The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is an excellent movie about a beloved figure who indeed seems ageless and whose story includes the kind of comebacks usually reserved for fiction.
  2. Montana Story
    This is a deeply felt work anchored by two earthy performances that stay small-scaled no matter how melodramatic the slowly revealed secrets become.
  3. 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.
  4. Pieces
    The movie manages to luck into that ideal combination of over-the-top bloodshed, gratuitous nudity (of both male and female types, though the latter is, as expected, the mainstage show), and unintentional absurdity for which enthusiasts of the genre are perpetually on the hunt.
  5. Becoming Cousteau
    What this fascinating, thoughtful documentary is really about is how even an icon can evolve. The “becoming” part of a life never really ends.
  6. Beba
    It can be overwhelming at times, and it’s true that Huntt’s deeply rooted powers of introspection can sometimes curdle into self-absorption. But her lacerating honesty and restless, searching spirit make Beba a virtuoso bomb-drop of a documentary.
  7. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    Just getting to see McDormand and Washington assay these famous parts makes this Macbeth worth preserving for posterity, alongside Fences in the Denzel Washington Giants Of Theatre section. But Coen’s equivalent of a solo album has its own virtuosic style.
  8. The Forever Prisoner
    Gibney’s challenging interview style, the uncompromising tone of his questions, and the way he undercuts Mitchell’s self-aggrandizing martyrdom (and conveniently murky timeline regarding the deployment of EITs in the field) are satisfying distillations of what so many people who recognize Mitchell as a war criminal who got away would probably like to say.
  9. Hold Your Fire
    Forbes’ film is a fine tribute to him, and a fascinating glimpse at a different, but not distant, past.
  10. Watermelon Man
    The pounding prelude to a cultural and cinematic revolution, Watermelon Man nearly bubbles over with the rage that exploded outright with Van Peebles' follow-up, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.
  11. X
    While you’re languishing in the performances and period detail, West is sneaking up to pull the rug out from beneath you, or to raze some outdated cliché. X is bloody, ballsy fun.
  12. A Quiet Place: Day One
    Nyong’o, a prestige actress who moonlights as the world’s most expressive scream queen, does wonders with the nuances of Sam’s sorrow, the tug of war between acceptance and fighting for her life.
  13. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    Carlo Collodi’s serialized story for kids may have inspired it, but del Toro isn’t going for fealty. He very much has a take, and if he creeps you out with it, so much the better.
  14. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    It’s a sexually frank and intimate story told in a pleasingly mainstream manner that avoids greeting card clichés and empty “girl power” posturing.
  15. Emily the Criminal
    Here Plaza sacrifices her signature irreverence for a bone-deep frustration that feels all too relatable, even ordinary, resulting in the most true-to-life performance of her career.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hatching
    Hatching is an efficiently told fable, the moral of which is multilayered, making the ending a puzzling emotional experience that both begs for resolution and feels like a confident choice for a first time filmmaker.
  17. Resurrection
    Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
  18. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    The imagery runs backward and forward, gets freeze-framed, goes through different filters, and is blown up, reduced, diced, and re-assembled like playing cards. But director Bianca Stigter fully commits to this formalist dare—and it pays off tremendously.
  19. Wonka
    In King and company’s capable hands, the care package delivered is a soul-warming cup of cocoa. Sweet yet never saccharine, cute yet never cloying, their hyper-stylized portrait of an iconic literary and cinematic figure is not only powered by the pure imagination that inspires the songs’ spectacle, but it’s also filled with audacious flourishes of charm, whimsy and poignancy.
  20. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    It functions reasonably well as a straightforward, agonized melodrama, but it’s first and foremost a master class—co-taught by famed cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Quiz Show), who got his start with Fassbinder—in the dynamic visual use of a constricted space, and proof that a tiny budget is no excuse.
  21. Not Okay
    This deceptively frothy yet incisive little film asserts that even if the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, redemption can’t be claimed in public spaces. Rather, it has to be earned in private, and sometimes, forgiveness isn’t necessarily the most virtuous next step—especially since healing takes time. For these mature observations alone, we have no choice but stan a peerless Quinn.
  22. Fire Island
    As much a documentary-like depiction of the titular queer haven as it is a real-deal romantic comedy, Fire Island’s real love letter is to the experience that is Fire Island.
  23. The Sea Beast
    Overall, the narrative, performative, and visual splendor of The Sea Beast are enough to vastly outweigh minor issues in presentational consistency. This is a richly realized nautical world, with the animation team expressing an obvious love for the adventure stories that inspired it and a passion for telling a story as hopeful as it is exciting.
  24. Operation Mincemeat
    It’s also shot through with a humanizing sense of uncertainty, moral complication, and even wistfulness about the manner in which this work weighs upon its practitioners, for an altogether rewarding experience even for those viewers who traditionally eschew wartime dramas.
  25. The Asphalt Jungle
    The Asphalt Jungle would be considered a heist picture if the mood didn't dictate otherwise. The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor.
  26. Moonage Daydream
    If there’s a message at all in Moonage Daydream, it is secondary to the experiential nature of the movie. That’s hardly a knock. One goes to a concert to be thrilled, not necessarily to gather life lessons. Leave that sort of thing for the other, lesser documentaries.
  27. Mississippi Masala
    A wholly original story written and directed by women that thoughtfully explores the complexities of interracial love between people of color.
  28. The Menu
    Mylod’s stew saves its most mouth-watering plate for the last. That’s why it’s fiendishly delightful.
  29. The Gray Man
    Gosling’s one of those actors for whom a recurring action hero role somehow feels long overdue, and the Russos have taken advantage of more than just his good looks and smoldering gazes.
  30. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    Guadagnino’s documentary is very much like walking through an immersive and interactive museum designed to make one feel nostalgic for a bygone era of art and craft. It’s magical stuff.
  31. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon both dwell on the problems of leadership, balancing out a respect for classic American frontier virtues with a less generous assessment of how those virtues were applied.
  32. Dark Passage
    Dark Passage is usually ranked as the least of the four Bogart-Bacall collaborations, but it's a practically perfect little noir exercise, with Bogart as a prison escapee tracking his wife's killer.
  33. The Sentinel
    While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.
  34. High and Low
    While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.
  35. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    Beavis And Butt-head Do The Universe is pretty much what you expect—and it’s, uhhhhh, pretty cool.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Strange World
    Strange World feels like a new iteration of Disney, one that is more thoughtful and inclusive without sacrificing any of the humor or fun.
  37. Good Morning
    A knowing comedy, Good Morning isn't one of Ozu's indisputable masterpieces, but it serves as a fine example of everything he does well.
  38. She Will
    It’s the film’s mercurial nature, its hazy dreamlike logic, that makes it so extraordinary.
  39. 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.
  40. I Stand Alone
    I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Slam
    The powerful, natural acting is right out of a documentary, and the open-ended conclusion is an equally challenging statement about the sad futility of sending young people to jail.
  42. Orphan: First Kill
    Offering the winning combination of a subversive spin on a well-established villain, Orphan: First Kill is a gnarly, wild and absolutely demented ride.
  43. Fall
    Even on the couch, with the ability to hit pause, it reaches heights (ha!) of quintessential B-movie greatness, causing exactly the kind of discomfort that elicits verbal rebukes.
  44. Cats Don't Dance
    So many feature cartoons of this era operate under formula constraints; the animation of Cats Don’t Dance often feels exuberantly free.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Crucible
    It's a good movie about the Salem Witch Trials, featuring a gripping final reel and an impressively broad performance by Daniel Day-Lewis: His fine work throughout the movie's first two thirds is rewarded by several climactic Oscar-clip tirades.
  46. Rosaline
    Dever is as excellent as ever as the acerbic, quick-witted, jilted ex. She coaxes the hilariousness and heartbreak out of each scene with ease and authenticity.
  47. Hellraiser
    Bruckner, Collins, and Piotrowski plant their vision in fields that are no less rich, terrifying, or gorily violent than the hellbound story that started it all.
  48. Evil Dead Rise
    For fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago.
  49. 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.
  50. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Since more moviegoers are likely coming to a Magic Mike movie for the moves than the plot, let it be stated the moves are outstanding, even if the movers remain mostly blank slates.
  51. Christmas in Connecticut
    A thoroughly wacky 1945 screwball comedy that also doubles as a fascinatingly subversive commentary on conventional gender roles. It’s a bit of a hidden gem in the Christmas canon.
  52. Piggy
    As much as Piggy certainly has points to make about passive-aggressive status quo maintenance versus open violence, it unabashedly delivers enough terror, tension, and gore before it’s done.
  53. Variety Lights
    A moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.
  54. Sisters
    As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Nil by Mouth
    Shot through a bleary haze of cigarette smoke, alcohol, and hard drugs, Nil By Mouth is the cinematic equivalent of Oldman's old acting style, a return to form by absentia.
  56. Sharper
    The film operates like a clockwork mechanism. If there were foul-ups or major implausibilities—as such trick plots often have—they eluded me.
  57. Inside
    Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Scream VI
    Fueled by a seemingly endless appreciation for how enjoyable it can be to subvert horror conventions and audience expectations, Scream VI is one of the most fun (and funniest) modern horror experiences one can have at a movie theater.
  59. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    This is a funny, sweet, heartfelt exploration of pubescent self-discovery that lives up to its namesake.
  60. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers may peg its tale on a truism that can feel trite (you never know what others are going through). But Payne, Hemingson, and its central trio of actors find welcome nuances within that platitude.
  61. You Hurt My Feelings
    Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a treasure as always, basically plays it straight and is terrific.
  62. Eileen
    Oldroyd has crafted a strange and mysterious thriller with Eileen. It’s not entirely satisfying, however it’s also never less than imaginatively conceived and utterly beguiling.
  63. Talk to Me
    Though it leans on familiar genre tropes and stylistic conventions, a devastating script and charismatic cast (spearheaded by Sophie Wilde) make Talk To Me a terrifying and pervasively heartbreaking tale of grief.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Bottoms
    If Bottoms doesn’t land every single punch, we can be happy that at least someone is out here swinging.
  65. Joy Ride
    Joy Ride is a real blast, offering its sentimentality as a garnish to a road trip that emphasizes the sex in sex positivity.
  66. Napoleon
    Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
  67. House of Wax
    Characters are occasionally in physical danger (a young Charles Bronson, still billed as Charles Buchinsky, plays Jarrod’s mute muscle), but true horror derives from the juxtaposition of composed behavior and obscene acts. No one delivered that combination better than Vincent Price.
  68. The Lavender Hill Mob
    Though [Guinness's] performance may not immediately announce itself as his best, it's certainly one of his most representative, a thoroughly recognizable character of unseen depths and unexpected capabilities.
  69. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    It might not be destined to join the ranks of teen comedy masterpieces, but in the short term, its ability to nail the right balance of emotional and comedic unpredictability makes it a very pleasant journey, and a must-see for teen movie aficionados.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Creator
    The Creator is likely to stand as the most impressive and immersive sci-fi movie of the year.
  71. Robot Dreams
    With Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger has crafted an aesthetically gentle but emotionally hardened New York City. Operating under the belief that there is little one can control in a city of that size, Berger allows his film to take flights of fancy that loop around back to companionship.
  72. Close Your Eyes
    Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.
  73. La Chimera
    La Chimera is a formal delight that holds no shortage of surprises. It calls for further viewings, asking us to unearth the mysteries buried long ago.
  74. Perfect Days
    With Perfect Days, Wenders shows what an artist who has lived a full life can accomplish. There’s a sweet rhythm to the film that cherishes the small moments that might go unnoticed elsewhere.
  75. Sympathy for the Devil
    Cage may hate that people quote his over-the-top moments out of context, but since this entire movie is one, you can’t really take any of it the wrong way.
  76. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    It’s rare to see family animated films as purely focused on fun as this one.
  77. Wild Style
    The story of a much-admired graffiti artist who is tempted by the possibility of mainstream success, Wild Style is extremely clumsy as a drama, with awkward dialogue and even more awkward acting. However, as a showcase for many aspects of the incredible outpouring of creativity that took place in New York during the late '70s and early '80s, it can't be beat.
  78. Priscilla
    Unafraid of shattering rose-tinted glasses, Coppola’s film is fierce in its subtlety, relying on Spaeney’s breathtaking performance and the inherent tragedy of Priscilla’s story to deliver a film that’s equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking.
  79. White Heat
    Cagney's magnetism stems from his note-perfect combination of broad gestures and subtle shifts of posture, but the keen eyes of his directors are what make his gangster pictures classics.
  80. Winter Kills
    Winter Kills provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favorably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone's JFK and James Ellroy's book American Tabloid.
  81. Maestro
    If the film is a tad baggy and unruly that seems by design and thus less a critique than an accurate assessment. But overall and while painting so boldly on such a broad canvas (the film spans decades and calls on its actors and make-up department to work overtime in delineating the passage of time) Maestro emerges as a bombastic aria of a biopic befitting its central subject.
  82. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    The incongruous pairing—the late-’40s equivalent of dropping the American Pie gang into a Saw movie—really shouldn’t have worked, but it resulted in a highly entertaining film that became a huge hit and breathed new life into the comedy team’s career, while providing a convenient tombstone for the monsters, who faded from screens.
  83. Thanksgiving
    Packed with memorable kills, knowing winks, and a playful slasher whodunit plot, Thanksgiving is a horror feast worth sitting through, even if it never exactly pushes beyond the bounds of its central hook.
  84. The Burial
    The Burial is dramatic yet also funny. It works because it isn’t afraid to be “inspired by” the story’s actual people and isn’t just content to retell the events of this little-known but highly consequential civil court case.
  85. Godzilla Minus One
    When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
  86. Starve Acre
    Aiming for authenticity, Kokotajlo finds supernatural power and dramatic weight in the genre’s rustic simplicity.
  87. The Fall Guy
    Even with the action and stunt work operating at full throttle, what really makes The Fall Guy work is the partnership between Gosling and Blunt.
  88. The Shrouds
    Cassel and Kruger shine, but the rest of the performances feel either staid or over-the-top. Some of the story comes across as pretentious, and some of the pacing is disjointed and inelegant.
  89. Mother Mary
    Mother Mary is not scary, nor is it particularly violent. But it does conjure an emotional and metaphysical weight that is practically impossible to shake off post-viewing. This is the most successful Lowery has been at evoking a sensory experience.
  90. 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.
  91. The First Omen
    Forget what you think you know about horror prequels. The First Omen gets it, goes for the throat, and never lets go.
  92. Presence
    Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.
  93. Between the Temples
    Underneath the prickly screwball banter, the jokes, the movie-isms, the occasional zaniness are probing questions about how we define ourselves and whether a community of faith can still represent something more important than gossip and an annual Holocaust remembrance bake sale.
  94. Daughters
    The film opens up an audience to deep reservoirs of feeling. The result is something both heartbreaking and beautiful, instructive and enlightening.
  95. Good One
    Good One is beautifully observed, making its point without being too obvious, and perfectly judged in that it doesn’t waste a single shot. The beats of the film are simple and straightforward, but if you hone in on the details, every second is full of information.
  96. In a Violent Nature
    With In A Violent Nature, Nash crafts something entirely new; composed, near and real. But the film’s sense of tone and timing prove that he also intimately understands why audiences were always invested in these marathons of blood, gore, and guts.
  97. It's What's Inside
    While the film’s social commentary isn’t radically incisive, it does manage to capture the nature of a true party game: excitement initially abounds, but you can’t play along forever.
  98. The Room Next Door
    The Spanish maverick’s penchant for melodrama is somewhat off-kilter, but his exquisite eye for color and contrast is decidedly intact, with his lead actresses posing as perfect canvases.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Crossing
    Perhaps a bit predictably, Crossing emphasizes the importance of forging new connections rather than holding onto relationships that may no longer serve us. However, its dramatic conclusion still manages to forgo cliched expectations and cater instead to the limitless possibilities that abound in an urban sprawl.
  100. Superman
    Gunn eventually finds his footing and Superman returns to the fray, delivering heat vision reprisals and truth and justice platitudes to Luthor’s hostile forces (he leads a sycophantic science outfit that resembles DOGE gone berserk).
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »