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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    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Do I Sound Gay?
    It’s a serious topic, but the resulting documentary isn’t an especially severe sit. Do I Sound Gay? is a briskly entertaining 77 minutes, and frequently as mouthy as its title.
  2. The Gallows
    Making audiences care about the characters is always a more effective fear-generating strategy than just knocking off a bunch of dimwits in the dark.
  3. Tangerine
    It’s the movie’s quietest, softest moments that register most strongly, be it Alexandra’s low-key performance of Victor Herbert’s “Toyland” to an almost empty bar, or the final scene, which finds her and Sin-Dee alone in a Laundromat at the end of a long, bad night.
  4. Strangerland
    Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.
  5. Boulevard
    It doesn’t help that Boulevard is a movie that feels at least a decade past its sell-by date, if not two.
  6. Self/less
    It probably shouldn’t star Ryan Reynolds, who is generally likable, but frequently miscast. Only Kingsley’s bizarre, severely mannered performance seems to be following the undercurrents of the material.
  7. Minions
    Minions has idiosyncratic roots, but it’s a franchise play all the way. Finally, even 5-year-olds have their own movie that mechanically cashes in on something they loved when they were younger.
  8. Amy
    Winehouse was a complicated artist who deserved a nuanced, honest look at her life. In lesser hands, Amy could be a feature-length E! True Hollywood Story, but Kapadia treats his subject with respect and heart.
  9. Stray Dog
    With stencil-typeface credits that can’t help but bring to mind the scrappy regional genre movies of the 1970s, and an opening sequence that finds Hall sampling moonshine with his buddies, Stray Dog announces itself as something homegrown—a verité look at a quintessentially American oddball, made with an eye for life in rural Southern Missouri.
  10. Jackie & Ryan
    The cross-cutting duet it builds to, with two people singing the same song separated by hundreds of miles, is a nice musical moment, but just that: a moment. Ideally, even a low-key romantic drama should have more than one.
  11. Stung
    Paul and Julia can rescue each other, but they need more help pulling Stung out of "Tremors" and "Party Down"’s combined shadow.
  12. Jimmy's Hall
    Jimmy’s Hall is one of [Loach's] clunkers: Footloose set in 1930s Ireland, basically, with jazz in lieu of Kenny Loggins.
  13. Cartel Land
    Whatever one’s moral qualms regarding the Autodefensas—and Heineman makes a point of showing that Mireles, who’s married, has a penchant for using his celebrity to seduce much younger women—there’s no denying the engrossing nature of the footage shown here, or that the people involved are fighting for their own lives.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    In Stereo
    This is a tedious modern romance that thinks it’s spouting universal truths when it’s actually as myopically narcissistic as the two leads.
  15. Faith of Our Fathers
    It’s obnoxious, to say the least, to use the Vietnam War as an excuse to affirm the importance of telling all and sundry about Jesus at all times (i.e., “testifying”), under all circumstances.
  16. Terminator Genisys
    This new Terminator, the first since the dreadfully dreary and Arnold-less "Salvation," is engineered to feel at once eerily familiar and raise-the-stakes fresh.
  17. Mala Mala
    Amid all the images of celebration and joyful physical abandon—including a showcase solo dance performance that functions as a kind of climax—the most lingering images are the ones depicting daily routines.
  18. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    As a musical, the film is often thrilling.
  19. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL is a piece of arm candy, as shallow as a mud puddle and just as bright. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to hang out with.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Felt
    Everson is endlessly watchable as she cycles through despair, anger, wariness, and trust. Her sense of humor as an artist and performer shines through.
  21. The Little Death
    The Little Death never feels remotely of a piece, and is likely to find its proper audience months from now when the individual sketches show up on YouTube.
  22. Runoff
    Like its rural setting, Runoff is slow, deliberate, and concerned with practical things.
  23. 7 Minutes
    Despite its unconvincing seriousness mixing poorly with its unconvincing dark comedy, 7 Minutes proves difficult to despise outright; it’s watchably swift and somewhat engaging in the moment.
  24. Advantageous
    As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.
  25. Fresh Dressed
    It’s about just about everything, so while the subject might seem niche it’s actually so broad and expansive the film strains to cover it properly in a trim 82 minutes.
  26. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    The toxic paranoia poisoning American life is on display in 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, a fine and timely documentary about the 2012 killing of black youth Jordan Davis.
