The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,436 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: 5,578 out of 10436
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10436
  3. Negative: 1,112 out of 10436
10436 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  8. The Idea of You
    It’s a warm, approachable movie that you’ll get blissfully lost in.
  9. 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.
  10. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Viewers will either be transported by Honkasalo's somber artistry or begging for someone to stick a gasoline-filled syringe into their veins...As art, 3 Rooms is magnificent, but as a viewing experience, it's almost impossible.
  11. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Among the many quirks of this very idiosyncratic comedy is that it really is structured like a thriller or a horror film.
  12. A Private Life
    A Private Life offers plenty of fizzy pleasures alongside somber reflections on the passage of time and the regrets you have to live with.
  13. The Family Fang
    What’s left is those two strong performances. Bateman is especially funny in the sequence that lands Baxter in the hospital, and Kidman never resorts to shallow-actress clichés when indicating how a life in different kinds of spotlights may have frayed at Annie’s nerves.
  14. The Last Duel
    The setting may be the 14th century, but this is very much a historical drama of modern concerns. Damningly, it suggests that yesterday’s injustices remain very much today’s.
  15. My Bodyguard
    It’s all riveting enough, the kind of youth film that still has parables for adults and moves along at a quick and witty clip for kids—never a prat fall into sticky sweetness. My Bodyguard offers a charming take on what could have been a generic after-school-special tale, and couldn’t have picked a better backdrop to do it in.
  16. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
    For a children's film, Willy Wonka is surprisingly malevolent, which is most of its fun. But the refreshing malice and twisted whimsy only kick into high gear after 45 minutes of plodding setup and film-padding songs.
  17. 2 Days in Paris
    For all the verbal jokery, it's more tragedy than farce.
  18. Juliet, Naked
    Epistolary courtship can be achingly romantic—but only on paper, where it belongs.
  19. Man Bites Dog
    It’s a sick piece of work—I felt like a heel for watching it, yet I couldn’t look away, either.
  20. Last Days
    In the end, it feels like a life aestheticized, not examined.
  21. Life and Debt
    Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.
  22. A Decade Under the Influence
    For neophyte cinephiles, A Decade Under The Influence should serve as a lively primer on a seminal film era, but its reverent tone is antithetical to the rule-breaking spirit it celebrates.
  23. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Better Luck Tomorrow is that, on a slow night, it's easy to imagine these delinquents wanting to rent a film just like it.
  24. Young Adam
    In this long, slow fall from grace, unceremonious nudity and half-hearted sex begin to look like a mockery of a paradise lost.
  25. Finding Neverland
    Forster's movie doesn't want to grow up, but it doesn't seem to understand childhood, either. For a film about the life-affirming power of imagination, Finding Neverland displays precious little of its own.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jay Kelly
    Every moment of Jay Kelly lives between the textual (the internal conflict of the fictional actor) and the metatextual (what the story tells us about the real creative forces behind the film).
  27. Haywire
    In truth, Haywire is simply a delivery system for ass-kickings, calibrated to the specific talents of Gina Carano, a former mixed-martial-arts star and American Gladiator whose fists (and feet) of fury can rattle skulls and cave in chests.
  28. This Is GWAR
    For all the documentary reveals about the band, it leaves you asking further questions, and wanting much more—an apt metaphor for a band that created an impressive legacy, and yet whose members rarely came to a consensus.
  29. Fresh
    Despite its bolder choices, however, Fresh doesn’t push the body horror as far as it could, and works better as an empowerment fable than as an actual thriller.
  30. As You Are
    Never does it sound much like something grunge fans might like.
  31. Perfect Blue
    With its fluidly changeable surfaces, animation may be the ideal medium for confronting the public's growing uncertainty with reality, but Perfect Blue is a missed opportunity, too shallow and exploitative to be taken seriously.
  32. Marvin's Room
    Nonetheless, Marvin's Room is not only sharply written and well-acted, but it's also the rare sort of film that takes an honest and uncompromising look at death and dying.
  33. Meduzot
    Jellyfish is the kind of film that will ring true for some viewers, while striking others as too slight and precious.
  34. Annette
    The film’s tension between sincerity and falsity is nonstop palpable; virtually every scene threatens to collapse and implode due to the gravitational weight of its heightened reality. The correct answer to any such mighty swing for the fences is: Yes, you may start.
  35. Chappaquiddick
    The stranger and more corrosive subtexts it locates in the Kennedy circle’s actions in the aftermath of the crash are undermined by its classy restraint, which saps the most conceptually outrageous moments.
