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. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    A baffling passion project whose cruelly protracted runtime is eclipsed only by the monumentally tedious way it fills it.
  2. Zombi Child
    There are elements of coming-of-age drama, tortured romance, and supernatural horror, though part of the film’s strange power is that it never seems to commit to any of those genres, hovering in some liminal state instead, teasing the audience with the various possibilities of where it might go.
  3. Matthias & Maxime
    It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.
  4. Parasite
    Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.
  5. The Perfection
    The Perfection takes deep, fetishistic satisfaction in pushing the envelope, then pushing it some more, building in seductive fits and shocking starts to an orgiastic frenzy of cinematic excess. Is it a progressive movie? Not especially, but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re getting into.
  6. Aladdin
    Ricthie’s Aladdin feels sluggish in comparison to the fast-paced original. Even the songs suffer; the direction of the musical numbers is surprisingly unimaginative and turgid, to the point that even surefire showstoppers like “Prince Ali” and the mighty “A Whole New World” end up succumbing to lackluster staging and uncomfortable performances.
  7. Booksmart
    What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.
  8. Brightburn
    Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.
  9. The Whistlers
    Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.
  10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.
  11. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  12. The Wild Goose Lake
    What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.
  13. The Lighthouse
    The Lighthouse is more satisfying when viewed through the prism of its pitch-black humor; it’s fine as a thriller, borderline brilliant as a comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo.
  14. Les Misérables
    While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted May 20, 2019
  15. A Hidden Life
    Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.
  16. Rocketman
    As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.
  17. Little Joe
    Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.
  18. Sorry We Missed You
    For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.
  19. Deerskin
    Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.
  20. Bacurau
    There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.
  21. A Dog's Journey
    Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.
  22. See You Yesterday
    See You Yesterday finds a striking-yet-natural balance between genre concept and a harsh reality that is achingly familiar to the people who have to navigate it every day.
  23. Trial by Fire
    But Zwick and Fletcher, in their eagerness to make an argument against the death penalty, needlessly stack the deck.
  24. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Although the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult novel finds welcome specificity in its world and character building, it never rises above the most generic of platitudes in its central teen love story.
  25. The Dead Don't Die
    The film feels like a creative resignation, too, meeting the end of the world with a shrug of tepid postmodern shtick. It puts despair itself in quotation marks.
  26. Asako I & II
    This is a film that, through its deceptively mellow means, manages to plumb the depths of what it truly means to love amid the uncertainties of self, others, and everything else besides.
  27. Photograph
    What’s consistent about Photograph is the way it maintains the delicacy of a particularly fine short story, complete with some ghostly supporting characters and plenty of ellipses where more conventional movies would amp up the exclamation points.
  28. The Third Wife
    An unabashedly reticent arthouse film, The Third Wife takes its time drifting through May’s coming of age, which will try the patience of some audiences. But those open to the seduction of Mayfair’s understated drama and its beautiful natural imagery will be handsomely rewarded.
  29. The Souvenir
    There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.
  30. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    Though Parabellum delivers at least a couple of action scenes that rank with the best of the series...there’s a certain fatigue to its two biggest set pieces, both of which pit Wick and his allies against unending waves of faceless henchmen. Wick is unstoppable. Do the movies know where to stop?
  31. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  32. The Hustle
    While The Hustle is more overt when it comes to discussing gender, including a monologue about why women are better suited to “the con” than men, it doesn’t really have all that much to say. Not about gender, not about con artistry, and definitely not about how to craft a satisfying studio comedy.
  33. Poms
    Together, Weaver and Keaton sometimes manage to tease out the movie inside the movie, the one drawn to the connections between death and joy, youthfulness and mortality.
  34. Charlie Says
    For as much as Charlie Says tries to reframe everything we know about the Manson Family, its characterization of the women remains shallow.
  35. The Biggest Little Farm
    The Biggest Little Farm has many valuable points to make about the connection between how our food is grown and eco-friendly living, but style betrays substance so often here that the message gets lost in the shuffle. Unless that message is simply We Bought A Farm!
  36. Pasolini
    And yet the movie never errs in its sincerity, which extends all the way to the decision to depict Pasolini’s murder in graphic detail.
  37. All Is True
    Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.
  38. General Magic
    If one is not already paranoid about the relationship of politics, money, and the tech sector or about the industry’s general lack of perspective on itself, then this sort of uncritical puff piece should do the trick.
  39. Tolkien
    The real model here, of course, is "Shakespeare In Love," but that movie was also a comedy, while Tolkien is as reverent and moist-eyed as a Peter Jackson goodbye scene.
  40. Long Shot
    At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.
  41. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    It ends up a whole lot of cute, branded nothing — watchable junk for young adults of tomorrow to look back on with inordinate fondness.
  42. Shadow
    The scales ultimately tip slightly in favor of style, but when that style is this gorgeous, remembering a movie for the way it looks rather than its plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  43. El Chicano
    The story never even grazes the sublime; it’s dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don’t celebrate a reunion. They’re at war.
  44. The Intruder
    The film is so full of jump scare fake-outs and shout-at-the-screen moments, it neglects to build sustained suspense — a far worse sin than its lack of logic, which can actually be kind of fun.
  45. Tell It to the Bees
    What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.
  46. Non-Fiction
    This is, in other words, Assayas’ homage to highbrow gabfests — the mid-period films of Woody Allen (complete with a Bergman reference) and especially the work of Éric Rohmer, the pseudonymous critic-turned-director who made a career of exploring his characters’ private dilemmas, but remained famously secretive about his own personal life.
  47. UglyDolls
    Adults in charge might want to take a cue from the movie’s penny-pinching, and save some money on movie tickets.
  48. Meeting Gorbachev
    The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since?
  49. Ask Dr. Ruth
    As a documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth has it kind of easy: It’s got an enchanting subject eager to tell a fascinating story.
  50. Body at Brighton Rock
    While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.
  51. The White Crow
    Unlike its subject, The White Crow is ultimately forgettable.
  52. Avengers: Endgame
    An earnest, overstuffed, fitfully funny superhero melodrama, Endgame hits the buttons it wants to hit, and sometimes affectingly.
  53. J.T. Leroy
    This story remains fascinating, but the perspective here feels skewed.
  54. Little Woods
    Little Woods revolves around a remarkable lead performance: Thompson shows her range as an actress in this film in ways that, as fun as they can be, she just doesn’t get to in any of her blockbuster roles.
  55. Rafiki
    In some ways, Rafiki recalls Nijla Mu’min’s 2018 film "Jinn," which also superimposes a unique, beautifully realized point of view onto a conventional coming-of-age story.
  56. The Curse of La Llorona
    More fitfully funny than it is frightening, The Curse Of La Llorona might be the first film in the Conjuring universe to remain a standalone.
  57. Teen Spirit
    In a film seemingly aimed more at teens than adults, Minghella effectively updates that familiar star-is-born template for an arthouse-minded Instagram generation.
  58. Hail Satan?
    Lane’s lighthearted approach will probably convert more than a few viewers to the TST cause — it’s a short walk from pissed-off atheist to smirking satanist. Given how entrenched the culture wars have become in America, maybe all Satan needs at this point is a good publicist.
  59. Under the Silver Lake
    Enabling and mocking paranoid obsession at the same time might sound incoherent. In this hilariously demented spin on L.A. noir, it’s simply honest.
  60. 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.
  61. Fast Color
    While the story may be flimsy in places, the performances are anything but.
  62. Breakthrough
    Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.
  63. After
    The real problem with After is that it’s a lifeless slog of thinly written clichés, one that’s missing the charismatic spark of the actual One Direction boys.
  64. 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.
  65. Hellboy
    Less a thrilling adventure tale than a trip to a teenager’s messy, sock-strewn bedroom.
  66. Girls of the Sun
    Without a more clearly defined cultural basis for its characters’ actions, Girls Of The Sun is a story about sisterhood that doesn’t provide its women the detail they deserve.
  67. Little
    Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.
  68. 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.
  69. Mary Magdalene
    Once Mary makes the difficult decision to leave her family (rejecting the arranged marriage they’d planned for her) and follow Jesus (or “the rabbi,” as everyone mostly calls him, in a nicely accurate touch), she’s unfailingly loyal, understanding, compassionate, and wise. In a word, she’s boring. At least Jesus gets to be plagued by fear and doubt.
  70. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
    The worst part of The Haunting Of Sharon Tate is how seriously it takes its ham-fisted themes of fate and the nature of reality; the movie opens with an Edgar Allen Poe quote, for f*ck’s sake.
  71. Pet Sematary
    This may look like the same story, but the soul of it is missing — lost on the way out of the ground.
  72. The Best of Enemies
    Bissell’s fudging of the facts (which includes completely making up the reasons behind the charrette) doesn’t create a story that’s more insightful or dramatically cohesive than the real thing; the only thing it reveals, if indirectly, is liberalism’s longstanding discomfort with the relationship between civil rights and labor movements.
  73. Amazing Grace
    One of the great performances of the 20th century.
  74. Unicorn Store
    It’s a candy necklace of a movie: sweet but chalky.
  75. Missing Link
    It operates on its own little wavelength, rather than broadcasting itself loudly.
  76. Peterloo
    Peterloo does get progressively more compelling as it goes. Leigh hasn’t lost his knack for finding first-rate but relatively little-known actors.
  77. Unplanned
    There’s not a single scene that speaks to characters with lives outside their streamlined narrative function; they’re performers in a parable traced over a Chick tract, filmed with a bland competence at odds with the true perversity of the material. Old-school Pure Flix: Welcome back!
  78. The Beach Bum
    The Beach Bum, by turn, seems to exist in the hazy headspace of its protagonist, a kindred spirit in less-than-lofty, party-till-you-puke ambition. But there’s a bummer relevance lurking in his fantasy of a rich idiot who does whatever he wants and faces no consequences for his actions.
  79. Diane
    In all this, there remains a purposeful if haphazardly realized design. As Diane’s relatives and friends continue to fall away with the passage of time, Jones intensifies the film’s discombobulating rhythms, taking Diane from hard-edged physicality to a more interiorized, subtly dreamlike haze.
  80. The Brink
    The inherent risk of this vérité approach is that your subject won’t prove to be all that fascinating, and The Brink, while far more openly critical of Bannon than "American Dharma," ultimately offers little justification for spending an hour and a half in his company.
  81. Dumbo
    Farrell’s Kentucky accent here is as merely passable as his Chicago accent in Widows was, and Parker’s precocious interest in physics and chemistry seems similarly phoned-in. Both characters are just there to keep the story moving, to provide awestruck reaction shots as we move from oddly muted spectacle to agreeable callback to the heartwarming happy ending.
  82. The Highwaymen
    After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.
  83. Slut in a Good Way
    Lorain’s film ultimately doesn’t go especially deep in detailing its romantic relationships, its friendships, or any overarching storyline. But Slut In A Good Way is more than the sum of its entanglements; the actors and the camera work so well together that it feels, at times, like a musical.
  84. Shazam!
    What is often the most businesslike part of a superhero origin story—establishing the hero’s powers — ends up becoming the most entertaining part of Shazam!, carried along by Levi’s fidgety, boyish charm. (Similarly, the inevitable climactic light-show showdown — a reliably butt-numbing staple of the genre—is surprisingly zippy.)
  85. The Dirt
    But even with the absurdist spectacle making for occasionally fun viewing, what has room to rise and fall in a 400-plus page book gets condensed into trite moralizing in 108 minutes.
  86. Ramen Shop
    If you can tolerate a little saccharine piano music and ethereal backlighting with your food porn, Ramen Shop is an appetizing little bite of multicultural foodie edutainment.
  87. Dragged Across Concrete
    This is an ugly, borderline vile piece of work. Thing is, it’s also been made with craft, wit, and a frankly exhilarating disregard for how films like this are supposed to operate, how they usually sound and move.
  88. Relaxer
    For a movie that’s often embarrassingly funny — with its absurdist hangout dialogue, posturing nobodies, and perfectly timed spews — Relaxer is fundamentally sad.
  89. Hotel Mumbai
    If the thought of seeing a lot of people get murdered with automatic weapons at close range makes you queasy right now, Hotel Mumbai is not a film you want to go anywhere near. Few slasher movies have such a high, graphic body count.
  90. 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.
  91. 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.
  92. Captive State
    It’s not unreasonable to expect something like excitement out of a story about freedom fighters plotting to take back the planet. Captive State does not clear that fairly low bar.
  93. Wonder Park
    Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.
  94. Five Feet Apart
    Unfortunately, welcome insight into the physical and emotional experience of living with cystic fibrosis eventually gives way to increasingly improbable romantic and dramatic scenarios...By its third act, the film almost starts to feel like a parody of the most maudlin conventions of the “sick teen romance” genre.
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