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. 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.
  2. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    This virtually action-free war movie (which premiered at Cannes last year with the English-language title The Wakhan Front) will frustrate anyone seeking concrete explanations. Its haunting atmosphere, however, in conjunction with its half-harrowing, half-sleepy milieu, keeps the film fascinating until it finally fizzles.
  3. Bros
    Bros is an excellent comedy, both as an expression of classical romance on screen, and one of a queerer, more diverse variety.
  4. Stevie
    Neither condemning nor forgiving, the film is a model of documentary evenhandedness, even though James makes no claims of objectivity.
  5. A Song for Martin
    Starts in one direction, then performs a cruel narrative fake-out, sandwiching together two different movies that are scarcely related.
  6. Road to Perdition
    Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.
  7. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.
  8. Ammonite
    Ammonite is too pallid to really get your blood flowing.
  9. Climates
    Though Climates lacks "Distant's" haunted, poetic melancholy, it has a vivid, sensual texture that's unmistakably Ceylan's. He's one of those rare directors who doesn't need a credit for identification.
  10. Skate Kitchen
    In fact, all the weed smoking and street-smart sidewalk banter aside, Skate Kitchen’s perspective is, in many ways, downright innocent; as such, it may be a better fit for adolescent viewers than adult ones.
  11. The Devil's Candy
    Byrne adds a twist by appealing to a growing and under-represented segment of the extreme art forms’ shared fan base: parents.
  12. Gone Baby Gone
    Though its procedural goes a little soft in the middle, Gone Baby Gone quietly accumulates in power, leading to one of the more subtly devastating final shots in recent memory.
  13. Iron Crows
    The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.
  14. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    Galluppi’s premise has ingenious simplicity.
  15. 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.
  16. Where Is Kyra?
    Unlike Oren Moverman’s superficially similar "Time Out Of Mind," in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man, Where Is Kyra? doesn’t constantly feel like what it necessarily is: the work of wealthy people simulating poverty. In part, that’s thanks to Pfeiffer’s vanity-free, internalized performance, which could hardly be more different from her deliciously abrasive turn in last year’s "Mother!" (It’s great to have her back.)
  17. Zodiac Killer Project
    For those who haven’t really thought about the filmmaking behind the glut of true-crime clogging up the streamer carousels, there are some revelatory moments of media criticism in here. But for those more aware of how the sausage is made, it’s simply a light and dry bit of jabbing at a dominant kind of media.
  18. Magic Mike
    Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.
  19. Straight Outta Compton
    Aside from these few flourishes of the outré and symbolically charged, there’s little to distinguish the movie from any number of overlong hit-by-hit music biopics of the nodding-approvingly-from-behind-a-mixing-console variety.
  20. Tale of Tales
    This is one of those cases where a movie is ornamented by its defects. Garrone’s undiscriminating direction of the cast, none of whom appear to be acting in the same movie, textures the film with mismatched accents, somehow adding to its macabre humor and overall strangeness.
  21. Juror #2
    To all appearances, it’s a solid, unpretentious piece of work, but like some of Eastwood’s more ambitious classics, it centers its murky moral contradictions without contriving a way to resolve them.
  22. Captain Fantastic
    To those outside his bubble, it can look at best like a form of child abuse, at worse like a cult: the nuclear family as survivalist militia.
  23. Cooley High
    With its sprawling cast of characters, digressive plot, and hit soundtrack (in this case, a boisterous Motown primer), Cooley High has been compared to another last-days-of-youth movie that came out just two years earlier, American Graffiti. Both films inevitably lace their fun with melancholy, chasing a long, wild coming-of-age bacchanal with the impending hangover of adult life. Difference is, Cooley High’s eulogy for childhood turns out to be much more sadly literal.
  24. New York Doll
    Unexpectedly heartwarming documentary.
  25. 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.
  26. Still Mine
    Cromwell delivers his defiantly gruff dialogue with amusing relish, while still grounding his protagonist’s actions in desperation and desolation. And his nostalgic conversations with Bujold while the two lay in bed have a naturalness that almost overshadows the creakiness of the surrounding material.
  27. Nanny
    It’s not a film that seeks to freak you out with jump scare after jump scare, but rather a film that wants to burrow down into your heart and fester, seeping into your room like a slow trickle of water.
  28. The Island President
    The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.
  29. Our Nixon
    The results are akin to seeing the Nixon presidency through the eyes of his top aides; it’s as much a portrait of innocence lost as a behind-closed-doors exposé.
  30. The Cabin in the Woods
    It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?
  31. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    Public Enemy openly raises the question of why officers of the law hated Mesrine so much that they were willing to turn his death into a block party.
  32. Miami Blues
    Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie.
  33. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    There's little wrong with Charlie, but it needs the Burton of old to animate its candy-colored universe with mischief and awe. Instead, he remains trapped like Wonka in a hermetic house of wonders, and the movie suffocates along with him.
