The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. Victor Frankenstein
    The first words spoken in Victor Frankenstein are “You know the story,” and anyone who simply mutters “Yep,” gets up, and heads back to the box office for a refund will be well ahead of the game.
  2. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    Whenever the story starts to drag, Berg cuts to a scene like Big Brother’s era-defining performance of “Ball And Chain” at Monterey, which had even Los Angeles’ prematurely jaded rock superstars gaping in justified awe. They knew they were watching something explosive, in a package too fragile to contain it.
  3. The Danish Girl
    There’s an irony that a movie about a trans individual who needs to live and be accepted as a woman should have some of the worst symptoms of a very straight and very male gaze.
  4. The Good Dinosaur
    Perhaps more than ever before, the animators do the heavy lifting: Every detail, from the gentle bob of a beast's breathing to the fluid shifts of Spot's facial expressions, has been lovingly rendered.
  5. Creed
    Creed works far better than it should, and does so twice: as the unexpected payoff to a nearly 40-year-old series, and as the confirmation of a major talent in its director.
  6. Mediterranea
    There’s a specificity to Mediterranea that at times makes it feel like an actual documentary.
  7. The Night Before
    The Night Before isn’t Rogen’s funniest movie. Minute for minute, it doesn’t have as many laughs as "Superbad," "Neighbors," or "This Is The End," among others. But it does contain one of Rogen’s funniest performances, as Isaac navigates a very long and very bad drug trip, a responsibility-free Christmas gift from his wife.
  8. Legend
    When the two Krays are in the same room, circling each other with a mix of fraternal affection and deep loathing, Legend is as heady and unforgettable as it means to be. The rest of the time, it’s a movie with a lot of good points, but no connecting line.
  9. Carol
    Haynes has pulled off something remarkable here, without a trace of winking or archness. It’s been a long time since the movies have seen a fuse of pure ardor burn this slowly and steadily, leading to such an unexpectedly moving explosion of resolve.
  10. Secret in Their Eyes
    Yet nothing short of overhauling the material into something genuinely fresh could make Ray’s Secret feel essential. Tweaks aside, it remains, by in large, the same movie — which is to say, fundamentally redundant.
  11. Mustang
    The result, while less poetic and artful than Eugenides’ book or Coppola’s film, is much more emotionally direct, and pulls off a very tricky balancing act between bemoaning its characters’ fate and celebrating their resilience.
  12. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Awash in a depressive shade of perpetual blue, Mockingjay—Part 2 out-Nolans Christopher Nolan in the race to see just how dark a PG-13 tentpole can get before the audience itself revolts.
  13. Shelter
    A compelling story might have succeeded in overcoming those cosmetic distractions, but Bettany only offers an overwrought romance.
  14. By the Sea
    Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
  15. Heist
    Would the movie be as (barely) entertaining as it is without De Niro? He only has about 15 minutes’ worth of scenes in Heist, but whenever he’s on-screen the film almost feels legitimate.
  16. Man Up
    Rather than aim for uproarious, it constantly settles for amusing.
  17. The 33
    Stalled in management mode for much of its duration, Riggen’s film nonetheless has its solid elements, one of them being Banderas’ energetic lead performance.
  18. Entertainment
    It’s a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.
  19. James White
    So James White’s title character is an entitled, self-centered a--hole. But the movie about him is still a marvel: an honest, moving, and occasionally even funny portrait of what happens when a cripplingly immature young man gets hit with one reality check after another.
  20. My All American
    Move over, "Rudy." Hit the showers, "Brian’s Song." There’s a new tearjerking true story of gridiron triumph, one that combines those male-weepie favorites in a way no focus group could possibly resist.
  21. Love the Coopers
    A movie that should be punctuated like a Christmas card sign-off but instead, losing a comma, becomes an off-putting directive. How Robert De Niro didn’t make it to this set is a mystery for the ages.
  22. Miss You Already
    Tonally, Miss You Already is a slapdash mess of achingly sincere moments and tasteless jokes.
  23. Spotlight
    Like "All The President’s Men," it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.
  24. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Uniquely ambitious, Rivette’s film (technically a serial) spends nearly 13 hours stitching paranoia, loneliness, comedy, and mystical symbolism into a crazy quilt big enough to cover a generation.
  25. Brooklyn
    It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.
  26. Trumbo
    Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.
  27. The Peanuts Movie
    While it’s more technically elaborate treatment than the characters have ever received, it’s also gentler and more eye-pleasing than any of Blue Sky’s other features. It‘s also a neat extension of Schulz’s style—though, granted, no one needs to see Pig-Pen’s permanent cloud of filth rendered more vividly.
  28. 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.
  29. Theeb
    Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.
  30. SPECTRE
    What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise.
  31. In Jackson Heights
    The sheer variety of humanity that Wiseman documents keeps the film lively, and he finds plenty of terrific subjects.
  32. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    On the plus side, the film is high energy and moves quickly. And some of the zombie gore effects are fun, reaching nearly Raimi-esque heights of splatter during the climactic battle. None of it is really scary, though, especially since it’s so predictable.
  33. Love
    Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.
  34. 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.
  35. The Wonders
    If the film fails to deliver wonders, it does offer substantial pleasures.
  36. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It treats the complicated moves and countermoves of a major election as fodder for a broadly comic grudge match.
  37. Burnt
    Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.
  38. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    By making it so that everyone can see the evil coming, it also robs the franchise of one of its most potent pleasures: studying the frame for signs of trouble, little telltale hints that something is about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Sentient inkblots are a poor substitution for that sensation.
  39. Extraordinary Tales
    Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.
  40. Nasty Baby
    At long last, Nasty Baby decides what it wants to be: a complete mess.
  41. Jem and the Holograms
    Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.
  42. Suffragette
    Despite a top-shelf cast and strong subject matter, Suffragette feels like the product of limitations.
  43. I Smile Back
    Silverman tackles the role with total conviction, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her play a similarly unhinged character in "Take This Waltz" — or, for that matter, anyone who’s seen her perform live.
  44. The Last Witch Hunter
    It’s a shame that The Last Witch Hunter ends up crumbling into another generic showdown of murky fantasy effects and snatched artifacts, with a final shot that is literally framed around a door to possible sequels.
  45. Rock the Kasbah
    It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.
  46. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono’s hip-hop musical is a chiefly visual pleasure, in part because most of the cast can’t rap worth a damn; its warped frame bounces between shimmering neons and fluorescents, disco-ball samurai suits, living statues, and all kinds of things that have been painted gold for gold’s sake.
  47. Bone Tomahawk
    S. Craig Zahler’s horror-Western hybrid Bone Tomahawk is a strange movie, one that might take more than one watch to fully understand. Not that it’s deliberately obscure, or has a plot too complicated to follow the first time around. It’s actually a pretty straightforward film, albeit one filled with eccentric choices.
  48. The Pearl Button
    A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.
  49. Heart of a Dog
    Given the number of films nowadays that would be just as enjoyable with both sound and picture turned off, a superlative soundtrack is nothing to sneeze at.
  50. The Russian Woodpecker
    The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever.
  51. Tales of Halloween
    Anthology films are known for being inconsistent, and after the wild mood swings of recent horror anthologies like the "V/H/S" and "ABCs Of Death" movies, it’s a relief to report that despite consisting of 10 segments directed by 11 people, Tales Of Halloween is remarkably cohesive.
  52. Experimenter
    The film bears the subtitle The Stanley Milgram Story, but it’s most effective when it strenuously avoids biopic conventions, focusing intently on the man’s controversial professional life.
  53. Beasts of No Nation
    The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.
  54. The Assassin
    Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling.
  55. Room
    On their own, each segment of Room is tense and emotional. But they’re even better placed back-to-back.
  56. Truth
    That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.
  57. Goosebumps
    Though it revives at least a dozen of Stine’s most popular beasts and fiends, the new Goosebumps movie rarely recalls the old preteen page-turners for which it’s named.
