The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Noble
    The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.
  2. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Seven Five
    Dowd is the film’s main interviewee, telling his story with a hyped-up machismo that makes him seem like a Scorsese character come to life. The biggest issue with The Seven Five is that it often feels like it’s mimicking Saint Marty’s stylistic and thematic bag of tricks.
  4. 5 Flights Up
    If 5 Flights Up is worth seeing, it’s primarily for the pleasure of Keaton and Freeman’s company, plus maybe for some tips on buying and selling an apartment.
  5. The D Train
    It’s a mess, but it’s a commendable mess. Bonus points for ambition and nerve.
  6. Maggie
    The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.
  7. Hot Pursuit
    Witherspoon and Vergara are both experienced comedic actors with charisma to spare, and watching them pal around is a perfectly pleasant way to pass some time. But with material this uninspired, 87 minutes of riding shotgun is long enough.
  8. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.
  9. Reality
    A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.
  10. Far from the Madding Crowd
    To be fair, Far From The Madding Crowd isn’t the kind of novel that lends itself to adaptation; it was originally published as a monthly serial, and still reads that way.
  11. Hyena
    A few dreamy interludes aside, the film’s tone is cool, dispassionate, and matter-of-fact. All that’s missing is a reason to give a damn.
  12. Far From Men
    Nobody moseys like Viggo Mortensen. In "The Road," "Appaloosa," "Jauja," and the new French Western Far From Men, the erstwhile Aragorn masters the tricky art of being a figure in the landscape.
  13. Ride
    Hunt’s writing isn’t exactly knocking off Woody Allen (her characters do send text messages, after all), but it shares with Allen a peculiar, stylized imitation of how New Yorkers supposedly sound.
  14. Welcome to Me
    The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.
  15. Iris
    It’s a happily modest movie that, while frequently edging toward boredom, is never actively off-putting.
  16. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    There’s so much ground to cover here—so many introductions to make, so much story to churn through, so many gargantuan set pieces to mount—that the movie never really finds room to breathe.
  17. The Forger
    Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.
  18. Kung Fu Killer
    Here, in this entertaining, preposterous goof of a kung fu movie, are all those values missing from the mainstream of American action filmmaking, not the least of which is a sense of the camera as a participant.
  19. Little Boy
    A colossal miscalculation in audience uplift.
  20. Misery Loves Comedy
    To a person, these comedians are looking for a connection, some attention, and appreciation — which makes them, as Penn Jillette points out toward the end, just like everybody else, only they have microphones and spotlights.
  21. Adult Beginners
    Adult Beginners, by contrast, is mostly just… nice. Neither dramatic enough to qualify as drama nor amusing enough to completely succeed as comedy, it’s the kind of movie that coasts on pleasantness, content to elicit a few smiles before disappearing from memory banks.
  22. 24 Days
    24 Days is neither subtle nor particularly sophisticated as filmmaking, but its refusal to reduce lived reality to generic tropes is admirable.
  23. The Water Diviner
    His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.
  24. The Age of Adaline
    For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    As expressionistic as it is journalistic, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten triumphs as both an objective record and a poetic lament: It’s a film that’s every bit as entrancing and haunting as the lost music it celebrates.
  26. Child 44
    Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.
  27. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.
  28. Unfriended
    The filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format.
  29. True Story
    The meat of the movie is the behind-bars rendezvous between Finkel and Longo, whose interactions raise questions of journalistic responsibility and the banality of evil. But when a closing block of text announces that the two men still talk on a semi-regular basis — a surprise, given the finality of their last on-screen meeting — it’s hard to shake the feeling that a truly complex liaison has been reduced to an acting exercise for a couple of moonlighting funnymen.
  30. Tangerines
    The shift from philosophical parrying to actual combat doesn’t make Tangerines more compelling; on the contrary, it suggests that the filmmakers didn’t have the confidence to tell their story without falling back on genre tropes.
  31. Alex of Venice
    So doggedly ordinary that it constantly teeters on the edge of tedium.
