The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Climax
    There’s a spontaneity to Climax—a naturalistic immediacy born of its exceptional, energetic cast of unknowns, firing off entirely improvised jokes and insults and threats.
  2. The Towering Inferno
    As the bland, star-laden drama gets swallowed by fiery special-effects setpieces, it feels like one type of big-budget mediocrity giving way to the next.
  3. Wendell & Wild
    Selick and Peele operate a bit at cross purposes in Wendell & Wild. The genius visualist wants to haunt our dreams. The socially engaged provocateur wants to haunt our troubled collective realities. Whatever doesn’t quite mesh in their collaboration is easier to forgive when feasting upon such extraordinary sights.
  4. Solitary Man
    The second movie nestled within Solitary Man--the one that doesn’t show up often enough--is about a man of rare eloquence and honesty, sharing his views on salesmanship and sex with anyone who’ll listen.
  5. Bastards
    This as one of the director’s most pitiless visions—a drama as pitch black as the night that envelops its characters.
  6. The Bank Job
    Donaldson also misses the chance to score some easy laughs from his petty criminals, who are infinitely more audacious than they are competent.
  7. Cult of Chucky
    Cult Of Chucky is the most purely entertaining Child’s Play film since the original.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Voice
    Though it's got some funny one-liners, sight gags, and Blethyn's over-the-top histrionics, Little Voice is often painfully dramatic, right down to its final mother-daughter confrontation.
  9. Talk to Me
    Unfortunately, that story isn't particularly well told, and after a while, the strength of the two leads' work and the popping soundtrack can't hide the fact that Lemmons doesn't really have much to say about the material.
  10. Nuclear Nation
    Tangents involving government committees and the nuclear energy lobby only serve to scatter the already-diffuse narrative, as do numerous intertitles relaying facts about nuclear power in Japan or indicating the passage of seasons; they seem like leftovers from a longer film.
  11. The Birth of a Nation
    Nate Parker’s film on Nat Turner, imperfect though it is, deserves to be seen.
  12. The Night Comes for Us
    It uses a thin plot touching on the classic Hong Kong action themes of brotherhood and loyalty as an excuse to string together a series of gonzo action set-pieces so ingeniously bloody that one could conceivably classify the film as horror.
  13. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.
  14. The Death of Dick Long
    Billy Chew’s screenplay takes at least one important lesson from the best of both crime movies and small-town portraits: The characters, however minor or ridiculous, seem to lead lives that started well before the movie and will continue long after. Well, except for Dick himself. He’s gone.
  15. Huda's Salon
    Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality.
  16. William Eggleston in the Real World
    The trouble with artists making documentaries about other artists is that art tends to get in the way.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    There's incredible feeling behind Steal A Pencil For Me--enough to sustain two lives throughout unimaginable hardship--but the film doesn't bring much of it to the surface.
  18. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    In another self-reflexive move, Far From Home transfers the real dilemma back to the filmmakers: The character comedy is great fun, and the action spectacle often feels like their responsible burden.
  19. Friday Night
    Seasoned with amusing bits of fantasy, like a pizza topping that briefly curls into a smile, Friday Night captures the city at its most inviting, alive with the feeling that wonderful things can happen to ordinary people.
  20. Zero Day
    Though comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project" are inevitable, the impeccable first-person camera technique not only makes sense dramatically, but also facilitates a complex and queasily ambiguous relationship between the conspirators and the audience.
  21. Collateral Damages
    Sauret's approach isn't the most artful, but it doesn't have to be. Hearing his subjects speak for themselves is good enough.
  22. The Elephant in the Living Room
    Gripping, maddening, well-told stories.
  23. Sparrows Dance
    There are times when the slight, small Sparrows Dance pushes too hard, both visually and narratively: a blinking red light outside Ireland’s window provides overly fussy on-off lighting during two long scenes, and the movie’s flairs of serious conflict are less deft than its offhand moments of connection. There are enough of said moments, though, to sustain its sweetly hesitant romance.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Seven Five
    Dowd is the film’s main interviewee, telling his story with a hyped-up machismo that makes him seem like a Scorsese character come to life. The biggest issue with The Seven Five is that it often feels like it’s mimicking Saint Marty’s stylistic and thematic bag of tricks.
  25. Ginger & Rosa
    The movie can be affecting at times, and might’ve been even more so if Potter hadn’t made its theme so explicit, via heavy “this is the point” speeches delivered during what’s otherwise a powerful climax.
