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. Jealousy
    Jealousy — arguably the slightest film Garrel has produced since the 1980s — may not add up to a whole lot, but its sense of life and the medium is, as always, substantial and accomplished.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Homestretch
    In a moral sense, teen homelessness is very much a crime, and Chicago-based filmmakers Anne De Mare and Kirsten Kelly aim to shed a light on this nationwide epidemic in The Homestretch, using the Windy City as a test case.
  3. Selma
    As cinema, Selma is commendable; as cultural barometer, it’s beyond reproach.
  4. Black Mass
    Without an emotional core, a stronger sociological angle, or many visceral thrills, Black Mass more or less limits itself to procedural status. Within those aims, it’s a pretty good one, absorbing and well-made.
  5. The Green Prince
    Yet even if the individuals and their motives themselves don’t always come into full focus, The Green Prince is an absorbing psychological study of shifting allegiances.
  6. The Tribe
    One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.
  7. The Longest Week
    Aggressively derivative though The Longest Week is, however, it’s clearly the work not of a lazy thief, but of a raw talent who’s still struggling to find his own voice. In the meantime, his impressions are pretty darn impressive.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ABCs of Death 2
    Omnibus features are by their nature uneven, so it’s to the benefit of the ABCs Of Death series that the creative constraints (26 short horror films, each one pegged to a specific letter of the alphabet) encourage brevity.
  9. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    It’s little surprise that Her turns out to be the better of the two movies, mostly by virtue of prominently featuring Chastain, who conveys an interior life — shifting emotions, competing desires — the script doesn’t supply her.
  10. American Sniper
    American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.
  11. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    While The Man From U.N.C.L.E. probably isn’t any less of a caricature of its period than "Sherlock Holmes," it carries its fakeness with more snap in its step. The imaginary intrigue it generates is fleeting, but often beautiful.
  12. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
    The film is at its best when cutting between delicious stories... It doesn’t make for the strongest film, but it does work like a case of people swapping outrageous war stories over a few beers.
  13. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys is funny enough when it sticks to its heroes — whether pinned in a tight spot or bickering with each other — that its less-than-compelling intrigues and digressions come as an acceptable trade-off.
  14. Now You See Me 2
    Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.
  15. The Last Five Years
    For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.
  16. Love & Mercy
    Capturing the spirit of that music (while dramatizing the circumstances of its creation) is Love & Mercy’s biggest victory.
  17. 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.
  18. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The uninitiated, meanwhile, can start with Pigeon and work their way backward through Andersson’s trilogy. It only gets better in reverse.
  19. Still Alice
    Though shot in the stolidly inconspicuous style of a low-rated cable drama, Still Alice is rarely anything short of compelling, in part because its sense of progression and scale offers such a distinctively unsentimental take on the terminal-countdown tearjerker.
  20. Kong: Skull Island
    Skull Island has a lot of globe-trotting fun assembling its team of expendables.
  21. Red Army
    If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.
  22. Hellaware
    Even with a runtime just barely over an hour, the shock comedy of Hellaware grows a bit numbing after a while.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Heart Machine
    The Heart Machine’s denouement is ultimately disappointing, but the film is still one of the more successful cinematic portrayals of online intimacy.
  24. The Night Before
    The Night Before isn’t Rogen’s funniest movie. Minute for minute, it doesn’t have as many laughs as "Superbad," "Neighbors," or "This Is The End," among others. But it does contain one of Rogen’s funniest performances, as Isaac navigates a very long and very bad drug trip, a responsibility-free Christmas gift from his wife.
  25. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    To some degree, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is a more offbeat film than the original, with better gags, better (and more cartoonish) action, and more visual variety.
  26. Thor: Ragnarok
    Thor: Ragnarok, with its jabs of reportedly improvised banter, isn’t really an action movie. It’s a round-robin buddy comedy, mismatching Hemsworth’s amiable lug to characters old and new.
  27. Zero Motivation
    Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny.
  28. Penance
    The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.
  29. Zootopia
    Like Disney’s "Big Hero 6," the movie is busy, but not breathless with invention.
  30. What We Do in the Shadows
    The result is more often amusing than gut-busting, but it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and that’s fairly impressive in itself.