  32. Félix And Meira
    Félix & Meira eventually proves to have more in common with "Fill The Void," and with Burshtein’s effort to depict Orthodox Judaism as more than just a women’s prison, than it had appeared.
  33. The Dead Lands
    The problem with this kind of universal narrative is that, like the cult of the golden ratio, it emphasizes formulas at the expense of those expressive qualities that actually make art and entertainment.
  34. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Here, the monsters are entirely incidental to the story. Instead we are forced to sit through 119 punishing minutes of what plays like a dorm-room answer to modern war films, complete with the constant profanity and masculine hysterics that pass for impact in an immature script.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Reconstruction of William Zero
    It’s always easy to see what Bush and Byrne are aiming for with this timely piece of speculative fiction. But their execution is, with rare exception, weakly imitative at best and exasperatingly inept at worst.
  36. Broken Horses
    Very loosely inspired by Chopra’s 1989 feature "Parinda," this wan crime drama plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate. Everything feels rudimentary and slightly awkward, though it’s possible to discern how the material might once have been powerful.
  37. Black Souls
    For long stretches, it doesn’t appear to be a genre movie at all, which unfortunately means that certain tropes stick out more conspicuously when they do arrive — a minor flaw that only slightly detracts from the overall quality of the production.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dior and I
    Dior And I isn’t any kind of hard-hitting exposé. Tcheng — who previously co-directed another style doc, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" — is seduced by this exclusive world, and he communicates that allure with undeniable flair.
  39. Kill Me Three Times
    Director Kriv Stenders seems to think he’s spun a twisty, delightfully amoral genre riff. Instead, he’s made a brightly colored smirk noir.
  40. Rebels of the Neon God
    Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.
  41. Clouds of Sils Maria
    Binoche and Stewart inhabit their characters’ complicated friendship, whether they’re doing the nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes business of managing a career or getting drunk at a small casino.
  42. Ex Machina
    Make no mistake, this is a film of ideas—sadder, quieter, more delicate than the Hollywood sci-fi standard.
  43. Lost River
    Lost River displays almost no distinctive personality of its own. The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he’s a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.
  44. Desert Dancer
    The whole thing resembles nothing more than the kind of video a well-meaning high-school teacher would put on to occupy their class while they catch up on some paperwork. It will almost certainly be used for this purpose in the future.
  45. The Longest Ride
    Despite undermining its own better qualities, The Longest Ride still qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer’s works.
  46. About Elly (2009)
    This is clearly the work of a master in the making, an artist on the cusp of greatness. Farhadi may be fixated on fibbers, but there’s almost no one working today who makes films so emotionally honest.
  47. Last Knights
    There’s no reason for a film with a plot this simple to drag on to the two-hour mark. In a movie filled with public executions, that running time qualifies as truly cruel and unusual punishment.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Girl Is in Trouble
    The story has plenty of possibilities, though Onah rarely manages to put his own stamp on things.
  49. Effie Gray
    On a purely technical level, Effie Gray is fine, if uninspired, with its washed-out color, attention to detail, and lack of heavy-handed moralizing. As an experience, though, it’s a drag without much reward.
  50. 5 to 7
    It’s a movie to be mildly enjoyed and then left behind — apropos, given the subject matter.
  51. Lambert & Stamp
    Packed with rare footage from the band’s early years, and narrated through present-day sit-down interviews, it’s pop oral history at its most formless and fannish: fixated on juicy tidbits, points of influences, and historical cameos, and sorely lacking a point of view.
  52. 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.
  53. Cheatin'
    As is, Cheatin’ offers little narrative or emotional advantage over watching a series of the director’s more concise works. At 76 minutes, it should play like a short feature. Instead, it’s more like an extra-long short.
  54. Furious 7
    The series will doubtless continue on with Diesel, Rodriguez, Johnson, and the rest, but in the meantime, Furious 7 comes to the most conclusive and emotionally satisfying ending since, fittingly, the very first film.
