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. Claire's Camera
    Serves as a thoroughly engaging divertissement. That it comes across as more than a little half-assed is part of its unruly charm.
  2. High Anxiety
    Anxiety is nearly as obsessive in recreating Alfred Hitchcock's visual style as Gus Van Sant's Psycho was, but to much greater effect.
  3. The Rider
    More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.
  4. Us
    Us proves, if nothing else, that Peele has become a blockbuster visionary, fully in control of his craft. It’s a privilege to step back into the funhouse of his imagination.
  5. Columbus
    Come for the breathtaking architectural scenery, stay for the likable pair staring up at it.
  6. Harmonium
    The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.
  7. 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.
  8. She's Gotta Have It
    From the jump, She's Gotta Have It announced that it wasn't going to define black life in terms of crime and poverty, just as it wasn't going to bind independent filmmaking to moribund realism.
  9. The Reagan Show
    It’s an approach that works well when the audience enjoys the company of this person who’s become a permanent fixture on their TV. But it’s also one that enrages opposing voters, who can only ever see the maddening fakery.
  10. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    Banzai is an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.
  11. Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    I feel like we catch a brief glimpse here of an amazing filmmaker who never quite existed.
  12. Interiors
    Much of the first half of Interiors feels like a stage play, though one in which characters walk in and out of frame. That, along with the overly symbolic breaking of a vase, have earned Interiors some criticism for being too on the nose, which isn’t entirely unfair. But the rest of the movie is so starkly bold that it renders those problems insignificant. It’s beautiful, affecting, and exactly as jarring as Allen probably intended it to be.
  13. 4 Days in France
    What makes 4 Days In France special, though, is that it’s far more expansive than its basic premise would suggest.
  14. The Death of Stalin
    The Death Of Stalin isn’t quite as pointed or rat-a-tat funny as In The Loop (or Veep at its best), but its application of [Iannucci's] signature barbed comic voice to such grim history (executions are a constant source of gallows humor) packs its own punch.
  15. Thirst Street
    Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    My Girl
    It’s an introduction to adolescent viewers of some of life’s most painful events, even if those events aren’t always depicted in the most realistic ways. And therein lies My Girl’s effectiveness.
  17. Gerald's Game
    Perhaps because he’s had a couple of decades to think about it, Flanagan’s vision for the film is assured, full of intimate closeups that allow Gugino’s multi-layered performance to shine.
  18. First Reformed
    The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role.
  19. Foxtrot
    Heavy with horror though it may be, Foxtrot turns out to be too conceptually and stylistically audacious to be called a slog; it keeps throwing curveballs, some crueler than others.
  20. Sweet Country
    Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.
  21. Zama
    In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.
  22. American Graffiti
    American Graffiti is an unabashed nostalgia piece, but the poignancy of Lucas holding onto this memory only becomes clear at the end. For these boys, nothing would ever be the same again.
  23. The Little Stranger
    In truth, The Little Stranger is barely a horror movie at all. It’s more of an impeccably crafted chamber drama with a supernatural bent, like Edith Wharton by way of Shirley Jackson.
  24. Benny's Video (1992)
    Haneke's schoolmarm tendencies come to the surface in Benny's Video, which implicates the media for desensitizing people to violence.
  25. A Quiet Place
    Horror movies often play with the contrast between deathly silence and deafening cacophony, one puncturing the other to shred nerves and send asses out of seats. A Quiet Place takes that strategy to a new extreme, engulfing characters and viewers alike in an eerie sustained hush, and then generating anxiety about how and when it will suddenly be shattered. It turns sound itself, cinema’s first invader, into a threat.
  26. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    This is Tarantino’s Eden, the unspoiled garden when the things he loves don’t have to be sought out or championed because they permeate every aspect of life. The sense of blissful immersion extends to the film’s costuming and production design, both of which are as meticulous as one might expect.
  27. Blindspotting
    Diggs, Casal, and Estrada are all walking on a high wire here, requiring a balance so delicate that it may not be visible to some of the audience until they have to decide for themselves whether Blindspotting’s leap-of-faith climax works.
  28. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Go To The Movies is for kids who like bright colors and wacky humor, certainly, but it’s also targeted directly at the sort of superhero nerd who would catch a reference like that.
