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. Mucho Mucho Amor
    As one former collaborator notes, Mercado almost certainly wouldn’t have achieved the level of fame if he’d ever come out as gay. Mercado proved you could be idolized while still being othered, a fact that’s too often glossed over in stories of marginalized people who break down barriers. But that reality couldn’t dampen Mercado’s love–or lust, as he put it—for life, nor does it prevent Mucho Mucho Amor from radiating with it.
  2. The Green Knight
    Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.
  3. 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.
  4. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.
  5. Benedetta
    Belgian movie star Virginie Efira plays the title character with complete conviction, whether she’s kneeling in awe before the Virgin Mary or being pleasured with a dildo carved out of a statue of the Blessed Mother.
  6. Feels Good Man
    Pretty darn entertaining.
  7. 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.
  8. The Woman Who Ran
    An unassuming but richly suggestive portrait of a lonely vacationer.
  9. 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.
  10. Caged Heat
    Caged Heat is inspired from start to finish.
  11. Mona Lisa
    His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare.
  12. 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.
  13. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    An overlooked gem in the annals of low-budget horror.
  14. Yankee Doodle Dandy
    There may be no American movie more patriotic than Yankee Doodle Dandy, a jingoistic biopic of famed Broadway star George M. Cohan that transcends its innumerable genre clichés through the sheer willpower of its star.
  15. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The entire picture exudes the wide-eyed (some might say immature) wonderment found around slobbering beasts and magic spells. No, you absolutely do not need to know a thing about D&D to like this. But if you have a familiarity with the Forgotten Realms, the 1980s D&D cartoon show, or if you’re just a Led Zeppelin fan, there’s something here for you. Otherwise, there’s too much going on to ever feel left out.
  16. Wise Blood
    Huston’s tone sometimes feels as conflicted as his protagonist’s, and the overbearing Alex North score doesn’t help. But the decision, possibly helped by the film’s tiny budget, to shoot the novel as a contemporary piece with no period trappings and a minimum of the attendant Southern-gothic clichés pays off beautifully.
  17. Brute Force
    Brilliantly photographed by William H. Daniels, Brute Force is both a humanistic personal drama and a bravura piece of genre filmmaking.
  18. Wild Strawberries
    Wild Strawberries remains a surprisingly optimistic and affirmative movie about getting old: It’s only natural for people at the end of their lives to reflect on the roads taken or not taken. And there’s peace on the other side.
  19. Amulet
    Amulet elevates these themes of repentance and sin through deft editing, strong performances, and a chilling score. It’s an evocative, confident debut, recalling the metaphorical horror of Jennifer Kent’s "The Babadook" or Babak Anvari’s "Under The Shadow," even as it announces the arrival of a singular new voice.
  20. The Naked City
    Perhaps the best thing about Naked City is that it does justice to that source material. At times, it rivals Weegee's best work in its harsh, unsentimental portrayal of New York as a city with a dark side the size of the Hudson River.
  21. The Honeymoon Killers
    That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.
  22. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    Ultimately, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise is a documentary about the myriad ways that the poor stay poor, and the way our society marginalizes them by reducing them to numbers on a balance sheet instead of people with their own unique stories to tell and their own network of friends and family who love and rely on them.
  23. 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.
  24. Point Blank
    Point Blank smartly joins film-noir elements with techniques from the then-cresting British, French, and Italian new waves.
  25. Adam's Rib
    George Cukor employs an unusually large number of long takes, often allowing the inspired spats between his leads to play out in unbroken real time. But the much more likely explanation for the film’s enduring popularity has to be the way it took the gender politics underlying many of the duo’s collaborations and made them the full-fledged focus.
  26. Animal Crackers
    Animal Crackers leaves the song-and-dance to Groucho in the great "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," sends Harpo running after screaming blondes in the background, and breaks down the fourth wall for a wry Eugene O'Neill parody.
  27. Without Limits
    Towne never strains for effect, justifiably confident that his polished staging and wry, sneaky wit will be enough to give resonance to Pre's life.
  28. 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.
  29. They Live by Night
    It's a strikingly poetic first feature, more about the naïve romance between young hoodlum Granger and his reluctant nursemaid Cathy O'Donnell than it is about robbing banks and dodging cops.
  30. 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.
  31. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Although Stanfield and Kaluuya offer up two compelling—and contrasting—performances, Judas And The Black Messiah is an ensemble piece with no weak links, only secret weapons.
  32. I Care a Lot
    I Care A Lot isn’t some brilliantly subversive social satire. It’s a tightly constructed, masterfully acted, lightly stylish little caper picture, which revels in just how mean it can be. It’s not essential, and it’s not for everybody. But for those who prefer their pulp to carry the faint aroma of moral rot, this movie is a real treat.
  33. Horse Feathers
    Anarchy finally reigned supreme in 1932's classic Horse Feathers, which was the first Marx brothers comedy that smoothly integrated the story into the troupe's routine.
  34. 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.
  35. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.
