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. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Through it all, Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains unaccountably romantic, a confirmation that love, elusive and painful as it can be, is still worth pursuing.
  2. Public Enemies
    Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to the size of a standard police procedural. His refusal to mythologize Dillinger’s exploits is audacious, but too much of Public Enemies feels disappointingly smaller than life.
  3. Resurrection
    Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
  4. Tsotsi
    In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."
  5. Lost Embrace
    At its best, Lost Embrace conveys, with real warmth, the hopelessly intertwined pasts and shared futures of a community of outsiders and immigrants. At worst, it's a sitcom without a laugh track.
  6. Countdown to Zero
    Walker has something important to say with Countdown To Zero, but if this movie were standing on a doorstep with a petition, most reasonable people would sign it quickly and send it on its way, rather than inviting it in to chat.
  7. Her Smell
    Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. The Little Prince
    Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.
  11. A Ciambra
    The result is busy, murky, and remote. It doesn’t have the leftie political clarity of Ken Loach, the purposeful intensity of the Dardenne brothers, or even the character development of Ramin Bahrani’s early features.
  12. Wilde
    There are many fine works by and about Wilde, and if you haven't read them, you should. Nearly all are preferable to this one.
  13. The Brother from Another Planet
    The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.
  14. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.
  15. Devils on the Doorstep
    Though shorn of 20 minutes for its U.S. debut, the film's wry comic portrait of the Japanese Occupation during WWII hasn't lost any of its incendiary brilliance, both as a political provocation and as a brusquely humane take on the horrors and absurdity of war.
  16. Owning Mahowny
    Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.
  17. 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.
  18. More Than Honey
    It’s a film that wants to celebrate as much as doom-say.
  19. Hedda
    Simply put, there is nothing polite about Hedda—adultery, drug use, and suicide are all integral to the story—but the grit beneath the opulent glamour of this estate is what makes spending an extended evening within its walls so exciting.
  20. Colossal
    Monster movies aren’t generally known for their subtlety, but leave it to Nacho Vigalondo to make one that keeps surprising its audience until the very end.
  21. Blank City
    In the end, Blank City becomes not just a salute to the artistic adventurousness of a bygone New York, but a reminder that new strains of creativity keep emerging, just when the scene looks stalest.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In & Out
    Screenwriter Paul Rudnick could be the closest thing 1990s Hollywood has to Preston Sturges, and in this era of Jim Carrey's slapstick seizures and Adam Sandler's deliberate anti-cleverness, it's a welcome thing. His In & Out is a smoothly paced, often wildly funny tale.
  23. Late August, Early September
    Late August, Early September is a resolutely minor work, a quiet departure from the brash showiness of Irma Vep, but it's crafted with the sure hand of a major director.
  24. Emilia Pérez
    Though its thematic threads are never woven into salient social commentary, there is a perverse pleasure to be had with Emilia Pérez, even if its positions on gender, sexuality, and broader Mexican society lack proper nuance.
  25. Sword of Trust
    It’s a pleasure to see Shelton in her element again, guiding actors to places that feel unexpected yet authentic. Maron is an ideal match for her sensibility, and they make terrific scene partners, too. May this be the start of something special.
  26. Monkey Man
    Patel’s film may have found its greatest success in the way it seamlessly, powerfully translates the director’s pure, kinetic love of cinema into something bold, new, and unforgettable.
  27. Big Fan
    Because the audience isn’t privy to the hero’s thoughts, the final 15 minutes or so of Big Fan are white-knuckle.
  28. Herself
    In an era when neighbors often turn on neighbors, the film’s optimistic “It takes a village” perspective risks hokeyness. But thanks to Dunne’s quietly powerful performance as a single mother barely treading water, the end result is an effective, affecting look at community triumphing over fear.
  29. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    For better and worse, Ant-Man And The Wasp knows it’s small potatoes.
  30. House of Sand
    House Of Sand is a gorgeous piece of cinema, but by the end, it just dries up and blows away.
  31. Grease
    Grease is a pure pop construct, fueled by movie-star poses, hit songs, and persistent audience fantasies of being an acceptable kind of "bad." Barry Gibb-penned disco theme aside, Grease doesn't really belong to any one era. It's like it's always existed.
  32. Test
    Clumsy metaphors and contrived attempts to articulate Frankie’s fears—especially as he awaits the results of the titular test—diminish the emotional authenticity engendered by Daniel Marks’ hyper-real cinematography and the film’s incisively curated soundtrack.
  33. Mia Madre
    A minor effort in which the movie-within-the-movie never seems like a real project — can’t help but be riveted by the fake production it’s mounted within itself.
  34. Sun Children
    A tidal wave of compassion and empathy that crests into rage and sorrow—all of it provoked by the plight of Iran’s child laborers.
  35. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The result is an uneven paean to a man who deserves a more complicated portrait.
  36. Barfly
    Barfly has few peers when it comes to pitch-black comedies of ill manners.
