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. Bad Hair
    The impression is of a provocative logline that Simien never quite figured out how to expand into a satisfying movie; once you get the thrust of the story, it’s mostly repetitions on a theme.
  2. After We Collided
    After We Collided is too invested in its central couple to know what to do with its new romantic rival. Which is a shame because Sprouse turns in one of the film’s livelier performances.
  3. Synchronic
    Synchronic does allow its symbolism to grow relatively organically, but in terms of character arc and parting message, this film is far more conventional than those that have come before. And a little something is lost in these broader strokes, particularly because they seem to have been self-imposed.
  4. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is frequently funny and occasionally pointed, more than enough to recommend it as a comedy. It’s also another instance where doing things as they’ve always been done no longer feels like quite enough. The prejudices Baron Cohen exposes have become too fond of exposing themselves.
  5. The Witches
    Where is the Zemeckis who projected a cartoon-noir Christopher Lloyd into every child’s nightmares? The same director has thrown a softening, coddling filter over Dahl, preserving the shape of his source material while sanding down its edges.
  6. Nocturne
    Nocturne, like its brittle protagonist, is good enough at what it does to make you wish it were a little better.
  7. The Lie
    After roughly 90 minutes of unbelievable behavior and botched suspense, the twist ending is too audaciously ridiculous to entirely resist. You’ll scream, but not in fear.
  8. Evil Eye
    There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.
  9. Black Box
    Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.
  10. Midnight in Paris
    The flubbed ending is more glaring because the film is otherwise so enjoyable and relatable. It’s achingly familiar in its exploration of what seems to the seniors like a final dash toward adulthood and its accompanying freedoms.
  11. Rebecca
    Manderley is in part a state of mind. In this Rebecca, that state is exasperating boredom.
  12. Love and Monsters
    Give Love And Monsters credit: If nothing else, it does at least come up with a new (albeit ludicrous) twist on the killer-asteroid premise that once fueled two dumb disaster movies in the same year.
  13. Honest Thief
    Not exactly a thinking man’s action movie, and not a gleefully dopey thrill ride either, Honest Thief is as grudging as its main character when it comes to doling out thrills.
  14. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Red, White And Blue is stark and straightforward, further proof that McQueen has distinguished each entry in his bold foray into small-screen storytelling.
  15. 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.
  16. French Exit
    The film’s artificial, stylized remove—what might be called his current style, a kind of half-ironic, half-romantic wooziness—seems an odd landing point for the scrappy DIY filmmaker behind Momma’s Man and the genuinely touching and hilarious Terri, which DeWitt also wrote and which was so human it hurt.
  17. Martin Eden
    Yet without dumbing down its message, Marcello’s sweeping Künstlerroman has all the pleasurable characteristics of a simmering romance and a poignant tragedy, too.
  18. Totally Under Control
    If anything, the biggest knock against Totally Under Control is that with a length of just over two hours, it sometimes feels as exhausting as it does exhaustive.
  19. Trump Card
    By this point, D’Souza is unconvincingly frothing on the soundtrack about how “the socialist left and the Democrats want to make us grovel” and “make us worms,” but the whole premise is, predictably, a radical, cynical misunderstanding of Orwell.
  20. 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.
  21. The War with Grandpa
    There’s a pleasing kernel of genuine warmth glowing at the heart of this movie, but it’s been heavily insulated—almost buried—by juvenile silliness. One could argue that this merely echoes the family dynamic, but your tolerance for buffoonery will still need to be quite high.
  22. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It doesn’t offer perfect solutions, only a brand of humor and astute wisdom one might from someone who has lived the life.
  23. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Among the many quirks of this very idiosyncratic comedy is that it really is structured like a thriller or a horror film.
  24. Books of Blood
    Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
  25. Charm City Kings
    Charm City Kings distinguishes itself from similar fare not just through its location and eye-popping bikes but also with the believably imperfect people that populate it.
  26. A Rainy Day in New York
    This is a bad movie, with maybe two good jokes and some of Allen’s clunkiest direction.
  27. Hubie Halloween
    There is something half-satisfying and pacifying about Hubie Halloween. In true content-blurring Netflix fashion, Sandler has essentially made a likable children’s movie to babysit undemanding adults.
  28. Yellow Rose
    Yellow Rose may not be a success on the whole, but it does suggest that Paragas, like her protagonist, is still finding her way.
  29. Undine
    For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
  32. Possessor Uncut
    In the end, Possessor privileges the visceral over the cerebral. Which is not to deny that it lands somewhere rather provocative as a character study.
  33. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement. May we all have the opportunity to be present at our own funerals, surrounded by loved ones, before it’s too late.
  34. The Glorias
    The result is a choppy mix of timelines, color schemes, and differing levels of realism that’s too unfocused to really inspire.
  35. Save Yourselves!
    Save Yourselves! didn’t have the budget to pull off its ambitiously bizarre and essentially unresolved ending (which might not have been satisfying even had it been fully realized—it’s really way out there, quite literally), but it gets the small things just right, and that’s far more important.
  36. 12 Hour Shift
    The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself.
  37. Scare Me
    The idea that movies can easily lose 10 or 15 minutes of running time to curry favor with impatient audiences is often patently absurd, yet nearly every single scene in Scare Me feels some degree of overlong.
  38. Ava
    Ava is a napping-on-the-couch movie through and through, with recognizable names and a sexy premise but no distinct personality.
  39. On the Rocks
    There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.
  40. The Boys in the Band
    Mantello is the first to tell people he hasn’t had a lot of experience directing movies (his last feature was the 1997 adaptation of his Broadway hit Love! Valour! Compassion!), yet his version of Boys fights its stage roots far more than Friedkin’s film.
  41. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    The Trial Of The Chicago 7 wants to bottle the revolutionary spirit of its setting—the take-to-the-streets idealism of the ’60s—but its snappy montage-glimpses of demonstrations verge on costume-party kitsch. The movie is at its best and most persuasive in the courtroom, when Sorkin can draw on the clashes of ideology and personality.
  42. Gunda
    You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.
  43. The Calming
    The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.
  44. Malmkrog
    One is left to admire the literal and figurative wallpaper—to be blessedly distracted by the mise en scène and Puiu’s attempts to constantly vary how he’s filming each interaction.
  45. Kajillionaire
    The chemistry between Rodriguez and Wood is undeniable, and Rodriguez’s more naturalistic performance balances out her costar’s affected shuffling and deep, gravely monotone. Wood’s performance is sensitive, but it’s also silly at times.
  46. Enola Holmes
    Without much of a mystery to solve, this young Holmes comes across more like a junior-level Wonder Woman: intelligent and highly trained yet puzzled by this unfamiliar, unfair world of men.
  47. Shadow in the Cloud
    Pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure.
  48. Joe Bell
    Wahlberg, delivering a performance that feels like community service, just isn’t up to driving a drama whose conflict is almost entirely internal; his default setting of sneering irritation is the wrong tool for the job. It leaves you wondering if this should have more fully been Jadin’s story, especially given the sensitivity of Miller’s turn.
  49. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    This film is charming and educational enough, but it’s not especially profound; it flirts with big ideas about the origins of life and the twin cycles of creation and destruction but doesn’t really let them sink in.
  50. City Hall
    As always, Wiseman’s approach guarantees memorable encounters.
  51. 76 Days
    At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.
  52. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    McQueen has zoomed in on a very specific milieu, but he’s also tapped into the universal and suddenly inaccessible joy of an endless night of music and dance, a house party for the ages. You don’t have to know your reggae or have been born 40 years ago to long for the ache of communal fun on which Lovers Rock waxes nostalgic.
  53. Alone
    There’s something deeply appealing about an already stripped-down cat-and-mouse scenario that becomes dirtier and more elemental as it goes along, tracing a devolutionary arc from the rules of the road to primeval combat.
  54. The Father
    Hopkins methodically strips away every quality we’ve come to expect from him—the refinement, the silver tongue, the imposing intensity he lent Lecter and Nixon and Titus—until there’s nothing left but frailty and distress. In doing so, he helps convey the full tragedy and horror of dementia: the way it can make someone almost unrecognizable to themselves and their loved ones.
  55. I Care a Lot
    The film is arguably too long, with a mushy middle section that slows the momentum of its savage first third. But Pike’s performance remains sharp as her character’s blonde bob throughout, and the pleasures of watching her and Dinklage face off are significant.
  56. Concrete Cowboy
    It’s a little corny at times, but it looks good and has heart—and, let’s be honest, Black cowboys are pretty damn cool.
  57. 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.
  58. The Truffle Hunters
    The Truffle Hunters is more eccentric and lyrical than its logline might suggest.
  59. Shiva Baby
    The style of humor in Shiva Baby can best be described as “sex-positive cringe,” in which the secondhand embarrassment comes less from the sexual situations themselves than our heroine’s collision with polite, conservative society.
  60. New Order
    The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.
  61. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.
  62. Pieces of a Woman
    Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.
  63. Limbo
    While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.
  64. 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.
  65. The Devil All the Time
    What’s haunting about The Devil All The Time — and, ultimately even a little hopeful — is this idea that there’s a world beyond this world, where perhaps not everyone is so cruel or intense. It may not be the biblical Heaven; but that’s okay. Sometimes Cincinnati will suffice.
  66. Blackbird
    With its quasi-literary tone and over-calculated concessions to the messiness of real life, the movie settles for coming across like a clumsy amalgamation of the wonderful Amy Bloom short story “Love Is Not A Pie” and the 1998 Sarandon tearjerker "Stepmom." The hollow, unsatisfying feeling the movie leaves behind may be the most authentically funereal thing about it.
