The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard’s misbegotten Palme D’Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a "Taxi Driver" for today’s Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between "Death Wish" and Ken Loach.
  2. A Bigger Splash
    The cast is uniformly strong, and willing to go wherever Guadagnino takes them, in however little clothing he deems necessary; the ensemble-wide equal-opportunity nudity is almost frequent enough to qualify as confrontational.
  3. Captain America: Civil War
    That Civil War doesn’t collapse under the weight of its various moving parts, that it manages to be the most serious entry yet in this franchise of franchises without sacrificing much in the way of valuable comic relief, is a testament to the creative mojo of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
  4. Term Life
    Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.
  5. Mother's Day
    Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.
  6. Keanu
    The film is a one-joke comedy, but the joke is decent, and it helps that the actors know how to deliver it.
  7. 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.
  8. Viva
    Perugorría is such a terrific, soulful actor that he makes Viva’s predictable dramatic trajectory — disapproving dad slowly grows to accept his child’s differences, while the kid gradually learns to forgive his father’s lifelong absence — seem a bit less moldy.
  9. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The only way to enjoy this movie is to concentrate on its frequently stunning compositions and ignore the fact that none of it makes even a tiny lick of sense.
  10. Special Correspondents
    The more Special Correspondents skirts bad taste — by having the heroes record an ISIS-inspired ransom tape, for instance — the closer it gets to having something to say about mass media and geopolitics.
  11. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    It’s the sort of film that’s destined to be the answer to a trivia question, and not much more.
  12. The Family Fang
    What’s left is those two strong performances. Bateman is especially funny in the sequence that lands Baxter in the hospital, and Kidman never resorts to shallow-actress clichés when indicating how a life in different kinds of spotlights may have frayed at Annie’s nerves.
  13. Ratchet & Clank
    Like a lot of entertainment pitched at the family matinee audience, it sits at the zero point of watchability.
  14. 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.
  15. Holidays
    Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.
  16. Men & Chicken
    The film is grotesque and bizarre without ever really being funny, and while the sight of Mikkelsen as a nebbishy loser is initially bracing, the novelty wears off fast, leaving little else.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.
  18. 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.
  19. Nina
    Nina has been so thoroughly misconceived, on virtually every level, that the only less interesting portrait imaginable would be one that takes place entirely when Nina Simone was in utero.
  20. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    It’s all pretty silly, but it compensates for a lack of emotional weight with star power.
  21. Elvis & Nixon
    As much as the movie sidesteps biographical conventions with its narrow frame and playful tone, it can’t avoid a separate cliché that plagues this sort of material: Elvis & Nixon is basically a diverting TV movie given a theatrical release.
  22. 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.
  23. Wedding Doll
    In spite of all Wedding Doll’s strengths, its scenario comes to seem a little unseemly: Giladi establishes Hagit’s hopes and dreams mostly just to show the terrible ways that they’re dashed.
  24. My Big Night
    My Big Night, pitched in a state of perpetual frenzy, whiffs out in its ending.
  25. An Eye for Beauty
    Beautiful people living in beautiful houses surrounded by stunningly beautiful Canadian landscapes dominate the aptly titled An Eye For Beauty, which unfortunately also demands a stomach for tedium.
  26. The Adderall Diaries
    On a purely technical level, the film is fine, if overly reliant on indie-movie clichés. It features some good performances from proven actors, and touches on some interesting philosophical questions.
  27. Rio, I Love You
    Rio offers the uncomfortable spectacle of 10 different filmmakers mostly failing to produce a sense of place that can be sustained over 10 minutes, much less multiple senses of place that can be stitched into an interesting patchwork.
  28. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    Though this series is built on comic looseness, it’s that sincerity that carries through its minor comedic missteps, like underusing Hall and leaning too heavily on Cedric’s wacky-old-man shtick.
  29. Criminal
    A high-concept thriller that teeters like a seesaw between deranged and dull.
  30. Green Room
    Green Room is a rare gift from the genre gods: a nasty, punk-as-f..k midnight movie made by a genuine artist, a filmmaker with a great eye and a true understanding of the people and places he’s splattering in viscera.
  31. 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.
  32. The Jungle Book
    Special effects take pride of place in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories that is as technically accomplished as it is thinly conceived.
  33. The Invitation
    Kusama expertly manipulates the tone throughout, ratcheting up tension and releasing it in quick bursts of nervous laughter, only to build it up again.
