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. Whiplash
    More "Full Metal Jacket" than "Dead Poet’s Society," the film is an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other.
  2. One Chance
    Blandly directed by "The Devil Wears Prada"-helmed David Frankel, One Chance lacks the middlebrow polish that has made his films such reliably re-watchable cable-TV fodder.
  3. Drive Hard
    There was a time when the very presence of someone like John Cusack could enliven otherwise normal movies, and lift worthier ones onto a higher plane. But films like Drive Hard are too slapdash to even allow for coherent performances, let alone movie-saving heroics.
  4. Left Behind
    This Left Behind may be worse than the last Left Behind, but it’s much less boring, thanks in part to the commitment of its star, who plays the often ludicrous material with the straightest of faces. The Cage works in mysterious ways.
  5. Harmontown
    The documentary Harmontown falls over itself to balance his dark and light sides, with talking heads testifying both to his rare comedic voice and his impossible-to-deal-with irascibility.
  6. The Liberator
    It’s an equally fiery, magnetic star turn, but being trapped in a stolid, unimaginative, and simplistic example of the genre — a typical historical biopic, in other words — saps a surprising amount of its strength.
  7. The Good Lie
    It’s a sappy, but occasionally sensitive, coming-to-America story that hits all of the familiar beats. It has one very big problem, though, and she’s played by Reese Witherspoon.
  8. Annabelle
    As a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap.
  9. Gone Girl
    The movie’s most tantalizing mystery is the question of what’s really going on in their heads. It remains unanswered.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    One9 applies enough emotion and visual flourishes to steer clear of hacky Behind The Music territory.
  11. Men, Women & Children
    While many of the individual storylines are ludicrously melodramatic, building toward emotional meltdowns (and one suicide attempt), it’s the cumulative fear and loathing of everything digital that crosses the line into absurdity.
  12. Hellaware
    Even with a runtime just barely over an hour, the shock comedy of Hellaware grows a bit numbing after a while.
  13. Fishing Without Nets
    If nothing else, Fishing Without Nets looks good on a big screen, directed in the kind of slick, just-off-arthouse style that mandates every shot of a character walking be framed from behind.
  14. Advanced Style
    Although Advanced Style is little more than a string of small profiles that broadly cohere into anti-ageist propaganda, it’s nevertheless a cogent reminder that people are so often defined by the things they need that it’s easy to dismiss the things that they don’t.
  15. Good People
    Good People might have been better titled "Dumb People", or at least "People Who Have Never Seen A Movie In Their Entire Lives."
  16. My Old Lady
    Apparently struggling to please two very different audiences at once, Horovitz seems to have little control over the material, ultimately wrapping things up with a neat little bow that makes a mockery of the preceding ugliness.
  17. Lilting
    Khaou’s avoidance of visual fireworks and his attempt to barrel through his own script in such a workmanlike fashion has the side effect of letting his actors down.
  18. The Boxtrolls
    In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.
  19. The Two Faces of January
    January skirts by on its tastefulness and appreciation for the source material, however single-minded. It’s a movie of small pleasures: slow-burn suspense; period flavor, with an emphasis on the textures, clothes, and luggage; an effective score by Pedro Almodovar’s regular composer, Alberto Iglesias.
  20. The Equalizer
    It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.
  21. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    It’s hard to hear what All Is By My Side is saying about anything, given how many scenes feature vaguely druggy overlapping dialogue, part of a fussy sound design that’s paired with intentionally choppy editing.
  22. Pride
    Manipulative but big-hearted, Pride is an ode to activism as a social equalizer, and a gushy illustration of the belief that hearts and minds can be changed, and that it’s impossible to truly battle oppression without opposing all forms of oppression. Why resist?
  23. Tracks
    Rendered in the over-polished, pre-packed prestige style of director John Curran (The Painted Veil, Stone), Davidson’s journey appears meaningless, little more than a succession of pretty vistas for the dirt-caked trekker to squint at while having flashbacks of her childhood.
  24. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    There’s more existential wisdom in five random, zombie-infested minutes of Shaun Of The Dead than in the full two hours of this feel-good folly.
