those schooled in Eastern European history may have better luck deciphering it, but what keeps it compelling throughout is Loznitsa's direction, which favors sophisticated long takes and particularly suspenseful use of foreground and background action. His next film should be a doozy.
  30. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    Little Richard: I Am Everything manages to find the proper balance between grace and respect towards Richard’s legacy and valid criticism of his more unsavory views or ill-conceived exploits.
  31. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.
  32. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    The lack of dialogue makes Shaun The Sheep easy for younger children all over the world to understand, and the film is undeniably intended for that demographic.
  33. Invisible Life
    Much of this is relentlessly bleak and hopeless—true to reality, perhaps, but also repetitious and dramatically inert.
  34. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.
  35. White Material
    Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film's consuming madness.
  36. The Station Agent
    McCarthy's characters make for good company even in their story's awkward patches, and in a film so unabashedly about the value of friendship, good company goes a long way.
  37. 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.
  38. Bamako
    The film feels oddly slack and inert, livened only by testimony better suited to another forum.
  39. Beginners
    Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.
  40. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.
  41. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Timberlake himself is a stunner, whether he’s smoothly pirouetting his way through “Suit & Tie” or he’s choking back tears during his stirring set closer “Mirrors.” But his team is well-matched by Demme’s.
  42. Captains Courageous
    On either end of Harvey’s adventure, Captains Courageous goes on a bit too long; the circumstances of his boarding-school transgressions are needlessly overcomplicated, and the emotional denouement is less than concise. But the seafaring section that makes up the majority of the film is well-crafted and gives way to surprising emotion.
  43. Bright Star
    It’s a studied movie that gives itself over to bursts of intensity, and between them sometimes threatens to become as spellbound by its subjects as they become with each other.
  44. MLK/FBI
    It’s a useful reminder not just that this American hero was a widely vilified figure during his lifetime but also that he accomplished everything he did despite nonstop resistance from intelligence agencies, the media, and the public alike.
  45. The Headless Woman
    A remarkably nuanced, ever-evolving performance (María Onetto).
  46. Wait Until Dark
    Hepburn's blend of pluckiness and self-pity and Arkin's cool cunning give Wait Until Dark emotional weight, but their final tussle is what most fans of the film remember.
  47. Jackie
    Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame.
  48. Tropical Malady
    In light of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's young career, it's fitting that his beguiling, transfixing romantic fable Tropical Malady splits down the middle into two radically different halves.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Weekend
    Bittersweet, achingly authentic, and so intimate it almost feels invasive.
  50. Happiness
    Thoroughly realized characters and relationships and Solondz's masterful ability to switch the tone from comic to tragic within the same scene help make Happiness a better film than it might have been otherwise. Much better, in fact.
  51. Beginning
    Whether this challenging film is more than the sum of its formally inventive parts will depend on a viewer’s patience, as well as their tolerance for ambiguity and discomfort.
  52. Raw
    The film gained an unfortunate reputation as a gross-out cannibal shocker on the festival circuit, and while that categorization is not entirely, technically incorrect — this is a piece of body horror, and an intensely visceral one — it detracts from the striking imagery and layered symbolism of Ducournau’s uncommonly assured debut feature.
  53. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The uninitiated, meanwhile, can start with Pigeon and work their way backward through Andersson’s trilogy. It only gets better in reverse.
  54. Inherent Vice
    In its graceful superimpositions and its use of water to evoke a more idyllic time (particularly in a rainy flashback set to Neil Young), Inherent Vice is very much a companion piece to "The Master."
  55. Under the Sun
    The truths revealed in this film have more to do with the North Korean government’s self-consciousness about how they’re perceived by foreigners. Here, they seem desperate to appear productive, congenial, devoted, and above all, happy.
  56. Three Identical Strangers
    So bizarre is this story that its most mundane aspects take on a certain profundity. Even when Three Identical Strangers falters, it fascinates, and that’s a claim very few documentaries can make.
  57. Wrinkles
    Ultimately, though, Wrinkles doesn’t offer the aesthetic rewards necessary to make its sad material compelling.
  58. Revenge
    The film works best if you approach it as a fantasy, with Jen as a near-supernatural angel of vengeance; otherwise, it’s easy to get hung up on the inconsistencies as the action grows increasingly over-the-top.
  59. Midnight Family
    To his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery.
  60. American Fiction
    American Fiction is an intriguing conundrum. It starts as a sizzling, hilarious satire that manages to sling pointed arrows at most of its targets. However, by trying to become too many things, it ends up sanding the edges off its sharpness. Still, the journey to its denouement remains mostly entertaining.
  61. Il Divo
    Through Sorrentino's lens, Andreotti's chief lieutenants are made to look like Reservoir Dogs, with Andreotti as a calm, tight-lipped, upper-crust analog to Lawrence Tierney.
  62. Leviathan
    Anyone who enjoys overpowering cinematic sensation and watching people do a job will be predisposed to like Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s avant-garde documentary about life aboard a commercial fishing vessel. Leviathan is an immersive experience, plunging viewers into darkness and chaos, amid a rush of vivid color and rapid movement.