  67. Apples
    The droll Twilight Zone absurdism is not without its pleasures, many of them comic.
  68. Nomadland
    As this flinty, self-sufficient, and geographically unmoored woman, McDormand provides a blend of toughness and vulnerability that’s a perfect fit for the material.
  69. The Disciple
    For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.
  70. One Night in Miami
    As one might expect from a movie based on a play and directed by a famous actor, dialogue and performances are the driving force.
  71. Ammonite
    Ammonite is too pallid to really get your blood flowing.
  72. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.
  73. Black Is King
    Black Is King reconfirms a notion that many understood back in 2016 with Lemonade: When it comes to pairing strong, resplendent imagery with equally rousing music, the only person who can potentially outperform Beyoncé is Beyoncé herself.
  74. Rent-A-Pal
    Rent-A-Pal goes full-tilt mayhem in its final act, shattering its carefully calibrated dread in a race to make an already belabored point: that technological advancements are to be questioned, and there is no substitute for human connection.
  75. Sibyl
    Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.
  76. All In: The Fight for Democracy
    Frankly, All In would be better if it were less expansive. A more straightforward bio-doc about Abrams, with extended digressions about the larger history behind her voting rights activism, might’ve been more powerful.
  77. Matthias & Maxime
    This is a film with big emotions and swoon-worthy wet hair moments, and it finds unexpected places in the subconscious to settle.
  78. Feels Good Man
    Pretty darn entertaining.
  79. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    For a film about heartbreak, The Broken Hearts Gallery is a bit too glossy for its own good.
  80. Mulan
    Rather than lean into the more mature elements that make it stand out, the movie does frustratingly little with its noteworthy upgrades on the original, resulting in a version of the story that’s only superficially more sophisticated.
  81. Antebellum
    If only the filmmakers trusted their actors to convey the messages of this story, instead of burdening them with obvious, explanatory lines and speeches.
  82. Tenet
    Rarely is a film of this budget and scope so proudly difficult to follow.
  83. i'm thinking of ending things
    By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?
  84. Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe
    Best of all, Candace Against The Universe plays up the heart of the relationship among Candace, Phineas, and Ferb: For all her schemes, the show often revealed that Candace really does love her brothers. But this new movie makes a point to show how much they appreciate her as well.
  85. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The Bill & Ted movies derive much of their humor from the blending of extremely low and extremely high stakes. Face The Music kind of blows it on the former: For all the preaching about the importance of togetherness and unity, the film mostly keeps its fiftysomething stars and their kids apart. Which is a shame.
  86. Class Action Park
    For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.
  87. The Binge
    Even the occasional funny line grows wearying, because nothing in this movie happens for any real reason. The details that labor to appear random, the big slapstick plot turns, and the predetermined character arcs are all equally meaningless, unchecked byproducts of filmmakers emptying their joke files with Superbad playing on a loop in the background.
  88. Tesla
    Far from the flamboyant figure of fantasy and popular myth, this version of the inventor is totally interiorized.
  89. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    While the first Train To Busan was an affecting, character-driven tale of grief and redemption, Peninsula flounders in generic spectacle. Even fans may wonder if there are any bones left to pick on this franchise.
  90. Unhinged
    This may be the first role that’s really capitalized on Crowe’s celebrity reputation as a hothead, even if the unnamed lunatic he’s playing only barks threats into a phone instead of chucking it at anyone.
  91. Boys State
    With so much attention paid to the campaign trail, Boys State fails to show us how the waterworks get built.
  92. Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
    When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.
  93. Project Power
    You might as well spend a couple hours with this film on in the background, but don’t expect much about it to stick with you—except for the jaw-dropping Henrietta Lacks monologue. You may need to pop a pill to forget that.
  94. Sunless Shadows
    This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.
  95. I Used to Go Here
    I Used To Go Here would rather be painfully relatable than cutting.
  96. A Thousand Cuts
    The movie is loaded with moments meant to generate shock and outrage, but it could use more shoe-leather procedural scenes, showing in detail how Ressa’s team goes about investigating the police’s abuses of their constitutional authority.
  97. La Llorona
    What stands out about the film is the pain that lies underneath Bustamante’s placid compositions—an anguished desire for justice that, like the Weeping Woman herself, still cries out to be heard.
  98. The Tax Collector
    Does The Tax Collector sound intriguingly bizarre? In actuality, it’s a tediously paced procedural about work-life balance in which suspense-free displays of hackneyed gangbanger signage are filled in with a few flashbacks that look like they were a cut from a much more exciting movie.
  99. The Secret Garden
    The Secret Garden is a mid-tier adaptation, though one with heart and soul.
  100. Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Historically, of course, making no earthly sense hasn’t been a major impediment in Jodorowsky’s work. In this instance, he commits a sin graver than charlatanism by just being boring.
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