The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort, even though it already looks sadly out of touch with the times.
  2. October Country
    In digging deeper into the stories behind the junk--many of which involve the drug problems, legal problems, custody battles, cycles of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorders of Mosher’s own family--October Country veers awfully close to exploitation.
  3. In Fear
    In Fear takes place almost entirely inside a moving car, severely limiting both the cast’s isolation (a big factor in Blair Witch’s strategy) and the extent to which they could wander off in an unexpected direction. Instead, the film simply goes in circles.
  4. Carancho
    If anyone's likely to have trouble with Carancho, it's fans of Trapero's previous films, who won't be able to help noticing the sizeable step he's taken toward conventionality.
  5. The Hip Hop Project
    Project provides an unmistakably one-sided view of rap as God's gift to the poor, angry, black, and young, but given the beating rap has taken in the press lately (please Oprah, don't hurt 'em!), the film's pro-rap cheerleading couldn't be more timely or necessary.
  6. SherryBaby
    Theirs is a well-worn story that may not need to be told, but they do tell it well.
  7. Landline
    Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.
  8. Stardust
    The film's merry, enthusiastic tone--set largely by Robert De Niro, playing a giddy transvestite sky-pirate to the hilt--is hard to beat.
  9. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    When the crazy comes, it's pretty good crazy. Ferrell is in full-on brazen redneck mode, doing a variation on his "Saturday Night Live" George W. Bush impression.
  10. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Between their bickering, Grønkjær's offscreen prompting, and the sappy, ubiquitous soundtrack, The Monastery is like the opposite of "Into Great Silence."
  11. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    A superb portrait of a band and an industry in flux.
  12. Tattoo
    Unlike so many "Seven" followers, it makes its missteps memorably, and offers a variety of stylistic rewards by way of compensation.
  13. Margarita Happy Hour
    The trouble is that while Chaiken's community is nuanced, it's not exactly a warm, inviting place to spend time. It's dingy and dismal, and though not exactly humorless, Margarita Happy Hour misses many chances to be funny, at times when a laugh or two would open the picture up.
  14. Wedding Doll
    In spite of all Wedding Doll’s strengths, its scenario comes to seem a little unseemly: Giladi establishes Hagit’s hopes and dreams mostly just to show the terrible ways that they’re dashed.
  15. The Reagan Show
    It’s an approach that works well when the audience enjoys the company of this person who’s become a permanent fixture on their TV. But it’s also one that enrages opposing voters, who can only ever see the maddening fakery.
  16. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    Cheech And Chong’s Next Movie was Cheech and Chong’s next movie, their dogged lack of imagination seldom as amusing as in the self-reflexive title. Already they had begun to lose steam, recycling a joke in which one character tricks another into railing a line of powdered laundry soap.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Valley Girl
    the wooden acting and threadbare plot of the 1983 Romeo And Juliet-meets-The Graduate-meets-MTV love story Valley Girl is almost entirely redeemed by the stung cockiness of Nicolas Cage.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  19. Snoopy Come Home
    Rarely has a movie made for kids been so devastatingly honest about how relationships can sour over time.
  20. Dandelion
    While Dandelion begins on a promising note and intermittently strikes the right chords, this cinematic symphony sours during its crescendo when it should be intensifying, bringing its stirring sentiments together in resounding harmony.
  21. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    In Curran's hands, what might have seemed like a "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" redux gets cut into avant-garde pieces, with experimental inserts, sound effects, and wrinkles in time that add to an uneasy mood.
  22. Pieces of a Woman
    The result is a clichéd maelstrom of psychological turmoil and empty outpourings of feeling. The film is uninterested in the inner world it claims to investigate; it also cheapens a woman’s trauma by rendering her pain into a confused dramatic spectacle.
  23. Strange Days
    A film that's prescient and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived in roughly equal measures...Strange Days is the cinematic equivalent of trip-hop, a shadowy realm of atmosphere, mood and suggestion with a decidedly drugged-up, post-apocalyptic feel. But the many things Strange Days gets right are negated by the things it gets wrong.
  24. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker defangs herself with The Sky Is Everywhere, which seems to aim for putting something broadly positive in the world but lands on inconsequential.
  25. American Teen
    Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.
  26. Byzantium
    With her piercing baby blues that never seem to settle on a subject, even when she’s locked in conversation with it, Ronan seems just… off enough to play a vampiric vixen.
  27. Slack Bay
    In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.
  28. The Edge
    Tamahori’s workmanlike production doesn’t match the elemental power of Mamet’s script, and it fails to evoke the harsh physical conditions that turn ordinary, civilized men into resourceful survivalists and predators.
  29. The Dark Crystal
    The story is a standard fairy-tale concoction, but the New Agey philosophy about healing and heroism makes for a classic Henson story, all heart and rapturous wonder at the world's incredible possibilities.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jackass Number Two
    Some movies simply shouldn't be seen sober or alone.