  63. Fish Tank
    In that way, Jarvis is a lot like Arnold: an artist who knows the steps, but doesn't yet have all the moves.
  64. Sweetie
    Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.
  65. Variety Lights
    A moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.
  66. The Things You Kill
    Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    No
    The result is the most unexpectedly riotous comedy in years — one with more bite than usual.
  68. 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.
  69. The China Syndrome
    Ultimately, Lemmon's performance is what makes The China Syndrome work: The script contains its share of technical jargon and clunky exposition, but his subtle transformation from complacency to anger to panic tells the story in raw emotional terms. The China Syndrome is ultimately a story about how the potential for human error can trump science and reason, and few actors have ever been as unmistakably human as Lemmon.
  70. My Architect
    Touring his father's magnificent structures, Nathaniel shows signs of coming around to his mother's point of view, and of realizing that Kahn's towering contributions to art and humanity perhaps exceed (if not altogether excuse) his shortcomings as a father, a husband, and a lover.
  71. In Fabric
    Sheila’s humanity is a necessary counterbalance to Strickland’s intentionally stiff, formal style, which manifests in the film’s efficient pacing and crisp sound editing as well as its stylized performances and lavish production design.
  72. Hot Fuzz
    Everything an action-comedy should be. It achieves through parody what most films in the genre can't accomplish straight.
  73. Police, Adjective
    A clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he's told.
  74. Django Unchained
    Tarantino simply isn't a good enough performer for his presence to be anything but a distraction in a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser this consistently great.
  75. Sister
    In an unusually subtle performance by a child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein stars as a crafty ragamuffin.
  76. 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.
  77. Accepted
    Accepted ultimately arrives at a conclusion about the harmfulness of the “model minority” narrative without necessarily deploying the exact term, as it highlights the fact that these inspirational stories about marginalized people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps are often used to allow systemic inequities to fester.
  78. Us
    Us is something of a frustrating watch, a visual and technical marvel that just doesn’t seem to know what it is. Unlike Get Out, which only swelled in impact as you left the theater, Us is best viewed on a visceral level, not an intellectual one.
  79. Wattstax (re-released)
    Now an invaluable time capsule, the film has to transcend its own conceptual messiness.
  80. The Big Short
    In the end, McKay’s edu-tainment tactics work, even if the laughs aren’t as hearty as his broader work with Ferrell. The Big Short pulls off its own oddball gambit: grabbing attention through fringe wonkiness rather than a tantalizing glimpse at bro-banker lifestyles.
  81. The Devil's Miner
    So polished that it might pass for a scripted narrative feature, but that's not a bad thing. They found a remarkable spokesman in Bolivian teenager Basilio Vargas, and while his cogent, organized descriptions of his life, beliefs, history, and ambitions sometimes seem too calculated, at least they're calculated to communicate efficiently and appealingly.
  82. Closed Curtain
    Closed Curtain is a spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren’t about himself—which seems to be the point.
  83. Moana
    Occasionally, the movie’s combination of formula and tweaks makes it play like a one-blockbuster-fits-all reconciliation of a standard Disney checklist with a second list of corrective measures. For the most part, though, the movie feels more heartfelt than calculated.
  84. The Wailing
    The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time.
  85. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    Describing the early stages of their sexual attraction, Bachardy sums up the whole outrageously fortunate arc of his life. "It was exactly what the boy wanted," Bachardy says. "And he flourished."
  86. Shadow
    The scales ultimately tip slightly in favor of style, but when that style is this gorgeous, remembering a movie for the way it looks rather than its plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  87. 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.
  88. Gimme the Loot
    It’s a bright, lively movie, with a vision of New York as a multicultural free-for-all, where everybody’s always looking to see what they can take from everybody else.
  89. Tchoupitoulas
    A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Eel
    Pointless conflict aside, The Eel is a thoughtful film, oddly touching despite its quirks.
  91. Skyfall
    Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.
  92. Thunder Soul
    Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.
  93. Of Time and the City
    A caustic, witty, regretful elegy for a place so transformed that it's virtually unrecognizable.
  94. Consuming Spirits
    The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.
  95. 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.
  96. A Fantastic Woman
    At its most compelling as a conventional character study of an unconventional female lead.
  97. Your Name.
    There’s admittedly a certain pleasure in the deft fake-out that Shinkai executes here—most viewers will automatically make an assumption that’s ultimately proven wrong—but it comes at the cost of overall narrative incoherence.
  98. Melancholia
    The grand concept is really just a vehicle for a more intimate study of depression and its dangerous, shifting polarities.
  99. You, the Living
    You, The Living, if only by virtue of a more intimate scale than Songs, benefits from a lightness of touch and even a thin sliver of optimism in some sequences.
  100. The Go-Go's
    Ellwood’s most valuable views are these more candid, honest looks, as there’s something refreshing about the band coming clean, revealing all its dirty laundry in a no-holds-barred manner.
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