The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Mohawk
    Viewers who are looking for something thought-provoking as well as thrilling have come to the right place.
  2. They Remain
    Beyond the performances, They Remain is uneven. The film uses a series of innovative, old-school visual tricks to create a surreal and hallucinatory vibe, and when something works, it’s powerful and discomfiting.
  3. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer’s trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion. He doesn’t have the footage to make Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? come together as an investigation narrative, and his insistence on a quasi-chronological structure means that it doesn’t work as an essay, either.
  4. Werewolf
    Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.
  5. Love, Simon
    Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.
  6. Mute
    The film ignores all the potential commentary and conflict in its pulpy, hyperbolic premise (tradition technology, urban contradictions, etc.), offering only trivialities, superficialities, and contempt. It has as little to say as its protagonist. Possibly less, even
  7. Annihilation
    If "Ex Machina" was a mess of provocative, half-formed thoughts on gender, creation, and desire, Annihilation locates something closer to a clear, cogent thesis: that there’s nothing scarier than looking at those closest to you, or even yourself, and not recognizing the person staring back.
  8. Every Day
    There are any number of metaphorical applications for A’s condition, some implied more strongly than others, including trans struggles, gender fluidity...teenage desire to fit in, even accidental catfishing.... Every Day is sweet and sincere enough to remain open to these interpretations, but too gentle to assert itself into anything of real consequence.
  9. The Lodgers
    It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.
  10. Game Night
    This tame but fitfully funny goof on suspense cinema at least assembles an agreeable guest list.... As with any real game night, the company is more important than the game.
  11. The Young Karl Marx
    From its lifelessly anachronistic English dialogue to its Masterpiece Theatre lighting and production design, The Young Karl Marx tries to filter radical thought through the pace and aesthetics of a middlebrow drama.
  12. Samson
    A bargain-bin biblical epic that delivers the requisite mass-murder-by-ass-jaw as a cheapjack approximation of Zack Snyder-esque pomp, but is for the most part clinically dull.
  13. Red Sparrow
    It’s about halfway between "Atomic Blonde" and a Focus Features late-summer thriller, which more or less fits the Francis Lawrence aesthetic. He brings to this material what he brought to "The Hunger Games": a sense of style that feels constrained by obligations to hit a certain number of plot points.
  14. Nostalgia
    Hamm gets to dig deeper than he has before on the big screen, tweaking some Draperian notes of aloofness into a credible emotional dimension, even when Nostalgia abandons its unsensational, slice-of-life-in-boxes approach for something closer to traditional tragedy.
  15. The Party
    The shining star of this little community is Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), who’s put together an intimate gathering of friends to celebrate her recent promotion to Shadow Minister for Health.
  16. Black Panther
    There are hiccups in its ambition, but it’s hard not to get swept up in all the technologies, characters, and politics crammed into the movie’s compelling dramatic conflict, which casts the charismatic Michael B. Jordan—the star of Creed and Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station—as the most complex villain in the post-Dark Knight cycle of superhero blockbusters.
  17. Western
    Although thoughtful and probing, this portrait of good intentions gone awry has been so thoroughly intellectualized that there’s not much juice to it. It’s a movie that’s busy analyzing itself while you watch.
  18. Early Man
    Early Man can’t overcome the limitations of its premise—one of Park’s less fruitful genre mashups.
  19. Double Lover
    The film is as campy and nearly as regressive as the E.L. James adaptations it consistently out-kinks, except that it’s been made with a slumming Hitchcockian verve that enhances, rather than apologizes for, the proud disreputability of the material.
  20. Looking Glass
    Because Hunter’s movie works best in its early, less crazed stretch, there aren’t any really memorable sequences here coming from the director or his distinctive star.
  21. The 15:17 to Paris
    A failed experiment in stunt casting.
  22. Fifty Shades Freed
    Turns out, what really turns series creator E.L. James on is well-heeled domesticity.
  23. The Ritual
    Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.
  24. Golden Exits
    If Perry’s last film, the throwback psychodrama Queen Of Earth, used Bergman worship as a jumping off point for its own genre games, Golden Exits is just a tin-eared imitation: Interiors remade as a stilted exercise.
  25. Basmati Blues
    The movie starts out heedless in its desire to charm, but it winds up feeling constrained by self-consciousness, and more’s the pity.
  26. Peter Rabbit
    For a Brit-inflected talking-animal picture in the wake of the "Paddington" series, it’s not good enough.
  27. The Cloverfield Paradox
    In the case of The Cloverfield Paradox, it’s just a fancy word for “junk drawer.”
