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. The Opposite of Sex
    Consistently clever without ever being funny. The film is so in love with its own carefully calibrated outrageousness that it doesn't bother to give its characters any depth beyond sitcom-level stereotypes.
  2. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    Listening to Berg's characters talk so naturally, honestly, and colorfully about the small, surmountable problems of their daily life is so engaging that whenever Kempner cuts away to another dry historian or fervent fan, it's doubly aggravating.
  3. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Originally released at a time of national anxiety—four months before Pearl Harbor—the comic fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan positively radiates reassurement, in the form of a beatific and perpetually amused Claude Rains.
  4. Time After Time
    It may eventually champion love as the guiding light amidst so much homicidal darkness, but Meyer’s film—happy ending be damned—resonates most deeply when confronting the ugly, inescapable reality that man’s murderous past is likely also his future.
  5. Lion
    In trying to tell the whole of this nearly implausible tale, the film can’t figure out whether it’s more invested in young Saroo’s harrowing journey or older Saroo’s feeling of displacement.
  6. The September Issue
    A fascinating, frustrating documentary.
  7. Fresh Dressed
    It’s about just about everything, so while the subject might seem niche it’s actually so broad and expansive the film strains to cover it properly in a trim 82 minutes.
  8. Beeswax
    Bujalski’s funny, diverting character piece has a lived-in quality that’s no small achievement.
  9. Amour Fou
    The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll.
  10. Cinderella Man
    Lacking a more specific sense of time and place, Cinderella Man leans heavily on the technically proficient Crowe to slip into Braddock's skin, but he can only do so much with a character who's ready to be mounted in bronze over Central Park.
  11. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    It’s telling that the filmmaker captures one of Gallagher’s best moments in a long and relatively uneventful take situated at a breakfast table; this movie may wander, but Akhavan’s attention to perfect little moments is unwavering.
  12. Rocketman
    As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.
  13. The Cooler
    Hokey and convoluted, but as a sticky-hearted fable of redemption, it's surprisingly seductive.
  14. Buffalo '66
    While watching Gazzara, Huston, Kevin Corrigan, Rosanna Arquette, and others take things two steps beyond over-the-top is inherently compelling, it becomes embarrassing before long.
  15. Eating Raoul
    Despite the casual homicide and a premise rich with Reagan-era political undertones, the gleeful satire draws inspiration as much from Bugs Bunny as Luis Buñuel.
  16. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Brown's respectful film offers the usual music-doc mix of archival footage, song clips, and talking heads, but with a figure as enigmatic and underreported as Van Zandt, the safe course works well.
  17. Giorni e nuvole
    At times, Soldini gets so wrapped up in his characters' suffering that the movie loses perspective; it's a little hard to sympathize when the couple's needs grow so great that they're forced to sell their boat.
  18. Frontrunners
    What makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns.
  19. Head Games
    Head Games is particularly devastating when it shifts from the NFL and NHL, where brutality and headshots are a given, to girls' soccer and under-14 football leagues, where still-developing young necks and skulls make kids perhaps more vulnerable to head trauma than their professional counterparts.
  20. Hannah Arendt
    Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.
  21. The Little Hours
    Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.
  22. Escape from the Planet of the Apes
    Escape From The Planet Of The Apes gets the series back on track, sending three apes back to the 20th century for a story that begins comically and ends in fear and loathing.
  23. Duplicity
    The female lead in Duplicity calls for the kind of atomic, glow-in-the-dark, Rita Hayworth-in-Gilda sexuality that is most assuredly out of Roberts' range. Angelina Jolie effortlessly conjures up that kind of fire-breathing sexiness. Roberts? Not so much.
  24. The Painted Veil
    While the film remains intelligent and transporting, a gorgeous travelogue into another time and place, it nonetheless feels like it's going through the motions, applying period gloss to a story that needs to be more tactile.
  25. Evil Dead Rise
    For fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago.
  26. It
    While Pennywise is legitimately terrifying, overall, It is more intense than it is chilling.
  27. Funny Games
    The audience is indicted for its bloodlust. There's perversity in paying admission to get harshly scolded, and Funny Games is not for the squeamish, but this may be one time to step up and take the licking you deserve.
  28. Peepli Live
    Peepli Live has a lot in common with Billy Wilder's black comedy Ace In The Hole, in that it explores the cynicism of modern life with wit and honesty.
  29. Digging for Fire
    With so much talent involved, there are inevitably some amusing moments, which keep tedium at least partly at bay.
  30. Black Gold
    There's been a proliferation of "globalization sucks" documentaries over the past couple of years, but few have been as blunt as Black Gold.
  31. Cold Souls
    The premise seems profound, but the claustrophobically inert execution lacks reach or imagination.
  32. How to Build a Girl
    Feldstein is as contagiously ebullient as always in the role, and her English accent is mostly passable, although it breaks down at times during the voiceovers that bookend the film. But her character’s actions keep chipping away at the actor’s natural charisma.
  33. Tuesday
    Tuesday is a tonal mess, flitting between horror, humor, absurdity, and at least one candidate for this year’s most gag-inducing visual as quickly as a parrot traversing the oceans to deliver death to all the world.
  34. The Sleeping Beauty
    It's clear what Breillat is trying to do here in the abstract - and The Sleeping Beauty is never less than gorgeous to look at - but the movie doesn't hang together as a story, and "stories" are what these fairy tales are meant to deliver.
  35. Just Another Love Story
    Enjoyably moody in the early going, and it develops into a decent Hitchcockian thriller at times.
  36. Life During Wartime
    "Happiness" was, in its own dry, muted way, a howl of fatalistic despair discernible to anyone who's ever felt life had run out of cruel tricks to play. Life During Wartime is less a reprise of that howl than its echo.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tahrir: Liberation Square
    It's an exhilarating, though unfocused, look at how the country reached its tipping point, one that feels unfiltered in ways both good and bad. It's a collection of striking images rather than a considered whole.
  38. General Magic
    If one is not already paranoid about the relationship of politics, money, and the tech sector or about the industry’s general lack of perspective on itself, then this sort of uncritical puff piece should do the trick.
  39. The Unknown Known
    Tackling another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in The Unknown Known, Morris has finally met his match. The film is illuminating only in its utter lack of illumination — for looking deep into the eyes of someone incapable of letting his guard down and finding, predictably, nothing whatsoever.
  40. I Am Greta
    Still, there’s something instructive in how little progress Thunberg seems to make even with sympathetic politicians—which means that she has to keep raising her pitch. And there’s definitely something infuriating about all the clips of world leaders and snarky TV pundits mocking Greta, calling her stridently angry, dangerously naive, and even “mentally ill.”
  41. The Ignorant Fairies
    His Secret Life's languid pace and general aimlessness keep getting in the way.
  42. Melody Time
    Though not the masterpiece Disney's marketing would indicate, it is a charming, imaginative anthology of cartoon shorts set to music by the likes of such '40s favorites as Roy Rogers and The Andrews Sisters.
  43. Operation Avalanche
    Alas, while modern technology allows for impressive, convincing effects work on a comparatively tiny budget, the basic concept itself hasn’t improved with age. Clever ideas are still in short supply.
  44. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.
  45. Blockers
    The comedy Blockers, which is not written, produced, or directed by Apatow but feels descended from some of his work, sets for itself a more ambitious challenge, daring itself to give each member of its ensemble a coming-of-age arc, and to pull off two different high-concept comedies at once in the process.
  46. La Grazia
    La Grazia salutes simple, humble decency, and writer-director Paolo Sorrentino follows the example of his protagonist, largely avoiding the usual array of visual flourishes that have marked his previous collaborations with Servillo. The result is a decidedly reflective film that’s among the director’s most affecting.
  47. Green Book
    No wonder Green Book, which is like an inverted "Driving Miss Daisy" by way of "Rain Man’s" mismatched-buddy road trip, is already earning ovations: Intentionally or not, it flatters the delusion that racism, in its ugliest form, is more of a past-tense problem.
  48. White Reindeer
    If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since "Bad Santa," dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills.
