The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. People Places Things
    People Places Things, though reportedly also based on Strouse’s own experience, plays like a mediocre, bloated sitcom episode — never novel or insightful, and only moderately funny.
  2. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    Alternately hypnotic and headache-inducing.
  3. The Italian Job
    Even if it weren't a remake, The Italian Job would still look startlingly unoriginal, but in a summer that promises plenty of sold-out showings, it could be the season's breakout pretty-okay-second-choice film.
  4. The Inheritance
    An initially engaging but ultimately wearying combination of naturalistic acting, cinéma vérité camerawork, and broadly melodramatic plotting.
  5. Protagonist
    Offers four fairly interesting monologues, undercut by ominous music, stylistic frippery, and a structure that all but guarantees the audience will be able to predict where the stories will go.
  6. The New Black
    The film largely lacks the urgency its subject demands. It’s an extended news segment in the form of a feature film.
  7. Before I Wake
    Before I Wake has its imperfections and moments of narrative lag, but its thoughtful touches and attention to character load Cody’s abilities and the threat of the Canker Man with a dramatic weight that often outbalances the generically spooky imagery.
  8. Never Say Never Again
    A persistent disappointment... a flabby, cutesy Bond picture, which derives most of its enduring entertainment value from its cast—starting with the man at the top.
  9. Spy x Family Code: White
    While the film is friendly to newcomers, there’s no question that it’s the fans who will get the most out of it.
  10. Never Look Away
    We watch as the film moves from year to year, the characters sometimes disappearing illogically, with Kurt forever at work on one unsatisfying project or another, until he finally finds a subject that speaks only to him. The movie’s German title — Werk Ohne Autor, which means Work Without Author — seems almost too apt.
  11. Neighbors
    Trouble is, Neighbors rarely exploits its generational war of attrition for big laughs or true insight. And despite a couple of puerile gags, it often feels as domesticated (and fatigued) as its main characters.
  12. Top Secret!
    Top Secret! replaces the scattershot-parody approach with a more precise re-creation of the dopey simplicity of WWII romances and Elvis pictures.
  13. Noah
    The result is a monolithic slab of Biblical fan fiction, at once deeply serious and seriously silly. It’s a mess, but at least it’s the mess its creators wanted.
  14. Crimes of the Future
    Nothing about it makes a lick of sense, but there’s a surreal flow to it all that, in the moment, carries you from scene to scene.
  15. Small Town Crime
    An amiable crime dramedy from a more under-the-radar pair of filmmaking brothers, Ian and Eshom Nelms.
  16. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    If the movie were just meme-able moments, it might run out of steam, even with Cage delivering them practically nonstop. Thankfully, there’s an actual plot, which allows everyone else (and the film as a whole) to spoof less Cage-specific tropes.
  17. 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.
  18. Black Widow
    For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.
  19. Whip It
    It’s virtually impossible to hate the film, but Barrymore’s presence behind the camera suggests more calculation than vision; like a lot of actors who direct, she tends to the performances, but her style never rises above bland proficiency.
  20. Dick Tracy
    Dick Tracy has pop-art elements, imaginatively conceived montages, and a riff on crime-as-business that’s as pointed as the Godfather movies, if more family-friendly.
  21. Z for Zachariah
    Fans of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel will likely be appalled. Those unfamiliar with the cult classic, on the other hand, are more likely to scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering how a yarn with such potential is so suddenly derailed.
  22. Problemista
    There’s no doubt that should Torres continue, Problemista will eventually look like a scrappy first album filled with promising primordial quirks. The film’s issues do not impede it from being a fleet-footed comedy filled with laugh-out-loud jokes.
  23. American Woman
    At its best, though, American Woman brings to mind "Erin Brockovich" or "20th Century Women" or "Gloria Bell": films about how the constraints of gender, class, and age push down upon a woman in myriad ways. And Miller finally gets the chance to demonstrate what she can do as a proper protagonist, breaking away from the stereotypes she’s too often played.
  24. Praying with Lior
    Intimate, moving documentary.
  25. The Housemaid
    Though impeccably photographed and acted, The Housemaid begins to feel stifling and airless once Im's thesis about the abuses of the powerful starts to drive the film to a foregone conclusion.
