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. Collateral
    Mann's moody Collateral unravels toward the end, faltering at its conclusion but dispensing enough atmosphere, characterization, and world-weary humanism along the way that audiences would be wise to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the final destination.
  2. 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.
  3. House of Sand and Fog
    Folds like a house of cards, collapsing under its own flimsy foundation.
  4. The Tenant
    Though the result is too slow and curious, with a weak lead performance by the writer-director, The Tenant's tone of abstracted anxiety is distinctive, and its central message, that the obnoxious define the world for everyone else, provides another tile in Polanski's career mosaic of paranoia and power brokerage.
  5. Lourdes
    Lourdes starts from the unexpected position of believing miracles are possible, but it doesn’t paper over the religious and practical problems they raise--for the blessed and bereft alike.
  6. Euthanizer
    Nikki, who appears to be making the most of an extremely limited budget, has attempted to make something like a modern-day take on the creepy, kinky, deeply personal B-movie, studiously avoiding anything that would smack of revivalism; after all, no authentic B-movie ever set out to look like a B-movie. The surrealists would have liked this film.
  7. Don't Breathe
    Half a century after "Wait Until Dark" pitted a blind Audrey Hepburn against the three crooks trying to get into her apartment, along comes Don’t Breathe to successfully invert its scenario.
  8. Neshoba
    For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.
  9. 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.
  10. Beyond the Gates
    Hurt steals scenes with a brilliantly nuanced character, a man bitter enough to make every line delivered to his peers a challenge or an accusation, yet experienced enough to present those challenges with an ingratiating politesse that only cracks in extremis.
  11. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Provides little in the way of comforting catharsis. That may be because Berlinger, a thorough and impassioned muckraker, has managed to find hints of injustice in the justice that was served.
  12. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.
  13. Strongman
    Though Levy's film feels shapeless at times, what it loses in structure, it gains in handheld intimacy, letting viewers get to know the mercurial but fundamentally sweet Pleskun.
  14. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Through Bingenheimer, the film not only gets the last word on the peculiar allure of celebrity, but also captures a fascinating shadow history of West Coast rock, which owes no small part of its livelihood to Bingenheimer's influence as a tastemaker.
  15. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    It might not be destined to join the ranks of teen comedy masterpieces, but in the short term, its ability to nail the right balance of emotional and comedic unpredictability makes it a very pleasant journey, and a must-see for teen movie aficionados.
  16. Blinded by the Light
    A cheerful, cheesy coming-of-age story that evokes the earnest films of the era in which it’s set, Blinded By The Light is not one for the schmaltz-averse. Yet as with Chadha’s "Bend It Like Beckham" and "Bride & Prejudice," there’s some appreciably meaty stuff beneath its toe-tapping, crowd-pleasing surface.
  17. Johnny Got His Gun
    The film, which bears many marks of the Vietnam era, isn’t against any particular war, it’s against war itself. By immersing viewers in the horrors of one man’s suffering, it forces them to consider the implications of sending soldiers out to fight for a cause.
  18. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Gehry is a fascinating subject, a strangely magnetic combination of rumpled, aw-shucks humility and Herculean ambition and hubris, but every time Pollack stumbles onto a fascinating topic like Gehry's battles with anti-Semitism, he pulls away instead of delving deeper.
  19. The Big Picture
    For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
  20. 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.
  21. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    Slight but fun.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bob Trevino Likes It
    What stands out most about Tracie Laymon’s debut feature is how courageously, unapologetically earnest it is—that it was based on her own experiences only adds an extra level of vulnerability.
  23. In July
    Every time the pace starts to flag, it coughs up one hilarious left-field interlude after another.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Padilha's film has a witheringly low opinion of most people - the gangs are no better than animals, the regular police are gleefully corrupt, the liberal intellectuals are sanctimonious fools, and the politicians are only interested in protecting themselves.
  25. Black Book
    In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.
  26. Girls Trip
    Before the opening credits have finished rolling, voice-over narration is lamenting the distance that can grow between even the tightest of friendships and hyping up the audience for a reunion of characters who have barely been introduced. It may be shameless, but it’s honest.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Way He Looks
    Ribeiro captures the experiential awkwardness of young love pitch-perfectly.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    A haunting, expressionistic portrait of two lonely souls who have reached out for companionship and instead found themselves on a proving ground, where they are mercilessly denuded of their protective lies and self-deception.
  29. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Hugh Grant’s face is perpetually locked in a concerned grimace as Bayfield, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere when he’s not doting on his wife.
  30. Remote Area Medical
    The camera tracks every emotional up and down, through tests and surgery, with an unfussy precision that allows the themes to arise naturally.
  31. The Farewell Party
    The Farewell Party leaves no doubt as to where it stands on the right to die with dignity when facing terminal illness, but it’s so clumsily made that it serves only to exasperate.
  32. Francofonia
    Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.
  33. The Great Escaper
    A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.
  34. Drinking Buddies
    The entire film unfolds in a recognizable register of ominous hesitation; the results are a bit schematic but nevertheless hit on something real.
  35. The Theory of Everything
    It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.
  36. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    The trilogy's conclusion, 71 Fragments, doesn't quite fit the glaciation theme, but it does show Haneke's willingness to experiment with the form and challenge the way audiences receive information. The film's radical deconstruction of various narrative strands questions the way such information is delivered and received.
  37. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.
  38. The Descent
    The Descent sustains a level of intensity that most horror films can barely muster for five minutes.
  39. Rana's Wedding
    Agreeably soft at heart, a fun and progressive entertainment that above all wants to give love a wide berth, no matter what imposing obstacles have to be cleared from the aisle first.
  40. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Given the duo’s withering take on capitalism, it’s ironic that their stumbling second feature feels throughout like an infomercial for a shtick whose expiration date is rapidly approaching.
  41. A Perfect World
    It’s material primed for mushiness, yet Eastwood shrewdly marries sentimentality to both self-deprecating humor (including a late bullhorn gag) and darker, more desolate undercurrents.
  42. Dogman
    The lead performance, from the mostly unknown Fonte, is a small symphony of crumbling ingratiation: the portrait of a good man trying to cling to his principles in the face of stubborn, selfish immorality.
  43. The Road
    Moving fluidly between gory sight gags and implied, insinuating terror, The Road is a movie made to be seen after midnight, preferably in a mildly dilapidated theater with a full house.
  44. Cam
    Mazzei’s script and Goldhaber’s direction complement each other beautifully, with true-to-life details like the tacky dollar-store carpet that decorates Alice’s camming room and the pink taser she keeps in her car playing off of—and enhancing—the naturalistic dialogue.
  45. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.
  46. Rain
    Rain lays so much portent on every scene that it becomes ungenerous and morally forbidding, as if each bummed cigarette or leisurely cocktail will lead the family that much closer to oblivion. In this case, the punishment is far greater than the crime.
  47. Piranha
    With Piranha, Dante delivers a superior Jaws rip-off with a light, goofy touch that anticipates the anarchic, gleeful mayhem of his later work.
  48. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.
  49. Get On Up
    Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.
  50. Blitz
    Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.
  51. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The result feels like a DVD or Blu-ray special feature with a celebrity pedigree, rather than a movie that can stand on its own two feet.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Gazer
    There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more compelling.
  53. 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.
  54. The Boys of Baraka
    Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.
  55. 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.)
  56. The Evil Dead
    Then the carnage comes, and when it does, it delivers on all promises and more, with a parade of gushing wounds, demonic howls, and oceans of gore which approach the line of good taste, toe it, then gleefully dance across. [22 Sept 2010]
  57. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Rosner works for famed Democratic strategist James Carville, who stops just short of dry-humping the camera lens in his hunger for the spotlight here. Our Brand Is Crisis is full of strangely resonant parallels to American politics.
  58. Mrs Henderson Presents
    Poking fun at uptight British civility has long been a monocle-shattering comedic staple, and Mrs. Henderson Presents gets by for a while on its genial naughtiness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Now, Voyager
    With its bittersweet romance and air of tragic empowerment, Now, Voyager represents the pinnacle of the woman's picture.
  60. The Room Next Door
    The Spanish maverick’s penchant for melodrama is somewhat off-kilter, but his exquisite eye for color and contrast is decidedly intact, with his lead actresses posing as perfect canvases.
  61. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    Currently serving out a sentence that will likely consume the remainder of his life, Spector turns the interview into a trial on his own terms--one that's gripping, revelatory, and a little self-incriminating.
  62. Fort Tilden
    For all its exquisite theater-of-cruelty viciousness, Fort Tilden is finally a work of empathy about people whose own supplies are running on empty.
  63. Double Dare
    Given how well Micheli captures the personality and aspirations of two complicated professionals, it's too bad she never answers the key question: What makes one person a stuntwoman, and another a star?
  64. The Motel
    Like the best independent films, The Motel realizes that life is made up of minor pleasures and tiny epiphanies, not sweeping character arcs or big dramatic moments.
  65. Yossi & Jagger
    A sprint when it should be a marathon, Yossi & Jagger crackles with promise, but much of it goes unrealized. Without the time or resources to develop its characters and overstuffed plot, the result feels like the Cliffs Notes for a longer, more satisfying film.
  66. Prisoners
    It makes for a compelling viewing experience, thanks to Villeneuve’s formal chops and the uniformly strong performances.
  67. Year of the Dog
    White's gently perceptive film is a funny, poignant, emotionally honest minor-key character study.
