The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Do I Sound Gay?
    It’s a serious topic, but the resulting documentary isn’t an especially severe sit. Do I Sound Gay? is a briskly entertaining 77 minutes, and frequently as mouthy as its title.
  2. Being Evel
    Being Evel’s story is too plain in the telling, but it’s still incredible, and relevant in the way it shows how a person can achieve wealth and fame if he’s willing to leap way high—and to endure the inevitable wipeout.
  3. Stray Dog
    With stencil-typeface credits that can’t help but bring to mind the scrappy regional genre movies of the 1970s, and an opening sequence that finds Hall sampling moonshine with his buddies, Stray Dog announces itself as something homegrown—a verité look at a quintessentially American oddball, made with an eye for life in rural Southern Missouri.
  4. I Am Chris Farley
    As a thoughtful examination of its subject’s life, I Am Chris Farley has its moments, but it plays more like a loving tribute than documentary, as if a bunch of his friends got together to tell stories. In that way, it succeeds, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the picture isn’t complete.
  5. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Perhaps because Lando was less explored than Han in the original films, Glover manages the tricky task of both paying homage to role originator Billy Dee Williams while adding his own spin to the character. Like Ehrenreich, his version goes comic without tipping into outright spoofery.
  6. When Animals Dream
    The gore is there, as are the transformation sequences, but they’re played in such a muted fashion that their more visceral pleasures are somewhat mitigated. But viewers who check their expectations will find a solid entry into the burgeoning feminist werewolf sub-genre that’s well worth a look.
  7. Tales of Halloween
    Anthology films are known for being inconsistent, and after the wild mood swings of recent horror anthologies like the "V/H/S" and "ABCs Of Death" movies, it’s a relief to report that despite consisting of 10 segments directed by 11 people, Tales Of Halloween is remarkably cohesive.
  8. Amnesiac
    The film uses minimal locations, minimal cast, and minimal blood for a story that, in another director’s hands, could play like Grand Guignol. But this sense of restraint — which, combined with some stylish choices on Polish’s part, can be quite elegant — is also what makes it largely forgettable.
  9. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    The ordinariness of this film—and the flatness of its video-shot images, relative to Blank’s beautiful-looking ’70s films — isn’t a significant drawback, given how eloquent Leacock can be.
  10. Freeheld
    Nowhere the film goes is unexpected... but the plainspoken Freeheld charts a mostly admirable course there.
  11. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    Stanley Nelson’s absorbing, provocative documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution measures how much and how little has changed since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Panthers in Oakland in 1966.
  12. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.
  13. Ready Player One
    Ready Player One, based on the bestseller of the same name, is a pandering, crassly commercial victory of intellectual property law that’s also, in its best moments, a grand popcorn entertainment, made with skill and wit and even sincerity.
  14. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono’s hip-hop musical is a chiefly visual pleasure, in part because most of the cast can’t rap worth a damn; its warped frame bounces between shimmering neons and fluorescents, disco-ball samurai suits, living statues, and all kinds of things that have been painted gold for gold’s sake.
  15. Where to Invade Next
    Moore here makes his strongest bona fide argument in ages, albeit one that still gleefully stacks the deck and avoids examining possible downsides too carefully. He even comes across as genuinely patriotic, in his own way.
  16. De Palma
    De Palma is just De Palma gabbing for two hours into a camera, and that’s its ultimate limitation, but also its great strength.
  17. Chevalier
    With all the bromances and buddy comedies out there, it’s valuable to encounter a film that treats male friendship like the battle of egos it sadly sometimes becomes.
  18. Prophet's Prey
    The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.
  19. In Jackson Heights
    The sheer variety of humanity that Wiseman documents keeps the film lively, and he finds plenty of terrific subjects.
  20. A War
    The film is low-key and evenhanded to a fault, resisting opportunities for melodrama at every turn; it radiates intelligence and fairness, which, while admirable, don’t exactly inspire a strong emotional response.
  21. Remember
    Egoyan will not be getting an Oscar nomination for this picture. But after a long creative slump, he may have found a new calling.
  22. Junun
    Barely a feature at 54 minutes, it’s the closest Anderson has come to just kind of goofing around behind the camera — though, obviously, his version of goofing around is more dynamic than an ambitious effort from the average contemporary.