  26. The President's Last Bang
    Though The President's Last Bang is undeniably dense-with more than a dozen significant characters-the particulars aren't too tough to understand.
  27. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Genesis And Lady Jaye accurately portrays a restless artist with a kitchen-sink aesthetic, and offers up a film to match.
  28. Primer
    A brainteaser of the first order, Primer ranks among the best of recent thrillers such as "Memento" or "The Matrix," which rupture the fabric of reality and radically destabilize the narrative in kind.
  29. The Girl on the Train
    Given several years’ distance from the media blitz, Téchiné brings clarity, maturity, and perspective to the case while still subtly addressing all the thorny social issues the affair touched off.
  30. Four Lions
    Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.
  31. Rustin
    Bayard Rustin deserves to be remembered for the entirety of his being, both as an activist and as an openly gay Black man in a time when it was criminal. As much as Rustin attempts to balance both, it carries the former better than the latter.
  32. The Falcon and the Snowman
    Schlesinger’s portrait of his two characters’ scheme, which comes to involve transactions with KGB handler Alex (David Suchet) and unravels courtesy of Andrew’s burgeoning heroin habit, is consistently suspenseful, thanks to swift pacing and a script that mires itself in its protagonists’ confusion and paranoia.
  33. Into Eternity
    Madsen casts doubt on the notion that this Pandora's box will never be opened, either by some cataclysmic event, like another Ice Age, or drilling by future generations who may not be aware of Onkalo, or even able to decipher warnings of its contents. Something terrible seems likely to happen-just not today.
  34. The Good Thief
    Jordan invests attention in even the most throwaway moments and marginal characters, and his care makes the film a sustained, low-key pleasure.
  35. I Was at Home, But
    The filmmakers that Schanelec draws on for inspiration are all masters of one kind of economy or another. The problem is that Schanelec herself is not. Despite its austere, theory-heavy minimalism, I Was At Home, But… is lopsided and lumpy, filled with longueurs in which the brain begins to check out.
  36. Monsters and Men
    Green’s graceful direction and keen ear for dialogue certainly make him a new filmmaker to watch, and it’ll be fascinating to see what he does with a more focused narrative.
  37. Gladiator
    In the end, Gladiator is overdrawn and too insubstantial for its own good, just like the old days, but it satisfies as entertainment on a grand scale.
  38. Bluebird
    Earnestly well-intentioned and doggedly uncommercial, this is the kind of film that’s worth rooting for in principle, but a solid cast and evocative 35 mm photography can’t compensate for its slightly stultifying familiarity.
  39. Moon
    Moon is enjoyable as much for its small scale and solid execution as for its crazy twists and creeping existential dread.
  40. The Sentinel
    While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.
  41. Last Days in the Desert
    By the end, what seemed like a lovely rumination starts to sound more like poetry refashioned as prose.
  42. Band Aid
    You’ll believe you’re watching two people who love each other but no longer know how to live with each other. You may still wish Band Aid better distinguished their relationship.
  43. The Captain
    The film is consistently beautiful to look at in an “industrial metal album cover” kind of way, pairing dimly lit, black-and-white cinematography and artfully composed mise-en-scéne.
  44. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Segel has always played more a serial monogamist than a horndog, and his earnest, self-deprecating screen persona graces the film's crudest moments with a kind of innocence.
  45. American Promise
    Ultimately, American Promise seems split between a personal perspective and a broader one. It’s a bold experiment that’s also a textbook case of filmmakers being too close to their material.
  46. V/H/S/Halloween
    It’s the playful entries in V/H/S/Halloween that hit like a sugar rush. This edition is hardly nightmare-inducing, but it’s still as broadly enjoyable as a crisp October night.
  47. Dead Man's Wire
    This is Van Sant’s Dog Day Afternoon moment. Judged solely by Skarsgård’s scenes, Dead Man’s Wire makes for an insightful and tense portrait of its subject. But judged by the limits of its perspective, the film is narrow to the story’s detriment.
  48. Concrete Cowboy
    Derived from the novel Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri, this film iteration bargains in vague platitudes as it unsuccessfully tries to piece together a collage of factors threatening the viability of this one-of-a-kind place.
  49. Avatar: The Way of Water
    Avatar: The Way Of Water not only delivers upon everything its predecessor established, but advances them in ways gleaming and ocean-deep, through the eyes and heart of a cinematic storyteller with a passionate and well-documented love of the sea.