  34. Headhunters
    Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.
  35. Quinceañera
    Quinceañera sketches its characters and conflicts with warmth and empathy.
  36. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    On the whole, the filmmakers hold too much to the text, and too often employ the smugly knowing, self-righteous tone typical of British telejournalism.
  37. Stone Reader
    There's a terrific short film somewhere inside Mark Moskowitz's feature-length documentary Stone Reader. Unfortunately, it's buried within a flabby 128-minute slog that feels like a rough draft nobody had the heart to edit down.
  38. All or Nothing
    It's a hard-won comfort, found here over a bleak stretch of days, but All Or Nothing makes it look like the best life has to offer.
  39. Bowling for Columbine
    Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.
  40. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    Brittany Runs A Marathon winds up feeling like a story told by an outsider who’s empathetic toward, but not fully immersed in, a specific lived experience.
  41. Alléluia
    Was there a pressing need for yet another rendition of this story? Should it come around again (and it likely will), a unique perspective on the events would be welcome.
  42. Millennium Mambo
    Millennium Mambo is a resolutely minor work, so enveloped in ennui that it never gets past the surface of things. But those surfaces are remarkable.
  43. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer's signature play of shadow and light.
  44. Promising Young Woman
    Promising Young Woman fancies itself edgy, and relishes complicating the catharsis of something like the scene where Cassandra smashes some douchebag’s windshield with a tire iron after he yells at her on the road. But while the craft of the film is top-notch, and the writing razor-sharp, its nihilistic point of view isn’t as unprecedented as Fennell seems to think it is.
  45. Easier with Practice
    Love stories don’t come much squirmier than this one, and Alvarez plays it with honesty, insight, and the awkwardness inherent in this blindest of blind dates.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    The true magnitude of this band no longer existing is felt most strongly in these moments, when Shut Up is at its most uplifting and danceable. It's a party Shut Up And Play The Hits decides to leave far too often.
  47. The Wedding Plan
    Turns out that, every once in a while, wedding something old to something borrowed can make something new.
  48. The Scout
    The Scout is as pretty-gloomy as an off day in New York, as winning as a good work anecdote, as defeating as another day on the job, and as listless as a generation starting to feel the shadow of their looming midlife crisis.
  49. Love, Simon
    Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.
  50. Diplomacy
    It’s a stagy setup whose theatrical roots are always front and center, yet it’s one that’s handled with aplomb by director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), whose latest has enough visual panache to compensate for the static, conversational nature of the work.
  51. Crime After Crime
    Through the ceaseless efforts of two dedicated pro bono lawyers-both with personal reasons to keep up the fight for five or six grueling years-director Yoav Potash follows every revelation and setback with an urgency most fiction films can't muster.
  52. Dogtooth
    It's an exhilaratingly unpredictable experience, and not an easy one to shake.
  53. In the House
    All the way up to the stunning final shot, Ozon urgently asks whether, for storytellers, it’s better to be on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out.
  54. Hal
    Though clearly aimed at fans, it presents only a chummy overview of his life and career, too superficial to work as a biography, an in-depth appreciation, or even a primer.
  55. A Face in the Crowd
    It's like an early version of Network, and it's just as overwrought, but Kazan enlivens the material with a mise en scène so vigorous that it could make anyone buy into the auteur theory. Kazan varies his shooting style, alternating between portraiture, expressionism, and docu-realism for a look and rhythm that's about 15 years ahead of its time.
  56. City of Gold
    As Gabbert alternates [Gold's] monologues with long, gliding shots of funky supermarkets and old cinemas, she makes the point these aren’t disconnected aberrations in L.A. This is the city.
  57. Rejoice and Shout
    The smartest move that McGlynn makes in Rejoice And Shout is to let those old performances run on at length.
  58. In Bloom
    Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.
  59. Berlin
    If nothing else, Julian Schnabel's concert film Lou Reed's Berlin presents the album's 10 songs with a force they've rarely shown before.
  60. All That Jazz
    Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts.
  61. M3GAN
    Though the contortionist-level juxtaposition of an American Girl murderbot should probably be more viscerally satisfying, Cooper’s offbeat humor and Johnstone’s ability to build tension with her characters make for a potent combination.
  62. Belushi
    Cutler takes on the ambitious task of showing not only Belushi’s impact, but how that impact wound up leading to his own ruin.
  63. God Grew Tired of Us
    It's convincing as everything but a piece of good filmmaking.
  64. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.
  65. Seabiscuit
    Though the results are a matter of record, the uplift is nevertheless intoxicating, even enough to compensate for a film that routinely substitutes corny iconography for real imagination and vision.
  66. Always Shine
    Always Shine shines brightest when it lets these women be themselves, and the filmmaking provides the dissonance.
  67. A Secret
    A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no mater how well-maintained.