  23. Deathgasm
    First-time writer-director Jason Lei Howden (who has a day job working for Peter Jackson’s special effects house Weta Digital) has delivered something amiably silly, liberally splattered with human viscera, and scored to the punishing grind of electric guitars.
  24. Toy Story 4
    The basic pleasures of this fourth installment may be at once more hectic and more shopworn, but the film preserves, at least, the pathology of its series: that anxiety about finding meaning and your own place on the shelf.
  25. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    For better and worse, Ant-Man And The Wasp knows it’s small potatoes.
  26. Ixcanul
    This is a decidedly small-scale tragedy, but it still packs a cumulative wallop.
  27. Godzilla vs. Kong
    There may be a moral somewhere in Godzilla Vs. Kong about hubris and greed, but really, this movie knows you came to see monsters punch each other. And monsters punching each other you shall get.
  28. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    This is the very definition of the kind of movie people complain that “they” don’t make anymore: a modestly budgeted, character-driven drama for adults that doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence or lean on shock value.
  29. Elstree 1976
    Visually, Elstree 1976 is often striking, thanks to some haunting extreme close-ups of these actors’ Star Wars action figures.
  30. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    Once the action shifts to the dead-eyed denizens of Santa Mira, the remote town that Silver Shamrock calls home, the film becomes a sly and creepy indictment of corporate engineering. It’s not what Halloween fans wanted—and Wallace rubs it in by showing a couple of clips from the original film on TV—but take the Halloween part away and Season Of The Witch is a standalone oddity worth considering on its own terms.
  31. Allied
    Zemeckis has fashioned an unfashionable throwback, and if Allied doesn’t land the gut-punch it winds up to deliver, there’s nevertheless plenty to admire in a blockbuster craftsman and two beautiful stars paying tribute to the spirit of an older Hollywood.
  32. Ip Man 3
    As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.
  33. Lamb
    Throughout Lamb, Laurence makes sure that every one of the character’s bad choices makes sense. That’s what makes the movie so sad.
  34. Rolling Papers
    At its best, Rolling Papers is like a paean to old-fashioned journalism, with its curious, intrepid writers — backed by well-heeled publishers — diligently finding and piecing-together important stories in the public interest. If Dickman had really wanted to be clever, he could’ve called this movie "Potlight."
  35. Doctor Strange
    “Cool enough” doesn’t do justice to this blockbuster’s city - and reality-bending set pieces. “Awe-inspiring” is closer.
  36. Men Go to Battle
    A big part of the appeal of Men Go To Battle lies in its poky sense of humor, which recalls regional filmmaking gems like "The Whole Shootin’ Match" in the early going.
  37. Southbound
    Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.
  38. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    There’s a fine, nerve-jangling little psychological thriller here. Pity it couldn’t have been allowed to just be that.
  39. Swiss Army Man
    The easy elevator pitch on Swiss Army Man is that it’s "Cast Away" meets "Weekend At Bernie’s." Weird as that movie may sound, it’s not nearly as weird as the one actually cooked up by “Daniels,” a.k.a. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the branded directing duo making its feature-length debut.
  40. Goat
    For once, the frat boys are depicted not as lovable dolts or harmless pranksters, but as sadistic bullies. Likewise, their excessive initiation rites are played not for lowbrow comedy, but for something closer to horror. This is basically the anti-"Animal House."
  41. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    If there’s anything tying together the detours and roadblocks that comprise Big Holiday, it’s the film’s big, bold, screaming celebration of human difference.
  42. Sing Street
    John Carney’s peppy flashback musical Sing Street is to his earlier "Once" what a glossy major-label debut is to a scrappier first album: Both have their pleasures, but the former can’t help but look a little artificial when compared to the latter.
  43. The Birth of a Nation
    Nate Parker’s film on Nat Turner, imperfect though it is, deserves to be seen.
  44. Nina Forever
    Despite these uneven moments, the film still serves as a dark and morbid fable about the poor choices people can make in their efforts to prove that they are how they see themselves.
  45. Dark Night
    Dark Night isn’t really a polemic. It’s a mysterious elegy for a community on the verge of a nightmarish crucible.
  46. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    Works best when it straddles the same line between mild hostility and equally mild affection.
  47. Indignation
    This is a bleak film, one whose undercurrent of morbidity stems any romanticization of the past. That ominousness can at times be suffocating, as the action barrels toward a conclusion it insists on foreshadowing. Light summer fare this is not.
  48. Audrie & Daisy
    Audrie & Daisy could’ve done more to connect up the way the internet looms over both cases.... What the documentary does well, though, is critique a culture that allows young men to disregard other people’s humanity.
  49. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    If there’s one major criticism to level at Eat That Question, it’s that Schütte too often satisfies fans of Zappa’s personality at the expense of those who prefer his music.
  50. Kate Plays Christine
    There’s an emotional dimension to Kate Plays Christine—an empathy linking an actor to the human headline she’s dressing up as—that’s nearly abstracted into oblivion by the film’s neurotic self-examination.
  51. The Lure
    For her debut feature, The Lure, Smoczyńska has very loosely adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story — so loosely, you might not realize that’s what she’s doing until halfway through — into a genre-defying film that blends elements of musicals, horror, romance, and fantasy into a contemporary fairy tale that celebrates the animalistic, the feminine, and the intimate intersections between the two.
  52. Morris from America
    Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.
  53. Under the Shadow
    There’s still something exciting about seeing familiar tropes placed in an unfamiliar context — in this case, a nation ravaged by violent conflict and stifled by fundamentalist law.
  54. The Confirmation
    The Confirmation isn’t much to look at, and its rhythms are wobbly (the quest narrative starts to feel strained early on), but Nelson is a dogged enough dramatist that even the story’s resolutions—even the really pat and obvious ones—are satisfyingly earned.
  55. Things to Come
    If Things To Come doesn’t completely fulfill Hansen-Løve’s career mission of elevating minor incidents to major themes, it still rings with her clarity and personality. She conveys in single sentences what less confident filmmakers might expound on in a monologue, and makes small gestures more poignant by tossing them off casually or making an unexpected cut.
  56. The Mermaid
    A relatively straightforward comic love story/environmental parable, it’s a sharper bit of whimsy than CJ7 and less weighed down with mythology than Journey To The West.
  57. Boom Bust Boom
    For those who aren’t automatically turned off by the idea of an issue-doc that Schoolhouse Rock-ifies a serious, grown-up subject, Boom Bust Boom is a worthwhile way to spend an hour.
  58. Holy Hell
    Holy Hell has an undeniable car-crash fascination, especially once Allen reveals just how deeply this particular phony guru abused the trust of his faithfuls.
  59. Patriots Day
    The movie, none too revelatory, mostly just stands as a sturdy thriller, one that’s more fleet than flat-footed as it shuttles among a veritable network of characters and story lines.
  60. The Meddler
    Here Scafaria makes nice use of her widescreen frame, and cuts the movie together crisply—a lot of the jokes actually come from the cuts, and the way they punctuate the often pitch-perfect dialogue.
  61. Presenting Princess Shaw
    This film barely brushes up against the many, many issues it raises, but those conversations can be had in the lobby, after the pleasure of watching an underappreciated artist finally get her due.
  62. Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice is the rare movie that’s immersed in improv as a subject, not a behind-the-scenes technique for goosing laughs.
  63. Life
    Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.
  64. Annabelle: Creation
    Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.
  65. A Cure for Wellness
    Equal parts baroque fairy-tale, atmospheric mystery, and hideous body-horror nightmare, the film puts what could have been a cost-effective genre exercise on steroids, giving life to a two-and-half-hour, R-rated Frankenstein monster.
  66. Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
  67. Julieta
    Almodóvar has directed what’s basically a melodrama as if it were a thriller—a fascinating experiment that doesn’t always work as intended, but creates a useful dissonance en route to a powerfully open-ended conclusion.
  68. Queen of Katwe
    In some ways, the more novel element is the film’s depiction of chess, which in Katwe is a popular sport on the level of football. And while that might seem unlikely, it’s accurate, at least in the wake of Mutesi’s success.
  69. The Neon Demon
    Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.
  70. It
    While Pennywise is legitimately terrifying, overall, It is more intense than it is chilling.
  71. Time to Choose
    It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.
  72. Hacksaw Ridge
    One might call this a refinement of Gibson’s fixations as a director: battles more terrifying than "Braveheart" and a portrayal of sacrificial lambhood that’s more compelling than "The Passion Of The Christ," in part because Doss, as much of an unwavering do-gooder as he might be, is an actual character with conflicts.
