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. Daniel Isn't Real
    Mortimer builds Daniel Isn’t Real to a conclusion that, in concept, should be both tragic and terrifying. Here, it just feels perfunctory.
  2. A Million Little Pieces
    The movie version plays exactly like every other rehab-facility melodrama ever made. Even the stuff that Frey invented seems overly familiar, borrowed from sources ranging from "28 Days" to (somewhat improbably — people in recovery aren’t necessarily allowed dental anesthetic, it turns out) "Marathon Man."
  3. 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.
  4. The Aeronauts
    On the whole, The Aeronauts is a pretty good small-scale adventure movie. It’s also a pretty dull everything-else, the unceasing flashbacks providing multiple instances where telling might have been preferable to showing.
  5. The Two Popes
    Apart from its impressive (though partially digital) recreation of the Sistine Chapel, The Two Popes offers little in the way of purely cinematic pleasures, relying almost exclusively on the expert parrying of Hopkins and Pryce.
  6. Queen & Slim
    Maybe it’s inevitable that the film ends up feeling like an extremely diluted combination of Matsoukas’ two most famous music videos, crossing the political imagery of Beyoncé’s “Formation” with the outlaw imagery of Rihanna’s “We Found Love”—though it’s nowhere as stylish as the former or as sexy as the latter.
  7. Little Women
    Little Women is the best kind of Hollywood film: thoughtful yet escapist, sophisticated yet accessible, expertly crafted and deeply felt. The performances are all top notch—Ronan and Pugh, especially, breathe new life into their characters. Gerwig’s direction is also first rate.
  8. Varda by Agnès
    As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.
  9. 21 Bridges
    This is a well-crafted, exciting movie, sometimes more impressive for maintaining those qualities in the face of an utterly unsurprising story.
  10. Waves
    Waves felt to me like a bitching soundtrack in search of a movie. Maybe I’ll find one on rewatch.
  11. Frozen II
    Frozen II is just an echo, drawing prospective fans in without finding many new notes to hit.
  12. The Good Liar
    Instead of deepening his material, Condon has made an unsuccessful fling of a movie: fun for a while, but trying to get as far as it can by leaving crucial material off of its profile.
  13. Dark Waters
    Dark Waters would likely have been a forgettable mediocrity in anybody’s hands, given its fact-based, muckraking limitations. Coming from the visionary who gave us Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, and Carol, it’s a crushing disappointment.
  14. Ford v Ferrari
    Setting aside more particular genre trappings, Mangold re-engineers one of his unfussy studio throwbacks into a supersized Dad Movie event.
  15. I Lost My Body
    Where it fumbles is in the framing device.
  16. The Hottest August
    While it never feels completely defeatist, her film offers scattered snapshots of an uncertain society in its dog days.
  17. Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
  18. Noelle
    Noelle has a few of those peppermint hot chocolate moments, but thanks to its bizarre warm-weather detour and wasting of a stellar cast, it just barely makes the nice list.
  19. Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
  20. The Report
    The actor’s (Driver) performance isn’t just gripping; it’s inspiring. He’s not just portraying Jones; he’s embodying an ideal.
  21. Playing with Fire
    It’s more tedious than unwatchable, and pint-size Cena fans may be curious to see him in a movie more compatible with his Kids’ Choice Awards hosting gigs than the likes of "Blockers" or "Trainwreck." Sadly, the movie never shows similar curiosity about what its young audience, and subjects, might be thinking or feeling.
  22. Midway
    A stolid film that largely rests on its director’s competence at helming extravagant aerial views of pyrotechnic destruction.
  23. Last Christmas
    As escapist comfort-food cinema goes, this is a stick-to-your-ribs, tryptophan-coma-size helping.
  24. Primal
    One hires Cage for a generic timewaster like this in the hope that he’ll make it at least a little more interesting on screen than it was on paper, by virtue of some crazed facial expressions and off-the-wall line readings, but he evidently wasn’t in the experimenting mood.
  25. The Kingmaker
    While researching the project, Greenfield herself thought she might find a “redemption story.” But the film eventually proves to be a far more troubling examination of the Marcoses’ continued political hold in the Philippines.
  26. Lady and the Tramp
    Watching the remake over-explain every joke and dramatic beat only increases one’s appreciation for how the original trusted its young audience to understand subtext, satire, and emotional nuance.
  27. The Current War
    The truth is that a movie about deeply personal obsessions can’t work if it doesn’t have some of its own, and the prevailing mood of The Current War is indifference.
  28. Arctic Dogs
    There’s really not much to recommend about this film: the animation lacks texture, the score is overwrought, the plotting is scattershot, and the character design is uninspired.
  29. Doctor Sleep
    For as much as the story concerns leaping into other people’s heads, Flanagan never quite gets into Danny’s; his tortured grappling with his memories is abstract at best, McGregor’s mostly functional performance failing to offer the necessary window into that process.