  34. Neon Bull
    Writer-director Gabriel Mascaro doesn’t really have a story to tell about these folks, but he does have a wealth of almost documentary-style detail to share, plus style to burn, and that’s nearly enough.
  35. 11 Minutes
    Almost paralyzingly dull until its last few minutes.
  36. Demolition
    Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.
  37. Hardcore Henry
    Shot with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the Russian-made action flick Hardcore Henry mimics the experience of watching someone else play a very derivative first-person shooter with sub-Duke Nukem humor.
  38. Mr. Right
    Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell have often been the lone bright spot in otherwise dismal movies, and it takes their combined charm to redeem Mr. Right.
  39. Louder Than Bombs
    These stylistic tricks open windows into the hearts and minds of the characters. They also make a movie about people grappling privately with their emotions feel energetic, even thrilling, in its own melancholic way.
  40. The Boss
    The Boss, without quite reaching the heights of McCarthy’s work with Paul Feig, establishes its star as sort of a comic auteur — which is not the same as repeating herself.
  41. One More Time
    The main reason for anyone to see One More Time...is Walken, who brings a lot of life and fine shading to what could’ve been a one-note deadbeat dad type.
  42. God's Not Dead 2
    The first film pandered to a heavy persecution complex; this installment’s relatively subtler, but there are dog whistles aplenty.
  43. Meet the Blacks
    It’s more like an extremely confusing and sloppily written chunk of Purge fan-fiction—a tortured use of another movie’s absurd mythology to help make muddled quasi-satirical points, while indulging the apparently fail-safe punchline of saying the word “purge” about once a minute.
  44. Miles Ahead
    So give Don Cheadle credit for innovation, at least: His Miles Davis biopic (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in), Miles Ahead, tackles the problem head-on… by inventing cinematic things for Davis to do when he’s not playing music, including ludicrous car chases and gunfights.
  45. The Dark Horse
    The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.
  46. Standing Tall
    A non-professional making his screen debut, Paradot serves up plenty of volatility, but he never quite succeeds in making Malony seem like a kid with real potential that’s being squandered.
  47. Francofonia
    Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.
  48. Darling
    Darling is light on plot and long on style, meaning that horror fans who criticized "The Witch" as “boring” may have a similar reaction here as well.
  49. Afternoon
    Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.
  50. Everybody Wants Some!!
    In its funky, aimless, winningly juvenile way, Everybody Wants Some is about as inclusively celebratory as any college comedy in memory: Per its title, it really does want everybody to get some.
  51. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    Ironic, given what a deeply personal filmmaker she could be, that the film that best shows her brilliant intellect and insight isn’t her own.
  52. No Home Movie
    Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.
  53. Baskin
    Anyone deep enough into the genre to watch a movie like Baskin may find it, for all its bizarre and beautiful surrealistic imagery, oddly uninspiring.
  54. Born to be Blue
    While there isn’t much to distinguish Born To Be Blue’s dramatic stakes from any number of stories about self-destructive, self-centered artists (or “movies about jazz musicians,” as they’re more commonly known), the film is given a spark of life by the inspired casting of Ethan Hawke.
  55. Valley of Love
    Valley Of Love is at its best when it wanders away from its ostensible premise and just lets two old pros connect, riffing lightly on our knowledge of their real-life histories.
  56. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."
  57. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Batman V Superman takes a title fight kids of all ages have been speculating about for decades—costumed titan from the cosmos, meet costumed vigilante from the city—and invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.
  58. The Clan
    Trapero...often demonstrates his technical mastery here. But as a storyteller, he’s unfortunately less successful.
  59. They're Watching
    It’s not scary, and not goofy enough to be funny.
  60. April and the Extraordinary World
    This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.
  61. Get a Job
    With a cast this talented...Get A Job is never painful to endure, but neither does it ever rise above lazy mediocrity.
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
  65. Sweet Bean
    What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.
  66. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    Maybe that call will be answered next time with enough incremental improvements to finally notch a good Divergent movie, a possibility Allegiant raises repeatedly and frustratingly. Ultimately, though, this movie isn’t just adhering to a formula; it’s carefully following a recipe designed to offset any good ingredients that get mixed in there by mistake.
  67. The Program
    It’s a rote hatchet job, rehashing information that virtually everyone already knows, but at least it facilitates one of the year’s oddest and gutsiest performances.
  68. Too Late
    If you enjoy strippers delivering monologues on Bugs Bunny — something that actually happens in this movie — then Too Late will scratch that same adolescent itch that leads young film buffs to dress in black suits and Ray-Bans after seeing "Reservoir Dogs" for the first time.