  26. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    Unfortunately, while there’s enough fascinating material here for an hour-long documentary, this one runs two hours, with most of the present-day talking-head footage (interspersed throughout, to momentum-halting effect) feeling irrelevant.
  27. Patriots Day
    The movie, none too revelatory, mostly just stands as a sturdy thriller, one that’s more fleet than flat-footed as it shuttles among a veritable network of characters and story lines.
  28. Depraved
    Breaux is able to wring great pathos out of the character of Adam with very few words, which only makes Henry and Polidori’s arguments about ethics, which increase in frequency as the film goes on, seem all the more tedious.
  29. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
    It’s less a story of the supernatural than one about a party on the wrong side of town, with hints of danger, interesting strangers to meet, and an overall cool vibe that even lingers the morning after.
  30. The Armor of Light
    The main reason to see The Armor Of Light is to spend more time with Schenck, and to get a sense of how deeply he’s thought about all of this.
  31. 25th Hour
    The film at its simplest serves as a cautionary tale, but it also functions as a meditation on how little it takes to redirect a life by choice or by chance.
  32. The Hidden
    The Hidden is a textbook example of how a B-movie can transcend its origins and budgetary constraints through craft, imagination, and all-around resourcefulness. Shifting genres almost as often as its villain changes bodies, it's at once an enormously effective thriller, a smart exercise in science fiction, an exciting action movie, and a kinetic dark comedy.
  33. The Fault in Our Stars
    Good movies are made out of great books all the time, and to fault Fault for not living up to its inspiration isn’t much more fair than dismissing the novel on the grounds that it sounds, superficially, like "Love Story" for millennials. As with infinities, some successes are just bigger than others.
  34. Welcome to Me
    The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.
  35. Inferno
    The writing is clumsy, with information packed crudely into the dialogue, and his attention to the performances is inversely proportional to his attention to style. Yet his “New York” has an eerie, deserted, otherworldly quality—much as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would later—and some of the individual setpieces are spectacularly vibrant.
  36. Europa
    Europa has been described as a Kafka-esque fever dream, and while that isn't inaccurate, it's also a cover for the film's confounding narrative, which wends through murky noir plotting, a polyglot of accents and performance styles, and surreal interludes. The best approach is not to puzzle too much over the details, and to marvel at von Trier's technical wizardry, which re-imagines the period through a patchwork of vivid impressions.
  37. 21 Jump Street
    It's more consistently amusing and inspired than an adaptation of an '80s TV show has any right to be.
  38. Greener Grass
    Always in control of its deeply bizarre, suburban surrealist tone, even when its story is more like a series of comedy sketches than a feature film.
  39. Redbelt
    The film unravels a bit in the last few moments, amid unanswered story questions and a simplistic climax, but until that moment, Redbelt is Mamet's richest film of the decade.
  40. Vodka Lemon
    A dark-humored film about devastation, which makes Vodka Lemon's final rush into comedy in the truest sense all the more refreshing. Even in the wasteland, there might be humor other than the gallows kind.
  41. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Beyond treating this story like a potboiler, Deraspe does her best to make A Gay Girl In Damascus cinematic. She alternates nicely framed and photographed interviews with some fairly expressive dramatic reenactments. Some of these are pretty powerful.
  42. The Cocoanuts
    Only about half of 1929's The Cocoanuts, an early sound-era comedy, was entrusted to the Marx brothers' vaudevillian antics; the rest was left to drippy Irving Berlin songs, kick-lines of bathing beauties, and a half-baked subplot about a stolen necklace. Yet the good scenes establish the Marx dynamic to hilarious effect.
  43. Selah and The Spades
    If you took "Harry Potter," put it in a paper bag with "The Wire," and shook it vigorously, you’d get the basic idea behind Selah And The Spades — a film that, to its credit, is only partially defined by those two elements.
  44. Blood Relatives
    Like the cobbled-together parts of an aging engine, or the seemingly incompatible members of a chosen family, Blood Relatives holds together with just enough passion and love that its sturdy engine takes audiences for an enjoyable if not always memorable ride.
  45. Fair Game
    It's ultimately a tale of heroism in the face of fearsome, powerful opposition, but as stubborn pride masquerading as ideological purity proves Wilson's Achilles heel, the film's heroes reveal themselves as flawed to an almost fatal extent, and messily, fascinatingly human.
  46. Good Morning, Night
    Bellocchio's film, which enlivens the grim realities of months in a stuffy apartment with striking bursts of lyricism, is often a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming a slave to ideology.
