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. The Lovebirds
    The dynamic between this screwball couple is half affectionate and half exasperated, and there are enough funny lines sprinkled throughout—a personal favorite: “documentaries are just reality shows no one watches”—to keep the laughs coming. But while The Lovebirds are sparkling conversationalists, as the plot gets more convoluted, the champagne starts to go flat
  2. 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.
  3. Corpus Christi
    It deviates enough from formula — especially in its arresting ending, which takes full advantage of Bielenia’s haunted visage — to be worth seeing.
  4. Sylvie's Love
    Sylvie’s Love lacks the ineffable spark that keeps it from fully transcending its period dress-up. There’s a pervasive self-consciousness on display that veers from delightful to forced depending on the goals of each scene. Sometimes the cast and the production design embrace the artifice strongly enough to make it look and sound organic. Other times, it just appears… artificial.
  5. Miss Americana
    Whether this book is really open, and whether it reveals the “real” Taylor Swift or not, Miss Americana is convincing, positive, and entrancing nonetheless.
  6. Suburbia
    Compassion and sociological acuity can only take a film so far, however, and clunky dialogue, comically broad supporting characters, and often-amateurish acting sabotage much of Suburbia's plot-and-dialogue-heavy second half. But it still shows enormous empathy and sensitivity in capturing the angst and alienation of American youth, making it seem both rooted in a specific time and place and strangely timeless.
  7. The Amusement Park
    The Amusement Park passes in a deranged blur; it’s a glorified PSA made with the means (and in the spirit of) antagonistic outsider art.
  8. Candyman
    The Candyman of 2021 represents more than he did three decades ago—indeed, more than a 91-minute movie can adequately explore. But there are worse crimes for a movie to commit than having too many ideas.
  9. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement. May we all have the opportunity to be present at our own funerals, surrounded by loved ones, before it’s too late.
  10. Kajillionaire
    The chemistry between Rodriguez and Wood is undeniable, and Rodriguez’s more naturalistic performance balances out her costar’s affected shuffling and deep, gravely monotone. Wood’s performance is sensitive, but it’s also silly at times.
  11. Minari
    Minari is that rare slice-of-life drama that contains multitudes without needing to look beyond the borders of its highly specific story.
  12. Zola
    Zola is first and foremost a zany, catastrophic road-trip dramedy, one that balances the whimsy of social media with the harrowing reality of being trapped in a dangerous situation.
  13. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Fitting for a film backed by the groovy sounds of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, the biggest myth Crip Camp is out to bust is that disabled people aren’t sexual beings.
  14. The Dissident
    For all its wealth of detail and thematic ambition, The Dissident is a good documentary that never quite becomes great. Because Fogel spends a lot of this film re-reporting a story that was in all the papers, all over the world, for months, watching The Dissident at times feels like hearing someone summarize a bestselling murder-mystery novel, while ominous “true crime” music plays incessantly on the soundtrack.
  15. Miss Juneteenth
    At its heart, Miss Juneteenth is about the relationship between a mother and her daughter, which Peoples brings to the screen with a subtlety that’s very true to life.
  16. Boys State
    With so much attention paid to the campaign trail, Boys State fails to show us how the waterworks get built.
  17. The Truffle Hunters
    The Truffle Hunters is more eccentric and lyrical than its logline might suggest.
  18. His House
    A potent, heart-wrenching spin on the classic haunted house story, buoyed by two stellar lead performances.
  19. Relic
    The kind of dread-infused slow burn that’s very much in vogue at the moment, Relic is so entirely, transparently, even explicitly about the horror of dementia and losing a loved one to it that the more traditional genre elements—like a potential supernatural presence in the house—feel rather redundant, maybe even unnecessary.
  20. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Ultimately, The Rise Of Gru exerts a negligible impact on the Minions’ canonical journey. If nothing else, the film serves as a reminder of the characters’ cartoonish charms, both literally and thematically, and their transcendent appeal.
  21. The Stepfather
    Appreciating what’s special about The Stepfather involves accepting—or at least tolerating—some clunky moments.
  22. Adoration
    The film flounders a bit in its second half, as it struggles to maintain the tension of its inciting incident. But Harduin’s performance as Gloria goes off her meds and descends into her own private world would be impressive for an actress of any age, let alone a 13-year-old.
  23. Ironweed
    Ironweed asks a lot with its 140-plus minutes of low-key suffering. It feels long, in part because not a lot happens from a plot perspective. Still, its strongest moments linger.
  24. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    The Bob’s Burgers Movie can’t functionally change too much about the characters’ inside the animated snow globe that is its serialized namesake, so instead it picks them up, plays with them, and then puts them back like you would a Kuchi Kopi or Horselain.
  25. Stillwater
    It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision.
  26. 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.
  27. The Old Guard
    Greg Rucka pens the screenplay, refashioning his own graphic novel and doing as much to retain tone and character agency as Gillian Flynn did for her "Gone Girl" adaptation, for example.
  28. On the Rocks
    There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.
  29. The Razor's Edge
    The Razor's Edge never quite reaches its destination but there are all manner of minor pleasures to be gleaned along the way.
  30. Why Don't You Just Die!
    At its best when breathlessly racing from one set piece to the next, Sokolov’s comedy really only has a single central joke to its name—gouts of blood firing in high-pressure streams at moments when the audience least expects them—and yet delivers that simple dose of brutal humor with mindful precision.
  31. The Brother from Another Planet
    The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.
  32. Undine
    For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.
  33. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Across the extended, handsomely shot sit-down interviews (with Ma’s daughter and the three other writers), what emerges is a fragmentary oral history of Chinese rural life across several transformative decades of the 20th century: family stories, tragedies, remembered slogans, the particulars of trying to grow crops in alkaline soil or coming of age as the son of a declared “counterrevolutionary.”
  34. A Better Tomorrow
    Superlative action scenes, particularly a bloody guns-grenades-and-swords finale with a body count to rival the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, help wash away many of the flaws. Action for its own sake may not have been the film's intended point, but it'll do.
  35. Sea Fever
    Despite some overly literal tributes to the films that inspired it (namely Alien, Jaws, and The Thing), Sea Fever’s vision of humanity’s insignificance in the face of nature is exactly the sort of awe-inspiring message some of us need to hear right now.
  36. Malignant
    Regardless of one’s math on the ratio of fun to dumb in Aquaman, there’s no way to watch this deranged follow-up and not conclude that Wan’s back where he belongs. Still, a little of that time in the superhero trenches seems to have crept into his supernatural comeback.
  37. Tigertail
    Where the film stands out from other dramas of its type is in its poignant exploration of the little-discussed emotional consequences of single-mindedly pursuing the American dream.
  38. Swing Time
    It's not quite as charming as Top Hat or Shall We Dance, and the plotting drags heavily in spots, but whenever it gets free from the demands of farce, it's a dizzy delight.
  39. Silent Movie
    When American films were addressing social turmoil like never before, Brooks used his clout to turn back the clock by combining silly sight gags, show-biz satire, silence, and celebrity cameos in 1976's aptly named, ingratiatingly goofy Silent Movie.
  40. Mayor
    If Mayor succeeds at conveying some of the awkward cringe comedy of running a community under occupation, it also captures the dread.
  41. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    That it falls short when it comes to matching the emotional impact of Into The Spider-Verse is further exemplified by a surprisingly abrupt cliffhanger conclusion that instead of sending the viewer out on a rousing high just makes one wonder why such an otherwise sharp franchise is going the route of weaker MCU entries in shortchanging its effectiveness as a stand-alone film to tease a future installment.
  42. Come Play
    Writer-director Jacob Chase, making his feature debut, expanded Come Play from an inventive short film. The result is involving, but a little pat as drama; you see the strings, even when it’s successfully pulling the ones attached to your heart. As a horror movie, though, it’s often diabolical fun: a PG-13 funhouse ride of peekaboo jolts.
  43. You Don't Nomi
    It may not be as bizarrely entertaining as the film it obsesses over, but You Don’t Nomi is a captivating document of how a piece of art—especially one this deeply, powerfully weird—can take on a life wholly beyond its original intentions.