  50. Snow Angels
    In spite of strong performances and a characteristically vivid sense of place, the film feels disjointed and heavy.
  51. Summer of Sam
    Lee at his best, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking that's stylish, substantial, and rich in detail.
  52. Lord of the Flies
    Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.
  53. The Blackening
    The movie is highly entertaining, while being oddly validating and very funny. It cleverly weaves the horror tropes that it rebukes right into the narrative. And it’s done without slipping into parody like the Scary Movie series, where similar notions are skewered more broadly and, with The Blackening now on the table, way less successfully.
  54. Dig Two Graves
    The movie looks superb, especially for its minuscule budget. While Adams is clearly a very promising director, however, his screenwriting chops aren’t so advanced. This is one clunky amalgam of mystery and guilt.
  55. Super Fly
    Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur.
  56. Other People
    What keeps Kelly honest is the wealth of authentic detail he sprinkles throughout.
  57. Almost Peaceful
    Too many of these characters behave like they just stepped out of a Noel Coward production.
  58. Interiors
    Much of the first half of Interiors feels like a stage play, though one in which characters walk in and out of frame. That, along with the overly symbolic breaking of a vase, have earned Interiors some criticism for being too on the nose, which isn’t entirely unfair. But the rest of the movie is so starkly bold that it renders those problems insignificant. It’s beautiful, affecting, and exactly as jarring as Allen probably intended it to be.
  59. Kung Fu Panda 2
    The sequel remains visually beautiful and strikingly designed, but otherwise, it's a surprise in all the wrong ways.
  60. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    A fine enough piece of work, but it's a shame Werner Herzog didn't get to Gunther Hauk first.
  61. Robot and Frank
    Schreier elicits warm performances from Langella and Susan Sarandon, and even from his robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard).
  62. Slither
    Though it occasionally dips too deep into a well of redneck humor, Slither cleverly exploits the nervous laughter that fills a theater whenever a horror movie gets too frightening to bear.
  63. Vox Lux
    It’s a more cynical, and arguably more realistic, depiction of the unique malignancies of fame than this year’s other Oscar-baiting pop musical, "A Star Is Born." But ultimately, it’s no more insightful.
  64. Future Weather
    First-time writer-director Jenny Deller has assembled a superb cast, with Madigan in particular making the most of her character’s no-nonsense flintiness.
  65. In Bruges
    When it's funny, it's hilarious; when it's serious, it's powerful; and either way, it's an endless pleasant surprise.
  66. Ned Rifle
    Consequently, anyone coming to Ned Rifle cold will be bewildered. But there are numerous pleasures for the initiated, from Ryan’s continuing dissolute mellifluence as Henry Fool to Simon’s rebirth as a terrible stand-up comic constantly monitoring the comments on his blog.
  67. Brigsby Bear
    The big finale never reaches "Chuck & Buck" levels of therapeutic catharsis, because Mooney hasn’t really let us see James’ pain, only his gushy wide-eyed innocence, his lovability.
  68. Running on Empty
    The film is first and foremost a family drama, where the politics that led to this predicament take a back seat to the people who find themselves in it.
  69. Phantom of the Paradise
    A smorgasbord of camp, Grand Guignol, and bird imagery that thumbed its metal beak at commercial considerations.
  70. Nocturnal Animals
    Like Ford’s debut, Nocturnal Animals treats film as a medium of luxury, where the emotive and the self-indulgent cross paths. He is primarily a sensualist.
  71. Russian Dolls
    These characters are still rich, and their potential growth still compelling. Here's hoping we meet them again in another five years.
  72. Bolt
    For the first time in years, it feels like Disney has done its namesake proud.
  73. The Righteous
    It’s steeped in a grave sense of portentousness that burrows under your skin. The issue is the weighty script, bleak and heavy with apocalyptic consequence, which contains undeniably intriguing notions that are often not satisfactorily explored or don’t quite cohere.
  74. T2 Trainspotting
    It teeters on the edge of relapse, aimless and at a loss as to how it can motivate its returning ensemble of former and current lowlifes, who only ever needed one thing to get them from scene to scene.
  75. This Is the End
    Funny is funny, and it would be truly dishonest to deny the big laughs—the spikes of gut-busting inspiration—that the film sporadically delivers.
  76. My Old School
    Cumming is magnificent in this role, mastering the exact rhythm of Brandon’s speech while also interpreting his emotions with a naturalism that blends seamlessly with testimonials from former students and instructors.
  77. The Door in the Floor
    Bridges turns in another remarkable performance, and he's well-matched by Foster.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    Like "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Sound Of My Voice plausibly demonstrates how someone's sense of self and certainty can be eroded, and like "Another Earth," it was co-written by actress Brit Marling, a melancholy, luminous presence as the group's leader.
  79. The Blood of a Poet
    Few drug-induced visions, however, can match the playful ingenuity of this freewheeling assault on the senses, which eschews conventional narrative in favor of one mesmerizingly bizarre image after another.
  80. Steel City
    For the most part, they live life convincingly, in a refreshingly inward-looking, well-made film that's smart enough to stay small, and leave the car crashes to the big summer action movies.
  81. Mondovino
    For all its pervasive irritations and lack of discipline, succeeds in using below-the-belt tactics to get its message across, especially for those unschooled in the rarified world of oenophilia.
  82. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed.
  83. Fahrenheit 9/11
    As much as the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival insisted that the Palme D'Or was awarded to the best film in competition, it was a sign of the times that they chose to honor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, marking a clear and decisive victory for ideology over aesthetics.
  84. Berlin Babylon
    The film's deep, precise colors, which look like they belong in a Peter Greenaway movie, are Berlin Babylon's first major surprise. The second is how watchable it is, given its obsessive focus on buildings.
  85. Hellaware
    Even with a runtime just barely over an hour, the shock comedy of Hellaware grows a bit numbing after a while.
  86. The Wall
    Haushofer’s book may be a classic, but this is the least imaginative way of filming it imaginable, short of simply pointing the camera at a copy and rapidly flipping the pages.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    It’s enough for Workman to simply assemble a patchwork of Welles in his myriad incarnations (as the hearty Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight; as an arched-eyebrow spokesman for Paul Masson wine; as The Third Man’s cynical Harry Lime; as a sharp, vital youth and a sharp, frail elder) and allow the many faces to confirm, contradict, and, ultimately, speak for themselves.
  88. Halloween
    Halloween isn’t explicitly a horror-comedy, but it does have the destructive habit of undercutting its scares with broad laughs, Green and McBride deflating the tension at every turn with goofball asides.
  89. Synecdoche, New York
    For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Edge of Seventeen
    While Edge Of Seventeen was marketed largely toward gay audiences, it’ll resonate with anyone who remembers the awkwardness and elation of their first sexual experiences, because it captures those experiences better and more honestly than practically any other film.
  91. Charlie Wilson's War
    Nichols succeeds in spinning an entertaining yarn, but the cautionary aspects feel fatally undernourished.
  92. The Iran Job
    The sports drama gives The Iran Job a strong hook, while the cultural context enriches the movie's real story, which is less about Sheppard's life in Iran than about the people he meets.
  93. Alive Inside
    Alive Inside runs a brisk 78 minutes, but that’s still far more time than it requires to make its point; once you’ve seen a couple of old people suddenly come to life upon hearing “I Get Around” or “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” there’s not much to be gained by being presented with half a dozen more instances.
  94. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.
  95. The Little Stranger
    In truth, The Little Stranger is barely a horror movie at all. It’s more of an impeccably crafted chamber drama with a supernatural bent, like Edith Wharton by way of Shirley Jackson.
  96. The Armstrong Lie
    Those who want to see Armstrong sweat may leave disappointed. Calm and seemingly well rehearsed in interviews, Armstrong shrugs off years of public statements without ever seeming truly remorseful.
  97. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    Like Miranda himself, We Are Freestyle Love Supreme has an exuberant theater-kid earnestness that will either prove endearing or grating depending on how you feel about backstage warm-up games and spontaneous sidewalk performances.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ambassador
    The film's tone and structure seem a little strained by the danger in which the filmmaker increasingly puts himself, and the indifference to human life exuded by some of those he meets. By the end, Brügger himself seems to be having trouble finding any of this funny.
  99. The Idea of You
    It’s a warm, approachable movie that you’ll get blissfully lost in.
  100. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.
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