  49. Late Shift
    Even with all these spinning plates, Volpe struggles with maintaining tension despite Benesch’s knack for immediacy and impeccable dramatic timing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Alps
    Lanthimos' skill at orchestrating these tense, creepy, shockingly funny setpieces is just as evident here as it was in "Dogtooth," but too much of Alps is left vague.
  51. The Competition
    Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.
  52. Boy Erased
    For all of the effort invested in limning the specific contours of Jared’s struggle, Boy Erased stops just short of its core.
  53. The Avengers
    Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.
  54. Venus in Fur
    Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.
  55. Beirut
    Though entertaining in stretches, the central metaphor of back-channel dealmaking as a game of Texas Hold ’em — played by Skiles and different factions within the CIA, the PLO, and the Israeli government — comes up short in the end.
  56. Imelda
    For the fascinating character study Imelda, Ramona S. Diaz was given a month's access to the former first lady, who supplies so many bizarre equivocations that it's hard to tell whether her actions were malicious or merely delusional.
  57. American Hardcore
    A raucous, relevant documentary, capturing the mood of the times and the participants' best anecdotes.
  58. This Divided State
    Greenstreet's film at least serves as a reminder of how useless public debate becomes when everyone's screaming and no one's listening.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There's Something About Mary
    One of the funniest movies of the year, but you may need to shower afterwards.
  60. Dark River
    Barnard, who made The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, has an impeccable sense of grubby pastoral space, and her performers locate some truth in cliché. But this is a kitchen-sink drag.
  61. Zero Motivation
    Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny.
  62. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Reijn, whose last directing effort was Instinct, the Netherland’s 2019 Best International Feature Film Oscar submission, directs with a loose, improvisational energy. If she keeps too loose a grip on the reigns, occasionally letting scenes meander, there’s another surprise or biting line of dialogue to get things back on track. While there’s plenty of blood and nasty kills, Reijn is not here to provide a true horror film experience.
  63. Joshua
    It's regrettable that Joshua veers into outlandish "Omen/Bad Seed/Good Son" territory when the real terror lies much closer to home.
  64. The Piano Lesson
    In The Piano Lesson, the ghosts are as tangible as they’ve ever been, and the film barely containing them is as weathered and tense as any family in need of a séance.
  65. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Resnais’ new film, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, is ostensibly an adaptation of two unrelated plays by Jean Anouilh: "Eurydice" (1941) and "Dear Antoine": Or, "The Love That Failed" (1971). However, Resnais’ methods of adaptation — placing one play within the other, and then refracting its dialogue across multiple characters and layers of reality — quickly eclipse the source material.
  66. Tuner
    Where Tuner truly shines is in the work of Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn and the film’s sound team as they carefully recreate Niki’s world through the film’s engrossing soundscape. Roher’s technically impressive approach to this element weaves itself organically throughout the film and its story, setting the crime drama apart from more typical crowdpleasers.
  67. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    Though some of the heated exchanges in Forgiving Dr. Mengele seem awkward and staged, they put Kor at the center of a riveting debate over how best to come to terms with past horrors, and the potential (and limits) of putting them to rest.
  68. Rumours
    Even in these early scenes, a strangeness pervades the film: ironic, sometimes stagey or soapy, occasionally punctuated by over-the-top musical cues.
  69. Horns and Halos
    Isn't a particularly well-assembled documentary, but the queasy, hypnotic power of its story and subjects makes its technical shortcomings forgivable.
  70. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Young costars carry the film, creating real characters from a generally flat script and Peter Care's largely undistinguished direction, both of which conspire to keep Altar Boys' danger at a distance.
  71. What Will People Say
    Mozhdah, appearing in her first film, can’t match the astonishing, bone-deep understanding of psychic masochism and involuntary complicity that Nicole Kidman brought to her similarly fraught therapy sessions in "Big Little Lies" — this film isn’t operating on that rarefied level in any respect, frankly — but she does manage, in this quietly harrowing scene, to make Nisha more than just a helpless victim.
  72. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    How to Make Money Selling Drugs is breezy fun, even when it eventually turns openly cynical.
  73. The Trip to Greece
    At least everyone seems self-aware about how much they’re repeating themselves yet again.
  74. Moffie
    At its worst, Hermanus’ forceful direction can land with this sort of thudding literality. But befitting its harrowing subject of young men hammered into rigid conformity, Moffie leaves a lasting mark all the same.