  36. A Late Quartet
    Yaron Zilberman's first feature has a solid structure, but as with a piece of music, the way it's played makes all the difference. His principal actors aren't great at faking their instrumental prowess, but they're perfectly in tune with each other, playing artists who've postponed life's decisions in the name of pursuing their craft.
  37. Good Morning, Vietnam
    Williams is at his best in Good Morning, Vietnam when he’s pitched between manic and earnest: when he’s reacting to his castmates, who actually are funny. Too much of Good Morning, Vietnam, though, is self-congratulatory without giving any real reason for the applause.
  38. Korengal
    At best, Korengal is a glorified bonus disc, offering more views of the rocky terrain around OP Restrepo, and a little more time with the fresh-faced guys who spent their deployment stationed there.
  39. A Faithful Man
    Running just 75 minutes and seemingly loath to move beyond superficial feints at both comedy and melodrama, A Faithful Man, by comparison, barely qualifies as a trifle.
  40. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    It's all innocuous, forgettable fun, but it's firmly aimed at those who find underwear endlessly funny.
  41. The Ninth Day
    It's important for the film to establish the concentration camp as a hell on earth from the start, but Schlöndorff has more in mind than creating another reminder of the inhumanity of fascism.
  42. The Flower of Evil
    For all its aloof indirectness, The Flower Of Evil wants little more than to sling another arrow at the bourgeoisie, something Chabrol has done with greater flair on many other occasions.
  43. Open Range
    Mostly it's just a good yarn, with attractive picture-postcard vistas and an agreeable strain of light humor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Homestretch
    In a moral sense, teen homelessness is very much a crime, and Chicago-based filmmakers Anne De Mare and Kirsten Kelly aim to shed a light on this nationwide epidemic in The Homestretch, using the Windy City as a test case.
  45. Better Watch Out
    The film will continue to defy your expectations.
  46. The King of Staten Island
    Apatow appears to have moved on from using airless domestic and urban comforts as backdrops, and that’s probably a good thing. But The King Of Staten Island’s patience-testing failings, however well-intentioned, suggest that for now, he’s only found a new way to lose the plot.
  47. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf
    It’s fun to see this world, with all of its inhuman monsters and monstrous humans, from a different point of view, even if it isn’t quite as refreshing or engaging as Geralt’s.
  48. Sovereign
    Though Offerman buoys the film with terrifying aplomb, Sovereign is a missed opportunity to examine the cascading fallout from living in a country that fails its people and breeds violence.
  49. The Ides of March
    The Ides Of March goes down easily, with a sophisticated bustle and a strong third act twist to test the hero's mettle. But it all feels a bit inconsequential - perhaps by design.
  50. Tesla
    Far from the flamboyant figure of fantasy and popular myth, this version of the inventor is totally interiorized.
  51. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    The film feels like an earnest retread over old territory, albeit one that intermittently comes to life thanks to an amazing cast, expressive cinematography by French master Eric Gautier (Irma Vep), and Montiel's obviously heartfelt sentiments.
  52. The Great Hack
    There’s no satisfying end point to this movie (which premiered at Sundance as a 135-minute work in progress; over 20 minutes have since been trimmed), which reaches its alarmist conclusion quite early on and then functions more as a frustratingly sporadic video diary.
  53. Watermarks
    Well-intentioned and exceedingly nice, Watermarks aspires to warm the soul, but succeeds only in numbing the mind.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The acting, mostly by a bunch of unknowns, is equally fresh and funny, and Ritchie keeps the movie moving faster than you can say, "bludgeoned to death by a 15-inch black rubber dildo."
  55. Flow: For Love of Water
    Skips right past depressing on its way to apocalyptic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The film is also an earnest, big-hearted ode to friends as support and salvation, and to the talismanic quality a favorite song, treasured hang-out, or shared tradition can take on for a teenager.
  57. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    While witnessing the physical act of love on screen can sometimes transcend into something with great depth, this is, sorry to say, not one of those cases. It’s just a lot of huffing and puffing.
  58. Tom at the Farm
    As interesting as it is to see the filmmaker move out of his wheelhouse, Tom At The Farm is neither dramatically satisfying nor psychologically convincing. Something was clearly lost in its transition from stage to screen.
  59. The Circle
    Its fascinations compromised by its clunkiness, the film is a necessary niche history that serves well enough as a primer, placing it just a cut above coasting on good intentions.
  60. The Last Starfighter
    A sweet, unabashedly corny, matinee-friendly science-fiction adventure starring Lance Guest as a trailer-park videogame prodigy, and Robert Preston as the alien who recruits him to save the day from some space-baddies.