  68. King Jack
    Rich detail and strong performances do battle with coming-of-age clichés in King Jack, an indie drama that winds up feeling overly beholden to the dictates of various screenwriting manuals.
  69. Mickey 17
    Messy as it is, the filmmaking so energetically delivers its acidic pessimism that it’s rarely unpleasant.
  70. 3-Iron
    3-Iron gains its hypnotic power by observing these characters through a slight remove. With total command of his effects, Kim transforms an already peculiar romance into something as otherworldly as a ghost story.
  71. 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.
  72. His House
    A potent, heart-wrenching spin on the classic haunted house story, buoyed by two stellar lead performances.
  73. Earth
    On the nature-documentary continuum, Earth falls closer to the cuddly anthropomorphism of "March Of The Penguins" than the cold rationality of "Grizzly Man."
  74. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    As an expression of the filmmaker’s own sense of guilt over buying into the Apple myth, this picture intends to be a bummer.
  75. Princess Cyd
    So many movies are all sizzle and no steak; it’s kind of refreshing, in a way, to be frustrated by all steak and no sizzle.
  76. Bone Tomahawk
    S. Craig Zahler’s horror-Western hybrid Bone Tomahawk is a strange movie, one that might take more than one watch to fully understand. Not that it’s deliberately obscure, or has a plot too complicated to follow the first time around. It’s actually a pretty straightforward film, albeit one filled with eccentric choices.
  77. Risk
    It’s a patchy and seemingly unfinished film.
  78. Let Them All Talk
    Steven Soderbergh’s latest film boasts the relaxed, improvisational vibe of a temporary diversion—the sort of thing one might cook up to help pass the time during an extended voyage.
  79. 7 Days
    As a romantic comedy, 7 Days hardly circumvents a cinematic lexicon of time-honored tropes, but its skill in dismantling stereotypes, sexist beliefs, and even the process of falling in love offers a fresh and charming rejoinder to the cynicism of both its own genre and the emerging repetition of pandemic-set films.
  80. 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?
  81. Nine Days
    More often than not, it’s better when filmmakers have a point-of-view, a sense of style, and something to say—all of which is undeniably true of Oda. But Nine Days resonates at such a distinct frequency that some may find it hauntingly beautiful (and have found it so, ever since the film debuted at Sundance back in 2020) while others may find it much too blaring.
  82. Mike Wallace Is Here
    To be blunt—which Wallace, who died in 2012, always was—Mike Wallace Is Here is fascinating but scattered, and never quite decides what its target should be.
  83. Superman Returns
    Singer's reverence for the 1978 version edges perilously close to mimicry, as if he has no new ideas to bring to the table, but he succeeds in drawing out the Superman myth with simple power and a refreshing absence of irony.
  84. Weathering with You
    This is what ultimately makes the movie’s climate-change backdrop more poignant than perplexing. By the end of Weathering With You, this has become a story about two people with their whole lives ahead of them, navigating their way through a future where they pine for things we all take for granted. Like, say, the simple pleasure of a sunny day.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Men in Black
    Deserves credit for supplementing its special effects with a breezy script and genuinely charismatic performances by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
  86. Infinity Pool
    For his third feature, Cronenberg the Younger doesn’t ape his father’s style so much as he expands upon it. With Infinity Pool, in comparison to Cronenberg the Elder’s good-but-not-great Crimes Of The Future, you could even say he’s perfecting it.
  87. Good Hair
    Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pi
    Aronofsky's ability to capture the rush and confusion of racing down a timeline toward infinity, only to suddenly slam into a dead end, makes for impressive and occasionally disturbing stuff.
  89. The Bitter Buddha
    The Bitter Buddha closes with Pepitone pondering whether he’s wasted his life by focusing on comedy rather than family, but everything that’s come before suggests that decision has led to a life that’s a triumph rather than a tragedy.
  90. 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.
  91. Wreck-It Ralph
    Twice now Reilly and Silverman have helped to give a cartoon’s happy ending real emotional depth. And twice now, they’ve made their characters so endearing that some fans may feel oddly conflicted about the prospect of undoing those endings just to see them again.
  92. Heavy Trip
    While the film’s attempts at slapstick can be painful — in a cringing way, not in a brutal way — Heavy Trip does succeed in creating perhaps the most charming ensemble of morbid dorks since "What We Do In The Shadows."
  93. First They Killed My Father
    The most remarkable thing about First They Killed My Father is how quiet it is.
  94. ParaNorman
    It plays with comedy and drama, but keeps failing to commit to one or the other.
  95. Let It Rain
    There’s not much left to chew on when the movie is over; when Resnais adapted Jaoui and Bacri’s scripts, he added a visual counter-narrative that’s absent from Jaoui’s more functional approach. But a passing delight is a delight all the same.
  96. Luce
    It’s a remarkable, chilling performance: from Harrison, certainly, but also from his character, playing code-switching mind games with his teacher.
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