  73. Tickled
    All the same, Tickled does shine a much-needed light on that individual’s long history of abusive behavior, which has resulted in only a light slap on the wrist, thanks to inherited wealth and the power it confers.
  74. Graduation
    In the end, it’s the hard questions that linger, disquietingly unanswered.
  75. Slack Bay
    In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.
  76. Personal Shopper
    Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.
  77. Gimme Danger
    Considering how cheerfully its subject courted controversy, this is a chummy, openly booster-ish profile, designed as an introduction for those ignorant of the Stooges’ legacy. It’s plenty entertaining, but it’s also nearly as tame as Iggy, in his prime, was wild.
  78. Nocturnal Animals
    Like Ford’s debut, Nocturnal Animals treats film as a medium of luxury, where the emotive and the self-indulgent cross paths. He is primarily a sensualist.
  79. Gleason
    He can afford the best treatments and technologies and — by the end — even to extend his life, because he’s a well-off former NFL player. Most patients don’t have these luxuries.
  80. Phantom Boy
    Even though it doesn’t all come together thrillingly, Phantom Boy garners a lot of goodwill just for looking and feeling original.
  81. Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith
    These are the kind of character- and plot-driven police procedurals designed for binging, a lot like Netflix favorites "Happy Valley" and "The Fall." Although each of the first three films tells a full, discrete story, they work best cumulatively, as the ongoing adventures of one cranky, conscientious cop.
  82. The Discovery
    At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.
  83. The Mind's Eye
    From its opening title card proclaiming “This film should be played loud,” the telekinetic body-horror film The Mind’s Eye is punk as f--k.
  84. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Overall Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is as shallow as a puddle of Dom Pérignon spilled on the bow of a luxury yacht. That’s the joke, you see.
  85. The Foreigner
    The Foreigner is a good, lean cut of meat—in other words, a typical Martin Campbell movie, expeditious and cold-blooded in its cross-cut, cloak-and-dagger plotting and violence.
  86. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Flanagan has a couple of solid genre films on his résumé already; at this point in his career, it would have been surprising if Origin Of Evil wasn’t better than Ouija. It is better, though, in every conceivable way, from casting to story to atmosphere.
  87. Imperium
    Radcliffe’s performance also ramps up toward the end of the movie, when the pressures of undercover life and his struggle to empathize with these people — his main asset as an undercover agent — really begin to weigh on him.
  88. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Although it’s casual to a fault, Dream Is Destiny is generally engaging and liberally sprinkled with real insights into what makes this filmmaker special.
  89. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    Like a lot of memes, Ralph Breaks The Internet appears proud both of its clear place within a system and its ability to stand outside and poke fun at that system.
  90. Demon
    It’s the kind of film that, rather like its mournful title apparition, clings to your sleeve and follows you home.
  91. For the Love of Spock
    The scenes that most linger in the mind are more like the one where the director confesses his complicated feelings about his father to another Spock, Zachary Quinto. It’s moving to know that even Nimoy’s son is as in thrall to an icon as the rest of us.
  92. Danny Says
    A bunch of Fields’ war stories are rendered with simple animations, and while those aren’t as effective as the dozens of great photographs that dot the film, they do break up what might otherwise be an overly talky doc.
  93. Spa Night
    Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.
  94. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    It’s a testament to the buoyancy of the film that such exhausted, well-trod material can still feel fresh.
  95. Little Sister
    A slight, sweetly cynical indie dramedy about family and belonging and the ways we cope with life’s disappointments.
  96. 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.
  97. The Girl with All the Gifts
    Starts off strong but dilutes its impact with every consecutive reveal.
  98. Land of Mine
    The cheesiest thing about it is the punny English-language title with which it’s been saddled. Otherwise, Land Of Mine is tough and admirably grim, turning a harrowing history lesson into a study in how the battles of wartime don’t always cease with the ceasefire.
  99. The Eagle Huntress
    Director Otto Bell has found himself in awe-inspiring territory. Aisholpan is a remarkable person interacting with majestic creatures, surrounded by staggering natural beauty. It’s easy to become entranced.
  100. Sid and Nancy
    For a while, the tension powers the film. And when it doesn’t, the lead performances by Oldman and Webb pick up the slack.
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