  30. Redoubt
    It seems as though the artist, all too aware of his reputation for both pageantry and shock value, has decided to offer nothing of the kind.
  31. Light From Light
    While the contemplative tone and measured pacing are definitely features instead of bugs, Light Of Light is so anodyne at times that it borders on inert.
  32. Harriet
    A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.
  33. American Dharma
    What made this particular project so toxic? Simple: American Dharma is a fundamentally cordial conversation with Steve Bannon.
  34. Motherless Brooklyn
    This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.
  35. Paradise Hills
    This accessibility actually hurts the film, exposing the flimsy balsa-wood architecture under all those frills.
  36. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces caters to its intended viewers’ least savory biases, making sure all student activists shown fit into particular categories—overweight, gay, or simply “angry and black”—that stoke the resentment of the target demographic.
  37. Black and Blue
    A generically competent but unsuspenseful chase film that never lives up to its potential for either social commentary or thrills.
  38. Countdown
    In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.
  39. The Kill Team
    Its depiction of toxic masculinity and bloodthirstiness within the U.S. Army is blunted by an overly passive lead performance and a lack of specificity in its storytelling.
  40. Terminator: Dark Fate
    Dark Fate serves as a case study for the difficulty of crafting a satisfying follow-up to a pair of certified classics, a process that seems to involve constant toggling between hopelessness and insisting that all is not lost. As such, it’s hard to blame Cameron for keeping his old series at arm’s length. It’s also hard to stay interested in a franchise that looks, with each inessential sequel, more and more like a doomsday prepper rephrasing the same old prophecy.
  41. Synonyms
    Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.
  42. Frankie
    The whole thing struck me as pleasant, nicely judged, and unremarkable, right up to a final shot so graceful and moving that it sent waves of poignancy backwards through the movie.
  43. Wounds
    Hammer’s character, Will, is an empty vessel, no more than an updated model of the jerkwad boyfriend in every ’80s slasher.
  44. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
    Awkward and unfunny in exceptionally long stretches, Reboot probably won’t turn his diehard fans against him. But it’s unlikely to win him any new converts either. For that, there’s "Clerks," "Mallrats," or "Chasing Amy."
  45. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.
  46. By the Grace of God
    Mostly, though, this very empathetic project suffers from an inability to offer anything beyond what one would expect from its synopsis.
  47. The Cave
    It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.
  48. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.
  49. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    Refreshingly, Gilligan doesn’t try to run away from his TV-writing instincts: Each proceeding stage in Jesse’s high-stakes predicament plays out like its own distinct episode, a further blurring of the lines between media that might’ve been distracting in a bygone era, but is right at home on Netflix.
  50. Jexi
    Surely, bland cultural insights can’t defeat a film whose main attraction is the promise of stupid, raunchy fun? Reader, Jexi fails even at that, as it awkwardly struggles across its slim running time to land a single one of its existentially painful, seemingly bot-generated jokes.
  51. The Addams Family
    Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.
  52. Gemini Man
    One can smirk at the movie’s fuzzy philosophies and primordial clichés and still appreciate the delivery of Lee’s action scenes.
  53. Mister America
    Running only a little shorter than the average season of On Cinema At The Cinema, it’s never as cringe-inducingly funny or inventive as the webseries that spawned it.
  54. In My Room
    Written and directed by Ulrich Köhler (and co-produced by Köhler’s romantic partner, Maren Ade, a superb filmmaker in her own right), this droll yet poignant amalgam of the fantastic and the mundane ultimately suggests that while people can dramatically alter their behavior in response to extreme circumstances, on some fundamental level they don’t really change.
  55. The King
    It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.
  56. Pain and Glory
    Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.
  57. The Harder They Come
    While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.
  58. In the Tall Grass
    The movie is a mixed bag, well shot and well acted enough to mostly keep the viewer’s attention, but meandering enough to frustrate at the same time. It’s bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.
  59. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.
  60. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.
  61. Low Tide
    Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.
  62. Wrinkles the Clown
    The story of Wrinkles The Clown and the public reaction to his antics is funny, weird, and timely — there may just not be enough of it to warrant a feature-length documentary.
  63. Greener Grass
    Always in control of its deeply bizarre, suburban surrealist tone, even when its story is more like a series of comedy sketches than a feature film.
  64. The Irishman
    The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.
  65. Dolemite Is My Name
    What the film lacks in depth and focus, it makes up for in personality. Murphy’s obviously the star here, but Moore’s loyal entourage comes to the movie with plenty of charisma of its own.
  66. The Death of Dick Long
    Billy Chew’s screenplay takes at least one important lesson from the best of both crime movies and small-town portraits: The characters, however minor or ridiculous, seem to lead lives that started well before the movie and will continue long after. Well, except for Dick himself. He’s gone.
  67. The Day Shall Come
    Bitter and bracingly funny new political satire from British dark-comedy master Chris Morris.
  68. First Love
    First Love ranks among Miike’s most purely entertaining movies (out of more than 100 now!), gradually building steam until it reaches a sustained pitch of cheerful insanity.