  55. Woman in Gold
    An early contender for the most Weinstein movie of the year, Woman In Gold bends a complicated legal quagmire—heavy on questions of ownership and national responsibility—into a crowd-pleasing David and Goliath story. The title, too generic for Klimt’s masterpiece, suits the movie just fine.
  56. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    Whaley aims high for this sort of material, but his film, sweet as it is, gets a little too precocious.
  57. Marfa Girl
    This feels more like porn than any solo feature Clark has ever made, in part because his non-pro cast is unusually wooden even by his standards.
  58. Serena
    Played as a kind of constant wake, grimly marching on to tragedy, Serena is hurt by relentless applications of Johan Söderqvist’s unimaginatively somber score and DP Morten Søborg’s reliance on lots of over-the-shoulder handheld shots, the camera swinging close to and around people’s faces and shoulders.
  59. The Riot Club
    Boys will be boys and wealthy a--holes will be wealthy a--holes in The Riot Club, an alleged cautionary tale that revels in bad behavior for nearly two hours before finally offering up a stern “tsk, tsk, tsk.” Unlike the great gangster and outlaw movies, however, this unpleasant, moralistic film doesn’t succeed in making transgression look cathartically appealing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Salt of the Earth
    Whether snapping single-person portraits or expansive group shots, each of Salgado’s subjects is a unique and distinctive being. Their individuality resonates despite the fact that the world weighs heavy on them, threatening anonymity.
  61. Home
    Though it opens with the studio’s seemingly mandatory voice-over setup, the story itself, adapted from the children’s book "The True Meaning Of Smekday," shows immediate conceptual audacity.
  62. Get Hard
    Ferrell and Hart are too likable and crowd-pleasing to let the movie collapse around them. But they’re also too talented for something this wan.
  63. While We're Young
    Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends.
  64. White God
    As a curious hodgepodge of ideas, White God gets by. But the releasing-of-the-hounds at the start is a bad omen. The film, like the dogs, mostly goes downhill.
  65. Welcome to New York
    This is a film set entirely in places where people aren’t meant to stay for very long, a world of continual transit and gratification, with no endpoint. Maybe it’s the world that money creates for itself.
  66. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    The character of Houellebecq implicitly understands that this is just a transaction, and doesn’t take it personally. It’s too bad that, like so much of the movie, this germ of satire is never developed past the point of premise.
  67. Do You Believe?
    A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    She's Lost Control
    At its simplest, She’s Lost Control is a tale of girl meets boy (where “boy” is the lead’s latest client, Johnny, played by Marc Menchaca), and at its potential worst, just another attempt to probe the line between sex and self though the figure of the sex worker.
  69. Growing Up and Other Lies
    Part of what made Edgar Wright’s "The World’s End" so refreshing was the way that it feinted at being a certain tired sort of movie before suddenly making a wild leap in another direction. Growing Up And Other Lies, is exactly the mediocre movie that The World’s End was pretending to be.
  70. Backcountry
    Without effective characterization to drive the moments in between, the spectacle of humans painfully, extensively, gratuitously suffering for their arrogance is more sadistic than thrilling.
  71. Spring
    A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.
  72. Jauja
    Everything signals birth—of Argentina, cinema, the nuclear family—until Dinesen descends into a womb-like cave and Jauja takes a hard left turn into enigma. Even the title is a mystery, the Spanish byword for a land of plenty.
  73. The Gunman
    The Gunman is too disorganized and sloppy to make sense as political commentary or to work on the most basic level as a globe-trotting chase thriller.
  74. Tracers
    Tracers, then, is unavoidably a movie about Taylor Lautner joining a parkour gang, and often exactly as silly as that sounds. But it’s also a major improvement over Lautner’s last action-thriller, "Abduction," which had little action, few thrills, and zero abductions.
  75. Danny Collins
    This is the kind of thing that should come effortlessly to Pacino, one of the all-time greats of American acting, but no longer does. In fact, this qualifies as his best and most easygoing film performance in a good decade.
  76. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Steeliness comes naturally to, say, Jennifer Lawrence, but when Woodley unleashes the occasional voice-cracking battle cry, it generates tension between her desire for revolution and her utter believability as a teenager with more earnest ideals than ruthless training.
  77. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Ultimately, despite Kikuchi’s expressively dour performance and David Zellner’s formal invention... Kumiko feels like a collection of amusing and/or depressing riffs stitched together within a context that barely matters.
  78. Amour Fou
    The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll.
  79. Champs
    As a documentary, Champs feels a bit punch-drunk — weaving from one idea to the next while never quite zoning in on any particular target for too long.
  80. Walter
    Much of Walter’s behavior resembles, at very least, a movie version of mental illness, only to have the story reclassify it as a coping mechanism. This unwittingly makes the character seem as affected as any Sundance stereotype—and the movie disturbing for all the wrong reasons.
  81. Home Sweet Hell
    Katherine Heigl has exactly one funny moment in the dire black comedy Home Sweet Hell, which is still one more than anybody else has.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Wrecking Crew
    As a love letter to the director’s late father, The Wrecking Crew sparkles. As a potentially comprehensive, context-rich chronicle of one of pop music’s most inspired engines of rhythm and melody, it mostly sticks to one note.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    3 Hearts
    While the controlling deities might have found some amusement in this narrative, in Jacquot’s hands the tale is more bland than tragic.
  84. Seymour: An Introduction
    The biggest problem with Seymour, though, is that Hawke can’t quite find a structure or rhythm for the movie as a whole. It’s only 81 minutes long, and never remotely boring, but the feeling that it’s due to end at any moment kicks in around the midpoint and persists right up until it actually does end, like the documentary equivalent of "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King."
    • 54 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Cymbeline
    Almereyda tackles one of the Bard’s lesser-regarded later works, the plot-heavy tragicomedy Cymbeline, and again unearths untold depths.
  86. The Cobbler
    Maudlin when it’s not being offensive, The Cobbler belongs to that special class of comedy that seems to get worse with every new (mis)step it takes.
  87. It Follows
    Fans of early John Carpenter will immediately identify the master’s influence — on the voyeuristic slink of the camera, the synth pulse of Rich Vreeland’s throwback score, and the transformation of “safe,” warmly lit residential environments into landscapes of dread.
  88. Cinderella
    Clothed in a colorful mishmash of historical fashions and scored to sweeping strings, the movie is like an antique cut-crystal vase: gorgeous, fragile, empty.
  89. Run All Night
    Even though he never gets a grip on the over-complicated plot, the director hasn’t lost his knack for those elemental qualities that make a good action flick.
  90. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
    The film is at its best when cutting between delicious stories... It doesn’t make for the strongest film, but it does work like a case of people swapping outrageous war stories over a few beers.
  91. Chappie
    Like "Elysium," this rusty A.I. story is basically just "District 9" with a new coat of paint; it’s distinguished only by the jabbering, irritating personality of its title character.
  92. These Final Hours
    Incoherent and pointless as it is, These Final Hours moves with commendable swiftness.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    Much like the lager that gives the film its name, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is bland on the palette and best pissed away.
  94. X/Y
    It’s just that the quality of Williams’ script varies wildly, from superb to dire.
  95. Unfinished Business
    A once-energetic comic talent (and underrated serious actor) slows down to a pace he must feel matches his audience these days.
  96. Faults
    He’s (Riley Stearns) fashioned a movie that undergoes a slow, captivating metamorphosis, scene by scene, though who’s the caterpillar and who’s the cocoon remains unclear until the very end.
  97. Two Men in Town
    The result is a movie of complicated interpersonal and cross-cultural tensions.
  98. Buzzard
    Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.
  99. Merchants of Doubt
    There’s a reason folks like Singer and Morano are able to affect public policy with specious data, and it’s because they’re good at playing characters and cracking self-deprecating jokes and generally being interesting on camera, and real climate scientists aren’t.
  100. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    True to its title, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a mildly inferior sequel, diluting the modest charms of its predecessor. Said charms do remain, however.
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