  69. 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.
  70. Krisha
    At just 82 minutes, Krisha wouldn’t have hurt for a little more meat on its bones; the last act blows through a shitstorm of confrontation almost too abruptly.
  71. Midnight Special
    Shannon, best known for playing weirdos and crazies, is uniquely good at playing restrained everymen, and he inhabits the role of Roy as a man of unspoken internal conflicts and complicated feelings.
  72. The Bronze
    It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust to the film’s shticky conception of its main character, Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch).
  73. Miracles from Heaven
    Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.
  74. City of Gold
    As Gabbert alternates [Gold's] monologues with long, gliding shots of funky supermarkets and old cinemas, she makes the point these aren’t disconnected aberrations in L.A. This is the city.
  75. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Fireworks Wednesday carefully, organically introduces its characters, then lets the audience try to discern what they’re withholding.
  76. The Perfect Match
    Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.
  77. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    There’s a fine, nerve-jangling little psychological thriller here. Pity it couldn’t have been allowed to just be that.
  78. The Brothers Grimsby
    Eventually, though, The Brothers Grimsby runs out of room to fully work as a hit-or-miss comedy — and perhaps most disappointing, doesn’t reserve any of its hits for co-stars Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, Gabourey Sidibe, and Penelope Cruz; it’s a great, diverse female cast assembled to do not very much.
  79. 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.
  80. Me Him Her
    Unchecked impulse can be a boon, but Landis writes his way through every scene as though it were overdue homework, and directs with nary a hint of style.
  81. Eye in the Sky
    Like Brian De Palma’s underrated "Redacted," this is a film that doesn’t want to be easily pegged, either in terms of its politics or generic allegiances. Such ambiguity is a virtue, but for all his technical facility, Hood doesn’t really have the finesse of a great, fearless satirist.
  82. 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.
  83. Creative Control
    In the end, it all comes down a cautionary tale call to “real life” — a call that the movie will heed, just as soon as it’s done with this latest scene of David pretending to f--k a polygonal figure to Vivaldi.
  84. 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.
  85. Marguerite
    A well-appointed period piece that nonetheless has no time for Midnight In Paris-style nostalgia.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Lolo
    The film is at its best when its central trio fumbles around the same circle of hell they’ve obliviously created for themselves, making the best of a situation that is much worse than they could ever imagine.
  87. Mekong Hotel (2012)
    For the most part, though, this hour-long curiosity feels like a fans-only doodle, riffing on motifs Joe has done better elsewhere. Even for a filmmaker who takes pride in scaling the fantastic down to everyday proportions, there’s such a thing as going too slight.
  88. They Will Have to Kill Us First
    Early in First, Khaira compares music to oxygen. The film might’ve felt a little more enlightening if all the songs had room to breathe in turn.
  89. Emelie
    The rest of Emelie doesn’t live up to its peaks, through no fault of star Sarah Bolger, who makes a memorable villain.
  90. The Wave
    The movie isn’t afraid to go to some dark places.
  91. Trapped
    Trapped is hit-and-miss as a piece of filmmaking but effective as an argument, contending not only that some Americans’ rights are being systematically taken away, but that when only a handful of organizations stand up for those rights, they become a bigger target.
  92. Knight of Cups
    Malick’s tricks may be aging, but every world still looks new through his eyes.
  93. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    A movie like this doesn’t require 30 Rock’s joke density or silly streak, but it’s surprising that Fey and Carlock’s satirical eyes aren’t a little more alert.
  94. Zootopia
    Like Disney’s "Big Hero 6," the movie is busy, but not breathless with invention.
  95. London Has Fallen
    Perhaps the movie’s politics—which range from tone deaf to irredeemable—would be more of an issue if it weren’t so inept.
  96. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    Viewers will be torn between admiring its laid-back naturalism and wishing it possessed just a little more oomph.
  97. 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.
  98. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Anyone merely hoping for more gravity-defying fight sequences will be reasonably satisfied by Sword Of Destiny, which chugs along amiably enough and never goes very long without a skirmish of some sort.
  99. Gods of Egypt
    A treasure trove of gilded fantasy bric-a-brac and clashing accents, Proyas’ sword-and-sandals space opera is a head above the likes of Wrath Of The Titans, but it rapidly devolves into a tedious and repetitive succession of monster chases, booby traps, and temples that start to crumble at the last minute.
  100. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    The fundamental problem is that Tricked is more mildly amusing than funny, and most of said amusement comes from the pacing, which is one uninterrupted sprint.
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