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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  1. Photograph
    What’s consistent about Photograph is the way it maintains the delicacy of a particularly fine short story, complete with some ghostly supporting characters and plenty of ellipses where more conventional movies would amp up the exclamation points.
  2. Stay Hungry
    A smiley-face ending feels like a lazy copout, but the end credits, which put faces to all the names in the uniformly fine cast, underline this shaggy sleeper's greatest strength: creating a slew of characters worth getting to know.
  3. All Is True
    Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.
  4. Paradise Alley
    Striking in the way it evokes fears of abandonment—children’s worries blown up to grown-up scale—and completely unlike any film Stallone has put his name on since.
  5. 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 It’s full of rich ideas and revisions of outdated, sexist stereotypes, and thereby feels more modern than many animated classics.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.
  6. Hail Satan?
    Lane’s lighthearted approach will probably convert more than a few viewers to the TST cause — it’s a short walk from pissed-off atheist to smirking satanist. Given how entrenched the culture wars have become in America, maybe all Satan needs at this point is a good publicist.
  7. Nowhere
    Nowhere is Araki's most accomplished film yet, and if it never quite comes together, it's still a wildly entertaining film.
  8. Gymkata
    A true masterpiece of unintentional comedy...fantastically surreal.
  9. 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.
  10. Maiden
    Director Alex Holmes and editor Katie Bryer cannily draw out the story beneath the story, allowing it to bob along in the wake of Edwards’ tale.
  11. 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.
  12. The Batman
    Still, the film sustains its seductive atmosphere—its hushed pop-noir cool—even as the story fizzles into a string of reveals and a curiously perfunctory climax.
  13. The Farewell
    From a distance, The Farewell can look scattered, a series of ambling vignettes on the tradition-rooted quirks of modern China and the nature of families divided by culture and space. But there are some bright moments of truth, bittersweetly illuminating the grey spaces we create in our expressions of love.
  14. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The Last Black Man plays like a poetic portrait, part tender ode and part cartography of lived experience, bringing a nuanced and hard-earned perspective to the screen.
  15. Light From Light
    While the contemplative tone and measured pacing are definitely features instead of bugs, Light Of Light is so anodyne at times that it borders on inert.
  16. The Lodge
    The thing that haunted me the most about the film afterwards—aside from Riley Keough’s choking screams in one particularly intense, symbolically loaded sequence—was the ludicrousness of its plot.
  17. One Child Nation
    As wide-ranging in scope as it is horrifying in its particulars, the film does the necessary work of illuminating, for a large audience, a dark chapter of Chinese history.
  18. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    A must-watch for anyone looking for a thrilling summer blockbuster.
  19. Fourteen
    Medel and Kuhling both give remarkably even-keeled performances, making their differences clear without a lot of voice-raising.
  20. Ghost Town Anthology
    The gradual, matter-of-fact way that Côté transforms Ghost Town Anthology into an actual ghost story is quite impressive.
  21. Varda by Agnès
    As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.
  22. 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.
  23. The Tin Drum
    Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling.
  24. Dune: Part One
    However inconclusive as a story, the resulting film is a rarity among the overlong effects-heavy blockbusters of the last decade: One actually wishes it didn’t have to end so soon.
  25. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    This is a film that takes big swing after big swing, and leaves us filled up with spectacle, warmth, and a sense that the wait was probably worth it.
  26. Body at Brighton Rock
    While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.
  27. Extra Ordinary
    Some jokes may dissipate quickly, but its unusual warmth lingers in the air like a friendly ghost.
  28. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    Although the documentary is a brisk 74 minutes, filmmaker Elizabeth Carroll seems to so fully capture Kennedy’s unfiltered personality that Nothing Fancy becomes not just a portrayal of a world-famous authority on how various communities within Mexico farm, prepare, and eat their traditional dishes, but also a commentary on how we view or judge places through their food. Kennedy has complaints, and Nothing Fancy lets her air them.
  29. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    Gottsagen is too lively to be completely pinned down by feel-good clichés, and his unpredictability brings out the best in LaBeouf. As in most buddy pictures, so long as the chemistry works, all else is forgivable.
  30. Saint Frances
    Saint Frances goes down easy. It’s refreshingly small and intimate, and is specific on the lives of very particular women without overreaching to look more politically salient or strike zeitgeist concerns. Bridget’s personal growth is understated, and so, for the most part, are the pleasures of Saint Frances.
  31. Roustabout
    Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.
  32. Django
    The action that follows doesn't stray too far from formula, nor does it come close to Leone's film, but it's stylishly entertaining enough to serve as a passable time-filler, particularly when its second-rate hero takes to wielding an oversized (and anachronistic) handheld machine gun.
  33. Midnight Traveler
    If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.
  34. Loro
    Servillo—who previously embodied another former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, in Sorrentino’s Il Divo—never fails to deliver a memorably offbeat take on an outsize figure. Loro loses a bit of momentum once Berlusconi finally becomes its central figure, but it also gains some much-needed complexity.
  35. Low Tide
    Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.
  36. Swallow
    Although it’s a reductive statement, calling Swallow a high-class version of "My Strange Addiction" isn’t entirely inaccurate.
  37. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Ultimately, the copious, unmanipulated (one hopes!) footage of Dylan himself is what will endure.
  38. Plus One
    Plus One isn’t much more than consistently amusing and sweetly romantic, but in the right hands, those qualities can still feel like a lot.
  39. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    Frequently, Morrison punctuates her points and her recollections with a warm chuckle, expressing the same embrace of life’s fullness that informs even her bleakest stories.
  40. Atlantics
    For Diop as much as for her lead character, Atlantics resounds with the promise of great things to come.
  41. Bacurau
    As a statement on American entitlement and the intersection between capitalism and colonial terror, it’s a frying pan to the back of the skull: clunky but powerful.
  42. Pain and Glory
    Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.
  43. Frankie
    The whole thing struck me as pleasant, nicely judged, and unremarkable, right up to a final shot so graceful and moving that it sent waves of poignancy backwards through the movie.
  44. Les Misérables
    It’s not subtle, and it’s not pleasant. It’s angry, and it’s honest. Hugo would approve.
  45. Sibyl
    Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.
  46. The Whistlers
    Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.
  47. The Wild Goose Lake
    What it all adds up to has some of the unevenness of a nightmare, the belly sweat and oscillating fans of muggy summer heat mixed up with unrealities.
  48. Deerskin
    Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.
  49. Zombi Child
    The trappings of the boarding school, with its grand staircases, centuries-old cloisters, and self-serious teenage secrecy, are gothic. But Bonello nods just as much to American teen-anxiety horror. There is even an homage to Brian De Palma’s "Carrie."
  50. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Between Two Ferns meanders; it invents often-pointless conflicts between its characters; it sometimes feels like a film casting around desperately for an emotional hook to rest itself upon.... It’s also deeply funny, surrounding a talented comedian with other talented comedians and letting them riff off of each other for a feature’s worth of length.
  51. An American in Paris
    An American In Paris is muddled as an artistic statement, yet unsatisfying as conventional Hollywood product.
  52. Ford v Ferrari
    Setting aside more particular genre trappings, Mangold re-engineers one of his unfussy studio throwbacks into a supersized Dad Movie event.
  53. Bad Trip
    As if to counteract the bummer of watching a raucous comedy on Netflix rather than in a theatrical setting, Bad Trip comes equipped with its own crowd energy—a collective faith that there’s no idiotic stunt that can’t be pulled back from the brink of disaster.
  54. Soul
    It’s overflowing, like a bright portal into a new reality, with gorgeous details. So what if they don’t quite add up to a deeper whole?
  55. Freaks
    Much of what makes Freaks so unsettling comes from its refusal to treat its stars as, well, freaks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Gloria is the rare Cassavetes film to expand its scope beyond an insular community.
  57. Pumpkinhead
    Had Pumpkinhead been made in the silent era, it might now be treated with the reverence granted Nosferatu.
  58. Luz
    In a cinematic landscape where retro throwbacks are predictably bundled around the same small set of nostalgia-friendly filmmakers (we all love Carpenter, but come on), it’s positively invigorating to see a loving tribute to a director’s influences that’s also aggressively avant-garde.
  59. Hustlers
    Plenty of crime capers end ruefully, but few feel this potently bittersweet.
  60. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    Like The Amazing Johnathan’s act, it’s a funny, trippy, lively bit of sleight of hand that can often make you feel like you’re seeing something extraordinary, even if it’s just some prankster f**king with you.
  61. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Even with Ragnarok looming large in this film’s rearview mirror, Waititi’s work here marks an important and exciting untethering of MCU films from their obligations to a larger mythology—even if this one almost certainly carries much significance for the future.
  62. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    There’s something tidy and even schematic about the story of redemption and forgiveness A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood ultimately tells.
  63. Dolemite Is My Name
    What the film lacks in depth and focus, it makes up for in personality. Murphy’s obviously the star here, but Moore’s loyal entourage comes to the movie with plenty of charisma of its own.
  64. Just Mercy
    The filmmakers and actors imbue the characters with remarkable depth of feeling.
  65. Motherless Brooklyn
    This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.
  66. The Last Duel
    The setting may be the 14th century, but this is very much a historical drama of modern concerns. Damningly, it suggests that yesterday’s injustices remain very much today’s.
  67. Ema
    Under the weight of Larraín’s visual style, the emptiness at the center of Ema’s character nearly collapses the film, before a gobsmacking ending reveals her true motivations.
  68. La Flor
    Some petals are admittedly prettier or more fragrant than others (and the film has serious stem problems), but there’s forbidding beauty in the sheer ambition itself.
  69. The Perfect Candidate
    There’s a dramatic neatness here more indicative of a parable or fairy tale than an intimate family drama. Add in a swelling, sports-movie score and The Perfect Candidate would sit comfortably on the shelf along other feel-good underdog stories. (Think Rudy, but with municipal elections and lots of oud.) Yet Al-Mansour and her able cast supply a richer texture than such a description might suggest.
  70. The Devils
    Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.
  71. The Funhouse
    Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.
  72. Daniel Isn't Real
    A slick and thrilling take on the intersection of mental illness and creative inspiration that also doubles as a commentary on toxic masculinity.
  73. The Duellists
    In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.
  74. The Missouri Breaks
    Missouri Breaks begins as a ramshackle comedy and ends as a dour tragedy about the death of the old west with Brando serving as its singularly warped Angel of Death.
  75. The Manitou
    While Manitou does have its slower sections, the climax is a thing of beauty to be enjoyed forever, with crummy special effects, bad lightning, a star field, an Evil One symbolized by a cataract, and Tony Curtis struggling to maintain his dignity.
  76. The Jazz Singer
    As for its quality as an actual movie, well, The Jazz Singer is hardly great, but it provides solid melodrama and a valuable look at the ethnic stereotypes of early-20th-century entertainment.
  77. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Though it doesn’t entirely recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original, To All The Boys: Always And Forever is a worthy sendoff for this well-loved series.
  78. Color Out of Space
    Stanley does a remarkable job keeping the film grounded in emotional reality all things considered, but it’s admittedly an idiosyncratic movie about unconventional people made by an offbeat director.
  79. Babyteeth
    As that ending approaches, the tone shifts from dark comedy to sentimental drama, adding a maudlin aftertaste to an otherwise appealingly bitter brew.
  80. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
    This is pure, thick hokum. It’s also utterly absorbing, from start to finish.
  81. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Is this massively ambitious, unfairly burdened sequel as good as Black Panther? Definitely not—and it probably could never have been. But in a mythology where death is more often used as a narrative device than a true measure of loss, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever magnifies the truth that the title character’s world will endure, even if he doesn’t—and there are at least as many lessons to extract from his absence.
  82. Gretel & Hansel
    If one of the boundaries being tested in this film is viewers’ patience, the reward for—to use a refrain repeated throughout the film—“trusting the darkness” is well worth the commitment.
  83. I Lost My Body
    All of this letdown occurs only in the last 15 or so minutes, however. Until then, it’s good grotesque fun watching the hand make its way across town, scuttling Thing-like on its fingers. (Make it a double feature with the Addams Family reboot, if you like.)
  84. The Load
    As intelligently crafted as the film is, Glavonić’s directorial strategies do end up limiting the film’s observational power.
  85. King of New York
    Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.
  86. Anne at 13,000 ft
    That Radwanski so expertly navigates the fraught subject of mental illness, avoiding most pitfalls, makes it at once harder to understand and easier to forgive the lack of subtlety in Anne At 13,000 Feet’s titular controlling metaphor.
  87. Sound of Metal
    Sound Of Metal is nothing without its sound design. It’s a story about music and deafness—both auditory phenomena—and its success depends on being able to put you into the main character’s beat-up Converse. The film does accomplish that, thanks in part to its unique, first-person approach to sound.
  88. Saint Maud
    Saint Maud distinguishes itself through an emphasis on character over metaphor, as well as the nightmarish depths of the darkness at its center. We only get to see the true ferocity of Glass’ vision for a few fleeing moments, but have faith: It’s enough to burn into your soul forever.
  89. Bliss
    Bliss approaches its aesthetic with a straight-faced intensity, pummeling the viewer with woozy handheld closeups and violent bursts of montage until you feel like maybe you might have been dosed somehow on your way into the theater. The only irony here is that Begos says it’s his most personal movie to date.
  90. 13 Ghosts
    What Castle’s films lack in originality, they make up for in carnival energy and an eagerness to please.
  91. Knives and Skin
    Puts a forward-thinking feminist bent on the Riverdale school of neon Twin Peaks fetishism
  92. Tourist Trap
    What keeps it all from becoming high camp is the film’s eerie atmosphere and unsettling childlike quality, which sucks the viewer into a nightmarish alternate reality with such plainspoken innocence that we have no choice but to accept it at face value.
  93. Emma.
    Anchoring it all is horror darling Anya Taylor-Joy, who makes for a particularly icy Emma.
  94. Deadly Friend
    Remains a mesmerizing time-capsule portrait of ’80s-era hopes and fears about computers.
  95. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    The domestic humor is often too culture-specific to play for a non-Japanese audience, but Yamadas does have its accessible moments, particularly in the sweet extended opening flight of fantasy.
  96. Promising Young Woman
    Promising Young Woman fancies itself edgy, and relishes complicating the catharsis of something like the scene where Cassandra smashes some douchebag’s windshield with a tire iron after he yells at her on the road. But while the craft of the film is top-notch, and the writing razor-sharp, its nihilistic point of view isn’t as unprecedented as Fennell seems to think it is.
  97. VFW
    Soaked in neon and coated with a thick layer of 16mm film grain, it’s a visceral throwback to the gritty action fare that lined video store shelves in the early ’80s as grindhouses gave way to the VHS boom—coincidentally, also the era that made VFW’s core cast famous.
  98. The American Friend
    Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
  99. The Wiz
    The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.
  100. Dolemite
    Moore is so uncharismatic, he works his way back around to become incredibly charismatic, and so does the film.
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