  29. Crazy Rich Asians
    Like the best musicals, Crazy Rich Asians joyously embraces a heightened aesthetic while keeping its story grounded in real emotional truth.
  30. Not as a Stranger
    Not As A Stranger taps into the raging fury and animal sexuality lurking underneath Mitchum’s quiet-storm demeanor; the film’s redemptive arc requires him to realize what he has in a good, wholesome woman like de Havilland, but Mitchum’s bedroom eyes and leering swagger suggest that he really belongs to a femme fatale like Grahame, who undoubtedly tumbled out of the womb clutching a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other.
  31. Minding the Gap
    It generates a sense of personal immediacy that elevates Minding The Gap above the confines of mere portraiture; his presence facilitates (and sometimes hinders) honest admissions from his subjects.
  32. BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman, for all its indulgent… Spikiness, is held together by the force of Lee’s messaging. He’s the polemicist as insult comic, wedging truths between each karate chop to the (skin)head of racist America.
  33. High Life
    In terms of mood, cosmetics, and rhythm, it’s a worthy addition to the great filmmaker’s canon.
  34. Leave No Trace
    Moving, perhaps inevitably, toward a final fork in the woods, Leave No Trace condenses big questions into something simple and quietly powerful: two people bonded by blood and shared history, discovering how their needs align and diverge.
  35. Roma
    The result is a little too rose-tinted an homage, but Roma is still an exceptionally moving story, as well as another technical feat from Cuarón.
  36. Sunset
    Sunset, Nemes’ second feature, not only confirms his talent but demonstrates that his style works beautifully even when transferred to perhaps the least horrifying milieu imaginable.
  37. Suspiria
    As bold (and potentially alienating) as Guadagnino’s take on Suspiria might be, it’s also extremely precise, and he places each sweeping caftan and gurgling sound effect with the focus and intention of an haute cuisine chef fussing over garnishes. Prepare your palate accordingly.
  38. The Tale
    The power of this material—and of Dern’s devastating performance—stays with you.
  39. Eighth Grade
    What makes this coming-of-age film special is that it’s at once harsh and humanist: a perceptive, realistic comedy about tweenage life that’s also rich in compassion, that scarcest of junior-high commodities.
  40. 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.
  41. Nancy
    In the end, Nancy is a bit too dogmatic in its refusal to provide easy answers, its emotional impact dissipating like dust in a sunbeam with every understated non-revelation.
  42. Blaze
    Blaze feels like a true passion project, an engine running on Hawke’s endless supply of enthusiasm for his subject.
  43. Grass
    What’s most fascinating about Grass is the way Hong modulates the film’s atmosphere, gradually transforming its banal beginnings into something genuinely haunting and unresolved.
  44. The Endless
    Although The Endless works just fine as a standalone film, looking at it in the wider context of Benson and Moorhead’s work highlights another, more meta theme: the desire to return to an earlier, simpler period in one’s life, and relive those glory days forever.
  45. Whitney
    Whitney herself remains a figure of some mystery, her rise and fall refracting the hopes and anxieties of the people around her, with a tragic echo in the death of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, in 2015.
  46. People's Republic of Desire
    Wu weaves together the stories of two live-streaming stars, a manager, and a devoted fan to form a portrait not only of the extreme acceleration that defines contemporary Chinese pop culture, but also the bizarre fantasy economy and parasitic interdependencies of late capitalism as a whole.
  47. Relaxer
    For a movie that’s often embarrassingly funny — with its absurdist hangout dialogue, posturing nobodies, and perfectly timed spews — Relaxer is fundamentally sad.
  48. ...and justice for all.
    Justice is seldom as deep or trenchant as it wants to be, but there's abundant pleasure to be gleaned from skating along its surfaces.
  49. This Is Our Land
    Belvaux has made a gutsy, discomfiting movie about going along to get along, and just how dangerous that impulse can ultimately be.
  50. Red Rock West
    Notwithstanding its cop-out upbeat ending, Red Rock West solidified the expert neo-noir credentials of John Dahl (The Last Seduction). A taut, nasty bit of crime-genre business, Dahl’s tale (co-written with brother Rick) is in most respects archetypal.
  51. Tommy
    For all that Tommy bungles or overdoes, it’s still a powerful experience, musically and visually.