  68. Batman Begins
    A rousing, reverent, often brilliant re-creation of a seminal comics character, Batman Begins proves Batman is at home in the 21st century as he was in the 20th.
  69. Earth Days
    Nearly a quarter of the way through Earth Days, the movie seems on-track to being just another tongue-clucking “Isn’t it a pity” doc, painted in broad strokes.
  70. Empathy
    Somehow, all of these scattered pieces of film and video fit together, as do the ideas they represent.
  71. Bal
    Bal mingles the bitter and the sweet, but it gets mired in its own stickiness.
  72. Bird People
    It’s also just magnificently goofy, unafraid to court ridicule and confident enough to take captivating detours.
  73. Theater Camp
    It’s constructed from the inside out, all of its characters and energy flowing from a genuine place.
  74. Standard Operating Procedure
    With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts And Minds.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Star Trek: First Contact
    Of course, these movies are supposed to be big, but First Contact is the kind of porky, clumsy thing that would be ignored if it didn't come complete with an enormous guaranteed audience—and if it weren't actually kind of fun in spite of itself.
  76. I Love You, Man
    What saves I Love You, Man, at least partially, is the relaxed chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, both very funny men who are genuine enough to push back against a premise that's often maddeningly artificial.
  77. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.
  78. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.
  79. Ushpizin
    Ushpizin's effortlessly authentic depiction of Jewish orthodoxy--and the palpable, almost ecstatic sense of joy its characters take in it--ultimately tips the film's hand.
  80. The Walk
    It’s when the walk portion of The Walk arrives that this unevenly scripted, fact-based thriller achieves its full potential. Even without the suspense of uncertainty, the sequence achieves a bated-breath intensity and wonder.
  81. The Barbarian Invasions
    The Barbarian Invasions' flaws are mainly glaring because the movie is occasionally so winning.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dior and I
    Dior And I isn’t any kind of hard-hitting exposé. Tcheng — who previously co-directed another style doc, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" — is seduced by this exclusive world, and he communicates that allure with undeniable flair.
  83. Sundown
    Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness.
  84. Companion
    The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.
  85. A Complete Unknown
    A Complete Unknown is an honest film that wants to get close to an enigma, maybe even unlock his mystery a little. After the film, Dylan might not be any less of an unknown, but it’s the film’s breathtaking pursuit that counts.
  86. Rock 'n' Roll High School
    Underneath its chipper, anything-for-laugh grin, Rock ‘N’ Roll is as subversive as teen movies get, with an ending that, for all its absurdity, is still surprisingly shocking.
  87. Friday Night Lights
    When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.
  88. Manon of the Spring
    The pacing is expansive rather than draggy; Berri is in no rush to tear through his story, but the dialogue is generally meaningful and story-critical, and very little goes on that isn't directly relevant to the story's ultimate ends.
  89. Ordinary Love
    Despite their best efforts, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville can’t rescue Ordinary Love, a bland drama about a late-middle-aged couple grappling with a cancer diagnosis.
  90. The Bikeriders
    It is too conventional to be an outlaw, but Nichols and the cast have a blast pretending.
  91. Swimming Pool
    Swimming Pool returns Ozon to the psychological complexities of "Under The Sand" and his early mini-feature "See The Sea," and he again proves himself a master of building shocking moments from a series of seemingly insignificant gestures and throwaway lines.
  92. Narc
    Carnahan alternates gritty neo-realism with bursts of extreme stylization -- most notably in a breathless opening chase filmed with handheld cameras -- but thankfully, his stylistic flourishes are in the service of the film's story, not the other way around.
  93. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Once viewers adjust to the cognitive dissonance between intense Flemish dialogue and English performances of country and bluegrass songs,The Broken Circle Breakdown is a film that will likely stick with them long after the credits roll.
  94. 1900
    The story is almost too small for Bertolucci's sprawling approach, and the ungainliness of his international cast stifles both the dialogue and the performances.
  95. Catch-22
    It's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.
  96. Passione
    As an actor, Turturro brings wit and a healthy sense of absurdity to many of his roles, but his directorial efforts are notably lacking in self-awareness or restraint.
  97. Portrait of Wally
    Portrait Of Wally tells a gripping story, but the filmmakers should have been more forthright about their own part in it.
  98. All These Sleepless Nights
    It’s a film of nearly pure sensation: woozy, intoxicating, visually gorgeous… and maddeningly repetitive.
  99. Gabrielle
    Frequently charming. Marion-Rivard, who won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar earlier this year (the film itself won Best Picture), gives a strong, sophisticated performance, even as she’s disarmingly open in a way that would be almost impossible for an actor without Williams syndrome to fake.
  100. Rosewood
    Deliberately paced at the outset, the film slowly establishes a sense of hatred that makes the violent explosion of the film's second half as plausible and inevitable as the laws of physics.
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