  37. Paddleton
    Paddleton takes its emotional cue from "Terms Of Endearment," expanding that film’s final stretch into an entire feature and replacing mother-daughter bonds with the deep but usually unspoken love shared by two male buddies.
  38. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."
  39. Primary Colors
    One the truest-feeling political portraits in years, as well as a fine piece of drama.
  40. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration. But one salvageable piece emerges in the middle: a sharp and acerbically funny segment that seems written specifically for Parker Posey.
  41. Millennium Actress
    Animated in much the same style as "Perfect Blue," but with greater depth and a more elaborate sense of playfulness, Millennium Actress is a visual feast, but also a mental gymnastics routine.
  42. 10 Things I Hate About You
    Immensely likable.
  43. Freaky Friday
    Freaky Friday mines a lot of laughs from common misapprehensions adults have about adolescent life, with fun bits of observation about schoolwork, dating, and other practices where kids have to bend the rules in order to survive.
  44. Thirteen
    Though thirteen too often mistakes hard realism for overheated spectacle, the heightened drama brings out the best in Wood and Hunter, who turn their climactic scene into an actors' workshop, charged with raw emotion. As the film barrels toward the outrageously histrionic, they nearly pull it back from the brink.
  45. Sleep Tight
    This is a crime story with little to no interest in the who or the why, but only the what and the how. It's a reverse-procedural, tracking not the solution of a crime, but all of its awful particulars.
  46. Merry Christmas
    Though a painless time-passer, Joyeux Noël ultimately contributes little to the venerable anti-war genre beyond its curious message that to some degree, war is hell because it prevents soldiers from making really neat friends and pen-pals from different counties.
  47. Waging a Living
    Waging A Living's biggest failing is that Weisberg gives his subjects too much of a pass when it comes to their bad past romantic and career choices.
  48. The Changeling
    An underrated entry in the horror subgenre, generating consistent unease through long, ominous pans—up and down staircases, through hallways—that assume the perspective of its searching-for-peace specter.
  49. The King
    Elvis achieved a skyrocketing success previously unseen in pop culture, and then became his own victim by letting it get away from him. As Jarecki proves with this extended, sometimes bumpy, but still worthy metaphor, it’s the same with the U.S. We’ve been coasting along for so many years, taking democracy for granted, that the entire structure of the nation is now in peril.
  50. Together Together
    It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.
  51. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    Banzai is an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.
  52. Heartbeats
    Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.
  53. eXistenZ
    Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker.
  54. Sun Don't Shine
    Like "Upstream Color," Sun Don’t Shine owes a sizable debt to the philosophical lyricism of Terrence Malick. Working wonders on a tight budget, Seimetz uses handheld cameras and tight compositions to create an air of claustrophobic intensity interspersed with moments of ragged beauty.
  55. Gunner Palace
    For the soldiers, it's about living to see the next day and living with the things they see, and Gunner Palace honors their perspective like no other Iraq documentary has to date.
  56. The Skin I Live In
    Had Almodóvar embraced the genre more, and changed his style to suit a story in which human beings get hacked up and transformed, he might've naturally found his way into a more potent, satisfying narrative, rather than one that dawdles and dead-ends.
  57. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Few filmmakers could produce so grand a spectacle, but Zhang used to be good for more than just eye candy.
  58. Shall We Kiss?
    The very definition of "breezy." It's a featherweight romantic comedy.
  59. 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.
  60. The Last Unicorn
    The Last Unicorn will endure as a film for reasons both intellectual and aesthetic. It’s full of rich ideas and revisions of outdated, sexist stereotypes, and thereby feels more modern than many animated classics. Additionally, it’s often gorgeous.
  61. The Italian Job
    As a comic heist film, The Italian Job is diverting, though slight. As a feature-length advertisement for the MINI Cooper, however, it's an unqualified triumph.
  62. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    The problem with art like Jia’s is that a straightforward approach isn’t going to reveal anything that isn’t already there in the work or document anything that the movies don’t already document themselves. And why settle for second-hand when you can just go and watch the real thing?
  63. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes.
  64. Post Tenebras Lux
    The film is never less than fascinating, but it appears to be so intensely personal as to be all but indecipherable to viewers not personally acquainted with the filmmaker, or at least in possession of the press kit.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunshine Superman
    Strauch’s direction, in contrast, is numbingly uninspired, adhering stringently to the Doc. 101 assembly-line template cultivated by the film’s executive producer Alex Gibney.
  66. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Angio captures the outlandish twists and turns of Van Peebles' life with humor, color, and a welcome lightness of touch.
  67. The Science of Sleep
    An indie version of Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," albeit with none of the star power, a quarter of the budget, half the angst, and twice the charm.
  68. Elling
    The natural chemistry between Ellefsen and Nordin keeps the film pleasant and inoffensive, but is there any question about where or when or how it will go?