  52. The Towering Inferno
    The fun of watching The Towering Inferno is in figuring out which old star Allen is going to indiscriminately kill off, as well as watching ultramodern décor go up in flames while a bunch of stubborn egotists refuse to listen to reasonable men.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rambo: First Blood Part II
    If you accept that Rambo is not the same kind of movie as First Blood and watch it on its own merits, it’s a badass action movie.
  54. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    Barking Dogs Never Bite is uneven, unnecessarily provocative, and exhausts its central premise long before the closing credits, but it’s invigorating to watch regardless. After all, Bong is just doing what New Wave artists do: experimenting, breaking rules, showing off.
  55. McQueen
    A film that’s refreshingly free of the gushing sound bites from sycophantic celebrities that too often dominate fashion documentaries.
  56. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    This caper film possesses Miyazaki's usual good-hearted charm, but he injects a manically energetic humor that his more sedate children's films never quite achieve.
  57. Good Manners
    There’s nothing especially wrong with the arty horror movie that Good Manners becomes, mind you, and the metamorphosis (unexpected, for those who haven’t read a review or seen the poster image, anyway) offers pleasures of its own.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 24, 2018
  58. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.
  59. Blue Collar
    Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.
  60. Asako I & II
    Hamaguchi exhibits a careful, un-showy command of the frame, and a talent for creating small, sometimes comic surprises through editing.
  61. Happy as Lazzaro
    Poised somewhere between despondency and hope, its conclusion suggests that, unable to see pure goodness even when it’s right before our eyes, we unwittingly snuff it out. Yet that goodness will endure — and it will outlast us.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Image Book
    If Godard weren’t Godard, would we be so inclined to accept this faux history lesson as truth?
  63. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Though his symbolism sometimes errs on the side of obviousness, Bi shows an uncommon knack for recreating and exploring the space of a dream—its transforming identities and places, the unreality made more transportive by the 3D format’s underutilized potential for creating dramatic space, matched by the mutations of the camerawork from close-up to tracking shot to crane shot and back again.
  64. Shoplifters
    What these people have in common beyond a shared surname really pounds the film’s theme home with a sledgehammer, but there are numerous tender, affecting moments en route to the finale’s tearjerker overdrive, many of them productively tangential to the overarching idea of choosing one’s own family.
  65. Sorry Angel
    Sorry Angel doesn’t always make you feel the weight of its presence—but as any good romance should, it makes you feel the sting of its absence.
  66. Yomeddine
    There’s a lovely chemistry between Gamal, who Shawky met at Egypt’s Abu Zaabal Leper Colony, and Abdelhafiz. Both first-time actors, they capture the dynamic of two people pushed away from society who genuinely grow to feel love for each other.
  67. Border
    Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes Border. A thematically rich and deeply strange blend of romantic drama, magical-realist fantasy, and crime thriller, Sweden’s official entry to this year’s Academy Awards splits the difference between the highbrow cringe comedy of "Toni Erdmann" and the lowbrow cop fantasy "Bright."
  68. The Getaway
    Brutal but hugely entertaining.
  69. Knife + Heart
    The gauzy cinematography also helps, as does the mise-en-scène, which poses Anne’s chosen family of proud perverts in studied tableaus reminiscent of the Renaissance masters. Only, you know, in a porno.
  70. Who We Are Now
    Newton’s screenplays still suffer from third-act problems — both "From Nowhere" and Who We Are Now conclude with an ironic twist that feels slightly cheap — but his dedication to fine-grained real-world complexity sets him apart from most indie filmmakers these days.
  71. The Last House on the Left
    Wes Craven's The Last House On The Left occasionally plays like the longest, grisliest drug-scare film ever made.
  72. Soylent Green
    Though the mystery has been spoiled somewhat by an over-revealed twist ending, Soylent Green still succeeds thanks to director Richard Fleischer's sure command of one of the grimmest and most sadly plausible dystopias put to film.
  73. A Perfect World
    It’s material primed for mushiness, yet Eastwood shrewdly marries sentimentality to both self-deprecating humor (including a late bullhorn gag) and darker, more desolate undercurrents.
  74. In the Heights
    In The Heights’ irrepressible energy—transmitted by a big cast of rising stars and veteran performers—is the perfect note on which to kick off this summer’s blockbuster season.