  25. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    It’s a movie where everything, from the sets to the cast and crew, is an unconvincing, low-cost substitute for something else.
  26. Fort Bliss
    A movie like Fort Bliss seems designed to keep her (Monaghan) in fighting shape, in case bigger productions realize that she can do more than kiss a famous co-star.
  27. The Zero Theorem
    If only this imaginative environment were populated with a single compelling character or stimulating idea, rather than serving as busy distraction from the narrative tedium.
  28. Tusk
    Like most self-conscious attempts at a “midnight movie,” Tusk lacks the conviction that would make it anything more than an outré curiosity; it’s essentially a filmed dare, combined with fan service.
  29. This Is Where I Leave You
    This Is Where I Leave You demonstrates, a great cast is a terrible thing to waste.
  30. The Maze Runner
    If you’re going to treat your audience like a rat in a maze, it’s best to offer a tastier reward than the promise of more maze to come.
  31. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Every year, so many artless, gormless, generically slick thrillers make their way into theaters that any time a genre director displays basic filmmaking smarts, the result ends up seeming like a retro novelty. Such is the case with writer-director Scott Frank’s murky potboiler A Walk Among The Tombstones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    20,000 Days on Earth
    One thing that ties all his projects together is a grainy, cinematic quality, which is partly the reason why 20,000 Days On Earth works so beautifully.
  33. The Guest
    Dumb fun is rarely this smartly delivered.
  34. The Hole
    Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.
  35. No Good Deed
    By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.
  36. 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.
  37. Stray Dogs
    The plight of this struggling family unit weighs more heavily on the heart with each passing minute, making Stray Dogs the rare marathon-length art film that seems to grow less oppressive the longer it goes on.
  38. Bird People
    It’s also just magnificently goofy, unafraid to court ridicule and confident enough to take captivating detours.
  39. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Without having seen the two-film version, it’s unclear whether the gender-segregated points of view would enhance that emotional intensity or create more redundancy in an already thin narrative. In this form, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby tows the line between just enough and a bit too much.
  40. The Skeleton Twins
    What saves the movie is its actors: Exploiting audience’s memories of their previous collaborations, Hader and Wiig really do seem related. And both actors handle the balance between drama and comedy with aplomb.
  41. The Drop
    Cultural authenticity seeps into the cracks of this low-key lowlife drama, whose best attribute is the pungent sense of place it possesses.
  42. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is kind of infuriating, mostly because it tries to so hard to be innocuous.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wetlands
    Wetlands makes the internal external; the secret, scary bits of female anatomy are on display in a way that isn’t meant to be particularly titillating to the male gaze.
  44. Frontera
    The complexities of those people are diluted in a movie that’s not quite a functional ensemble but not intimate enough to qualify as a character study.
  45. Memphis
    Constantly just dodging visual cliché, Sutton tries to isolate moments of beauty and frustration within a specific milieu. Sometimes he captures resonant moments in bars and in stray dialogue; other times, his purposelessness seems less like a strategy and more like an evasive feint.
  46. God Help the Girl
    God Help The Girl is, in other words, a spotty movie — sometimes silly, sometimes dead serious. It is, however, nobly spotty — inconsistent in a way contemporary productions rarely are, its shortcomings the result of an excess of creative energy, rather than a lack thereof.
  47. The Identical
    It’s the kind of curio that’s arguably more interesting to think about than to watch — a plodding melodrama that mixes royalty-free Elvis worship with preachy proselytizing.
  48. The Longest Week
    Aggressively derivative though The Longest Week is, however, it’s clearly the work not of a lazy thief, but of a raw talent who’s still struggling to find his own voice. In the meantime, his impressions are pretty darn impressive.
  49. Last Days in Vietnam
    It’s not a documentary that reinvents the form or will alter anyone’s perception of the war, but sometimes a rich, exhaustive chronicle is more than enough.
  50. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.
  51. As Above, So Below
    What’s the point in shooting a horror movie in the catacombs if it’s just going to end up looking like every horror movie not shot in the catacombs?
  52. The Notebook
    Not a shred of human decency is on display in The Notebook, a handsomely made, hard-to-endure World War II parable set in an unnamed Hungarian backwater during the Nazi occupation of 1944.