  27. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Batkid Begins
    Miles treats this whole experience with an affectingly genuine innocence—something that the filmmakers, and many of the participants, seem to think can be bottled and sold as a soul-cleansing palliative.
  29. Max
    It is dull and weird — weird in that way that it is pronounced we-ee-eird, the stretched vowel signaling a weirdness that is probably unconscious on the part of the filmmakers.
  30. A Little Chaos
    Watching A Little Chaos, one might assume that its makers were dramatically limited by the details of Le Notre’s life, when it was really just their own imaginations do the limiting.
  31. The Princess of France
    In an era in which the big movies are bigger and more expensive than they’ve ever been, few acts of resistance seem more meaningful than making a small, careful, and personal film that still wants nothing more than to invite the viewer into its private world.
  32. Ted 2
    Either way, Ted 2 strikes a sometimes-awkward balance between sincerity and cheap provocation. It also forgets that the real draw of the first film wasn’t Ted himself, but Wahlberg, whose sweet-lug routine scored a lot of belly laughs.
  33. Big Game
    Big Game fails to live up to the kookiness of this set-up. Instead, it opts for ’90s action movie clichés and generic coming-of-age-isms. Helander’s inelegant, exposition-heavy English-language dialogue doesn’t help matters.
  34. Burying the Ex
    In spite of its modest running time, Burying The Ex feels stretched thin; it takes a good 35 minutes to get going, only kicking into gear once Evelyn returns from the dead.
  35. Gabriel
    Gabriel, the first feature written and directed by Lou Howe, gives Culkin an opportunity to demonstrate serious range, and he takes full advantage; if this film doesn’t ignite his career, it’ll only be because too few people see it.
  36. Dope
    Dope has more characters and subplots than it knows what to do with, and its performances are all over the place, ranging from Clemons’ and Revolori’s charismatic turns as second-banana goofballs to Roger Guenveur Smith’s stylized impression of a local millionaire, so vampiric that he might as well be slathered in German Expressionist makeup.
  37. Eden
    A viewer is always aware that they are being shown a place and an era, which helps explain why Eden manages the tricky business of being a movie that is overtly about lost time, but which unfolds chronologically, without as much as a flashback.
  38. The Face of an Angel
    Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.
  39. The Overnight
    The pleasure of the movie lies in the way it both rewards and subverts expectations, delivering on the risqué possibilities of its premise while also coming up with something smarter and a little deeper than a log line might suggest.
  40. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.
  41. Manglehorn
    Pacino has finally started acting again, which is cause for celebration. It’ll be real cause for celebration if/when he also starts picking projects worthier than The Humbling, Danny Collins, and now Manglehorn, all of which see him struggling to find moments of truth within a contrived, borderline ludicrous scenario.
  42. Inside Out
    Bucking the current company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with "WALL-E" on the books.
  43. The Tribe
    One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.
  44. Live From New York!
    Of course, a single documentary can’t cover everything, but this one’s slim but entertaining 80 minutes suggests that Nguyen erred on the side of brevity.
  45. Madame Bovary
    Wasikowska gives a solid, emotionally precise performance, ably supported by the men around her (especially Ifans, who relishes Monsieur Lheureux’s unctuous cajolery), and the result is intelligent and eminently watchable.
  46. The Wolfpack
    The Wolfpack is perhaps too reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry; what starts as a nonfiction mood piece grows frustratingly opaque as the brothers begin to venture out into the real world, meet girls, and get jobs.
  47. Soaked in Bleach
    If it doesn’t lead people to believe that Cobain was murdered, it might achieve its secondary goals — to at least nudge them toward the possibility, and to get the authorities to consider re-opening the case. It’s intended as a call to action, not just a salacious re-hash.
  48. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    A feature-length tribute to great directors with no direction of its own, his second feature is the kind of self-consciously quirky, slapdash movie that still leaves a viewer eager to find out what its director will do next.
  49. The 11th Hour
    By the time the film empties its inventory of shock tactics and reaches its (too calculated) ambiguous conclusion, we’re not sure if Maria deserves better, but it’s pretty clear that Basinger does.
  50. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    In a way, their continued ability to prank government agencies and the media speaks to how little they’ve achieved over the years, which becomes this third film’s subject.
  51. Set Fire to the Stars
    An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.
  52. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World, a goofy and fitfully entertaining summer movie, understands and even winks at its place in the pecking order of blockbuster sequels.
  53. We Are Still Here
    The new chiller We Are Still Here is the latest iteration of people unwittingly stumbling upon an ancient menace, and it succeeds more than it fails, thanks largely to the nice work of first-time director Ted Geoghegan.
  54. Police Story: Lockdown
    Instead of a claustrophobic thriller à la "Die Hard" or "The Raid," Lockdown is a kind of puzzle-box movie, but it hardly seems worth the effort, for the filmmakers or for the audience. Ol’ Jackie needn’t have bothered getting up for this.
  55. Blind
    All this nesting-doll storytelling might feel hollow if Blind didn’t possess such a solid emotional foundation.
  56. Charlie's Country
    Part of the movie’s mischievous charm lies in De Heer and cinematographer Ian Jones’ sophisticated use of Steadicam, which moves almost exclusively with Charlie, often seemingly in a struggle to keep up with his brisk, determined walk.
  57. Insidious: Chapter 3
    The motif of grief runs throughout Insidious: Chapter 3, which is surprisingly thematically rich for the third installment of a horror franchise. This emotional undercurrent informs the fright scenes, which otherwise lean rather heavily on jump scares.
  58. Wild Horses
    What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    There’s a good movie in Brittain’s story, but you wouldn’t know it from this lethargic, BBC-produced bore.
  60. An Open Secret
    The open secret in Amy Berg’s documentary An Open Secret is that child actors are regularly molested by the adults — managers, publicists, producers — who help them launch their careers. Such an important subject deserves a serious, thoughtful film. Instead, it got Berg (Deliver Us From Evil, West of Memphis), who’s prone to all manner of cheesy manipulation.
  61. The Nightmare
    The human brain, this movie suggests, is the ultimate horror-movie director, and sleep-paralysis hallucinations are just an extreme form of the standard-issue nightmares we all unwillingly create on a regular basis. It’s one thing to be tormented. It’s another thing to face the grim reality that you’re tormenting yourself.
  62. Love & Mercy
    Capturing the spirit of that music (while dramatizing the circumstances of its creation) is Love & Mercy’s biggest victory.
  63. Spy
    Spy, similarly, doesn’t exactly send up James Bond or Jason Bourne espionage thrillers, but it places McCarthy in the middle of the action while subverting the traditionally male domination of that arena.
  64. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The uninitiated, meanwhile, can start with Pigeon and work their way backward through Andersson’s trilogy. It only gets better in reverse.
  65. Entourage
    Though Entourage is set just months after the events of the HBO finale, its actors are (noticeably) several years older, and there’s something kind of sad, even desperate about seeing these characters behave like the same horny frat boys they basically were at the start of the series.
  66. Aloha
    Perhaps the energy Crowe could have expended on shaping believable characters went instead to the cultural context.
  67. Unfreedom
    Raj Amit Kumar’s film, which was banned by the country’s national censor board, is an intentional act of cultural and political provocation, and goes about its task as relentlessly as possible.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Survivor
    Fans of Jovovich’s Resident Evil series know the pleasures inherent in watching her sprint hither and yon. That’s about the only thrill provided by Survivor.
  69. I Believe in Unicorns
    It’s a testament to Meyerhoff’s talent as a director that she manages to give the standard coming-of-age material emotional resonance, especially amid classic teen-girl journal imagery like balloons, sparklers, homemade wings, and, of course, unicorns.
  70. When Marnie Was There
    As a children’s movie, it’s uncommonly sensitive and complicated, rooted in relationships rather than dazzling action. But adults may notice its simple poetry turning, after a while, to suds.
  71. Results
    Smulders, Pearce, and Corrigan are loose and eminently likable, and the direction is so in tune with the actors that one is almost inclined to think of Results as a movie carried entirely by performance, overlooking how much its shape depends on style.
  72. Heaven Knows What
    Because there’s no real narrative — just the constant effort to score and survive, plus Harley’s dysfunctional on/off love affair with Ilya — Heaven Knows What doesn’t so much conclude as just stop, which is less than totally satisfying.
  73. Gemma Bovery
    It’s minor, clever, and essential in the specialized field of Gemma Arterton studies.
  74. Tu Dors Nicole
    Shot on gorgeous black-and-white 35 mm that only seems to enhance the melancholic drabness of the events it depicts, Tu Dors Nicole is an especially wispy, French-Canadian addition to an irresistible genre.