  31. Predestination
    Predestination, a superficially cerebral new thriller, plays almost exclusively to the diagram-drawing crowd.
  32. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    The lack of dialogue makes Shaun The Sheep easy for younger children all over the world to understand, and the film is undeniably intended for that demographic.
  33. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    It’s the cathartic, even meditative qualities of metal that are explored in A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a new documentary whatsit that frequently resembles nothing so much as an adaptation of some imaginary black-metal record.
  34. The Visit
    A refreshing (and memorably strange) genre piece, premised almost entirely on a child’s willingness to accept grown-up weirdness as long as it ensures stability.
  35. The Revenant
    There’s a sense that the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of the parts, no matter how spectacular some of them are.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Salt of the Earth
    Whether snapping single-person portraits or expansive group shots, each of Salgado’s subjects is a unique and distinctive being. Their individuality resonates despite the fact that the world weighs heavy on them, threatening anonymity.
  37. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    [REC] 4 is a tight, controlled film, not the explosive epic promised by the “Apocalypse” in its title.
  38. Star Trek Beyond
    With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.
  39. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The end result is too boxed in by the demands of the franchise era and the usual restrictions of a PG-13 rating to qualify as art. It can’t show morally troubling violence or embrace hopelessness, and its day trip into the heart of darkness has to end with a ray of sunshine—“The horror, the horror...” in quotation marks.
  40. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    At times, Porumboiu’s mix of repetition and resignation recalls Samuel Beckett, and if the overall result is more of a clever exercise than a proper movie, it’ll still have some dryly amusing appeal for those who appreciate intellectual absurdism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Wrecking Crew
    As a love letter to the director’s late father, The Wrecking Crew sparkles. As a potentially comprehensive, context-rich chronicle of one of pop music’s most inspired engines of rhythm and melody, it mostly sticks to one note.
  42. Ghost in the Shell
    It is in its designs, more so than in its generic corporate-conspiracy plot, that this new Ghost In The Shell finds tantalizing expressions of theme.
  43. Bloodsucking Bastards
    So while this is all rather dumb, it’s dumb fun, and aside from some incongruous soundtrack choices—the credits music encourages us to “burn down the disco,” which, sure, but during office hours?—director Brian James O’Connell plays all of his tonal elements right, which is to say fast-paced; goofy; and very, very bloody.
  44. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    Captain Underpants’ charm lies in its lighthearted and lightly scatological silliness, so it’s a shame that the movie sometimes overstuffs itself.
  45. Ghostbusters
    As enjoyable as this movie is, sometimes it feels like it’s holding back; no one’s id runs wild. But the limitations of Ghostbusters make Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Jones even more valuable. They make a big franchise-starter warmer and more endearing than it needs to be.
  46. Dope
    Dope has more characters and subplots than it knows what to do with, and its performances are all over the place, ranging from Clemons’ and Revolori’s charismatic turns as second-banana goofballs to Roger Guenveur Smith’s stylized impression of a local millionaire, so vampiric that he might as well be slathered in German Expressionist makeup.
  47. I Am Michael
    Both of Kelly’s movies so far have shown the same strengths and weaknesses. He has an emotionally distant, observational approach, which makes the most outlandish behavior seem grounded and plausible, but which also makes moments of passion and confrontation come off a little flat.
  48. Mississippi Grind
    So long as the film focuses on that spiky rapport, and on the authentic, lived-in textures of the American Midwest, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Unfortunately, the grittiness and weary pathos ultimately gives way to a disappointingly pat finale, undermining everything that came before.
  49. Mistress America
    This new-new Baumbach isn’t necessarily better than the old-new Baumbach; "Young" felt meatier, with a stronger sense of who its neurotic New Yorkers were. But that film didn’t have Gerwig, bringing warmth, wit, and loopy star power to a character — a human bulldozer of incorrigible extroversion — as fictional as the Big Apple you see only on the big screen.
  50. The Overnight
    The pleasure of the movie lies in the way it both rewards and subverts expectations, delivering on the risqué possibilities of its premise while also coming up with something smarter and a little deeper than a log line might suggest.
  51. Cop Car
    A surprisingly nasty piece of work, more reminiscent of old John Dahl thrillers from the ’90s (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction) than of "Let’s Be Cops."