  75. Super Fly
    Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur.
  76. The Dark Crystal
    The story is a standard fairy-tale concoction, but the New Agey philosophy about healing and heroism makes for a classic Henson story, all heart and rapturous wonder at the world's incredible possibilities.
  77. The Three Caballeros
    Where the prequel is weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy, exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity.
  78. Barfly
    Barfly has few peers when it comes to pitch-black comedies of ill manners.
  79. 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.
  80. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    I wish the film had made its points a little more artfully and implicitly, rather than simply sticking them in McDonald and McKinney’s mouths, but Brain Candy has an overarching satirical vision that makes it much more than just an assemblage of mostly funny running gags and stand-alone bits.
  81. The Poseidon Adventure
    There's ample overacting by the likes of Stella Stevens, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, but the movie's one-obstacle-atop-another plot—and active meditation on faith—remain sharp and surprising.
  82. Phantom of the Paradise
    A smorgasbord of camp, Grand Guignol, and bird imagery that thumbed its metal beak at commercial considerations.
  83. Time After Time
    It may eventually champion love as the guiding light amidst so much homicidal darkness, but Meyer’s film—happy ending be damned—resonates most deeply when confronting the ugly, inescapable reality that man’s murderous past is likely also his future.
  84. The Changeling
    An underrated entry in the horror subgenre, generating consistent unease through long, ominous pans—up and down staircases, through hallways—that assume the perspective of its searching-for-peace specter.
  85. Hotel by the River
    But despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself.
  86. The Wolf Man
    The Curt Siodmak-penned, George Waggner-directed film uses werewolf legends as an excuse to put modern minds comfortable living with moral ambiguity into conflict with undeniable evil.
  87. Too Late to Die Young
    For better and worse (mostly better), Too Late To Die Young is a mood movie, situated on an emotional precipice.
  88. Lifeboat
    The roots of reality TV can be found here, but unlike most reality TV, Hitchcock shows a genuine (though characteristically distant) interest in people.
  89. Dead Souls
    The storytelling ends up saying nearly as much as the stories themselves: Not simply capturing and filing memories, the film becomes a portrait of how these survivors have processed their trauma, how they’ve framed the horror of their experiences, and how they’ve coped with survivors’ guilt.
  90. Torn Curtain
    Despite some weaknesses, the film remains a bold and challenging work, one that flies in the face of the conventional spy thrillers of its day.
  91. Her Smell
    Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.
  92. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    Minervini is not at his most provocative in What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire? That’s a good thing.
  93. The Exorcist III
    Dread this thick stays with you, long after the shock of projectile vomit and masturbation by crucifix has worn off.
  94. Body Snatchers
    Ferrara, a visual expressionist at heart, creates some really unsettling moments, though maybe the most impressive thing about the movie is that it manages to make what’s basically a happy ending seem soul-crushingly bleak.
  95. King Kong
    I’m still deeply fond of De Laurentiis’ King Kong now, no doubt in part because we’ll never see its likes again. Whatever the failings of its ape effects, they have a tangible quality that even Jackson’s great CGI work couldn’t fake.
  96. Melody Time
    Though not the masterpiece Disney's marketing would indicate, it is a charming, imaginative anthology of cartoon shorts set to music by the likes of such '40s favorites as Roy Rogers and The Andrews Sisters.
  97. The Rescuers Down Under
    It’s a gorgeous, visually ambitious film, full of show-offy setpieces reportedly inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    A remarkably faithful adaptation of Victor Hugo's epic 1831 novel about a lovable, golden-voiced hunchback and his trio of zany, wise-cracking gargoyle sidekicks, The Hunchback of Notre Dame should please both Disney fans and 19th century French romanticists alike.
  99. Cam
    Mazzei’s script and Goldhaber’s direction complement each other beautifully, with true-to-life details like the tacky dollar-store carpet that decorates Alice’s camming room and the pink taser she keeps in her car playing off of—and enhancing—the naturalistic dialogue.
  100. The Mustang
    It’s all well-trod territory. And yet — and here’s another cliché — The Mustang breathes new life into most of those conventions, thanks in no small part to Schoenaerts and his remarkable work.
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