  69. In the Shadow of the Moon
    In The Shadow Of The Moon is a disappointing misfire all around, but no matter—like so many other Netflix original films, it’ll be reabsorbed into the streaming void soon enough.
  70. The Golden Glove
    Whatever pleasure there is to be found in watching a film like The Golden Glove is in the intellectualizing, and the film does prompt a series of provocative questions about the implicit contract between artist and audience.
  71. Rambo: Last Blood
    The sequence is Last Blood’s pièce de résistance, and perhaps the only compelling reason the movie has to exist. But it’s also pure, relentless, grimacing punishment at the end of a joyless film, choreographed like a ritual sacrifice. Rambo has always been a monster, but in his old age, he has become something even worse: no fun.
  72. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Between Two Ferns meanders; it invents often-pointless conflicts between its characters; it sometimes feels like a film casting around desperately for an emotional hook to rest itself upon.... It’s also deeply funny, surrounding a talented comedian with other talented comedians and letting them riff off of each other for a feature’s worth of length.
  73. Abominable
    The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.
  74. Bloodline
    Director Henry Jacobson’s gory thriller is initially quite effective when it complements the lies families tell each other with arcs of jugular blood.
  75. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.
  76. Midnight Traveler
    If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.
  77. Loro
    Servillo—who previously embodied another former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, in Sorrentino’s Il Divo—never fails to deliver a memorably offbeat take on an outsize figure. Loro loses a bit of momentum once Berlusconi finally becomes its central figure, but it also gains some much-needed complexity.
  78. 3 from Hell
    In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.
  79. Ad Astra
    A mesmerizing sci-fi drama.
  80. Corporate Animals
    Corporate Animals, a dark comedy with horrific undertones that should draw upon many of their previous experiences, never feels especially relatable.
  81. The Laundromat
    Perhaps The Laundromat just runs into the limits of trying to merge agitprop and fun. Soderbergh’s assemblage of Hollywood somebodies is the sugar to make the medicine go down; he’s hoping, like McKay, that disguising this dissertation as a stylish, star-studded good time will help its lessons stick. But the result is occasionally as tiresome as an economics professor more concerned with being liked than with teaching you anything.
  82. Bad Education
    The strength of Jackman’s performance is that he hoodwinks us with his decency.
  83. Depraved
    Breaux is able to wring great pathos out of the character of Adam with very few words, which only makes Henry and Polidori’s arguments about ethics, which increase in frequency as the film goes on, seem all the more tedious.
  84. Jojo Rabbit
    Jojo Rabbit, a very nice but thin crowd-pleaser about love conquering all, bills itself as an “anti-hate satire.” But true satire challenges and provokes. This one offers free hugs.
  85. Uncut Gems
    The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.
  86. Marriage Story
    Marriage Story, unlike so many other breakup movies, offers venom in drips and drops instead of drowning us in it, because it knows that no matter how far apart Charlie and Nicole drift, the feelings that first brought them together are still there, informing their flawed attempts to move on without destroying each other.
  87. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    It’s a good story—especially the focus on music as redeemer—but it does feel a bit too warm and fuzzy.
  88. The Sound of Silence
    There’s no much going on here, either thematically or narratively.
  89. Hustlers
    Plenty of crime capers end ruefully, but few feel this potently bittersweet.
  90. Downton Abbey
    The big-screen version of Downton Abbey is still engaging, well-dressed comfort food. It just doesn’t quite feel like a full meal.
  91. Freaks
    The film shrewdly keeps us inside Chloe’s head, filtered through her very limited comprehension of her burgeoning and truly awesome abilities.
  92. Monos
    Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.
  93. The Goldfinch
    It’s an empty approximation of art, all gleaming surfaces masking a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there’s no basic utility to this imitation.
  94. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    There’s something tidy and even schematic about the story of redemption and forgiveness A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood ultimately tells.
  95. Joker
    For all its novelty and craft, Joker is more of a stylish stunt than anything else.
  96. The Truth
    Seeing the director’s usual style applied to a whole different culture provides fascination enough. Not surprising, maybe, but welcome.
  97. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    While the act of gracefully condensing this big book into a coherent movie is indeed impressive, the truth is that said movie does end up feeling a bit like glorified cliff’s notes, albeit ones enlivened by Iannucci’s gift for volleying banter.
  98. True History of the Kelly Gang
    It’s refreshing to discover that True History has an actual perspective on the events of Ned’s formative years.
  99. Judy
    It’s an intriguing idea that results in a painfully by-the-books biopic. That being said, a gusty, heartbreaking turn from Renée Zellweger makes the exercise worth sitting through.
  100. Knives Out
    Far from empty sleight-of-hand, Knives Out twists its borrowed, rearranged mechanics into a timely, sincere, and ultimately moving celebration of decency in the face of moral failure. To paraphrase one of Blanc’s funnier musings, that’s the donut within the donut hole.
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