  52. Entertainment
    It’s a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.
  53. Grandma
    It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.
  54. Misery Loves Comedy
    To a person, these comedians are looking for a connection, some attention, and appreciation — which makes them, as Penn Jillette points out toward the end, just like everybody else, only they have microphones and spotlights.
  55. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Ultimately, what makes Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead valuable is the sense it provides of how savage and uncompromising the National Lampoon was in its heyday.
  56. Take Me to the River
    With just a few minor tweaks, Take Me To The River could play as a moody supernatural horror picture, with Logan as the dangerously curious hero being warned away from an evil he shouldn’t confront.
  57. Two Men in Town
    The result is a movie of complicated interpersonal and cross-cultural tensions.
  58. Faults
    He’s (Riley Stearns) fashioned a movie that undergoes a slow, captivating metamorphosis, scene by scene, though who’s the caterpillar and who’s the cocoon remains unclear until the very end.
  59. Love & Friendship
    It does offer a very amusing portrait of guile and idiocy. Think of it as a divertissement. Both Austen and Stillman would surely approve.
  60. Seymour: An Introduction
    The biggest problem with Seymour, though, is that Hawke can’t quite find a structure or rhythm for the movie as a whole. It’s only 81 minutes long, and never remotely boring, but the feeling that it’s due to end at any moment kicks in around the midpoint and persists right up until it actually does end, like the documentary equivalent of "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King."
  61. Life
    Corbijn’s reserved, removed approach gives his stars the space to develop a real chemistry, which makes their characters pleasant company, once they get past their early clumsiness around each other.
  62. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Efron imbues his handsome-dope routine with such nuance that Teddy is not only funny but also touching in his sincere desire for brotherhood, in short supply postgraduation. What could have been simplistic self-parody becomes a genuinely, almost confusingly terrific performance.
  63. My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
    My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn, Liv Corfixen’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of "Only God Forgives," has a clear precedent in "Hearts Of Darkness," Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of "Apocalypse Now."
  64. Spring
    A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.
  65. Rebels of the Neon God
    Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.
  66. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    It has undeniable weaknesses: an underwritten protagonist, a generic villain, a shortage of interesting personalities. (No knock against the large cast, which is mostly very good, but underused.) But in many other respects, it is a better film than last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens: leaner, darker, with a distinct visual style and an actual ending that feels like a denial of blockbuster expectations simply because it shows basic narrative integrity.
  67. 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.
  68. Our Man in Tehran
    The story can’t help but work — even when its directors are beating viewers over the head with the message.
  69. Experimenter
    The film bears the subtitle The Stanley Milgram Story, but it’s most effective when it strenuously avoids biopic conventions, focusing intently on the man’s controversial professional life.
  70. The Founder
    Hancock is not the ideal fit for the queasy mix of fascination, sympathy, and discomfort that Siegel brought to movies like The Wrestler and Big Fan. The Founder is drier than either of those movies, which means it’s less funny but also has even less potential for sentiment.
  71. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Orson Welles famously called filmmaking “the biggest electric-train set any boy ever had,” and Raiders! captures that spirit without inviting the mockery that, say, American Movie does.
  72. Black Souls
    For long stretches, it doesn’t appear to be a genre movie at all, which unfortunately means that certain tropes stick out more conspicuously when they do arrive — a minor flaw that only slightly detracts from the overall quality of the production.
  73. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Despite some compelling performances, this R-rated but genial dramedy is a lot like its protagonist: unconventional, yet playing it safe.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Batkid Begins
    Miles treats this whole experience with an affectingly genuine innocence—something that the filmmakers, and many of the participants, seem to think can be bottled and sold as a soul-cleansing palliative.
  75. The Secret Life of Pets
    As it progresses, The Secret Life Of Pets starts to overreach dramatically, and loses some of its charm in the process.
  76. Youth
    Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it’s no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you’re on Sorrentino’s wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, “oppressive” might be a better word.
  77. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    This is an uncharacteristically unsubtle work from Lee — yet in the end, it’s not ineffective.
  78. The LEGO Batman Movie
    If The Lego Movie was a delightful tribute to the multifaceted experiences of playing with Legos, this movie is like one of the licensed sets that inspired it: Less essential, more market-driven, and still irresistible for certain kids, fans, and nerds.