  47. World's Greatest Dad
    With Dad and his last writer-director effort, "Sleeping Dogs Lie," Goldthwait has accomplished the formidable feat of making wry, tender, fundamentally sweet comedies about the human condition that just happen to center on acts of autoerotic asphyxiation and bestiality, respectively. That isn't easy.
  48. Dead of Winter
    Much like its locale, Dead Of Winter is a sparse but engrossing thriller, one that excels because of the nuanced work of its cast and Kirk’s focus on Barb’s grief amid the chaos.
  49. The Old Oak
    The Old Oak is a reminder that empathy isn’t merely about having the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and consider their perspective, it’s recognizing that one’s personal struggles extend beyond one’s own family and other people that look exactly like you.
  50. The Mortuary Collection
    The Mortuary Collection recalls everything from Hammer Horror to Sam Raimi at various points throughout the film. It’s less successful at actually transcending those influences, although Spindell’s devotion is endearing.
  51. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Go To The Movies is for kids who like bright colors and wacky humor, certainly, but it’s also targeted directly at the sort of superhero nerd who would catch a reference like that.
  52. The Drop
    Cultural authenticity seeps into the cracks of this low-key lowlife drama, whose best attribute is the pungent sense of place it possesses.
  53. The Company Men
    The cast doesn't treat The Company Men like a slideshow. They take something overly schematic and imbue it with real anxiety, shame, and humility.
  54. Chicago 10
    Chicago 10 is a lot of fun, but it could stand to take its subjects a little more seriously, if only because they themselves are so frequently goofy that mocking them is complete overkill.
  55. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie's heart is clearly in the right place -- but the Thornberry family's grotesquely huge heads, jutting teeth, stick limbs, and mismatched bodies look even more improbable and unpleasant on the big screen than they do on their TV show.
  56. Goyangileul butaghae
    Jeong's movie is at its best when it forgets about everything but the interactions of its cast, whether they're together or communicating via one of Cat's cleverly orchestrated cell-phone scenes.
  57. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    It remains to be seen whether Kill Bill is merely a skilled slice of juvenilia or a pastiche with real emotional and thematic underpinnings, but based on Tarantino's storytelling command in the first half, it's worth giving him the benefit of the doubt.
  58. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Intended to be shamelessly heart-tugging and even uplifting in an odd way, but it's recommended mainly as an acting showcase.
  59. The Monster
    With The Monster, writer-director Bryan Bertino plants a prickly mother-daughter drama at the center of a violent creature feature. It’s an intriguing combination in theory, but the individual elements both feel a little half-baked, and stirring them up into one doesn’t help. They’re two mediocre tastes that taste mediocre together.
  60. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    So why, given its moment-to-moment surplus of visual imagination, does the film feel so hollow and unsatisfying?
  61. Fear(s) of the Dark
    These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.
  62. Operation Filmmaker
    Operation Filmmaker takes a thrilling left turn from its original conceit, and Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches.
  63. Fahrenheit 11/9
    As one might expect, it’s not his most focused act of impassioned muckraking.
  64. Happiest Season
    It’s possible to imagine a much more risk-taking movie than the one DuVall has made. But before a film can break the queer holiday rom-com mold, someone has to set it up first. And Happiest Season is a welcome starting point.
  65. The Outfit
    Filled with twists and reversals that, for the most part, are motivated by character not plot, The Outfit is a nifty little period thriller that provides a showcase role for the always-amazing Mark Rylance.
  66. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Cha Cha Real Smooth has an unforced charm and lack of guile that’s refreshing and stops just short of being precious and ingratiating.
  67. Crazy Love
    There's plenty of black comedy in their twisted affair, but a more substantial documentary wouldn't leave you smiling.
  68. Man Up
    Rather than aim for uproarious, it constantly settles for amusing.
  69. The Exploding Girl
    There isn’t much to The Exploding Girl, but it’s blessedly compact, and owns its no-big-deal-ness.
  70. Dayveon
    By displacing some familiar gang-movie dynamics into an environment less often glimpsed on film, Abbasi stays true to the offbeat heart of his influences. The strength of his work here indicates an even more distinct voice might yet emerge.
  71. Starter for 10
    A beautifully observed coming-of-age story.
  72. 22 July
    With 22 July, Greengrass pushes up against the boundaries of respectful representation, traipsing queasily close to outright exploitation with his reenactment of the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 77 people, many of them children.