  31. Margot at the Wedding
    Margot has a kitchen-sink realism that's genuinely unsettling, like a John Cassavetes movie populated by the hyper-articulate. If nothing else, Baumbach deserves credit for refusing to cozy up to the audience.
  32. 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.
  33. White Noise
    It’s always admirable when a filmmaker makes a bolder choice and expands their horizon. For Baumbach, such a venture leads to a familiar place; the nuances of family strife remain his artistic sweet spot.
  34. Roofman
    It’s a star vehicle for Tatum and Dunst that can’t put all of its faith in the healing power of charisma and chemistry.
  35. Shall We Dance?
    While the characters, situations, and gags are all familiar, Shall We Dance?'s gentle humanity and quiet exuberance are contagious.
  36. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    Rather than major fits of laughter, chuckles of acknowledgement pepper the audience’s viewing experience, at least for folks over the age of 25.
  37. Scream
    Finely crafted, tense, scary thriller from start to finish.
  38. Wish Me Away
    While it's fascinating to observe the workings of the mammoth apparatus grafted onto an intensely personal decision, the movie's heart is the moments that take place in private (meaning, in this case, in front of only one camera).
  39. Swan Song
    Simply put, Swan Song would be dead on arrival without Ali’s dual performance, which manages to ground the film’s tearjerker premise in credible human emotion.
  40. Maelstrom
    For a movie about identity to have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the bloody talking fishes.
  41. Beautiful Boxer
    Uekrongtham films the saga in gorgeous style.
  42. Kick-Ass
    Vaughn opts for comic-book bigness—big fights, big laugh lines, big explosions—but without a Spider-Man or Batman at the front of the action, Kick-Ass’s heroes and villains look smaller-than-life in a larger-than-life world.
  43. The Snowtown Murders
    The sense of enervation that creeps into the movie's second half is bothersome mainly because The Snowtown Murders is often brilliant in its depiction of the mundanity of evil.
  44. The Jazz Singer
    As for its quality as an actual movie, well, The Jazz Singer is hardly great, but it provides solid melodrama and a valuable look at the ethnic stereotypes of early-20th-century entertainment.
  45. King of New York
    Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    With the development of most characters truncated in order to concentrate on Sobieski (who looks eerily like a young Helen Hunt), the film proves pretty dissatisfying.
  47. Mean Girls
    The film lacks the discipline to stay on point all the time, but Fey and director Mark S. Waters (Freaky Friday) have fun with offbeat throwaway touches.
  48. Transamerica
    Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.
  49. Notorious C.H.O.
    Despite her healthy fan base, Notorious C.H.O. looks like the dead-end to a limited repertoire.
  50. Dumb Money
    Smart, playful, and perhaps efficient to a fault (there’s only so many times a rap song can be used as a narrative stitch to take us from one character to another), Gillespie’s latest is an enraging David vs. Goliath, ripped-from-the-headlines tale that deserves to be seen to be believed.
  51. The Good Dinosaur
    Perhaps more than ever before, the animators do the heavy lifting: Every detail, from the gentle bob of a beast's breathing to the fluid shifts of Spot's facial expressions, has been lovingly rendered.
  52. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    Most fan-docs are fairly remedial, but Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields is more sophisticated than the norm, in keeping with its subject.
  53. Miami Vice
    While it never approaches the richness and gravity of a great Mann film like "Heat," Miami Vice blurs the thin blue line to similar effect, and he features a couple of bravura setpieces, including a tense raid on an enemy hideout and a shootout with chaotic, you-are-there immediacy. If only all summer movies were this majestically slight.
  54. Skinamarink
    We have a long way to go in 2023, but Skinamarink is already a top contender for the year’s most frightening film.
  55. Breaking
    Breaking is a noble and deeply sensitive effort that aims to commemorate an honorable veteran who was failed by the dysfunctional and racist country that he bravely served. But despite a committed cast, and a well-staged and devastatingly truthful finale, Corbin fails to break this story out of its predictable mold.
  56. Fun & Fancy Free
    Fun And Fancy Free is a mixed bag with more than enough interesting material to make it worth seeing, even if it falls short of Disney's shameless self-praise.
  57. Paris, je t'aime
    Because Paris, Je T'Aime's episodes are so short, the duds don't stick around long enough to grate much. But the good ones also don't get to explore their assigned Parisian spaces as much as they could.
  58. Pavarotti
    Ron Howard’s documentary Pavarotti is content to bask in his glow; despite the broad array of home movies, family photos, interviews, TV outtakes, and concert recordings at its disposal, it never feels intimate with Pavarotti the person.
  59. La Vie en Rose
    For all its florid pretensions and epic length, the film's overwrought take on its subject's not-so-rosy life leaves behind no lasting insight.
  60. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This Hobbit is, in other words, a much more eventful affair than its year-old predecessor. And yet for all the fine spectacle Jackson crams into his lengthy sequel-within-a-prequel, it’s still hard not to mourn the single, self-contained movie that could have been.
  61. Another Earth
    It's an ambitious premise and a risky approach, but Cahill and his cast execute it beautifully.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Let the Bullets Fly
    That dedicated wryness makes the endless twists and betrayals easier to process-these are awful people, but it's sure a lot of fun to watch them fight it out.
  63. Mid90s
    What Hill hasn’t yet mastered, despite considerable skill as a first-time filmmaker, is how to impose a narrative more quietly, especially in finding the right ending. He also doesn’t seem to fully trust his sense of humor.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    There's something admirable to this austerity and the way it insists viewers start by engaging with Kiefer's large-scale constructions, wordless explorations of which bookend the film.
  65. The Amazing Spider-Man
    The Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by "(500) Days Of Summer" director Marc Webb, doesn't put its own stamp on the material, which feels warmed-over in ways that don't help.
  66. Premium Rush
    He's Premium Rush's villain, but Shannon doesn't attempt anything like the austere derangement of a Hans Gruber type, even though he specializes in playing terrifying nutjobs. Instead, he's a buffoon of the first order, and his hapless tomfoolery sets the tone for a light, fast, frequently hilarious 90 minutes.
  67. Catfight
    In more ways than one, Catfight lives down to its title. This is a spectacularly petty and mean-spirited comedy that pivots around, yes, two women beating the shit out of each other.
  68. All of You
    As with so many great onscreen romances, it’s not that All Of You is doing something that’s never been done before, just that it’s doing it really well, with a great pair of actors at its center.
  69. Tommaso
    Like so much in this deceptively earnest film, the Roman backdrop creates ambiguous terms. One is left to wonder whether Tommaso’s internal chaos is that of an eternal figure in an ancient city, or just another guy trying to keep it together as he makes the turn to the Piazza Dante.
  70. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
    Though Hall's stunning vistas and gorgeous exploration of wide-open spaces hearken back to John Ford, Butch Cassidy otherwise radiates the youthful energy, manic pop playfulness, and antic clowning of the French New Wave.
  71. Marshall
    This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.
  72. Splice
    Played with black humor that never gets in the way of the horror, Natali’s film cleverly exploits Dren’s uncanny semi-humanity.
  73. Thirteen Lives
    Howard’s film winds up as a rote retread, transitioning from headline news to big-screen snooze.
  74. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    The rare sequel that magnifies the scope of the original without diminishing the fun.
  75. Barbershop
    Ice Cube serves as the film's solid moral center, with a dizzying variety of supporting characters in his orbit. A refreshingly class-conscious comedy-drama that refuses to talk down to its audience, Barbershop tackles serious issues.
  76. 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?
  77. Elf
    The cast wrings laughs out of David Berenbaum's script as if it were a damp washcloth.
    • The A.V. Club
  78. The Way Back
    Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.
  79. Shadow in the Cloud
    Pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Island of Lemurs: Madagascar
    Though wondrous in stretches, it barely scratches the surface of its subject, the ecological smorgasbord of Madagascar.
  81. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
    Narrows as it goes, and Browne doesn't do enough with the idea of a corporate takeover of a grassroots recreational activity, but Weber's antics and his colleagues' reactions make for fine drama all on their own.
  82. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    By the film's halfway point, the subplots have all started to head in the most obvious directions imaginable, which is too bad, since they all have real potential. Ferrera's story of spending the summer as an out-of-place ethnic element in the milk-white suburbs stays interesting the longest, in large part thanks to her performance.
  83. 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.
  84. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  85. Husbands
    John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial.
  86. Harriet
    A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.
  87. Scare Me
    The idea that movies can easily lose 10 or 15 minutes of running time to curry favor with impatient audiences is often patently absurd, yet nearly every single scene in Scare Me feels some degree of overlong.
  88. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    It’s too agreeable, too dutiful to building a new series, and too reluctant to disrupt this new status quo even as it detonates its many explosive setpieces.
  89. Blood Father
    Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
  90. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    Patchy but occasionally charming, the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them delivers most of what has come to be expected from J.K. Rowling’s book series and its successful film adaptations.
  91. Nénette
    As with all of Philibert's work, Nénette is impeccably composed and admirably disciplined, but his patient observation can't unlock the mysteries of an animal that's grown more introspective and likely less expressive over time.
  92. Black Butterflies
    At least Black Butterflies gets the tortured-soul part right.
  93. Beloved Sisters
    The result is immersive and intelligent, but not what one would call difficult. Graf’s knack for no-nonsense storytelling means that Beloved Sisters seems to fly past.
  94. The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes
    Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing.
  95. Elio
    Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.
  96. Waiting for Armageddon
    Davis and company do get at the odd mix of middle-class lifestyle and cheerful doom-saying that defines the mainstream apocalypticons.
  97. Bandslam
    Throughout its first two acts, Bandslam is charming, sweet, and funny enough to merit inclusion in the upper echelon of teen comedies. Then comes a third act weighed down with arbitrary romantic conflicts, leaden melodrama, and a tiresome subplot.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »