The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Only Yesterday (1991)
    Only Yesterday is animated, but rarely cartoony, in either its design or its storytelling.
  2. A Country Called Home
    There are a lot of bad things this movie doesn’t do, which is not quite the same as doing anything particularly well.
  3. Marguerite & Julien
    It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.
  4. Eddie the Eagle
    Starring Kingsman: The Secret Service’s Taron Egerton jutting out his chin and sporting oversized glasses in a concerted attempt to appear less handsome, Eddie The Eagle wears its quirkiness on its puffed sleeve.
  5. Triple 9
    As a game of cops and robbers, Triple 9 was probably more fun to play than it is to watch.
  6. Risen
    Refreshingly unpretentious, Risen reimagines the Gospel as an ancient Roman cop movie.
  7. Race
    The rest of Race has other moments of engagement in a slickly produced and watchable package. But ultimately, it offers history told as a series of passing anecdotes.
  8. Snowtime!
    Dialogue is witless (though at least there are no pop-culture references), and the kids are all generic types with pre-packaged personalities.
  9. 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."
  10. Forsaken
    An opportunity to see the Sutherlands onscreen together — with Donald playing Kiefer’s disapproving preacher dad — is the only new thing that Forsaken has to offer. Whether that’s enough will vary according to taste.
  11. The Witch
    The result is a horror movie that comes dangerously close to showing sympathy for the real devils, the kind that burned witches instead of instructing them. Good thing it’s scary.
  12. Embrace of the Serpent
    One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Funny or Die Presents: Donald Trump's the Art of the Deal: The Movie
    Like the real Trump, [Depp] delivers a bizarrely magnetic performance, and that magnetism is enough to hold the whole enterprise together, even as the intentional incompetence of the film-within-the-film threatens to sink the final act.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Glassland
    The script is consistently either overexplicit or undernourished, and there’s only so much two fine actors can do.
  17. Mountains May Depart
    Sentimental, and plotted with the elegance of a silent film, Mountains is nearly hamstrung in its futuristic final section by one very bad performance and a whole lot of tin-eared English dialogue.
  18. Cabin Fever
    Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.
  19. Zoolander 2
    It’s a bizarre and pointless spectacle, but not an unamusing one. Characters like Alexanya and Atari feel very much like try-outs for Saturday Night Live characters — not surprising, given that at least four of the cast members have worked on that show.
  20. Touched With Fire
    Yet as personal, well-performed, and sometimes lyrical as this material is, Dalio also has a peculiar way of making it all play like a public service announcement—like a feature commissioned for a mental-wellness convention.
  21. How to Be Single
    You might say that How To Be Single suffers from the influence of its older, more put-together sister Sex And The City, right down to the sappy montage and voice-over it needs to tie everything together at the end.
  22. Regression
    One can make a creepy demonic horror movie, or one can make a sorrowful exposé about a real-world phenomenon that destroyed multiple families, but it’s exceedingly difficult to make both at the same time.
  23. Jim: The James Foley Story
    Jim: The James Foley Story is more than just a tribute to a fallen journalist. It’s a deeply moving testament to a man who dared to face the worst of humanity and somehow managed to maintain his sense of empathy in spite of it all.
  24. Deadpool
    The eccentric touches—a Wham! musical cue, a dash of screwball body horror—are just accents on a stealth franchise extension. At a certain point, you have to do more than just recognize and point out the mold. You have to actually shatter it.
  25. The Choice
    Again and again, Sparks takes the stuff of great four-hankie melodrama—love, death, cute dogs—and grinds it into a formulaic mush. Ask more of your paperback romances. At least ask for a different one each time.
  26. Misconduct
    If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.
  27. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Photos, clips from Eisenstein’s own films and from newsreels, and the director’s erotic drawings are spliced in or sometimes projected over the background, but the overloaded visual plane only underlines the fact that Eisenstein In Guanajuato never moves anywhere; eventually, it becomes stultifying. It’s a movie jumping in place.
  28. 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.
  29. The Club
    This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.
  30. Tumbledown
    That Tumbledown sort of works in spite of all its clichés is a testament to the gifts of its two lead actors.
  31. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The movie feels bloodless, and not just because the gore is muted and computerized to stay within the boundaries of a PG-13 rating.
  32. Hail, Caesar!
    Somewhere in there are stretches of the Coens’ funniest comedy since "The Big Lebowski"; it just takes a little patience.
  33. Rams
    All Iceland all the time, and while it failed to snag a foreign-language Oscar nomination (after winning the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes last year), it does its country proud.
  34. Jane Got a Gun
    Even when the movie focuses on its imagery rather than its plot mechanics, it seems intent on covering its bases rather than committing to a particular look or mood.
  35. Fifty Shades of Black
    When Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick.
  36. Rabin, the Last Day
    The movie is almost literally a trial to watch, demonstrating all the passion and excitement of an unedited C-SPAN broadcast.
  37. The Finest Hours
    As charming as the early scenes are, The Finest Hours doesn’t really come together as a love story, either, and Affleck’s scenes on the tanker are too abbreviated to really sink in as great survival drama.
  38. Kung Fu Panda 3
    Kung Fu Panda 3 is Kung Fu Panda minus a dramatic arc, but with way more pandas.
  39. Lazer Team
    Lazer Team is carried along by the sheer enthusiasm of its main quartet....It’s just too bad that there’s less wit in the dialogue than there is in the Barenaked Ladies’ closing-credits song.
  40. Exposed
    If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.
  41. Dirty Grandpa
    There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.
  42. The 5th Wave
    Aside from a taste for Visual Storytelling 101 basics (a close-up of a dropped teddy bear, held for what seems like half a minute), British director J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) doesn’t do much to distinguish himself from any number of hired guns.
  43. Synchronicity
    Synchronicity is more contraption than movie, its plot as mechanically functional as a clock, rotating characters around like gears.
  44. Aferim!
    To the extent that the film has an emotional journey, it’s the story of this man’s very, very slight moral awakening, which achieves nothing whatsoever and doesn’t necessarily look as if it’s going to stick.
  45. The Boy
    At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.
  46. Ip Man 3
    As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.
  47. Monster Hunt
    Monster Hunt combines a lot of qualities from the other items on the all-timer’s list: epic action, elaborate special effects, broad comedy, and a style that could best be described as “exhausting.”
  48. Martyrs
    Unfortunately, in goosing the momentum, the creators of the film have lost the soul of what was essential to this horrific tale
  49. Mojave
    By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes.
  50. Bleak Street
    Neither Ripstein nor his wife and regular screenwriter, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, succeed in unearthing (or inventing) anything of more than sensational interest from this tragedy.
  51. A Perfect Day
    On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.
  52. Norm of the North
    Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.
  53. Intruders
    Intruders ultimately comes across like basic-cable schlock (or is it Netflix schlock now?), slightly redeemed by the germ of a great idea, even if said idea never truly germinates.
  54. Band of Robbers
    There’s an element of parlor trickery here that the movie’s never entirely able to overcome.
  55. In the Shadow of Women
    Shot on black-and-white film that has the luster of hard coal, In The Shadow Of Women is often quite beautiful—and it has some jokes, too.
  56. The Benefactor
    That makes the role well tailored to its occupant: Gere stays within his range of moneyed playboys, while still getting to indulge in the kind of unflattering behavior that a more put-together Richard Gere character would never exhibit.
  57. Moonwalkers
    By the umpteenth scene where the “joke” is that one of the characters is on drugs, the movie’s strained wackiness becomes wearisome.
  58. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.
  59. Ride Along 2
    The implausibilities, cop-movie checkboxes, and mildly wasted talent make Ride Along 2 lazy, but not downright loathsome. If anything, it’s perhaps slightly more amusing and agreeable than the original—a sign of how little that film’s seemingly surefire premise wound up mattering.
  60. The Forest
    The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.
  61. 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.
  62. Anesthesia
    Still, it’s dispiriting to see him (Nelson) produce something as turgid and heavy-handed as Anesthesia, which employs a dozen or so cardboard characters as mouthpieces for singularly unilluminating thoughts about the ways in which people struggle to bury their unhappiness.
  63. The Treasure
    Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.
  64. Diablo
    Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.
  65. Point Break
    The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.
  66. Anomalisa
    Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.
  67. Daddy's Home
    Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.
  68. 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.
  69. 45 Years
    A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.
  70. Son of Saul
    No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.
  71. Sisters
    Fey and Poehler are clearly the center of the film, and watching their lively games of verbal ping-pong is always an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes or so.
  72. Extraction
    Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.
  73. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.