  28. Winchester
    The real problem is that all that speculative fun has been shaped into a rather clunky, derivative bit of supernatural claptrap: a haunted house movie curiously low on mystery or honest scares.
  29. Before We Vanish
    It’s minor pleasures from a major talent: B-movie fun in the key of Kurosawa.
  30. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    By reducing teachings to vague platitudes and inspirational truisms, Bilal robs its religious story of any sense of grace, leaving only those components of early Islamic history generally not considered off-limits for visual interpretation—that is, a lot of early medieval warfare and violence.
  31. Thoroughbreds
    Thoroughbreds...has been made with diabolical craft and intelligence, the kind that marks Finley as a major new American talent. But it’s no empty exercise, no mere calling card. The style all comes in service of the central relationship and the superb performances that bring it to bewitching life.
  32. The Insult
    Regardless of its high aims, most of what The Insult offers—unlikely last-minute reveals, argumentative lawyers, stone-faced judges—is the stuff of a diverting, junky courtroom drama.
  33. 24 Frames
    It’s at once inspiring and heartbreaking to see a master with nothing left to prove still pushing the envelope in the final years of his life. He had plenty left to give us.
  34. A Futile and Stupid Gesture
    While pretty consistently amusing, the film still suffers from a chronic case of Wikipediitis, recreating Kenney’s bullet-point moments as substitution for original wit or drama.
  35. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    The runty little brother of "The Hunger Games" has gotten surprisingly proficient in that area of well-produced sci-fi junk where a lot of the dialogue consists of variations on, “Go, go, go!”
  36. Have a Nice Day
    Liu is clearly inspired by live-action filmmakers (the Coen brothers and the Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano are acknowledged influences), but his casual side trips into the fantastic—say, an extended daydream sequence that’s part parody of Cultural Revolution propaganda, part karaoke video—can only work in drawing.
  37. Please Stand By
    It’s hard to be persuasive, though, when your protagonist comes across as a collection of quirky tics rather than a credible human being.
  38. A Ciambra
    The result is busy, murky, and remote. It doesn’t have the leftie political clarity of Ken Loach, the purposeful intensity of the Dardenne brothers, or even the character development of Ramin Bahrani’s early features.
  39. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    The uplifting nature of this true story naturally triggers Van Sant’s pesky sentimentality, with scenes that recall the hug-it-out, therapeutic catharsis of Good Will Hunting. But this is still the writer-director’s most formally interesting, emotionally involving movie in a decade, however little that may really be saying.
  40. The Final Year
    The documentary follows — and frequently lionizes — three Obama officials throughout 2016, and frequently feels like it was intended as a well-deserved victory lap.
  41. Mom and Dad
    If it doesn’t entirely exploit the potency of its metaphor, there’s still a certain grim fun in seeing Taylor give “family feud” an outrageous new meaning.
  42. Den of Thieves
    It’s derivative and drowning in stagnant machismo, but stark enough to work.
  43. Small Town Crime
    An amiable crime dramedy from a more under-the-radar pair of filmmaking brothers, Ian and Eshom Nelms.
  44. 12 Strong
    Surprisingly stolid and barren for a Bruckheimer production, 12 Strong skates by on the virtues of an old-fashioned programmer: technical competence, an above-average cast, and well-written dialogue, the latter courtesy of screenwriters Ted Tally (The Silence Of The Lambs) and Peter Craig (Blood Father).
  45. Forever My Girl
    The movie isn’t as off-the-charts shameless as Sparks, but it lacks the Russian roulette death-guessing game to occupy viewers who get bored.
  46. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    It’s a movie with no greater ambition than to charm and occasionally delight. Mission accomplished.
  47. Dim the Fluorescents
    Fluorescents’ showy camera moves and full-jazz-hands theater-kid dorkiness are a tonic against the excessively muted naturalism that has come to define indie style.
  48. Proud Mary
    She’s (Henson) a compelling leading woman, all in all. Too bad she’s stuck in such an incompetently directed mess of a movie.
  49. Inside
    While it’s been orchestrated with some skill and even intelligence, a question still pokes at the viewer, like rusty scissors jabbing at soft flesh: What’s the point of a less extreme version of a film whose whole raison d’être was extremity?
  50. The Polka King
    Above all else, this movie is so well-cast that the laugh line makes perfect sense coming from Black.
  51. The Commuter
    The Commuter’s script may not be an exercise in fool-proof logic (the actual plot makes almost no sense in retrospect), but its politics are consistent — a rare quality for a contemporary thriller.