  75. Chronicle
    Chronicle becomes what "Hancock" wanted to be - a dark superhero story with firm footing in the everyday. Perhaps now the found-footage gimmick has been fully exploited; let us never speak of it again.
  76. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur Christmas gets a little sappy toward the end - it is a Christmas movie, after all - but it otherwise strikes just the right combination of naughty and nice, reverent and irrelevant, holiday-sweet and Aardman dry.
  77. The Other Dream Team
    Markevicius tells this incredible yarn through the significantly less exciting format of an ESPN-style documentary, which gets the job done with minimal flourish. Still, he employs former Lithuanian greats like Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis to serve as guides to the country's past and present, and the basketball culture that's thrived there under the best and worst of times.
  78. Into the Woods
    Even if this Into The Woods lacks the exhilaration of the best movie musicals, it does capture the show’s emotional intimacy—no small task in a field that favors razzle dazzle.
  79. Chronic
    When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy, and it really does play, for better and worse, like a lengthy exploration of that Shins song’s thesis.
  80. What They Had
    Unfortunately, Shannon isn’t the film’s star, and What They Had loses momentum whenever he’s not on screen.
  81. Blue Jay
    Duplass and Paulson counteract the deliberately banal dialogue (Duplass also wrote the screenplay) with superbly anxious body language; Jim and Amanda’s “casual,” “amiable” chitchat is so painfully forced that it’s a wonder nothing ruptures.
  82. Leto
    What Leto understands is that the lives of these Russian rock pioneers never approached the excess and flashbulb excitement their American and British counterparts enjoyed. Steadicamming through modest concert venues and studio spaces, the film replaces the melodrama of the typical rock biopic with lots of downtime, spent recording and talking about music.
  83. I Used to Be Darker
    Drenched in the evening glow of its urban and suburban backdrops, Darker comes alive in the dark, when its characters are drowning their sorrows in song, the sauce, or conversation.
  84. 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.
  85. Hallow Road
    Hallow Road really thrives when at its most simple. Sticking with Pike and Rhys in a simple windshield shot, cutting only to other tight, static angles from inside the car, allows the pair to carry the film.
  86. Predestination
    Predestination, a superficially cerebral new thriller, plays almost exclusively to the diagram-drawing crowd.
  87. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    The director has done the original Gremlins one better: Instead of a film with a subversive streak, he's made a puckish act of subversion with a streak of film.
  88. Kings of Pastry
    In a pressure-cooker environment, Pennebaker and Hegedus' moderately engaging but ultimately unsatisfying documentary feels disappointingly lukewarm.
  89. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    Made with affection and access but not enough structure.
  90. Asako I & II
    Hamaguchi exhibits a careful, un-showy command of the frame, and a talent for creating small, sometimes comic surprises through editing.
  91. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    The oppression is coming from all angles, but the unifying factor of these methods is that they have all already been described by author George Orwell. In the cutting documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck adds all these attacks up, expressing his contemporary horror using Orwell as his voice.
  92. Eyes Wide Shut
    Above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.
  93. The Company of Wolves
    A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path.
  94. The Last Winter
    The Last Winter's heart is in the right place, but it isn't pumping any blood.
  95. Chicken with Plums
    Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements-some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends-so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.
  96. Lover for a Day
    If Garrel’s recent films (which also include In The Shadow Of Women and Frontier Of Dawn) play like variations on a theme, this one at least varies more than usual.
  97. Tenet
    Rarely is a film of this budget and scope so proudly difficult to follow.
  98. Sunshine State
    Unlike in similar past efforts, Sayles never finds a way to bring it all together. Individual moments of considerable impact alternate with stretches that go nowhere.
  99. People Say I'm Crazy
    What's so remarkable about the movie is how matter-of-fact it is.
  100. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    The incongruous pairing—the late-’40s equivalent of dropping the American Pie gang into a Saw movie—really shouldn’t have worked, but it resulted in a highly entertaining film that became a huge hit and breathed new life into the comedy team’s career, while providing a convenient tombstone for the monsters, who faded from screens.
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