  73. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    The story’s many advances and reversals can be hard to follow at times, but this isn’t really a movie where plot is paramount. Everything boils down to the action, and what that action means.
  74. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    About A Son may not let in anybody who doesn't already have one foot in Nirvana's doorway, but those people are invited in fully, to experience the contradictions and preoccupations of a man whose music defined his era.
  75. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    An absorbing and meticulous piece of reportage.
  76. The Cuckoo
    Though it gets far too cute, The Cuckoo settles into the snappy rhythms of a promising sitcom pilot, at least until Rogozhkin decides to get serious.
  77. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Adapting a novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, François Dupeyron uses handheld cameras and some jarring edits, but, prostitutes and all, this is storybook material: heartfelt, pleasant, cuddly, and a little too insubstantial to stick in the mind for long.
  78. Changing Lanes
    Out of that clever setup, Changing Lanes pulls both the promised taut suspense and a much deeper film: an ethics thriller.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hitler's Children
    The subjects of Hitler's Children all speak about the actions of their infamous forebears with shame, shock, or disgust, but they also make it clear this isn't true of everyone in their families.
  80. Carry-On
    There’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves.
  81. Ong Bak
    Makes up in action what it lacks in storytelling finesse.
  82. We Live in Public
    We Live In Public doesn’t show that Harris was a genius so much as that he was a mentally and emotionally unstable egotist, trying to force a revolution in self-broadcasting and connectivity that later happened more naturally.
  83. Sightseers
    The relentless contrast of banality with horror seems to be Wheatley’s signature move, and like his "Kill List" (2011), Sightseers can claim a sizable fan base, especially in its native U.K. But the humor here, ironically, doesn’t travel well.
  84. The Pink Cloud
    Gerbase, making an impressive feature debut, proves herself a sensitive observer of human nature. The Pink Cloud joins a tradition of sci-fi films like Her that are less interested in their futuristic concepts than how they might affect people.
  85. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk Of Sorrow is lousy with allegory, and is often too heavy for its own good.
  86. The Harder They Fall
    The gonzo factor (sadistic violence plus multiple music numbers) is intermittently engaging. The characters, not so much.
  87. Compliance
    The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.
  88. Infamous
    Ultimately, the problem with Infamous isn't that it revisits Capote's turf--it's that it does the same things well, and leaves the same unsatisfying holes.
  89. Star Trek Beyond
    With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.
  90. Martin
    Martin touches on any number of post-Vietnam ills (urban decay, drug addiction, crises in faith) without overstatement, allowing for a deeply considered exploration of horror's ability to comment on society, a sort of belated answer to Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. At the same time, Romero still forces Martin to work as strictly a horror film, albeit an eccentric one in which the violence has an uncomfortable plausibility, starkly contrasting Amplas' romanticized black-and-white vampiric fantasy life.
  91. Icarus
    Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Gloria is the rare Cassavetes film to expand its scope beyond an insular community.
  93. North Country
    The story of America's first successful class-action sexual-harassment lawsuit may sound dull, but Caro ratchets up the intensity until every flung epithet and threat stings. The approach is sometimes shrill, but it's effective.
  94. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    If nothing else, Scheinfeld captures the essence of the Nilsson experience, and how, according to his attorney, "He would turn up at your door at 4 in the morning, and you knew that the next three days were going to be an adventure."
  95. Bullhead
    Bullhead is well-plotted, with a powerful ending, but its most brutal scene comes early, explaining why for Schoenaerts, life has been one long wince.
  96. The Night
    Ahari’s script is perhaps too focused on the secrets of its central couple, which are compelling but foreshadowed in a belabored way. By the end, the emotional catharsis is dulled somewhat by the sheer obviousness of it all, not to mention the convoluted route Ahari takes to get there.
  97. The Business of Being Born
    More propaganda than cinema, and at an hour and a half, its exhaustiveness diminishes its impact. But Epstein anchors the film nicely with her own pregnancy, which occurs while the documentary is in production and comes to an unexpected conclusion before shooting ends.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Like Crazy
    By the film's latter half, we're left not hoping its lovers will find a way to be together, but longing for them to get over each other and move on.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    Terms And Conditions may not be a particularly well-made documentary, but it provides a much-needed wake-up call.
  100. Marty, Life Is Short
    Marty: Life Is Short is an overdue appreciation of a performer who’s underestimated as a clown only because he makes being funny look so easy.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »