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. Upstream Color
    It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.
  2. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    Works best when it straddles the same line between mild hostility and equally mild affection.
  3. Ballets Russes
    Geller and Goldfine have assembled a vital historical document, covering a cultural era now mostly lost, corrupted imperceptibly but permanently when fledgling ballerinas started dreaming about Broadway and Hollywood instead of Swan Lake.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The General
    Credit director John Boorman with bringing a life like Cahill's to the screen with such acuity that it's easy to overlook the many familiar elements of his mobster movie.
  5. The Grand Bizarre
    It’s just a constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.
  6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Whenever it hits its stride, it's a well-acted, vividly executed, full-speed-ahead special-effects extravaganza that puts as much bang as possible into every remaining scene.
  7. Mikey and Nicky
    Mikey & Nicky is sometimes dull and sometimes confusing—and it's both at once in the first 10 minutes, when Cassavetes is semi-comatose in a hotel room—but it also features plenty of absurd-but-believable human behavior.
  8. Paprika
    A film so joyfully insane that it feels like Kon is overcompensating.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hell and Back Again
    The film portrays the dizzying divide between war and recovery eloquently enough that those choices seem like intrusions instead of connections, a misstep in what's otherwise a devastating profile of a soldier.
  10. The Hate U Give
    This is a film that’s tense from its earliest moments and tragic shortly thereafter, but never does it feel gratuitously punishing.
  11. 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.
  12. Hairspray
    Though the film is too slick and heavy-handed in its pro-integration sloganeering, and it's burdened by Travolta's ill-conceived star turn, its infectious high spirits and catchy tunes still pack one hell of a sugar rush.
  13. King Kong
    After a start heavy on exposition, the film strings one action setpiece after another, each realized with the breathless excitement of an adventure pulp cover. It's as if Jackson set out to bring to life every fantasy of the last moment before earth gave way to space as the site of the final frontier.
  14. Goodnight Mommy
    This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.
  15. I Lost My Body
    Where it fumbles is in the framing device.
  16. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    Like its predecessor, it’s whip-smart, joyful, and more than a little bit mischievous, yet another manipulation/reinvention of the classic whodunit, made with a cast whose thrill to be working produces an experience that’s as exuberant for them as it is for viewers. In short, it’s nothing less than perfect crowd-pleasing counter-programming for folks craving something that isn’t either superhero or horror-related.
  17. A White, White Day
    The film’s true power is elemental, rooted in weather conditions that all but erase the distinction between land and sky, and in the inky darkness of a tunnel traversed by one haggard, trudging figure whose weary body intermittently blocks a sliver of light barely visible at its far end.
  18. Summer 1993
    With Summer 1993, her accomplished debut feature, Carla Simón succeeds in creating a rich, vivid world from her own turbulent pre-adolescence, though the film does meander in a way that makes its deeply personal nature unmistakable.
  19. Starred Up
    It’s a credit to both Mackenzie’s talent as a director of actors and to the underlying humaneness of his vision that he argues that the right option is the more difficult and less predictable one — and that he does so without relying on sentimentality, unearned sympathy, or a happy ending.
  20. Midnight in Paris
    An unassuming wisp of a movie, Midnight In Paris finds Woody Allen penning a love letter to the City Of Lights, albeit one whose sentiments could easily fit on a postcard.
  21. 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.
  22. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    A must-watch for anyone looking for a thrilling summer blockbuster.
  23. Love and Death on Long Island
    An unpredictable, often funny, always winning film, Love And Death On Long Island is filled with low-key humor and sharp observations about the state of art at the close of the millennium.
  24. Benediction
    There’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry.
  25. A War
    The film is low-key and evenhanded to a fault, resisting opportunities for melodrama at every turn; it radiates intelligence and fairness, which, while admirable, don’t exactly inspire a strong emotional response.
  26. She Dies Tomorrow
    It is an emotionally vulnerable piece of work, touching on everything from the pain of experiencing a mental illness that no one around you understands to what it means to waste your life.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Living
    Living is not a big movie, despite the pedigree of its creators. But it is an artistically masterful one—a film that, while deceptively simple, may linger in your mind for years to come.
  28. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The family's few lines of dialogue are so integral to advancing the story that they may well have been scripted, but it's not that important whether The Story Of The Weeping Camel is more fiction than objective ethnography. If anything, the contrast between what's real and what may have been faked only adds to the tension between the natural world and encroaching modernism.
  29. Tuesday, After Christmas
    More about well-observed moments of everyday life than it is about heightened melodrama.
  30. The World's End
    Easily one of the year’s best comedies, the movie thrives off the chemistry between its leads, with Pegg painting a very funny portrait of emotional paralysis and Frost demonstrating a heretofore unseen talent for intimidation.
  31. Menashe
    Menashe Lustig brings warmth and a lumpen charisma to Menashe’s lead role, giving life to a film based in part on his own experiences.