  69. Elephant
    Has a gentle, hypnotic tone that's insistently sweet and elegiac, in spite of the horrors that overwhelm the frame. In its juxtaposition of the serene and the violent, the beautiful and the brutal, the film achieves a balance that's exquisitely judged, tiptoeing artfully through a cultural minefield.
  70. Love Songs
    Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against grief.
  71. Nenette and Boni
    Despite an alluring set-up and heartfelt performances from the leads, nothing ultimately coheres, and mood trumps logic on every occasion.
  72. Tragic Jungle
    More conceptual than intuitive, Tragic Jungle offers the problem without the passion: a journey into the heart of darkness without the thrill of the unknown.
  73. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    In the tradition of Britain’s class comedies, what makes Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris comes down to the difference between, say, your average fashion designer and someone like Dior: with a pattern, anyone can make clothes—but in Manville’s hands, she stitches together something magical.
  74. The Syrian Bride
    Ultimately, The Syrian Bride becomes an overtly political movie, but with all its loose threads and random directions, it feels more like the pilot for an unmade miniseries.
  75. Meet the Patels
    Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.
  76. Twist of Faith
    Perhaps because the trial hits so many delays and roadblocks, Twist Of Faith doesn't gather much dramatic momentum, though there's something to be said for the emotional grind of running in place.
  77. Doubt
    Doubt is a complex, thematically loaded piece of work, and though it isn't enhanced on film, it deserves the wider exposure.
  78. Liar Liar
    For those who like Carrey and are waiting for a film they can honestly say they enjoyed through and through, this ain't it.
  79. On the Job
    It’s a provocative premise, and one that manages to go beyond the usual themes of the crime genre. Too bad, then, it’s forced to share screen time with a humdrum and occasionally heavy-handed police procedural.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Informant
    Meanwhile, there’s a potentially fascinating theme imbedded in Darby’s story that goes largely unexplored: the idea that modern protest is little more than theater, and that the participants on both sides are just actors playing roles.
  81. Tel Aviv on Fire
    Despite its loaded premise, Tel Aviv On Fire rarely sparks more than mild amusement.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sidney
    In the end, Sidney is informative—it’s exciting to hear from him and from those who loved him, and from some of the people he influenced. But as evidenced by his two memoirs, This Life (1980) and Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000), there’s much more in Poitier’s life and legacy that this documentary fails to explore.
  83. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
    This is pure, thick hokum. It’s also utterly absorbing, from start to finish.
  84. Nightmare Alley
    Film noir is a cynical genre, and the script makes gestures toward establishing that these characters live in a cold world where nothing matters but the almighty dollar. But del Toro is a romantic at heart, and can’t help swooning where the subtext wants to spit. His sensibility isn’t a bad thing. It just works better when the monsters aren’t human.
  85. The Hoax
    It's an accomplished potboiler entertainment, as calculated and clever as the stories Irving spins to stay afloat in the growing sea of his own lies.
  86. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.
  87. Who Killed the Electric Car?
    Above all, the film is an extended love letter to the EV1, a sleek GM electric marvel that, by Paine's reckoning, marks the single greatest innovation in human technology since the wheel.
  88. Pauline and Paulette
    Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.
  89. Tosca
    Using a single set for each act and cutting minimally, Jacquot seems to recognize his limited ability to make the opera cinematic.
  90. Our Father
    Abouna starkly defines the masculine and feminine influence in raising children, and what happens when they're not so complementary.
  91. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    When it steers away from campaign-ad testimonials and considers Kerry's moral awakening in Vietnam and beyond, Going Upriver features some tremendously powerful scenes.
  92. Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie
    Their best material, and the film's most authentically Southern humor, comes from their comfortable interactions, their funny tall tales, and their alternating shows of respect and good-natured teasing.
  93. Pellet
    When El Bola isn't drawing cheap sentiment from the sight of a bruised and scarred little boy, Mañas raises vexing questions about how and why parents leave lasting impressions on their children, and whether good intentions really matter.
  94. Teddy Bear
    There's nothing surprising about the arc of Kold's story, but Matthiesen and his cast have created a believable space, and that ultimately helps give Teddy Bear the tension of a fine suspense film once Kold sits down across the kitchen table from Steentoft to speak his mind at last.
  95. Sisters
    As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.
  96. Lethal Weapon 2
    In the wake of Lethal Weapon, producers across Hollywood had started running the buddy-cop concept into the ground, which made 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2 a reminder of how to do this schtick right, with just as much emphasis on loose character interaction as on violent action.
  97. Mother of Flies
    The result is occult horror as potent as the snake venom in one of Selveig’s dreadful “cures.”
  98. Wuthering Heights
    It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.
  99. Only Human
    For a film that pads out such broad slapstick with toilet humor, obnoxious-child antics, and even cute-animal business, Only Human is surprisingly enjoyable, thanks to the filmmakers' relatively low-key, Pedro Almodóvar-style approach.
  100. 21 Grams
    A nearly unparalleled actor's showcase, the film boasts performances of impressive quality and quantity...Their complexity matches the film's.
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