  53. The Last of Robin Hood
    On the sliding scale of low expectations associated with the “I (may or may not have) slept with a famous person” biopic genre, Robin Hood is more smoothly professional and tolerable than the lowly likes of "My Week With Marilyn" or the JFK-adultery-soap opera "An American Affair."
  54. Life of Crime
    Thing is, though, for anyone familiar with the Tarantino film, this less remarkable picture will totally seem like a prequel, peering back as it does on younger versions of characters audiences got to know in "Jackie Brown."
  55. The Congress
    It’s a folly of the first order, but one that many people will nonetheless want to see, if only because it’s so out there.
  56. Starred Up
    It’s a credit to both Mackenzie’s talent as a director of actors and to the underlying humaneness of his vision that he argues that the right option is the more difficult and less predictable one — and that he does so without relying on sentimentality, unearned sympathy, or a happy ending.
  57. The November Man
    Too frequently, the movie also treats its female characters as props to be shuffled in and out of danger as the screenplay requires — a nasty tendency that undermines its ongoing (and murkily argued) debate about whether a successful agent can maintain his humanity.
  58. Metro Manila
    The movie is a catalogue of Nolanisms translated into Tagalog and executed on a tight budget.
  59. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him?
  60. Love Is Strange
    Setting several scenes to the famously poignant plinks of pianist Frédéric Chopin, Love Is Strange never achieves the sheer emotional resonance of "Make Way For Tomorrow"; it’s gently affecting, not deeply heartbreaking — in part because Sachs builds to a less devastating punctuation than McCarey did.
  61. Are You Here
    As a film, though, it amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
  62. If I Stay
    Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.
  63. When the Game Stands Tall
    For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.
  64. The One I Love
    The ending is intended to be ambiguous, but it’s not too hard to guess what happened in advance, as it’s the only dramatically satisfying option. What’s no longer at all certain is what it means.
  65. Abuse of Weakness
    Writer-director Catherine Breillat who adapted the film from her own roman à clef, seems content to let the story stand on its own two feet, as if it were something that she’d invented from whole cloth rather than experienced. It’s a laudable approach, in theory, but it backfires a bit in this particular instance, because what occurs is so psychologically inexplicable that Breillat’s alter ego comes across as terminally foolish.
  66. To Be Takei
    The technical, workmanlike production is made more irritating than necessary by Michael Hearst’s score, whose grating circus-comes-to-town sprightliness is routinely slathered over mundane footage.
  67. The Possession of Michael King
    After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.
  68. Winter in the Blood
    Cursed with a vague, rambling script and an equally indistinct lead performance, the film is a scattershot series of vignettes about self-definition that, ultimately, never coheres into a lucid whole.
  69. Expedition to the End of the World
    The Expedition To The End Of The World courses with the zeal of Robert Flaherty, the fearlessness of Werner Herzog, and the fatalistic humor of Lars Von Trier. While individual moments echo with a familiarly mordant sense of alpha-male adventure, together they cohere into something wild and new.
  70. The Expendables 3
    With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be.
  71. Dinosaur 13
    Dinosaur 13 reduces a complicated legal quagmire about paleontological ownership to something of a pity party. But hard luck is not the same as injustice.
  72. 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.
  73. Septic Man
    As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.
  74. The Giver
    The ironic side effect is that this major influence on today’s new class of dystopian YA smashes now looks like just another greedy knockoff on-screen—a monochromatic "Divergent," or something similar.
  75. Moebius
    A viewer familiar with the filmmaker’s latter-day schtick can’t help but wonder: How can an artist be so persistent in his use of symbols, and yet never manage to develop them beyond a rudimentary metaphorical framework?
  76. The Trip to Italy
    It works reasonably well as a film, too, though, provided that one isn’t overly bothered by repetition and a general sense of diminishing returns.
  77. Frank
    Frank is never more endearing than when Fassbender has a mic to his mouth, spitting out the hilariously batshit lyrics of his “most likeable song ever,” or literally singing the praises of his cohorts during an affecting showstopper.
  78. Life After Beth
    Enjoy the wordplay in the title, because that’s as witty as the horror comedy Life After Beth ever gets.