  32. District 9
    District 9 fuses science fiction mayhem and biting social commentary as well as any film since "Starship Troopers." It’s the rare alien invasion story that has the aliens running scared.
  33. 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.
  34. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.
  35. The Nest
    The Nest’s true star is that cavernous 15th-century mansion, which provides Durkin and Erdély with endless opportunities to carve out sinister voids that threaten to swallow this nuclear family whole.
  36. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Right Now, Wrong Then — which won the top prize at 2015’s Locarno Film Festival, and is heroically being released by brand-new distributor Grasshopper Film — is not only his finest work to date but also the very best film released in 2016 so far.
  37. Ford v Ferrari
    Setting aside more particular genre trappings, Mangold re-engineers one of his unfussy studio throwbacks into a supersized Dad Movie event.
  38. Bad Education
    In accounting for Almodóvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date.
  39. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    Whether through experience or intuition, Rianda and Rowe clearly understand animated comedy from the inside out; the gags stretch and snap as readily as the family tensions.
  40. Bullitt
    Peter Yates-directed cop thriller that relies on McQueen's chiseled features to hold an audience's attention through what's essentially a 45-minute TV show stretched to two hours. Aside from the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco, Bullitt is primarily watchable for McQueen's performance as a cop breaking the rules to break a case, as well as all the '68 cinema signifiers: lens flares, soft-focus foregrounds, a jazzy Lalo Schifrin score, and vivid location shooting.
  41. Silver Linings Playbook
    It's the perfect material for Russell, who not only deals perceptively with the dizzying swings of manic depression, but makes it the fabric of a big, generous, happy-making ensemble comedy.
  42. Norte, the End of History
    It feels as though wherever the camera might be—and however it might be moving—is exactly where it belongs.
  43. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Director Chiemi Karasawa is on her best footing when she deals with Stritch not as a Broadway icon and occasional film and TV star, but rather as a woman approaching 90 and holding on thanks to lack of filtering and an indomitable will to perform.
  44. Waiting for 'Superman'
    Superman argues convincingly that everyone should have the right to a good education, not just folks lucky enough to score winning numbers: It should be a birthright, not a matter of chance.
  45. Ray & Liz
    What’s crucial is that although Ray & Liz certainly moves like a memory play, the director has chosen to recreate events that he himself could not have experienced.
  46. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    It’s a neat surprise that DaCosta extracts more dark humor from the series than Boyle himself.
  47. Encounters at the End of the World
    A sort of distracted, freewheeling form of inquiry and observation drives Encounters At The End Of The World, a loosely constructed documentary that seems to have been made on a whim.
  48. The Turin Horse
    The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice.
  49. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    The value of Shake Hands With The Devil is in Dallaire's detailed recollections of what he observed: the anatomy of a mass murder.
  50. 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.
  51. The Martian
    At its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of our ability, as a species, to solve even the most daunting problems via rational thought, step by step by step. It’s basically "Human Ingenuity: The Movie."
  52. The Last Temptation of Christ
    The power to provoke may not always have a smoke-to-fire relationship with greatness but with Scorsese's film, a testament of faith that leaves in the question marks, it undeniably does.
  53. Neon Bull
    Writer-director Gabriel Mascaro doesn’t really have a story to tell about these folks, but he does have a wealth of almost documentary-style detail to share, plus style to burn, and that’s nearly enough.
  54. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    More quaintly focused than the exuberant previous film, though with no shortage of eccentric characters or longwinded side stories, Wake Up Dead Man agreeably seeks answers both existential and earthly.
  55. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    The documentary was shot on film, and Moormann's snappy editing and subtly moving camera match the energy of the jump-blues and roots-rock that Dowd loved.
  56. Ridicule
    Ridicule convincingly establishes a sense of dread that comes with living in constant fear of public humiliation. And, though it's set in the past, its depiction of wealth-bloated politicians who maintain a wide gulf between actions and rhetoric seems timeless.
  57. Wendy and Lucy
    Having the dog around raises the emotional stakes tenfold, and develops a kinship with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic "Umberto D.," which also revealed societal ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship
  58. Young Mothers
    Even in the more shallow form of Young Mothers, the Dardennes’ work emphasizes that there is little that’s more cinematic than complicated people surviving difficult circumstances.
  59. The Testament of Ann Lee
    The frenzied, lustful energy of the film’s first half makes it one of the most thrilling cinematic experiences of the year and, though the slower, more mannered second half struggles to recapture that same sense of propulsion, there’s a purpose to that too.
  60. Salesman
    More than 30 years removed from its theatrical release, Salesman looks less like the story of four traveling salesmen than the story of America itself.
  61. 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.