  52. Lover for a Day
    If Garrel’s recent films (which also include In The Shadow Of Women and Frontier Of Dawn) play like variations on a theme, this one at least varies more than usual.
  53. Paddington 2
    Though the formulaic treasure-hunting plot sometimes gets out of hand, it doesn’t muddle the intended message.
  54. Before I Wake
    Before I Wake has its imperfections and moments of narrative lag, but its thoughtful touches and attention to character load Cody’s abilities and the threat of the Canker Man with a dramatic weight that often outbalances the generically spooky imagery.
  55. Insidious: The Last Key
    A clumsy and internally confused sequel to Insidious: Chapter 3 (which was, uh, a prequel to the first film) that offers strictly mechanical jolts.
  56. In Between
    In Between suffers when cross-cutting among its three similar yet disparate storylines, and is strongest during moments that see righteous anger get complicated by human nature.
  57. Happy End
    Happy End is far from the best Michael Haneke movie. But it just might be the most Michael Haneke movie — a kind of grueling greatest-hits collection from the reigning scold of European art cinema.
  58. Bright
    Bright gestures vaguely at an allegory about police brutality and race, which may have been more impactful in the original script. It’s hard to tell. For his part, Landis has largely disowned the final product, which buries some glimmers of interesting ideas under a thick layer of adolescent tough-guy posturing.
  59. Father Figures
    Its scenes aren’t really long or improv-heavy enough to qualify as rambling, but they’re often slow enough to qualify as excruciating.
  60. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    While Bening does a studied impression of Grahame’s supple body language, she uses a light touch when recreating her Betty Boop-esque voice, letting Grahame’s seductiveness ooze from her gorgeously refined pores.
  61. All the Money in the World
    All The Money In The World is uneven prestige pulp: a kidnapping drama that also fancies itself a study of how money corrupts relationships and short-circuits compassion.
  62. The Greatest Showman
    For the most part, the movie’s ideas about Barnum are incredibly stupid and, at times, kind of sweet in their daftness.
  63. In the Fade
    The film’s third act plays like a nihilistic Liam Neeson thriller, with Kruger struggling in vain to make Katja’s actions remotely believable.
  64. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    Fast-paced, frequently funny, and consistently entertaining.
  65. Pitch Perfect 3
    It’s half-assed in every way but cast retention; almost all the major female characters return.
  66. Molly's Game
    The same fundamental strengths and weaknesses — the former usually outweighing the latter, happily — are evident in all of his movies, no matter who’s in charge. A master like Fincher can add some visual zing, but the song remains the same.
  67. The Leisure Seeker
    This particular film is a collection of cutesy “going in style” clichés — old lady on a motorcycle? Check. Senior-citizen oral sex joke? Check. — compiled into a road movie with shades of "About Schmidt" and "Little Miss Sunshine," and a morbid streak that comes in to cut the quirkiness just a little bit too late.
  68. Hostiles
    Like Cooper’s Rust Belt faux-noir "Out Of The Furnace," it’s an exercise in strained seriousness, the potential ironies and dramatic tensions lost in a repetitive, episodic, and politically vapid narrative.
  69. Ferdinand
    Ferdinand’s most saccharine moments end up being its most potent, even if they’re often more cloying than emotional.
  70. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    The Ballad Of Lefty Brown’s lack of flash keeps it from sinking comfortably into pastiche, but it doesn’t make for thrilling viewing.
  71. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    By the rousing final act, Johnson has brought an apocalyptic grandeur to the lightsaber duels and airborne combat. His often-stirring addition to the saga finally lands on an affecting point about the importance of preserving essential cultural tradition without clinging too strictly to the dogma—and the texts—of the old way.
  72. Foxtrot
    Heavy with horror though it may be, Foxtrot turns out to be too conceptually and stylistically audacious to be called a slog; it keeps throwing curveballs, some crueler than others.
  73. Just Getting Started
    Dramatically and comically impotent.
  74. Quest
    There’s enough material in these years to make for half a dozen more focused documentaries, but none could hope to be as heartbreaking and redemptive as this panoramic longview.
  75. Phantom Thread
    Anderson’s most diabolical trick is woven into the fabric of his style: He’s used perfectionist craft to celebrate the value of imperfection.
  76. I, Tonya
    I, Tonya may be more of a pop-biographical exercise than a deep interrogation, but there’s a resonance to the synergy between its star and its subject: one famous female artist reclaiming her professional narrative by playing another who never quite could.
  77. The Post
    A pile of muck (old muck, too) with no rake, Steven Spielberg’s National Board Of Review-approved Nixon-era newspaper drama The Post lacks the exact thing it glorifies: a reporter’s instinct for story.