  58. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.
  59. Junun
    Barely a feature at 54 minutes, it’s the closest Anderson has come to just kind of goofing around behind the camera — though, obviously, his version of goofing around is more dynamic than an ambitious effort from the average contemporary.
  60. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Though Farahani takes care to pose her project as both a portrait of and an intervention in Mohasses’ life, it winds up being considerably less interesting as the latter.
  61. All Things Must Pass
    If the homilies eventually feel a bit repetitive, the warmth and goodwill generated by the landmark company are conveyed by this earnest and affectionate documentary.
  62. Crimson Peak
    Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.
  63. Victoria
    Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.
  64. Trash
    But while once upon a time Daldry made a very good movie like "Billy Elliot", here he lets what should’ve been an efficient little thriller get stymied by an excess of style, and the weight of self-importance.
  65. Yakuza Apocalypse
    His latest, the deranged and frequently funny Yakuza Apocalypse, is in many ways a return to both his early years in the wilds of V-Cinema — Japan’s direct-to-video industry — and to the kind of midnight-movie fodder that first made his reputation abroad, albeit done on a much larger scale and with fewer quirks of style.
  66. Big Stone Gap
    The result is at once labor of love and cautionary tale: Apparently too close to the story to recognize how ill suited she was to translating its charms to the screen, Trigiani has emerged with nothing but corny, stilted Americana, like something Garrison Keillor might burp out on a really off day.
  67. The Final Girls
    This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.
  68. Knock Knock
    It’s the kind of vanity-free, dignity-be-damned performance that Nicolas Cage regularly delivers, and by the time Keanu is bellowing hysterically about free pizza, the urge to surrender becomes difficult to resist.
  69. Steve Jobs
    The tension between Boyle’s restless energy and Sorkin’s tendency to run in place drives the movie.
  70. Pan
    At once thinly conceived and maddeningly over-designed, irreverent and over-serious, and chock-full of strained references (to World War II, environmentalism, and drugs, among other things) and creepy violence, Pan is an elaborate flight of fancy with no vision — which makes it strangely compelling in spots.
  71. (T)error
    (T)error moves forward chronologically, and features enough astonishing twists to rival any episode of "Homeland."
  72. The Forbidden Room
    For those attuned to Maddin’s goofy sense of humor, it’s easily the funniest movie he’s ever made—a series of several dozen comic shorts strung together on a ludicrous clothesline. The only downside is that the experience, at just shy of two hours, can be a trifle exhausting.
  73. Freeheld
    Nowhere the film goes is unexpected... but the plainspoken Freeheld charts a mostly admirable course there.
  74. Shanghai
    Pulp without style: Shanghai has many of the staples of noir—back alleys, shadowy figures, hard-boiled narration, and more femmes fatales than a viewer could keep track of—but none of the atmosphere or cool.
  75. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Every new movie by Jafar Panahi is a miniature coup, an act of fearless political defiance.
  76. He Named Me Malala
    A puff piece for someone who doesn’t need one, Malala wraps Yousafzai’s life in media-circuit testimonials and fairy-tale-like animated sequences that stop just short of drawing an aureola of fire around her.
  77. Partisan
    That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.
  78. The Martian
    At its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of our ability, as a species, to solve even the most daunting problems via rational thought, step by step by step. It’s basically "Human Ingenuity: The Movie."
  79. Prophet's Prey
    The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.
  80. Deathgasm
    First-time writer-director Jason Lei Howden (who has a day job working for Peter Jackson’s special effects house Weta Digital) has delivered something amiably silly, liberally splattered with human viscera, and scored to the punishing grind of electric guitars.
  81. Labyrinth of Lies
    A lot more thought-provoking on issues of collective memory (or lack thereof) than the typical prestige picture, but it does falter dramatically in its later stretches.
  82. The Walk
    It’s when the walk portion of The Walk arrives that this unevenly scripted, fact-based thriller achieves its full potential. Even without the suspense of uncertainty, the sequence achieves a bated-breath intensity and wonder.
