The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 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 2.6 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 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Putty Hill
    This is a movie about the casual ways people know each other, even when their relationships are hard to explain-or perhaps even justify.
  2. Breathe
    Breathe, the second feature directed by French actress Mélanie Laurent (best known for playing the vengeful Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), tackles the subject from a refreshingly novel angle, depicting a platonic friendship that quickly grows toxic.
  3. Predator: Killer of Killers
    There’s little to no fat to be found in this film; it’s a lean, mean action-thriller that threads the needle between speculative storytelling and brutal sci-fi carnage.
  4. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.
  5. The Grief of Others
    It’s every bit as human-scaled as the filmmaker’s other work — but also, in its noble restraint, a little less involving.
  6. Shuffle
    It’s 81 damning minutes of tight filmmaking, great storytelling, and riveting investigation.
  7. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    In terms of celebrating his life by letting us soak in his impassioned, inspiring presence one more time, the film is successful. But viewers should take one more note from the man himself and not fall for easy scapegoats and trite narratives, whether they concern countries or a person who devoted his life to exploring them.
  8. Amanda Knox
    Amanda Knox serves as a corrective—a simple, brutal look at the dangers of hype, hysteria, and rushed prosecution.
  9. High Flying Bird
    High Flying Bird turns out to be a kind of shaggy heist movie, with a grand design (and payout) that’s only fully clear in retrospect.
  10. The Humans
    The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.
  11. The Card Counter
    The grace notes—including a final shot that could, potentially, be Schrader’s most sublime—are lost among the inconsistencies, incomplete subplots, and airlessness. It shouldn’t take an expert to figure out what a film is trying to articulate. Unfortunately, in this case, it does.
  12. Babette's Feast
    The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    5 Broken Cameras
    That intertwining of Burnat's home life and his political one make 5 Broken Cameras an unusual, moving work about a much-explored topic.
  14. One of Us
    The film does little to explain the history behind the dynamic between their men and women, which is based, it seems, at least partly on a blinding fear of lust.
  15. How to Draw a Bunny
    The opportunity to dig into the trove of Johnson's art is an ultimate reward beyond all offbeat attempts to understand the artist himself. At its best, How To Draw A Bunny amounts to a shadow history of the American avant-garde.
  16. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    In Amandla!, history doesn't just come alive--it sings, dances, and issues a passionate plea for justice and equality. The film joyously celebrates music as both a means to an end and an end unto itself.
  17. Dirty Pretty Things
    Frears has directed a surprisingly sturdy hybrid of thriller and social melodrama, even if the thrills turn ludicrous and the social critique grows a little pat.
  18. Punch-Drunk Love
    It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.
  19. O'Horten
    O’Horten feels like a waking dream. It's a film of subtle, insinuating charm, a character study about an eminently sane, reasonable man unsteadily navigating an increasingly insane, unreasonable world.
  20. In Between
    In Between suffers when cross-cutting among its three similar yet disparate storylines, and is strongest during moments that see righteous anger get complicated by human nature.
  21. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Overly conventional as a documentary, but it's inspiring as a rebuttal to the declining state of the world at large. It's encouraging to know that the endurance of institutions like marriage and family could hold the key to keeping civilization intact.
  22. Wings
    Wings is primarily a grand spectacle, with an ingenious piece of visual storytelling rolling along every few minutes.
  23. The Chronology of Water
    Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.
  24. The Thin Red Line
    Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing.
  25. Trouble in Mind
    Rudolph remains one of American’s film’s most unabashed romantics: Trouble In Mind is so sweetly, smartly, transcendently romantic that Kristofferson’s desperate need to get laid following years of nothing but male company comes off as a soulful man’s spiritual hunger for meaningful human connection, rather than mere horniness.
  26. After Dark, My Sweet
    It’s a pungently atmospheric little sleeper, and one of relatively few genre flicks to portray a mentally unsound protagonist as a recognizable human being—someone who really just has one particular screw loose, such that you might not notice unless you happened to stumble against that particular joint.
  27. A Passage to India
    While it isn't as brilliant as his The Bridge On The River Kwai or Lawrence Of Arabia, Lean's final film is just as meticulously designed, because more than any other filmmaker of his era, he understood how the right hat could say as much about a character —and a society—as any line of dialogue.
  28. I, Daniel Blake
    The movie is plenty affecting when it sticks to credible, low-key difficulties faced with weary decency; there was no need to crank the pathos up to 11 and throw a full-scale pity party.
  29. The Counterfeiters
    Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.
  30. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    Falls short of being a great film because it lacks a certain ambition.
  31. After the Wedding
    With its soapy earnestness and use of suffering souls as set dressing, After The Wedding could be the cinematic equivalent of a Coldplay song. And while that isn't necessarily a slam, it isn't a recommendation either.
  32. Alice in the Cities
    As a crash course in New German Cinema, this is tough to beat.
  33. The Dark Knight Rises
    The miracle of Nolan's Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.
  34. The Lost City of Z
    Through Gray’s orchestration of themes, ironies, and flashes of transcendence, the thick of the jungle becomes as haunting and multivalent an image as the hidden city. It is that which we all disappear into.
  35. Avengers: Endgame
    An earnest, overstuffed, fitfully funny superhero melodrama, Endgame hits the buttons it wants to hit, and sometimes affectingly.
  36. Blind Shaft
    A little slow for a crime story, and a little obvious with its anti-capitalism message.
  37. The Guard
    Focusing the film on Gleeson was certainly the right choice. His performance is equal parts funny and unnerving, and he keeps viewers guessing about what drives the man and what he'll do next.
  38. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    This fable’s push to meet, then fix, your heroes can still sound as saccharine as a solo acoustic set, but it’s smart enough to undercut itself early and often.
  39. Blue Ruin
    Blue Ruin rarely resembles anything but itself. Much of the singularity can be attributed to the film’s atypical hero, surely one of the year’s great characters.
  40. The People's Joker
    On one level, it directly lampoons the artificial mechanisms by which big-budget blockbusters tell their stories, yet it also provides an avenue for deeply personal storytelling within the framework of our shared cultural mythology.
  41. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is so affable, so good-natured, so modest—just so gosh-darned charming—that it’s difficult not to crack at least a little bit of a smile while watching it.
  42. Ex Machina
    Make no mistake, this is a film of ideas—sadder, quieter, more delicate than the Hollywood sci-fi standard.
  43. Oldboy
    The result is a powerfully visceral experience that justifies itself almost entirely on surface chops, with striking color composition and a complex sound design that elevates the story to an operatic scale.
  44. The Tribe
    One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.
  45. Morvern Callar
    Morvern Callar not only attempts to reveal an interior life, usually the province of novels, but also focuses on the interior life of a woman who refuses to open up to anyone.
  46. The Sisters Brothers
    It’s something of a hangout Western, too, and its pleasures mostly come down to the company we get to keep with the characters and the actors easing into their eccentricities.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blue Moon
    Though this can seem like a quibble, the cheated blocking Linklater uses to make Hawke look comically shorter than Scott distracts from some truly great writing.
  48. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    This is the darkest, saddest, most sophisticated Harry Potter film yet.
  49. Zootopia
    Like Disney’s "Big Hero 6," the movie is busy, but not breathless with invention.
  50. Innocence
    The more overtly allegorical Innocence becomes, the duller it gets.
  51. Hard Eight
    One of the best films of the year.
  52. Lost Boys of Sudan
    The film offers a rare and fascinating firsthand look at two sides of the modern immigrant experience.
  53. House of Games
    The clipped tough-guy language, Juan Ruiz Anchía's rich chiaroscuro lighting, the layers of "short cons" and larger deceptions—they're all elements of a genre whose time had passed, but that Mamet was able to revive with effortless aplomb.
  54. I'm Your Man
    This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama.
  55. A Love Song
    On the surface, there’s little more simple than a story of two people trying to make a connection. On an emotional level, however, few things are more complicated. Like life, A Love Song offers no easy conclusions—just simple realizations. In expert hands, that’s enough.
  56. Non-Fiction
    This is, in other words, Assayas’ homage to highbrow gabfests — the mid-period films of Woody Allen (complete with a Bergman reference) and especially the work of Éric Rohmer, the pseudonymous critic-turned-director who made a career of exploring his characters’ private dilemmas, but remained famously secretive about his own personal life.
  57. Mississippi Masala
    A wholly original story written and directed by women that thoughtfully explores the complexities of interracial love between people of color.
  58. Much Ado About Nothing
    So kudos to the cast of Much Ado About Nothing, Joss Whedon’s scrappy, snappy take of one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies. With little exception, the players assembled here — most of them veterans of the Whedonverse — pull off that difficult balancing act with gusto.
  59. Scum
    A straightforward prison flick, basically, honoring all of the genre’s many conventions, from the sadistic screws to the wars between rival cell blocks to the innocent who gets brutally gang-raped.
  60. Dead Mail
    Although the film has a certain languidness—shaving the 100-minute runtime down would have amplified the tension—its commitment to dissecting the internal workings of analog keyboards and the USPS prove just as intriguing as the unstable killer who threatens professionals in both of these fields.
  61. Up and Down
    Sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama.
  62. Lost in America
    Lost In America is equally potent as a satire of the road movie and of the American dream of endless mobility and escape.
  63. Endless Poetry
    Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.
  64. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer’s trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion. He doesn’t have the footage to make Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? come together as an investigation narrative, and his insistence on a quasi-chronological structure means that it doesn’t work as an essay, either.
  65. Beach Rats
    Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom.
  66. The Last Mistress
    Given their reputations as feminist provocateurs, the coming together of Breillat and Argento seems natural, even inevitable, and The Last Mistress gets a charge from their feisty, uncompromising spirit.
  67. Live-In Maid
    Live-In Maid's premise would be ideal for a play, or a bravura performance piece like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant."
  68. The Saddest Music in the World
    Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.
  69. Thief
    Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the most confident directorial debuts of its era, the product of an unprecedented amount of research and preparation.