  75. San Andreas
    Handsomely shot by Steve Yedlin, Rian Johnson’s regular cinematographer, and boasting a typically likable Dwayne Johnson as its star, San Andreas nonetheless struggles to drum up tension or interest, even as skyscrapers topple like Jenga towers and massive tidal waves sweep through San Francisco Bay.
  76. Poltergeist
    The most retro thing about the remake is its specific, outdated utility: If anyone still patronizes video stores with hard copies, and if those stores don’t happen to have the original Poltergeist (or Insidious) in stock on a Friday night, this version might do the trick.
  77. The Farewell Party
    The Farewell Party leaves no doubt as to where it stands on the right to die with dignity when facing terminal illness, but it’s so clumsily made that it serves only to exasperate.
  78. Love at First Fight
    Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.
  79. Aloft
    What’s really been withheld, in this dreary drag of a movie, is a reason to care.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunshine Superman
    Strauch’s direction, in contrast, is numbingly uninspired, adhering stringently to the Doc. 101 assembly-line template cultivated by the film’s executive producer Alex Gibney.
  81. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    The gross-out gore scenes and poop jokes are there, too, as is to be expected. The direction is bad, the acting is worse, and it’s lit to mimic the soap-opera effect on a poorly calibrated HDTV. Basically, The Human Centipede III is an unsexy "Ilsa" movie, and it’s just as impossible to sit through as that sounds.
  82. Tomorrowland
    Bird stages the PG mayhem with his usual grasp of dimension and space, his gift for action that’s timed like physical comedy. He keeps the whole thing moving, even when it begins to feel bogged down by preachiness and sci-fi exposition.
  83. Güeros
    Even if Güeros doesn’t entirely work, it feels worthy: a film made independently and without interference whose reverence for the past thankfully doesn’t result in too much solemnity or seriousness.
  84. L for Leisure
    At certain point, whether all of this is purposefully awkward becomes almost irrelevant: The non sequitur vignettes are often hilarious either way, and the film gains an oddly agreeable rhythm.
  85. Area 51
    Though Peli stages a few fun and creepy effects shots, nothing that happens here couldn’t be surmised from simply reading the film’s title.
  86. Time Lapse
    Time Lapse provokes thought, but mostly in spite of itself.
  87. Good Kill
    The trouble begins when this gaunt, intelligent star is charged with embodying someone lacking in levity, someone burdened with excessive malaise. His deadly seriousness can be deadly dull.
  88. Our Man in Tehran
    The story can’t help but work — even when its directors are beating viewers over the head with the message.
  89. Pound of Flesh
    The action hit being evoked here is "Crank."
  90. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    What’s perhaps most telling about the artist himself is a later-in-life project he builds in his cluttered backyard, a sort of funhouse ride through his own psyche.
  91. Animals
    It never pushes far enough into that territory to distinguish its beautiful losers from the many addiction-movie characters that precede them.
  92. Pitch Perfect 2
    It’s at once an encore, a postscript, and a fresh start.
  93. Slow West
    What it demonstrates most conclusively is that writer-director John Maclean, making his first feature after a career spent mostly as a musician (notably as a member of The Beta Band), knows how to tell a terrific yarn. Why he chose not to do so with the movie as a whole, then, is something of a mystery.
  94. Every Secret Thing
    Every Secret Thing doesn’t feel like it fell off an assembly line, but that’s not saying that it’s been skillfully engineered. By the end, its rickety narrative architecture collapses entirely, leaving a lot of good actors stranded in the rubble.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    I'll See You in My Dreams
    Every actor gives their all, even when the material is insultingly thin.
  96. In the Name of My Daughter
    Like any good prosecutor, Téchiné gives us enough information to render a verdict without bullying us into agreement. His gift to his viewers is the space to think for ourselves.
  97. The Connection
    Without a hair-trigger renegade like Popeye Doyle or a long-awaited De Niro-Pacino showdown at its center, this procedural account, running well over two hours, takes on a certain plodding, obligatory vibe.
  98. Mad Max: Fury Road
    For all the chaos erupting at all times, we never lose track of what’s going on, because it’s been staged not just with diabolical mischief, but also total clarity. What a movie.
  99. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The 100-Year-Old Man surely won’t conquer the U.S. box office, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a foreign film that isn’t deadly serious. We could use more subtitled belly laughs.
  100. Skin Trade
    These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.
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