  83. Hotel Transylvania 2
    The problem is, Hotel Transylvania 2 focuses so intently on parental neuroses—Dracula needs Mavis to remain his little girl and needs his new grandson to conform to his vampire lineage—that the movie itself feels smothering (especially on the heels of the similarly themed original).
  84. Stonewall
    Though it delivers disaster-movie specialist Roland Emmerich’s usual mix of pop iconography, cornball Americana, and conspiracy theory, and benefits from some better-than-average performances in hokey roles, Stonewall is a farrago.
  85. 99 Homes
    While its righteous rage is bracing, fans of the filmmaker Bahrani used to be will mourn the subtlety and careful character development of his early triumphs. His heart remains in the right place, but his head has gone hopelessly Hollywood.
  86. The Keeping Room
    Like Barber’s London-set vigilante movie "Harry Brown," it’s another lurid exploitation film classed up with moody lighting and character monologues, with none of the authentic regional flavor or amateur energy that gave real grindhouse flicks their tang.
  87. Misunderstood
    The ostensible boldness of Misunderstood is undermined by the sense that it’s also pandering—that its view of childhood as a bourgeois horror-show is at least as salable on the art-house circuit as it is authentic to its creator’s experiences.
  88. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Ultimately, what makes Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead valuable is the sense it provides of how savage and uncompromising the National Lampoon was in its heyday.
  89. Mississippi Grind
    So long as the film focuses on that spiky rapport, and on the authentic, lived-in textures of the American Midwest, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Unfortunately, the grittiness and weary pathos ultimately gives way to a disappointingly pat finale, undermining everything that came before.
  90. The Intern
    The lack of comic goals allows Meyers to write and write; a key emotional scene between De Niro and Hathaway late in the movie rambles on like a first draft, and the movie swells to the two-hour mark.
  91. The Green Inferno
    Enjoying this rancid slab of red meat depends not just on an appetite for slop, but also a taste for sloppy leftovers.
  92. Pay the Ghost
    The movie’s B-movie flimsiness is pervasive, and paired with an overall lack of B-movie flair, though director Uli Edel makes some game yarn-spinning attempts.
  93. The Reflektor Tapes
    There’s a lot of “this was really important,” and “this changed us,” but very little in the way of specifics. Maybe they couldn’t put their fingers on it, and that’s fine, but there’s no sense that they even considered digging deeper. Still, several live performances and some powerful fly-on-the-wall moments make it tough to dismiss Reflektor Tapes entirely.
  94. Everest
    Part IMAX nature documentary and part Hollywood disaster movie, it does an effective job of conveying what it’s like to climb the mountain, the hours and days spent acclimating on practice hikes, and the punishing physical effects that accompany each subsequent change of altitude.
  95. Captive
    The leads acquit themselves relatively well here, hinting at the interesting character study that could have been, but by the end the only captive left is the viewer.
  96. Office
    Office is one of the most original and imaginative musicals of the last decade, in spite of Lo Dayu’s largely unremarkable, temp-track-like score.
  97. Cooties
    Before Cooties is a zombie movie, it is an earnest-young-teacher movie that diligently subscribes to every cliché of the form.
  98. Hellions
    Plenty of striking, clever, effective movies have been made simply by re-arranging and re-calibrating familiar genre elements. Hellions might have been one of these, if it was predicated on something slightly less shallow than “kids in masks + chanting + blood = scary.”
  99. The Cut
    The director’s assured tracking shots follow Nazaret through one bustling, disorienting locale after another as he searches for help, family, and relief from his hardship. Yet like the film, they’re ultimately superficial gestures that maintain a detached perspective on their subject, incapable of penetrating his traumatized mind and tormented heart.
  100. The New Girlfriend
    The real problem is that Ozon can’t quite decide whether he’s making the crowd-pleasing tale of a cross-dresser’s empowerment or the thornier, more compelling tale of a woman who tries to recreate her dead best friend, "Vertigo"-style (and then sleep with her).
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