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. Pennies from Heaven
    There's something disconcerting and strained about plastic smiles and speed-fueled peppiness of dancers in old musicals, a forced bonhomie that's borderline creepy. Pennies brilliantly exploits that blatantly artificial pep in queasy, disquieting ways.
  2. Sleeping with Other People
    The small miracle of Leslye Headland’s second film as writer-director is not that it sidesteps its influences or shuns its genre. It’s that it somehow makes the lusty undercurrents of its male/female friendship unironically romantic and, at times, unapologetically sexy.
  3. Dreams with Sharp Teeth
    All told, Ellison is a fascinating person to spend 96 minutes with. But you probably shouldn't risk that 97th.
  4. Wanted
    Wanted is a queasily unapologetic power fantasy about becoming a better person through violence.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Enola Holmes 2
    The true joy of both Enola Holmes films is in the actors’ performances and the humanity they bring to the characters.
  6. Adoration
    At a minimum, his new film, Adoration, marks a welcome return to the Egoyan of old, the one who could spin seductive mysteries out of disassembled parts and show how images can be manipulated into comforting lies.
  7. Gaia
    Even when the story takes on biblical overtones, the melodrama never blossoms. And in terms of suspense, Gaia doesn’t so much tighten the screws as endlessly turn them in the wrong direction.
  8. JCVD
    A canny piece of autobiography that looks at the man behind the legend and the legend behind the man.
  9. Cop Land
    Cop Land emerges as a first-rate morality play in the form of an effective, if occasionally unwieldy, crime drama.
  10. Captain Marvel
    It’s comparatively short and fast-paced by modern standards. Unfortunately, it also has a lackluster plot; bog-standard chase scenes and pew-pewing space ships; a notable shortage of interesting characterizations; and a fight scene set to No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” that is nowhere as awesome or as silly as it should be.
  11. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    If nothing else, Leth shows how wrung-out and careless everyone gets amid constant bloodshed. "We don't need peace," one says. "We need school for our kids. Food. Sleep."
  12. Dolphin Tale
    Dolphin Tale is as casual as a pleasant afternoon nap and about as substantive.
  13. A Better Life
    A Better Life leans too heavily on sad music, broad symbols, and weighty speeches to tell its story; it's more effective when it lets images speak in place of words.
  14. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Mol nails it, in a performance that should earn her a comeback on a Heath Ledger-like scale.
  15. Rental Family
    Fraser walks through this aggressively sappy drama with the aura of simple goodness that has served him well. But such concentrated radiance starts to feel like a denial of the painful reality Rental Family ignores. The movie wants to give you a hug, but you may be tempted to slap it across the face.
  16. Unstoppable
    It’s commendable to avoid further clichés with regard to the portrayal of physical difference in film, but Unstoppable fails to pin down what exactly should take their place.
  17. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    Most of the film isn't as willing to reach out to viewers, and most won't be willing to do all the work in order to connect with it.
  18. undertone
    As a theatrical experience, it’s lots of fun, making clever use of proven techniques that build tension before releasing it with exploding light bulbs and ghostly figures appearing in the corner of the frame.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Clockwatchers
    The film's message, that it's impossible to trust in an environment that does not reward loyalty, is as dark as the message sent by the far more acidic In The Company Of Men. Though Clockwatchers doesn't feature the flashy language of that brutal film, it still reveals a similarly astute assessment of modern inter-office politics and workplace alienation.
  20. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    It's as notable for what it isn't as for what it is, but in a field full of loud, obnoxious fare, its easygoing affability qualifies as a welcome change of pace.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Innkeepers
    The two amateur ghost-hunters hope to document evidence of the spirit of Madeline O'Malley in their last days of employment, though they get far more than they bargained for when she starts actually showing up.
  22. Sister Helen
    An unforgettable tribute to a remarkable life, Sister Helen is inspirational in a way a film about a more conventionally pious religious figure could never be. Travis seems to be the antithesis of a cardboard saint.
  23. Northfork
    With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie.
  24. One Hour Photo
    Has a clean, antiseptic chilliness reminiscent of a Kubrick film. But too often, the director's stark visuals underline the naked simplicity of his story and make his picture of the suburbs seem hopelessly generic.
  25. Father and Son
    Less a story than a situation, the film contends with a difficult transitional period in the lives of its title characters, who face the growing necessity of getting some distance from each other.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    Adds up to another prefab youth-culture event and a mediocre movie.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Confess, Fletch
    As a return of a big-screen favorite, it’s perhaps a bit too slipshod for its own good, lacking the fun chase scenes and romantic interludes that helped make the first film such a beloved favorite.
  28. Quartet
    Quartet falls into the common actor-turned-director trap of valuing the performances of fellow actors over all other aesthetic concerns.
  29. Prometheus
    Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.
  30. Orgasm Inc.
    Broadly speaking, Canner hails from the Michael Moore school of first-person editorializing, but Orgasm Inc. isn't given to vanity or cheap shots.
  31. Paper Clips
    The story they get may be heartfelt and inspiring, but all that powerful sentiment doesn't make it any more complete.
  32. Fast Color
    While the story may be flimsy in places, the performances are anything but.
  33. Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
    The film is as low-key and internal as the meditation it touts, and nearly as uplifting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Goon
    Where George Roy Hill's "Slap Shot," the former reigning champ of the narrow hockey-film canon, descends into anticlimactic late-game zaniness, Goon fully commits to its theme of violence for violence's sake. It's "Paper Lion" by way of Sam Peckinpah.
  35. Mimosas
    Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation.
  36. Princesas
    It's well-acted and strikingly shot, and its depiction of contemporary Spanish squalor is hard to forget, but it never quite reconciles its high-drama situations with its low-key approach. It whispers when it really wants to shout.
  37. Always Be My Maybe
    Rom-coms have the tricky task of straddling the “rom” and the “com” part, with a lot of star-steered vehicles leaning toward the former. Always Be My Maybe thankfully focuses on the latter; there are a lot of laughs packed into its friendship-becomes-something-more story.
  38. The Lost Bus
    Without that grandeur—that Hollywood-sheen take on storybook resilience—the film’s uneven application of sad-sack strife might extinguish McConaughey’s guiding performance. But Greengrass’ throwback disaster-movie efforts, plus a healthy fury induced by our harmful ecological footprint, keeps feeding this fire.
  39. The Party
    Veteran slapstick fans may get a kick out of the free-form antics, and the party's chaotic ending is suitably memorable, but empathetic viewers are likely to be as uncomfortable with Sellers' improv as the partygoers he leads into havoc.
  40. Teenage
    Like adolescence itself, Teenage is educational, scattered, and over much too quickly.
  41. The Patience Stone
    There’s only so much anyone can do with a conceit that amounts to a movie-length speech delivered to a coma patient.
  42. Renoir
    Ace cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee (In The Mood For Love) does a superb job of creating an Impressionist look, especially when shooting exteriors, but the film’s loveliness is skin-deep.
  43. The Other Lamb
    Set in some indeterminate time and place rarely betrayed by modern technology or dress, The Other Lamb mostly operates in the realm of allegory.
  44. Big Bad Wolves
    Believe it or not, some of this mayhem—muscularly orchestrated by directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, who made 2010’s "Rabies" — does provoke laughter.
  45. The Pursuit of Happyness
    The Pursuit Of Happyness represents a belated and calculated attempt to scrape off the glossy movie-star veneer and connect with the everyday struggles of living hand-to-mouth in the big city, but it's too late. Watching his (Smith's) performance here is a little like imagining an American version of "Rosetta" starring Julia Roberts.
  46. In Praise of Love
    Its gloomy speculations on the ephemeral nature of art are paradoxically not easily forgotten, and Godard's daring again pays off, or at least comes close enough to get credit for trying.
  47. Eight Below
    Longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Frank Marshall is smart enough to know his core audience of kiddies came to see the dogs, who take center stage in many of the film's best sequences, especially a jolting leopard-seal attack that's as terrifying as anything in "Jurassic Park."
  48. The Bad Guys 2
    What The Bad Guys 2 has to say about turning over a new leaf isn’t profound, but it’s effective nonetheless, especially when accentuated by so many goofy laughs and sticky-fingered thrills.
  49. Bombshell
    The film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold, hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.
  50. Belle
    This effectively turns a story about race into a story about rank.