  62. The Sparks Brothers
    If you’ve never heard of Sparks, the good news is that you’re the perfect viewer for Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers, a two-hours-plus sales pitch for why they’re worth your time.
  63. The Wrestler
    Mostly though, the movie feeds off Rourke, who plays a genuinely decent guy who never lets his dawning self-awareness interfere with his responsibility to give the fans a show.
  64. The Hours
    That makes it hard to watch "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry's adaptation without thinking of the one Almodóvar might have made -- which surely would have been warmer, less self-consciously tony, and less relentlessly arid than the one that did get made.
  65. The Roaring Twenties
    This is an exciting, sweeping vision of American life, which treats crime like the ultimate small business, crushed by the machinations of the truly powerful.
  66. 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.
  67. Café Lumière
    Concerns feelings that can't be expressed, relationships that can't flower, and connections that are impossible to bridge.
  68. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Ultimately, Marcel’s clever creators reward our willingness to believe he and his world are real, while offering an opportunity to look at our own world from a different perspective.
  69. Promises
    "I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but.
  70. The Secret in Their Eyes
    The film sprawls across two decades and 127 minutes, but there isn't a memorable image in it.
  71. Good Time
    Stripping away almost all traces of movie-star glamour to reveal the naked, nervy talent underneath, Pattinson finally bursts out of the chrysalis of his pin-up boy celebrity. The metamorphosis from YA heartthrob into electrifying character actor is complete.
  72. Food, Inc.
    Like many social issue documentaries, Food, Inc. is better at addressing problems than offering solutions: its endorsement of organic food in particular feels a little flimsy. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they’re consuming cinematic health food.
  73. Tony Takitani
    Movies can't exactly replicate the feeling of reading a book, but Jun Ichikawa's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story Tony Takitani comes remarkably close.
  74. Everlasting Moments
    Heiskanen plays her layers beautifully, alternately revealing a talented artist stymied by poverty and marital problems, and a woman fiercely devoted to family first.
  75. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Even when making movies for small children, Studio Ghibli produces stories that are more emotionally sophisticated, and less philosophically polarized, than most adult fare.
  76. Forbidden Planet
    Here was outer space as only the lavish production values of MGM could imagine it, a journey to an alien landscape painted in bold Eastmancolor and stretched across a CinemaScope frame.
  77. The Mastermind
    A film so pure in its simplicity, relatable in its banality, quiet in its captivation, that it pulls off a nearly impossible feat: It’s a heist film that can’t be called a thriller.
  78. We Come as Friends
    The big difference is that We Come As Friends is observational, while the institutions Sauper is watching here are actively tampering with Sudanese customs, in the name of improving their economy and living conditions.
  79. The Wound
    The Wound excels so long as it hangs back a bit, watching Xolani struggle to project the authority that his role demands, despite being acutely aware of his own vulnerability.
  80. Prince of the City
    The tough urban realism Lumet perfected in cop dramas like Serpico, Q&A, and Prince Of The City has been reflected in first-rate TV shows like Homicide: Life On The Street, The Wire, and The Shield. But those shows had multiple seasons to draw out the breadth of institutional corruption, while Lumet miraculously covers this territory in 167 minutes.
  81. Perfect Days
    With Perfect Days, Wenders shows what an artist who has lived a full life can accomplish. There’s a sweet rhythm to the film that cherishes the small moments that might go unnoticed elsewhere.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Central Station
    While the cinematography is gorgeous and the script extremely sharp, Central Station owes much of its strength to its two mismatched leads.
  83. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Thankfully, it boasts a story that doesn't require a surplus of style to be compelling.
  84. 20,000 Species of Bees
    Despite its limitations, 20,000 Species of Bees is crafted from a place of empathy so often lacking in conversations about trans childhood.
  85. The Queen of Versailles
    To an extent, Greenfield tries to have it both ways with her film: she allows us to enjoy the fantasy of being rich, while also letting us see the bastards suffer a little.
  86. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
  87. Incendies
    While the film will likely stick with viewers, it's ultimately a tossup what they'll remember most: the stunning buildup, or the massive letdown.
  88. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    The movie winds its way artfully from a straight animal study to something more profound. It's hard to shake the film's astonishing final thoughts and shots, as Bittner nervously contemplates parrot eggs while hawks circle overhead.
  89. Nine Queens
    Bielinsky's debut is a fine con picture, but at its best, it achieves even more, presenting the profession as a lifestyle with almost existential ramifications.
  90. Trophy
    It’s also slightly unfortunate — though admittedly no fault of director Shaul Schwarz (assisted by Christina Clusiau) — that Trophy covers a lot of the same ground as did recent Netflix documentary "The Ivory Game."
  91. Incredibles 2
    Early and often, Incredibles 2 makes the compelling case that animation is the ideal medium for stories based on, or at least inspired by, comic book fantasias, where reality tends to bend and twist as elastically as Elastigirl.
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