  74. Concussion
    Smith’s Omalu makes a compelling character, supported by his mentor Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks) and former team doctor Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin). But Concussion doesn’t crackle like the best whistleblower dramas.
  75. Joy
    Rough even by Russell’s standards, this grab bag of dropped plot points, visual metaphors, and theatrical cues looks like the underdrawing of a comic drama, only half covered in bright impasto strokes.
  76. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  77. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    What Abrams has done is strip Star Wars down to its core components, rearranging the stuff people liked about the original trilogy and getting rid of what they hated about the rest.
  78. The Revenant
    There’s a sense that the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of the parts, no matter how spectacular some of them are.
  79. The Hateful Eight
    This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.
  80. The Ridiculous 6
    While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.
  81. Don Verdean
    Both Rockwell and Clement are back for the latest Hess production, Don Verdean, which can’t even work up enough comic energy to be considered bad.
  82. Body
    The film is well-acted, slickly made on a shoestring budget, and blessedly efficient, with a runtime that inches just past the one-hour mark, credits included. It’s also nearly devoid of surprises, sending its characters through some Hitchcockian paces en route to an ending that’s more depressing for its predictability than its bleakness.
  83. The Big Short
    In the end, McKay’s edu-tainment tactics work, even if the laughs aren’t as hearty as his broader work with Ferrell. The Big Short pulls off its own oddball gambit: grabbing attention through fringe wonkiness rather than a tantalizing glimpse at bro-banker lifestyles.
  84. In the Heart of the Sea
    Even though In The Heart Of The Sea’s framing device often feels like it was written by someone who’d never read a word of Melville, its visual style makes for a bold approximation of his allusive prose.
  85. Boy and the World
    As with the movie as a whole, the message those scenes deliver is a heady mix of uplifting and devastating.
  86. Almost There
    Almost There, made under the banner of Windy City-based doc shop Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams), gives Anton’s kitschy-colorful portraiture the requisite close-up, but the film quickly becomes more compelling as a protracted intervention than as an act of advocacy.
  87. Stinking Heaven
    Like many of Joe Swanberg’s recent efforts, Stinking Heaven plays like a potentially strong idea for a movie that never quite takes shape, which is the problem with “writing” a movie while the camera rolls.
  88. Krampus
    Neither particularly frightening nor especially funny, the Yuletide horror-comedy Krampus scrapes by on the novelty of its setup.
  89. 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.
  90. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Fighting misery means having fun, which is what filmmaking is supposed to be, and, despite its lengths and scope, Arabian Nights always feels handmade.
  91. The Letters
    The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.
  92. Life
    Corbijn’s reserved, removed approach gives his stars the space to develop a real chemistry, which makes their characters pleasant company, once they get past their early clumsiness around each other.
  93. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    The second interesting thing about Every Thing Will Be Fine is that it’s very bad, and that its bizarre throwaway lines and shrugged-off subplots brings to mind Tommy Wiseau instead of Douglas Sirk — an impression underscored by extensive, largely mismatched dubbing.
  94. The Lady in the Van
    Though director Nicholas Hytner does his best to enliven the material, Bennett very much comes across as a dull man’s Charlie Kaufman, even more so when the movie ends with flat, unearned whimsicality. Good as she is here, Smith must cede this round to Dench.
  95. Youth
    Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it’s no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you’re on Sorrentino’s wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, “oppressive” might be a better word.
  96. Macbeth
    We’re talking maximum sound and fury, and while no movie that stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard could signify nothing, this one doesn’t signify a whole lot.
  97. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq, Lee’s modernized take on "Lysistrata," is mostly bad art; it’s about an hour too long, sometimes leadenly unfunny, and set in Chicago, a place the Brooklynite director has no feel for.
  98. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    The movies may be, in part, about fantasy, but they always look like they’re from somewhere very real.
  99. Christmas, Again
    Poekel isn’t interested in something as mundane as a new romance. He’s basically trying to make Seasonal Affective Disorder: The Movie, and comes damn close to pulling it off. He has a tremendous ally in Audley, who gives one of the year’s best performances (albeit one destined to receive no awards and scant attention).
  100. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Though smarter visually than its TV-ready format would suggest (the camera team includes ace cinematographers Eric Gautier and Mihai Mălaimare Jr.), Hitchcock/Truffaut doesn’t offer a whole lot more than the opportunity to watch and hear very smart people talk about something they know very well.
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