  70. Rodney King
    This is the second time Lee has filmed one of Smith’s plays, and like A Huey P. Newton Story, about the Black Panthers founder, it’s more of a valuable document of an event than a full-fledged movie.
  71. Two for the Road
    The film's surface is made up of familiar '60s romantic-comedy elements, from Hepburn's haute wardrobe to the Henry Mancini score to the breezy interaction between the stars. They banter, bicker, and make up with witty repartee. It's what movie love is supposed to look like, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to know that it's destined to sour.
  72. Barbarian
    Cregger delivers an absolutely stunning addition to the horror canon. Barbarian is a twisted little film, a descent into a hell that is so achingly human that it loops back around as a funhouse reflection.
  73. Tracks
    Rendered in the over-polished, pre-packed prestige style of director John Curran (The Painted Veil, Stone), Davidson’s journey appears meaningless, little more than a succession of pretty vistas for the dirt-caked trekker to squint at while having flashbacks of her childhood.
  74. The Princess of Montpensier
    Tavernier turns a tale of courtly duty and manners into a tense, twisty drama.
  75. The Fearless Freaks
    In the wonderful new rockumentary The Fearless Freaks, Flaming Lips fans describe the band's live performances in almost spiritual terms, and for once, their fervor seems wholly justified.
  76. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Byrne excels at evoking pain and exhaustion, but also selfish ambivalence, and the kind of frazzled mother character she played in the Insidious franchise is put to far better use by Bronstein.
  77. Frankenstein
    Del Toro’s love for the grotesque and the abject is sincere and passionate, and there are scenes in Frankenstein that play like thesis statements for the director’s entire career.
  78. Sorry to Bother You
    There’s a messy, first-draft quality to how the film fits said ideas together, and a general sloppiness to the execution, with Riley botching the timing on too many jokes.
  79. The Devil Came on Horseback
    These images and reports have stirred consciences without quite stirring decisive action, and an earnest indie doc like this one seems like another cry in the wilderness.
  80. 1917
    By the end, 1917 has positioned itself as a salute to the sacrifices of those who died for their country. Mostly, though, it comes across as a monument to itself.
  81. Kedi
    There’s a fascinating therapeutic undercurrent to the interviews with human beings.
  82. Waste Land
    Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.
  83. The Substance
    It’s animated by a white-hot rage that escalates throughout its epic 140-minute run time, building to a jaw-droppingly audacious climax that sprays a firehose of blood at the audience. It’s demented and absurd in the best way possible.
  84. Murderous Maids
    Doesn't shy away from the social or psychological explanations of the Le Mans murders, but never comes down on one side or another.
  85. Afghan Star
    If nothing else, Afghan Star offers a reminder of how much has changed in Afghanistan from the late ’70s--when Kabul was a secular-oriented city with co-ed universities and a thriving nightclub scene--to the rise of the Taliban.
  86. The Aura
    The Aura holds together as a dreamy variation on "Reservoir Dogs'" heist-gone-wrong fatalism and the know-thyself confrontations of David Mamet's "Homicide."
  87. Paradise: Hope
    This tale of a creepy pedophilic relationship is the most tender, nuanced, and deeply felt picture Seidl has ever made. What’s more, there’s no need to have seen the other two films, as Hope works beautifully all by its lonesome.
  88. Logan Lucky
    Soderbergh isn’t exactly hiding a secret drama inside his barrel of laughs and twists. But his comeback project keeps quiet about being one of the sweetest, most affirming movies he’s ever made.
  89. James and the Giant Peach
    At least there’s plenty to look at among Selick’s beautifully detailed characters, who each have expressive bodies and their own ways of moving.
  90. High Life
    In terms of mood, cosmetics, and rhythm, it’s a worthy addition to the great filmmaker’s canon.
  91. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.
  92. Nosferatu
    There are moments of genuine horror and genuine artfulness in Nosferatu, neither of which would have been possible if the writer-director had approached the project with tongue in cheek. But at two hours and 12 minutes, it’s a solemn death march towards an inevitable conclusion—which fits the theme, but strains the limits of audience engagement.
  93. Missing
    While there's an element of left-wing fantasy in Lemmon's conversion from unquestioning patriot to newly awakened skeptic of U.S. covert activities, Lemmon's emotional directness, driven by a need simply to find answers, makes that transition entirely plausible. Within this decent citizen lies the conscience of a nation.
  94. 2046
    Just as memorable and emotionally intense as any of Wong's films. It's a mood as much as a movie.
  95. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    The doc’s examination of the band’s creative process contains some of its most riveting moments.
  96. A Quiet Passion
    What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.
  97. Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands
    Pusher II works best when it's dwelling on the disconnect between Mikkelsen's lurid imagination and his disappointing reality, though it starts to fade when it becomes about the strained relationships of fathers and sons.
  98. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    Stories Women Tell does succeed at what it primarily means to do, which is to take abortion out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more personal.
  99. Kung Fu Hustle
    Its crowd-pleasing, action-packed brand of frenetic parody promises to spread Chow's mythos even further.
  100. Meru
    How one responds to Meru will largely depend on whether its three subjects come across as heroically courageous or suicidally reckless.
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