  36. I Am Greta
    Still, there’s something instructive in how little progress Thunberg seems to make even with sympathetic politicians—which means that she has to keep raising her pitch. And there’s definitely something infuriating about all the clips of world leaders and snarky TV pundits mocking Greta, calling her stridently angry, dangerously naive, and even “mentally ill.”
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. Night of the Kings
    Lacôte’s got a lot on his mind, and despite a few missteps, his ambition pays off.
  41. Wolfwalkers
    A vibrant and expressive fantasy, magical and unyoked to realism without pulling any punches about the destructive folly of manifest destiny.
  42. Enemies of the State
    Over time, its perspective subtly mutates, even as its methodology remains exactly the same.
  43. Limbo
    The narrowness of the frame forces us closer to what is caught within it, and the result is often bracing or achingly tender.
  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. 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.
  46. Monkey Business
    In casting the brothers as stowaways on an ocean liner, Monkey Business gets laughs from broad Keystone Kops chase scenes, but extends the absurdity even further with bizarre one-liners (Groucho claims he "licked his weight in wild caterpillars") and a sequence in which all four brothers try to get off the boat by impersonating Maurice Chevalier.
  47. 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.
  48. 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.
  49. 76 Days
    The overall impression 76 Days delivers is that of dedicated professionals coping with an unprecedented onslaught of emergencies to the best of their ability, grimly waiting for the curve to flatten.
  50. Pillow Talk
    It’s the perfect first-date movie: It’s flirty and romantic and a little bit saucy, but it leaves viewers with just a peck on the cheek at the end of the night.
  51. Mister Roberts
    With no battles and a setting that primarily stays on the U.S.S. Reluctant, Mister Roberts still captivates, aided by some shimmering dialogue already polished to perfection by the Broadway version, along with the renegade hijinks of the crew.
  52. Husbands
    John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial.
  53. The Thin Man
    Powell and Loy's light, witty, unflappable characterizations became the unwavering backbone of a terrific series.
  54. Daughters of Darkness
    This psychologically dense, genuinely erotic vampire thriller lacks fangs, but it has plenty of bite.
  55. The Hidden
    The Hidden is a textbook example of how a B-movie can transcend its origins and budgetary constraints through craft, imagination, and all-around resourcefulness. Shifting genres almost as often as its villain changes bodies, it's at once an enormously effective thriller, a smart exercise in science fiction, an exciting action movie, and a kinetic dark comedy.
  56. The Company of Wolves
    A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path.
  57. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The honesty behind Garcia's queasiest moments gives the film its pull.
  58. Robin and Marian
    Robin And Marian would merely be an exercise in theory if the actors didn't make it breathe. Their scenes together a combination of easy humor and wistful grace notes, Connery and Hepburn find an easy rapport, playing something between legendary lovers and an old married couple.
  59. Some Kind of Heaven
    Some Kind Of Heaven contrasts the dissatisfaction of its subjects with the sunniness of their surroundings, the better to stress the wide gap separating how they feel and how they’re expected to feel in a community one talking head refers to, un-ironically, as “nirvana.”
  60. 3 Godfathers
    The fairy-tale-like 3 Godfathers casts Wayne as one of a trio of outlaws charged with caring for a baby, and discovering responsibility and perhaps his soul (the two go hand-in-hand for Ford) in the process.
  61. Meet Me in St. Louis
    An ambitious nostalgia piece with a broad emotional palette.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet uses an accessible medium to show the evils of propaganda and express the need for individuality. Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well.
  63. The Mack
    From its inception, The Mack had more on its mind than delivering a blaxploitation film, a label director Michael Campus always resisted. He shouldn’t have. His film is one of the finest examples of the genre, a smartly executed and deeply ambitious story of crime, corruption, and prostitution, shot on location in Oakland, California.
  64. The Three Musketeers
    The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.
  65. The Element of Crime
    Crime's dreamlike tone and fantastic visuals make it impossible to forget, like an absurd nightmare that overshadows the following day. Even if Von Trier never made another movie, viewers would still watch and admire this debut.
  66. Bitter Moon
    Widely reviled a decade ago, Bitter Moon now plays as a visionary bridging of Brian De Palma's cinematic perversity and Takashi Miike's literal perversity, in addition to being another uncompromising Polanski study of the ways people torture each other.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    A haunting, expressionistic portrait of two lonely souls who have reached out for companionship and instead found themselves on a proving ground, where they are mercilessly denuded of their protective lies and self-deception.
  68. Censor
    Censor’s meticulous, insidious structure sticks to the subconscious; this is an auspicious debut in modern genre cinema.
  69. John and the Hole
    John And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts.
  70. Pleasure
    “Shocking” is a word that gets thrown around too frequently. But it’s all too fitting for Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, a graphic, gripping, and unflinching drama charting the rocky rise of an ambitious newcomer to the adult film industry.
  71. Hive
    This is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.
  72. Sator
    Sator is an effective exercise in what the horror genre does best, underscoring awful truths—in this case, dementia and generational trauma—by making them explicitly monstrous. What Graham understands is that there are few things scarier than the ultimate fragility of the human brain and everything contained within
  73. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    Without a doubt, Wallace was more comfortable with his boys, and Biggie serves as an origin story on how his rise to hip-hop stardom took not just him but also his people out of the projects.