  79. American Made
    American Made has such style and energy that its hasty patchwork of a narrative becomes a kind of charm unto itself, even when it means losing track of talented actors.
  80. American Ultra
    American Ultra is one of those geeky genre mishmashes that’s very clever about being dumb.
  81. The Nightmare
    The human brain, this movie suggests, is the ultimate horror-movie director, and sleep-paralysis hallucinations are just an extreme form of the standard-issue nightmares we all unwillingly create on a regular basis. It’s one thing to be tormented. It’s another thing to face the grim reality that you’re tormenting yourself.
  82. Güeros
    Even if Güeros doesn’t entirely work, it feels worthy: a film made independently and without interference whose reverence for the past thankfully doesn’t result in too much solemnity or seriousness.
  83. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Though smarter visually than its TV-ready format would suggest (the camera team includes ace cinematographers Eric Gautier and Mihai Mălaimare Jr.), Hitchcock/Truffaut doesn’t offer a whole lot more than the opportunity to watch and hear very smart people talk about something they know very well.
  84. Love at First Fight
    Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.
  85. 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.
  86. In the Shadow of Women
    Shot on black-and-white film that has the luster of hard coal, In The Shadow Of Women is often quite beautiful—and it has some jokes, too.
  87. The Measure of a Man
    Brizé doesn’t have the Dardennes’ gift for narrative complexity, and he stacks the deck against his hero more than is really necessary.... But The Measure Of A Man’s beating heart is Lindon’s performance.
  88. My Golden Days
    Desplechin tackles drama with wildly confident eclecticism, sometimes even besting Martin Scorsese in pure movie-mad feverishness: iris shots, radically different camera styles, unexpected musical and literary quotations, theatrical flourishes, scenes broken up in collage.
  89. 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.
  90. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    No music mockumentary has really managed to reproduce This Is Spinal Tap’s comic mojo, but Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping gets closer than most to that subgenre-defining comedy’s mix of the dead-on and the over-the-top, even if it tends to go for quantity over quality.
  91. What We Did on Our Holiday
    What We Did On Our Holiday sets up a sturdy comic scenario and then proceeds to head in another direction altogether—one that’s nearly impossible to anticipate, making the film much more of a goofy delight than would have seemed likely at the outset.
  92. Yakuza Apocalypse
    His latest, the deranged and frequently funny Yakuza Apocalypse, is in many ways a return to both his early years in the wilds of V-Cinema — Japan’s direct-to-video industry — and to the kind of midnight-movie fodder that first made his reputation abroad, albeit done on a much larger scale and with fewer quirks of style.
  93. Land and Shade
    Land And Shade is a slow-paced art-film, where the static shots are held at length and the characters pause between lines of dialogue, to give viewers plenty of chances to register the mood, look, feel, and significance of everything Acevedo shows.
  94. The Club
    This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.
  95. We Are Still Here
    The new chiller We Are Still Here is the latest iteration of people unwittingly stumbling upon an ancient menace, and it succeeds more than it fails, thanks largely to the nice work of first-time director Ted Geoghegan.
  96. Gabriel
    Gabriel, the first feature written and directed by Lou Howe, gives Culkin an opportunity to demonstrate serious range, and he takes full advantage; if this film doesn’t ignite his career, it’ll only be because too few people see it.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Felt
    Everson is endlessly watchable as she cycles through despair, anger, wariness, and trust. Her sense of humor as an artist and performer shines through.
  98. Runoff
    Like its rural setting, Runoff is slow, deliberate, and concerned with practical things.
  99. Soaked in Bleach
    If it doesn’t lead people to believe that Cobain was murdered, it might achieve its secondary goals — to at least nudge them toward the possibility, and to get the authorities to consider re-opening the case. It’s intended as a call to action, not just a salacious re-hash.
  100. Cartel Land
    Whatever one’s moral qualms regarding the Autodefensas—and Heineman makes a point of showing that Mireles, who’s married, has a penchant for using his celebrity to seduce much younger women—there’s no denying the engrossing nature of the footage shown here, or that the people involved are fighting for their own lives.
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