  51. Suspiria
    As bold (and potentially alienating) as Guadagnino’s take on Suspiria might be, it’s also extremely precise, and he places each sweeping caftan and gurgling sound effect with the focus and intention of an haute cuisine chef fussing over garnishes. Prepare your palate accordingly.
  52. 1408
    In the end, 1408 amounts to little more than a radical shock-therapy session for a man still finding his way after the loss of his daughter.
  53. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    Schnack's sprightly, engaging documentary Gigantic takes a leisurely stroll through TMBG's career, mixing energetic live performances with smartly chosen clips, a few quirky detours, and compelling interviews with the likes of Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, and Ira Glass.
  54. Mondays in the Sun
    Fortunately, no one seems to have clued Bardem in on the game plan, and the fierceness and complexity he brings to his role nearly saves Mondays In The Sun.
  55. Blackboards
    Episodic and minimalist to a fault, Blackboards makes its ironic point about education, then makes it again a few times over for good measure, rarely expanding beyond its narrow seriocomic agenda.
  56. Enigma
    Achieves a dullness that defies its pedigree and its story's potential.
  57. The Sixth Sense
    Teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone.
  58. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    It boldly subverts stereotypes and challenges conventional wisdom by presenting affable Korean and Indian antiheroes who are just as sex-crazed, irresponsible, mischief-prone, and chemically altered as their white counterparts.
  59. Between Us
    Between Us is most compelling when it’s putting Feldman and Thirlby one on one, to talk about or around what ails their characters, in revealing tête-à-têtes or confessional voice-over.
  60. Pizza Movie
    There is room for vulgarity, horror, absurdity, and a whole lot of heart in Pizza Movie, though just barely, like attempting to host a rager in a 12′ x 14′ dorm room. The resulting stoner comedy is awkward, weird, and doesn’t quite work, but it just might become a core memory for those among the couchlocked who have yet to experience a proper house party.
  61. Swiss Army Man
    The easy elevator pitch on Swiss Army Man is that it’s "Cast Away" meets "Weekend At Bernie’s." Weird as that movie may sound, it’s not nearly as weird as the one actually cooked up by “Daniels,” a.k.a. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the branded directing duo making its feature-length debut.
  62. Fright Night
    The film's greatest pleasures come from Noxon's script - which puts the sexual chaos created by Farrell's attractive bloodsucker front and center - and from the performances.
  63. XX
    The four participating directors were all given complete creative freedom for their films, limited only by budget and running time. The fact that three of them have to do with motherhood is a coincidence, a thematic near-miss that’s emblematic of the film’s main disjointed weakness.
  64. Keep an Eye Out
    Like a Saturday Night Live sketch that airs in the show’s final 10 minutes, Quentin Dupieux’s Keep An Eye Out tosses around ridiculous comic ideas as if secure in the knowledge that few people will ever see them.
  65. Ready or Not
    The charitable reading is that Ready Or Not understands how moneyed entitlement knows no gender — that the only way to break the arbitrary yet destructive grasp of the super-rich is to chop it off, or possibly light it on fire. So no, not a subtle movie. But a fairly satisfying one.
  66. Che
    In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.
  67. Wolke Neun
    Ultimately though, apart from the ages of the protagonists, Cloud 9 is a standard-issue infidelity story.
  68. Youth
    Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it’s no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you’re on Sorrentino’s wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, “oppressive” might be a better word.
  69. 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.
  70. Look Both Ways
    After the first hour, it's clear the movie isn't going to offer any surprising new insights into messed-up modernity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Toys in the Attic
    Toys In The Attic is its own dark creation, filled with imagery reminiscent of Tim Burton in his prime as well as the odd Cold War metaphor.
  72. Continental Divide
    Continental Divide should have marked Belushi's tentative, encouraging first step towards quirkier, more substantive roles and films. Instead it, and Neighbors were more of a dead end.
  73. Nasty Baby
    At long last, Nasty Baby decides what it wants to be: a complete mess.
  74. Born to be Blue
    While there isn’t much to distinguish Born To Be Blue’s dramatic stakes from any number of stories about self-destructive, self-centered artists (or “movies about jazz musicians,” as they’re more commonly known), the film is given a spark of life by the inspired casting of Ethan Hawke.