  61. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    It’s little surprise that Her turns out to be the better of the two movies, mostly by virtue of prominently featuring Chastain, who conveys an interior life — shifting emotions, competing desires — the script doesn’t supply her.
  62. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    Adios serves as a loving tribute to their memory, but has little else to offer that the original film didn’t provide.
  63. A Master Builder
    Demme barely even makes an effort, shooting mostly in bland close-ups with the occasional zoom for completely random emphasis. Nor does A Master Builder have any meta-element—it’s like "Vanya On 42nd Street" without 42nd Street.
  64. Garbo: The Spy
    Even without the fine psychological shading, Garcia's story is a doozy.
  65. The Sapphires
    The emotions of soul music are irresistibly universal. The same is true of soul-music clichés. Based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the tale of four ambitious young Aboriginal girls from Australia who come of age performing before American serviceman in 1968 Vietnam. And yet the film is afflicted by a curious lack of cultural specificity.
  66. Garden State
    Garden State coasts on this considerable charm until it hits a brick wall in its final segments.
  67. The Green Prince
    Yet even if the individuals and their motives themselves don’t always come into full focus, The Green Prince is an absorbing psychological study of shifting allegiances.
  68. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    It's a film where the feelings and experiences of young people are highly specific in detail, yet fundamentally universal and timeless.
  69. Unforgivable
    That seems to be one of the main theses of Unforgivable: that nothing is as dramatic as it appears, and presuming otherwise means risking unnecessary trouble and pain.
  70. Caged Heat
    Caged Heat is inspired from start to finish.
  71. Long Shot
    At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.
  72. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.
  73. Freaky
    This is a fast-paced, likable, and silly romp arriving at a time where a horror movie’s memorability tends to correlate with its evocative doominess. Even when Freaky doesn’t live up to its full potential, there’s still something oddly satisfying about unmasking a slasher movie to reveal the ’80s comedy lurking underneath.
  74. The Legend of Ochi
    Yet for all of its imaginative inspirations, The Legend Of Ochi feels under-conceptualized: It’s a fairytale without much stirring under the studiously designed surface.
  75. Schultze Gets the Blues
    With dialogue as spare as its harsh landscapes, the film is so tonally dry that it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like the Farrelly brothers--it begins at a snail's pace before speeding up to a turtle's drowsy crawl.
  76. Girl Asleep
    Never betraying an iota of lived experience, it trots out tropes seen in dozens of movies and sitcom episodes (the embarrassing dad, the big party, the fictional rock star crush, etc.), which can ring true only because they’ve been in circulation for decades.
  77. 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.
  78. Upgrade
    Whannell strikes out on his own with his first truly original concept as a writer-director...in a film whose production is as ambitious as its story is formulaic. Thankfully, the former mostly compensates for the latter, making Upgrade a genre-bending summer treat for those who don’t mind a little (okay, a lot) of blood with their popcorn.
  79. Brothers of the Head
    Brothers isn't nearly as haunting and singular as "Last Days," because the faux-documentary format too closely mirrors the Behind The Music trajectory of a thousand other rock-band flameouts.
  80. Patti Cake$
    There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.
  81. Death at a Funeral
    Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Surfer
    The Surfer slowly follows the threads of its hero’s unraveling neuroses, and Cage walks right up to the line of sanity as each strand comes undone. It is a marvelous pushback against expectations that he stays on the other side of that line.
  83. 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.
  84. Ma
    The result is decidedly uneven, but the film’s sheer creative ambition is invigorating.
  85. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    To some degree, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is a more offbeat film than the original, with better gags, better (and more cartoonish) action, and more visual variety.
  86. Farewell, My Queen
    Working from Chantal Thomas' novel, Jacquot doesn't entirely scrape the gloss off this love triangle, which plays neither as a florid bodice-ripper nor as emotionally complex as it might have been. It stays on the surface, but at least that surface is gorgeous.
  87. Deep Cover
    As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.
  88. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Larger Than Life provides a look back at a time of show business and stardom that no longer exists.
  90. Jealousy
    Jealousy — arguably the slightest film Garrel has produced since the 1980s — may not add up to a whole lot, but its sense of life and the medium is, as always, substantial and accomplished.
  91. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Ultimately, this is a movie to appreciate in isolated bits and pieces.
  92. Reality Bites
    Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie's portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow...No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct.
  93. Rosewater
    All well and good — and, again, damn near unquestionably sincere — except that Rosewater isn’t much of a film.
  94. Stranger Than Fiction
    Amid all this metafictional hoopla lies the real heart of the movie, a tentative romance between Ferrell and a tax-withholding baker played with adorable prickliness by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
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