  78. Wonder Wheel
    Wonder Wheel is uncomfortably revealing, its real-life parallels too blatant to be anything but intentional. But to what end?
  79. The Other Side of Hope
    In that respect, it may be self-conscious to a fault. Plotted with typical shagginess, it lags as it tries to treat its two protagonists equally; they may be kindred spirits, but Khaled’s fears of deportation and his search for Miriam are a lot more urgent than Wikström’s mid-life crisis. But in drawing the two men together, the film creates a simple, persuasive metaphor.
  80. Loveless
    "Leviathan" (2014) pushed pitiless corruption into something like black comedy; Loveless is anything but funny, but does at least acknowledge fleeting moments of joy and understanding, even as it insists that they’re not nearly enough.
  81. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    Christmas has some good points going for it (e.g., Plummer’s grumpy, rascally Scrooge, who’d be great in a straight adaptation), but its portrayal of Dickens’ biography and family life is resoundingly dull, apart from some tense notes in Pryce’s performance.
  82. Call Me by Your Name
    The potential for a tryst hangs heavily in the humid Mediterranean air; every look and line of dialogue drips with subtext. But Call Me By Your Name’s erotic tension wouldn’t crackle so loudly without the chemistry between its leads.
  83. Coco
    One might argue that Coco could stand to be weirder and more self-indulgent; the alternate reality it creates is entertaining and expansive. But then it wouldn’t be a Pixar film. It is impeccable, time-tested craftsmanship, not experimentation, that drives Coco, both in its most familiar beats and in its most moving moments.
  84. The Star
    The director, Tim Reckart, is better known for his puppet-based stop-motion (he worked on Anomalisa and was Oscar-nominated for a short film) and seems to be out of his element here.
  85. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    There’s something bracing about the difficulty of reconciling this earnest middle-aged hippie with his maniacally impish younger self.
  86. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    It’s the rare instance when you can see this great actor laboriously acting.
  87. Justice League
    The “new and improved” model looks claustrophobically like an overpriced TV pilot, and not in a good way. Say what you want about the tenets of brooding, art-school-fascist superhero worship, but at least it’s an ethos.
  88. Wonder
    The film features some of the most clichéd aphorisms about kindness and inner beauty this side of an inspirational wall hanging. But honestly? It could have been a lot worse.
  89. Mudbound
    If the endgame is tough to bear, the getting there is rarely less than involving, thanks to the sensitivity of Rees’ staging. She’s made an economical epic with an intimate modern soul.
  90. On the Beach at Night Alone
    It’s also somehow simultaneously one of his (Hong Sang-soo) most straightforward, emotionally direct movies and the weirdest damn thing he’s ever made.
  91. A Fantastic Woman
    At its most compelling as a conventional character study of an unconventional female lead.
  92. Porto
    Its strongest evocation of poignant, imperfect memory has to do with its leading man, and the glimpse it provides of a fuller career that never was.
  93. Daddy's Home 2
    Like the passable original, this formulaic comedy can’t stop teasing the possibility of a funnier, smarter movie being made with the exact premise, central conflicts, and stars.
  94. No Stone Unturned
    At its heart, No Stone Unturned is a simple story shrouded in sad facts of the bigger one that surrounds it.
  95. Murder on the Orient Express
    Suspense remains a foreign concept for actor-director Kenneth Branagh. His erratic direction — more interested in cut glass and overhead shots than in suspicions and uncertainties — bungles both the perfect puzzle logic of the crime and its devious solution.
  96. Last Flag Flying
    Linklater, for all his gifts in directing ruminative, digressive gab, isn’t exactly the king of dramatic structure. There are clumsy, didactic, and sentimental moments scattered through the film; at 124 minutes, it’s too long and episodic for its own good. But his sensibility—sympathetic, politically skeptical—strikes through at simple, important truths.
  97. LBJ
    It’s almost sadistic to cast Jenkins, the actor who most resembles Johnson, in a supporting role in LBJ. His scenes with Harrelson suggest a man talking to his own Halloween-mask likeness.
  98. Blade of the Immortal
    The years have not mellowed Miike’s flair for over-the-top bloodshed, but they have refined his style. His decades of action-movie experience are evident in this kinetic, punchy live-action cartoon, which remains lively and charming enough to keep the audience engaged throughout most of its epic 140-minute running time.
  99. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.
  100. 11/8/16
    Perhaps when history has had its way with this era, it will be enlightening to re-experience U.S. presidential election night, 2016. But all 11/8/16 does from this near distance is confirm a recent memory and reinforce some safe assumptions.
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