  74. 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.
  75. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    If the movie were just meme-able moments, it might run out of steam, even with Cage delivering them practically nonstop. Thankfully, there’s an actual plot, which allows everyone else (and the film as a whole) to spoof less Cage-specific tropes.
  76. Sonatine
    Like the character he plays, Kitano directs the film in a style that alternates between tenderness and brutality, making it a relentlessly tense suspense film one minute and a gentle character study the next. Either half would make Sonatine worth seeing. But taken together as the story of a man who regains his soul but whose face remains permeated with the knowledge of its inevitable loss, it becomes an artful gangster film, Yakuza poetry, and essential viewing.
  77. Oklahoma!
    Both State Fair and Oklahoma! exemplify the composers' re-imagining of the musical form, which relied on more subtle vocal techniques, and songs that were catchy without always being hooky. The movies also catch the pair's unique version of nostalgia, which salutes provincial values while suggesting that they may not be enough to satisfy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Edge of Seventeen
    While Edge Of Seventeen was marketed largely toward gay audiences, it’ll resonate with anyone who remembers the awkwardness and elation of their first sexual experiences, because it captures those experiences better and more honestly than practically any other film.
  79. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.
  80. No Sudden Move
    Movies routinely place characters in desperate, life-or-death situations, but rarely do we see them behave in a genuinely desperate way. No Sudden Move, a period crime drama written by Ed Solomon and directed by Steven Soderbergh, corrects this oversight in a way that’s at once hilarious and distressing.
  81. a-ha: the Movie
    It’s a compelling tale of three perfectionists who consider music to be their bond, but don’t work together very well unless they have to.
  82. Catch the Fair One
    Although Wladyka foregrounds the movie’s razor-sharp edge—there’s a torture scene midway through that’s especially shocking—there’s a political undercurrent to the story, as well as an emotional one, that give Catch The Fair One uncommon resonance.
  83. Italian Studies
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
  84. 7 Days
    As a romantic comedy, 7 Days hardly circumvents a cinematic lexicon of time-honored tropes, but its skill in dismantling stereotypes, sexist beliefs, and even the process of falling in love offers a fresh and charming rejoinder to the cynicism of both its own genre and the emerging repetition of pandemic-set films.
  85. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    Quippy, zippy, and punchy, this teen-focused take on everyone’s favorite pizza-loving vigilantes is a refreshing reappraisal of a property that could very well have felt stale in 2023.
  86. Tenebrae
    Franciosa and John Saxon (as his agent) turn in amusing performances, and Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch.
  87. Bergman Island
    In its strongest, most evocative scenes, Bergman Island feels like peering in someone else’s window, sensing an echo of your own experiences, and marveling at all the ways a stranger could remind you of yourself.
  88. Belle
    Individual moments in Belle are frequently magical: Many of the real-world scenes are beautifully staged and illustrated, with characters moving quietly and slowly through outdoor spaces while sunlight dapples across the water and birds flit by.
  89. tick, tick...Boom!
    In joyfully embracing just about every tool in the movie-musical toolbox, Miranda crafts a fitting tribute to the act of artistic creation. And he might just make some musical converts in the process.
  90. The Meaning of Life
    The Meaning Of Life is unsparing and elaborate in its vision of humanity at its foulest.
  91. Eternity and a Day
    Eternity And A Day occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are emotionally resonant.
  92. The Worst Person in the World
    For all of Trier’s stylistic flair, the best scenes in The Worst Person In The World are unadorned conversations, little pockets of chemistry or conflict. The film peaks with a self-contained romantic episode, beautifully written and performed
  93. Deep Cover
    As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.
  94. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
    It’s less a story of the supernatural than one about a party on the wrong side of town, with hints of danger, interesting strangers to meet, and an overall cool vibe that even lingers the morning after.
  95. The Lost Daughter
    For most of the movie’s running time, Gyllenhaal pulls off a remarkable trick, turning everyday inconveniences like rotting fruit and rude people—and deeper existential crises like regretting parenthood—into sources of nerve-jangling tension. The film is like a chase picture, with a heroine racing in vain to escape societal expectations.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Western
    The film toys with the idea that your identity is determined not by where you're from but where you find love. It's an intriguing theory that makes the otherwise simple movie seem more complex and frequently affecting.
  97. Thieves
    At two and a half hours, it's a bit too long, but it's probably the most emotionally authentic film noir since The Grifters.
  98. Copshop
    Carnahan’s formal proficiency makes for a more sharpened and accomplished piece of work than many modern counterparts attempting to draw from the same well of cheap-o homage. That sense of precision doesn’t detract from the down-and-dirty fun, either; everyone on screen appears to be having the time of their lives gnawing on the rare slab of beef they’ve been thrown.
  99. The Wonder
    Thanks to a typically mesmerizing leading turn from Florence Pugh, it’s a film that can hold up a mirror to believers and nonbelievers alike as the best stories of faith do.
  100. Neptune Frost
    There’s little about it that is realistic, but it has points to make about the real world.
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