  75. Come Early Morning
    "Chasing Amy" star Joey Lauren Adams makes a competent, tender writing and directing debut with Come Early Morning, but the film is still entirely in Judd's hands.
  76. Before We Vanish
    It’s minor pleasures from a major talent: B-movie fun in the key of Kurosawa.
  77. The Fury
    The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.
  78. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    It’s easy to see why Demme admires the man, but amiability doesn’t make for a great documentary subject. If anything, it tends to be something of a drawback, offering only warm fuzzies.
  79. Elvis
    Unfortunately, what audiences get from Luhrmann is simply excessive: his fast-cutting super-montage style overpowers the subject matter, and the result is an impressionistic, jumbled highlight reel of Presley’s many accomplishments, despite vivid recreations by actor Austin Butler as The King.
  80. Gypsy
    This isn't a film about abstract social ills, it's about specific people in a specific place, and how they get disturbingly comfortable with theft and violence as a way of life.
  81. Holy Hell
    Holy Hell has an undeniable car-crash fascination, especially once Allen reveals just how deeply this particular phony guru abused the trust of his faithfuls.
  82. Kaboom
    Kaboom is pure fantasy in every sense of the word: It's a riff on sexy, sassy teen movies and conspiracy thrillers that at times seems to exist only so Araki can get his beautiful young cast to strip off their clothes and pair off in every conceivable combination, just as he used to do in his earlier, more scandalous films.
  83. Identity
    Simultaneously a contrived piece of hokum and an absorbing, old-fashioned mystery.
  84. Intermission
    Like many stylish, whipcrack American and British indies made in the wake of Quentin Tarantino and "Trainspotting," the film gets off on the same anything-can-happen storytelling brio, which at least keeps things lively. But without any resonant characters or ideas, it's all empty calories.
  85. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Posed somewhere between a fairy tale and harsh reality, the film pulls off a daring feat by turning Blancan into an almost abstract monster as a way of getting into the deeply unhealthy situation that created him.
  86. Team America: World Police
    Years from now, Team America will better convey the political character of 2004 than a stack of Time magazines. Staying funny helps even more.
  87. Christmas in Connecticut
    A thoroughly wacky 1945 screwball comedy that also doubles as a fascinatingly subversive commentary on conventional gender roles. It’s a bit of a hidden gem in the Christmas canon.
  88. Chinese Puzzle
    It’s the best of the trilogy, though that’s not saying much; Xavier and his gal pals have mellowed somewhat with age, and Klapisch seems much more energized by New York than he was by his previous locales.
  89. Napoleon
    Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    You Kill Me
    The main pleasure lies in watching a cast filled with fine character actors like Kingsley, Farina, Hall, and Bill Pullman work their way around the salty, noir-inflected dialogue. It's just unfortunate that those lines add up to such piffle.
  91. Living Out Loud
    LaGravenese lets real-life messiness keep it off a straight track, coming up with an unexpected and touching portrait of platonic friendship.
  92. Killing Them Softly
    For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.
  93. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing is less a fully formed satire than a clever idea stuck in first draft and stretched uncomfortably to feature length.
  94. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    This kitschy, weirdo movie has such a bizarre clarity of vision about what it wants to do that a few biffed jokes are almost part of its charm, like its sketch-comedy accents and intentional defiance of logic.
  95. Brideshead Revisited
    It's rare to find a work that explores issues of faith without veering into religious fundamentalism or militant atheism, which is reason enough to revisit Brideshead one more time.
  96. Fifty-Fifty
    Though it's equally concerned with sensitive young criminals in squalid communities, Schizo is no "City Of God," for better and worse.
  97. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    Though it doesn't rise above the cut-and-paste aesthetic of other making-of documentaries, The Siberian Mammoth assembles many members of the disparate Cuban cast and crew, and unearths some rare production photos and footage.
  98. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.
  99. Cloverfield
    It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.
  100. Miles Ahead
    So give Don Cheadle credit for innovation, at least: His Miles Davis biopic (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in), Miles Ahead, tackles the problem head-on… by inventing cinematic things for Davis to do when he’s not playing music, including ludicrous car chases and gunfights.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »