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. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Because the movie plays on so many common fears - including fears of being in a remote house with big windows when intruders arrive - the confusion of Martha Marcy May Marlene proves effective, not sloppy.
  2. House of Pleasures
    Without soft-pedaling it in the least, Bonello nonetheless mourns the passing of a time where prostitutes didn't control their destinies, but at least had each other.
  3. Creep 2
    For fans of the original who don’t mind the loss of scares, Creep 2 improves on the first film in nearly every way, from tone to dialogue to plot.
  4. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    The domestic humor is often too culture-specific to play for a non-Japanese audience, but Yamadas does have its accessible moments, particularly in the sweet extended opening flight of fantasy.
  5. The Retrieval
    Despite its meager budget, The Retrieval is characterized by its authenticity. The dialogue and attitudes are persuasive in creating both a consistent psychology and a sense of the historical past, without ever lapsing into a flowery 19th century-ness.
  6. The Trip to Italy
    It works reasonably well as a film, too, though, provided that one isn’t overly bothered by repetition and a general sense of diminishing returns.
  7. Lovely & Amazing
    Emerges as something rare, an issue movie that's so honest and keenly observed that it doesn't feel like one. It earns its thesis statement through minute details and a unique grasp of a commonplace problem.
  8. Knafayim Shvurot
    Broken Wings doesn't stray far from the common melodrama in its setup and resolutions, but Bergman's uncommon sensitivity makes the film feel specific, intimate, and utterly plausible at every turn.
  9. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    MC5's mix of showmanship, hippie idealism, and brawling Detroit muscle makes it tough to categorize, and A True Testimonial carefully moves through each step of the progression.
  10. 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.
  11. Lambert & Stamp
    Packed with rare footage from the band’s early years, and narrated through present-day sit-down interviews, it’s pop oral history at its most formless and fannish: fixated on juicy tidbits, points of influences, and historical cameos, and sorely lacking a point of view.
  12. Stan & Ollie
    An opportunity to see John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan mimic two of early cinema’s most iconic figures, which is this film’s true raison d’être.
  13. Undine
    What’s atypically clumsy here is Petzold’s effort to synthesize big ideas: Not only is the architectural metaphor overstated and the mythological element frustratingly vague, but the two have nothing much to do with each other, making Undine play like a bidding war between high concepts—one of them academic, the other genre-inflected.
  14. Charlie's Country
    Part of the movie’s mischievous charm lies in De Heer and cinematographer Ian Jones’ sophisticated use of Steadicam, which moves almost exclusively with Charlie, often seemingly in a struggle to keep up with his brisk, determined walk.
  15. Attack the Block
    Attack The Block turns its modest budget into a virtue by focusing on character, especially the surprisingly charged, complicated dynamic between enemies-turned-allies Whittaker and Boyega.
  16. Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-sac functions better as an affectionate goof on Waiting For Godot, enhanced by an unforgettable setting that naturally severs the trio from contact with the outside world.
  17. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    With its slim runtime, the film feels like it should have gone broader or closed in and been just a portrait of the talented, goofy Sano.
  19. Zombi Child
    The trappings of the boarding school, with its grand staircases, centuries-old cloisters, and self-serious teenage secrecy, are gothic. But Bonello nods just as much to American teen-anxiety horror. There is even an homage to Brian De Palma’s "Carrie."
  20. Terror's Advocate
    If nothing else, Terror's Advocate offers a useful summary of the last half-century of global politics, and how changing public perceptions can make goats out of heroes.
  21. I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
    Give Blair time. He may have a Green Room-grade corker in him yet.
  22. Dark Horse
    For the many, many viewers who’ve never heard of Dream Alliance, Osmond’s documentary is edge-of-the-seat stuff.
  23. 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.
  24. Muscle Shoals
    Although the intriguingly named first-time director Greg “Freddy” Camalier makes the twice-told tales of the film’s second hour watchable, they end up paling in comparison to its essayistic first half.
  25. Mala Mala
    Amid all the images of celebration and joyful physical abandon—including a showcase solo dance performance that functions as a kind of climax—the most lingering images are the ones depicting daily routines.
  26. The Landlord
    The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.
  27. Notturno
    Rosi’s compositions, static and mostly wide angle, are ennobling, albeit ambiguously. Life is going on, but not as usual.
  28. In Between Days
    The director deserves kudos for setting her movie during such a gray, dreary Toronto winter. It couldn't have been easy to find a climate that so resembles adolescence.
  29. Win Win
    Win Win is less quirky than "The Station Agent" and less soulful (and political) than "The Visitor," but it still does little to buck the trend.
  30. Clean
    The film gets its distinction from the performances by Cheung and Nolte, whose scenes together are suffused with loss and unexpected mutual compassion.
  31. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Where The Art Life proves most informative to longtime Lynch fans is in its closely observed depiction of his creative process, glimpsed here as he putters around his home studio in the Hollywood Hills, his adorable toddler daughter in tow, creating paintings, sculptures, music, or whatever else strikes his fancy.
  32. Heaven Knows What
    Because there’s no real narrative — just the constant effort to score and survive, plus Harley’s dysfunctional on/off love affair with Ilya — Heaven Knows What doesn’t so much conclude as just stop, which is less than totally satisfying.
  33. The Son of Joseph
    It’s overlong, but behind its jabs at literary pretension, droll punchlines, and minimalist sight gags lies a search for the kind of guidance that parables used to impart.
  34. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    May be too heady to take in one sitting. Even given relatively calm passages-like a hushed tour through the courtyard of a Scottish castle or a mediation on ripples in a pond-there's just too much to absorb.
  35. Fyre
    Fyre is the stronger, more worthwhile documentary, but its counterpart is a helpful reminder that, like so many stories, one account can’t contain the whole truth.
  36. Félicité
    The film’s tonal range is formidable enough to suggest that this director may be a major talent who’s now emerging from relative obscurity, thanks to the Berlin prize and subsequent attention at festivals in Toronto and New York. It’s always exciting to discover someone who’s eager to toss the manuals aside.
    • 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.
  38. Goodbye to Language 3D
    What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.
  39. Time to Choose
    It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.
  40. The French Dispatch
    The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.
  41. Lost in La Mancha
    At once bitterly funny and devastating, Lost In La Mancha sides with Gilliam in form and spirit, piecing together the train wreck with snaky humor and interludes that cleverly mimic his Monty Python collage animations.
  42. Bernie
    Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.
  43. Jinn
    Equally importantly, it shows how much an artist like Mu’min can bring to otherwise well-trod material, and how valuable underrepresented points of view like hers really are.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Chasing Ice
    As someone who admits to having harbored skepticism about climate change himself, two decades ago, Balog is trying to present an image-based response to all the denialists featured in the news montages scattered through the film, people who scoff at the numbers and lack of scientific consensus on whether global warming exists, and what it entails.
  45. Bridesmaids
    It's no surprise that Bridemaids sputters, coughs, and lurches, but it's a winning shambles, buoyed by a sharp, balanced comedic ensemble and some truthful observations about how close friends adapt when their lives fall out of step.
  46. 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.
  47. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    Riveting, eye-opening issue film.
  48. The Invisible Woman
    Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens.
  49. Tully
    Though Davis makes Tully convincing both as a human being and as a mysterious godsend, it’s Theron whose work is absolutely vital to Tully’s success.
  50. Elizabeth
    But much of it, like its subject, is so cryptic, distractingly stylish, and impenetrably posed that it's rough going most of the way.
  51. 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.
  52. The Muppets
    Henson's characters maintained an essential innocence while sending up the very idea of entertainment. They put on a show with quotation marks around it, but the irony never felt cynical. When it isn't getting bogged down in unearned sentiment, The Muppets gets that right.
  53. Time Out of Mind
    It’s the epitome of the anti-vanity project—a way for a veteran charmer to prove that he has more to offer than charm.
  54. Darkest Hour
    There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.
  55. An Inconvenient Truth
    Quite apart from its environmental agenda, the film is a reminder that there's no space for substance in political discourse: A 30-second soundbite on global warming could easily be brushed off as tree-hugging rhetoric, but after 100 minutes of level-headed elaboration, it's chillingly undeniable.
  56. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    As tense and taut as any crime saga, but the stakes are more personal.
  57. Lady Vengeance
    It takes patience and industry to make sense of the first half, intestinal fortitude to deal with the second, and a little flexibility to make the transition from one to the other. But the whole process adds up to a fairly impressive two-stage thrill ride, like rafting through choppy waters, then plummeting over a waterfall into a dark and deadly pit.
  58. Enchanted
    Adams' winning performance and the light touch director Kevin Lima (a veteran of animation and live action) brings to scenes not tasked with advancing the plot all suggest that, silly as they may look once you take it apart, irony-free, romantic fantasy--animated and otherwise--still has a place on the big screen.
  59. Lawless Heart
    Its protagonists' hearts aren't lawless so much as stuck in various states of quiet desperation, and the modest charms of this observant, affecting film fortunately bear little relation to the sensationalistic label.
  60. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Like Ang Lee's "Hulk," it's a fusion of arthouse and multiplex instincts, and though it seems unlikely to satisfy anyone, it's just as unlikely that anyone who sees it will forget it soon.
  61. Shrek 2
    The lovable characters remain, but they never do much of interest in a sequel that's safely above average but superfluous.
  62. Samson and Delilah
    Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.
  63. The Strange Case of Angelica
    Too shaggy at times, with digressions into science and history that come out flat and awkward. But there's a sweet, unshakeable poetry in the main idea of the film.
  64. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    A historical epic with elements of wu xia, supernatural thrillers, and drawing-room murder mysteries.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    I'll See You in My Dreams
    Every actor gives their all, even when the material is insultingly thin.