  44. The Driller Killer
    Darkly fascinating, as much a document of the late-'70s New York punk and pop-art scenes as it is a grindhouse plugger.
  45. Sweetie
    Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.
  46. Mikey and Nicky
    Mikey & Nicky is sometimes dull and sometimes confusing—and it's both at once in the first 10 minutes, when Cassavetes is semi-comatose in a hotel room—but it also features plenty of absurd-but-believable human behavior.
  47. 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.
  48. The Bellboy
    The Bellboy strings together artfully choreographed comic setpieces as it follows a silent Lewis through his rounds at a posh Miami Hotel.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    Follow That Bird isn’t really the most memorable movie in terms of music or storyline—there’s a reason you don’t remember any of the songs from the movie like you do the ones from Sesame Street, the show—but it contains moments, both comical and tragic, that are absolutely indelible.
  50. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers.
  51. I Used to Go Here
    I Used To Go Here would rather be painfully relatable than cutting.
  52. Howard
    Even for those outside of the Disney musical demographic, Howard is a moving portrait of an artist taken too soon during an era tragically marked by those kind of losses.
  53. A Thousand Cuts
    The movie is loaded with moments meant to generate shock and outrage, but it could use more shoe-leather procedural scenes, showing in detail how Ressa’s team goes about investigating the police’s abuses of their constitutional authority.
  54. Alone
    There’s something deeply appealing about an already stripped-down cat-and-mouse scenario that becomes dirtier and more elemental as it goes along, tracing a devolutionary arc from the rules of the road to primeval combat.
  55. 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.
  56. I Care a Lot
    The film is arguably too long, with a mushy middle section that slows the momentum of its savage first third. But Pike’s performance remains sharp as her character’s blonde bob throughout, and the pleasures of watching her and Dinklage face off are significant.
  57. The Boys in the Band
    Mantello is the first to tell people he hasn’t had a lot of experience directing movies (his last feature was the 1997 adaptation of his Broadway hit Love! Valour! Compassion!), yet his version of Boys fights its stage roots far more than Friedkin’s film.
  58. 12 Hour Shift
    The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself.
  59. The Wind and the Lion
    The Wind And The Lion—which was a hit, but not on the order of Milius’ later Conan The Barbarian or Red Dawn—never feels like the product of post-Vietnam America; it just comes from Milius’ imagination, where history and fantasy meet each other halfway.
  60. Notturno
    Rosi’s compositions, static and mostly wide angle, are ennobling, albeit ambiguously. Life is going on, but not as usual.
  61. One Night in Miami
    With the help of four intuitive performances, King’s film adaptation briefly removes these titans from their pedestals to tell a meaningful story that is as humane as it is political—a difficult feat when you’re talking about some of the biggest cultural figures in modern history.
  62. The Dark and the Wicked
    Although its bleak worldview may be a turnoff for viewers who like their media a bit more life-affirming, if you’ve ever said to a friend, “it’s so fucked up, you’ve got to see it,” The Dark And The Wicked is one horror movie that lives up to its title.
  63. City Hall
    It’s giving ordinary citizens the floor that makes the difference, and City Hall truly comes alive when Wiseman’s out on the street.
  64. New Order
    The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.
  65. Wife of a Spy
    The movie is sometimes quiet and poky to a fault; a few cheap pulp thrills might’ve made it feel more vital from start to finish. But Kurosawa and co-screenwriter Ryusuke Hamaguchi do gradually build tension and intrigue across Wife Of A Spy’s two hours, while also openly confronting a dark chapter of Japanese history.
  66. Another Round
    Another Round doesn’t quite come across like a cautionary tale, and that’s because Vinterberg takes a refreshingly, well, sober stance on the entwined pleasures and pitfalls of drinking. He’s made the rare movie about getting shitfaced that’s somehow neither a wallow in the gutter nor a fantasy of life without hangovers.
  67. Apples
    The droll Twilight Zone absurdism is not without its pleasures, many of them comic.
  68. Concrete Cowboy
    It’s a little corny at times, but it looks good and has heart—and, let’s be honest, Black cowboys are pretty damn cool.
  69. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    If it’s strictly information that you want, that’s what the Discovery Channel is for. The pleasures of a Herzog doc are unique to him.
  70. Shadow in the Cloud
    Pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure.
  71. Bruised
    When it’s firing on all cylinders, Bruised finds the Sirk amid the Stallone, wringing truly grand melodrama out of women reshaping their lives while beating each other senseless.
  72. My Favorite Blonde
    Hard-to-follow action and a silly, inconsistent tone work against the film, but Hope's reluctant can-do attitude and wry comments keep the energy level up.
  73. Nocturne
    Nocturne, like its brittle protagonist, is good enough at what it does to make you wish it were a little better.
  74. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    A short coming-of-age film that works well within the Small Axe saga, Alex Wheatle has a a richness comparable to any long, drawn-out biopic that’s come from Hollywood of late, thanks to the the nuances McQueen layers into the story.
  75. Small Axe: Mangrove
    If Mangrove is contrived in the way lots of legal procedurals are, it also tackles its conventions with a conviction that makes you believe in them all over again.
  76. 76 Days
    At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.
  77. Supernova
    Macqueen approaches the messy reality of letting go with measured sorrow, unrestrained tenderness, and even moments of joy.
  78. Alice in Wonderland
    A striking effort in its own right, though not in the ways that make one generation pass a film lovingly down to the next.
  79. Deep Water
    Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, both terrific in their roles, play the couple around whom the film’s meditation on modern sexual relationships revolves, while Lyne proves not only that he can film hot scenes unlike almost anyone in the business, but inject them with a psychological sophistication that complicates their (and our) postcoital bliss.
  80. I Carry You with Me
    Teaching the audience about the intricacies of the U.S. immigration system isn’t the point of this film—the point is to make you feel the intangible ache of being where you belong and far away from home at the same time. In that way, the film poetically, heartbreakingly succeeds.
  81. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Among the many quirks of this very idiosyncratic comedy is that it really is structured like a thriller or a horror film.
  82. Midnight in Paris
    The flubbed ending is more glaring because the film is otherwise so enjoyable and relatable. It’s achingly familiar in its exploration of what seems to the seniors like a final dash toward adulthood and its accompanying freedoms.
  83. Belushi
    Cutler takes on the ambitious task of showing not only Belushi’s impact, but how that impact wound up leading to his own ruin.
  84. Hard Target
    It’s a sturdy bridge between two markedly different filmmaking cultures.
  85. America America
    It’s a crude, clunky piece of writing, hampered by variable performances and a leading man whose looks of silent resolve are more compelling than his line-readings. Yet the film has the elemental power of a classic immigrant story, revealing a young man’s single-minded, arduous journey to America through black-and-white images that evoke the country’s promise to the huddled masses.
  86. Hunter Hunter
    It’s a jarring journey, filled with twists that snap and sting like bear traps, and an endurance test, too, especially for the squeamish.
  87. A Fine Madness
    Madness lacks sympathetic characters and a well-structured plot, but its manic energy takes it far.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    40 Years a Prisoner
    Director Tommy Oliver’s gritty documentary 40 Years A Prisoner not only recounts the violent events that led up to the raid, mixing eyewitness testimony with gripping news footage, but in heartwarming fashion, also presents the tireless pursuit by a son to free his parents.
  89. Baby God
    Stories like these are why 23andMe has you sign a waiver when you send in that tube of saliva, and after watching it, you’ll never think about those tests—or a trip to the gynecologist’s office—the same way again.
  90. Twins of Evil
    Twins Of Evil, like the best of Hammer, is about entering a world of castles, creatures, and torch-wielding mobs, all a little darker and more colorful than expected.
  91. Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    A peek behind the curtain of her private life during this tumultuous rise to international fame is the draw of the film, and The World’s A Little Blurry manages to deliver a compelling and intimate portrait of Billie Eilish without ever coming across as carefully PR-approved or evading knottier aspects of her life.
  92. The Mack
    The Mack certainly wasn't the first film to invite audiences to identify with a gleefully transgressive antihero, but its combustible take on sex, class, capitalism, and race made it an important touchstone not only for black film, but also for hip-hop culture.
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