  79. Let's Be Cops
    At times, the movie seems to exist for no other purpose than to collide these two personalities together, privileging their antagonistic banter above all else. But isn’t that the basic point of all buddy comedies?
  80. Step Up: All In
    It’s the rare movie that knows its limitations, but also understands how to use form to best convey its strengths, pulling together countless complicated dance scenes in which the relationships between teams and characters come through more clearly than they could through dialogue.
  81. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    At its best, the film is a staggering underwater spectacle, a cinema of attractions that outclasses each of Cameron’s previous technical achievements.
  82. The Dog
    As a portrait of a life lived strangely — and if you asked its subject, perfectly, with no regrets — The Dog is charming.
  83. About Alex
    About Alex benefits from a uniformly strong cast that does its best to find moments of truth in the banal, derivative scenario they’ve been handed.
  84. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.
  85. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    This innocuous crowd-pleaser delivers everything that its pedigree and ad campaign promise, courting the patronage of foodies, Oprah Book Club members, Travel Channel subscribers, and Helen Mirren lovers alike.
  86. Into the Storm
    Into The Storm is an uncanny valley disaster movie — not as consciously cheesy and cheap as something like "Sharknado 2," but built around a similar equation of unreality and gratification.
  87. What If
    There’s the requisite cutesiness: magnetic poetry, unnecessary animated sequences, multiple discussions of Elvis’ eating habits, a screening of The Princess Bride. (Perhaps "When Harry Met Sally" would have been too obvious.)
  88. Web Junkie
    It’s clear that these kids have a genuine problem, and a more probing film might have questioned the cultural factors that contribute to it, as well as the efficacy of more or less kidnapping errant youths and trying to coerce them back into productivity. Web Junkie doesn’t do much probing, however.
  89. Calvary
    Some of Calvary is uncomfortably bleak... But writer-director John Michael McDonagh—brother of the English playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)—has an ear for wry humor, providing his characters with a steady supply of acerbic wit.
  90. Rich Hill
    The movie exists mainly as an act of social advocacy, showing how one portion of the population lives and offering a sobering rebuke to pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric.
  91. The Strange Little Cat
    Ramon Zürcher’s miniature debut, The Strange Little Cat, is one of the most confident and unusual first features in recent memory.
  92. Child of God
    As a McCarthy adaptation, it’s an abject failure; as a piece of art - damaged trash, it occasionally delivers the requisite squirms. Visually and thematically, it has less in common with "No Country For Old Men" or "The Counselor" than with ’90s shot-on-VHS gonzo efforts like "Red Spirit Lake."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Finding Fela!
    What makes Finding Fela! just as poignant is the fact that Kuti, while still listened to and appreciated by millions, is not as ubiquitous a cultural institution as Davis or Brown. Gibney doesn’t fully, forcefully make the case in Kuti’s favor — but he does take a big step in the right direction, all while sketching a vivid, evocative portrait.
  94. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    A pandemic thriller infected with horror-film clichés, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero ditches the nasty allegory of Eli Roth’s original and Ti West’s studio-butchered first sequel for far duller, standard-issue conventions.
  95. War Story
    Jackson’s technique is undercut, if only a little, by story and characters that sometimes cross the line from minimalist to just plain underdeveloped. Yet as a formal exercise that gives Keener the space to really inhabit her character, War Story is effective.
  96. The Kill Team
    War is hell, in other words, and punishing these soldiers—and Winfield in particular—for doing what they were taught to do is wrong.
  97. Get On Up
    Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.
  98. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Guardians boasts not one, but two Han Solo proxies — not to mention an ass-kicking Princess Leia surrogate, a villain with a very Sithian fashion sense, and the flora answer to Chewbacca. Also, one of the Han Solo types is a talking raccoon.
  99. The Killer Inside Me
    Affleck is the perfect actor for this role, though he’s a little too mush-mouthed to do the voiceover narration required of a noir.
  100. Hercules
    Unsurprisingly, Johnson makes for a perfect movie-star Hercules, and the film gets a lot of mileage by playing his charismatic-but-modest take on the character off of the strong, predominantly British cast.
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