  66. Our Little Sister
    As a result, the movie version feels a tad weightless, especially relative to its hefty running time. Anyone in the mood for two hours (and change) of sheer, unadulterated loveliness, however, will be amply rewarded.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nico, 1988
    Like Gus Van Sant’s "Last Days," Nico, 1988 is at its best in these liminal moments, its creation of a cognitive space to ponder an artist’s legacy, as well as literal spaces that reflect it: faded ballrooms, twilit monuments, bleary countrysides. Unlike that movie, though, Nico, 1988 occasionally succumbs to hoary biopic clichés, awkwardly imposing narrative beats.
  68. Django
    The action that follows doesn't stray too far from formula, nor does it come close to Leone's film, but it's stylishly entertaining enough to serve as a passable time-filler, particularly when its second-rate hero takes to wielding an oversized (and anachronistic) handheld machine gun.
  69. Testament of Orpheus
    A self-crafted elegy starring Cocteau as himself, an artist at the end of his life wandering through a symbolic landscape filled with his own creations (and guest stars Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso). In the end, Cocteau takes comfort in the immortality of art, and therefore his own immortality, a sentiment that would seem far less moving and far more egotistical if it weren't true.
  70. Santosh
    In its most compelling stretches, Santosh operates as a kind of subverted procedural in which every aspect of the investigation is, at best, an informality of dubious legal standing.
  71. Spy
    Spy, similarly, doesn’t exactly send up James Bond or Jason Bourne espionage thrillers, but it places McCarthy in the middle of the action while subverting the traditionally male domination of that arena.
  72. Lilo & Stitch
    With its sharp wit and its portrayal of how broken families sometimes fit back together, Lilo would make a fine summer double feature alongside "About A Boy," another film that stays funny while dancing around a tiny abyss.
  73. A Chiara
    Though the path to its conclusions is at times more plodding than meditative, the finale is a subtle, emotional twist of the knife that makes the journey worth taking.
  74. An Unreasonable Man
    The film begins like a Frank Capra movie--pure-hearted idealist takes on corporate fat cats against impossible odds and triumphs--but ends like a Shakespearean tragedy.
  75. 24 City
    Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
  76. Night Moves
    There’s a certain muddled ambivalence to the movie; one gets the impression that Reichardt is more interested in these people than their ideas, but she never quite cracks Josh, who’s much more impenetrably aloof than the beleaguered travelers of "Meek’s Cutoff", her masterpiece. Night Moves is a portrait of outsiders that leaves its audience on the outside.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it's surprising—and ballsy—that De Palma makes Casualties Of War a full-on De Palma movie, with stylishly suspenseful action scenes, heightened performances, and plenty of moments where Fox takes on the role of a typically impotent De Palma voyeur.
  78. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Building to an emotional wallop that’s almost on par with anything found in one of Miyazaki’s or Takahata’s films, The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness is pornographically interesting for Studio Ghibli fans; as a delicate depiction of the artistic spirit, it’s equally essential viewing for everyone else.
  79. Crude
    Crude is so crammed with facts and figures that it can be a little dizzying, but what’s more important is what Berlinger records between all the talking-head interviews and vérité footage.
  80. John Wick: Chapter 2
    Lavishly expanding on the first film’s comic-book-esque internal mythology and its sense of the absurd, it’s less of a pure genre movie than its predecessor—more gothic, more narratively stylized, its superlative stuntwork sometimes taking a back seat to visual gags and vignettes of deadpan comedy.
  81. Send Help
    As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.
  82. Belfast
    This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.
  83. How to Train Your Dragon
    It’s a great-looking film--and an impressive use of 3D--but ultimately, the story makes it memorable.
  84. Civil War
    The film does not have easy answers, but rather than making it seem shallow, its lack of clear moral coding instead offers us something more primal and more powerful. It’s a film about the open-ended question of how much humanity we as a species have left in us, and that makes it a provocative, thrilling monster of a movie that will sear itself into your eyeballs.
  85. Side Effects
    Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.
  86. The Stunt Man
    The Stunt Man still thrills as a witty, sly, action-packed mind game.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Titanic
    That the familiar story of the Titanic disaster is told with suspense is not as surprising as Cameron's clear-headed balance of truth and fiction, spectacle and tragedy.
  88. Oceans
    It comes to American theaters saddled with narration by Pierce Brosnan, who purrs through the gratingly vague script like the world’s plummiest old half-drunken uncle.
  89. Blindspotting
    The film’s messy mix of flavorful, sometimes over-the-top character comedy and sincere racial politics benefits from the voice of its stars, who also wrote the script.
  90. The Invisible War
    Though Dick focuses heavily on just a few women, The Invisible War builds to a stunning montage of victim after victim telling their story to the camera without pseudonyms or silhouettes.
  91. Metropolis
    Technologically, the film is impressive, and it readily overwhelms the senses with frenetic computer-generated activity, an apocalyptic grand finale, and a bombastic jazz score. But unlike its classic predecessor, it doesn't leave much in its wake but ringing ears and unanswered questions.
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