The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,419 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: 5,574 out of 10419
  2. Mixed: 3,737 out of 10419
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10419
10419 movie reviews
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  1. Thor: The Dark World
    Forget the fairy-tale romance between Jane and her hammer-wielding hunk. The real emotional center of the Thor series is this sibling rivalry, more compelling than any climactic battle royale or winking teaser for the next chapter.
  2. The Tree
    Yes, the idea that the tree/father is literally tearing this family apart is way too blunt, but Gainsbourg and Davies sell it by playing the scenes naturally, with minimal histrionics.
  3. Point Blank
    The actors' charisma is a draw, but mostly, the movie relies on Pavlovian reaction to the genre: The audience has its designated place as surely as any element in Cavayé's relentless machine.
  4. Sleeping Beauty
    Emily Browning gives a game performance as the unconscious sex object, but Leigh doesn't provide her with a lot to work with in terms of motivation, dimension, or any kind of rich interior life.
  5. Another Happy Day
    Levinson stuffs the movie with so many emotional cross-currents and minor revelations that it's hard to keep them all straight, but the movie works the audience's nerves with enough determination to get under the skin and stay there, a sensation that comes awfully close to an earned emotional response.
  6. Carnage
    By the time everyone in Carnage has revealed themselves, we're left not with flawed human beings, but with monsters of banality whose company represents a brutal form of punishment in itself.
  7. Turbo
    For all its chronic familiarity, the movie has its minor pleasures, many of them visual. Though at this point it's basically a given that a new studio-animated movie will look good, Turbo often looks downright exceptional.
  8. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    There aren’t just more dragons, but more characters, more plot, more everything. The trade-off is that the charm of the original gets a little lost, a casualty of rapid-franchise expansion.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Good Neighbors
    That slow reveal is Good Neighbors' finest quality: It finds tension in stilted hallway interactions, unwanted dinner parties, and complaints about the wanderings of pets.
    • 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.
  11. The Way
    Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.
  12. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    Genial and pleasant to a fault, the film could benefit from a little more personality.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    French drama Special Treatment draws a brazenly provocative parallel between the professions of psychiatry and prostitution.
  14. Bullet to the Head
    The X-factors tend to be the script and the performances, and those elements largely betray him in Bullet To The Head, which is a perfunctory exercise whenever Hill isn't busying himself with gun battles, ax fights, and other mano-a-mano confrontations. He can only do so much.
  15. Le Havre
    Kaurismäki has a narrow vision, disarming and sweet, yet utterly predictable, and there's little distinction between the films he's directing today and the films he directed 30 years ago. They have the wrong kind of timelessness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    It's a ride worth more for its journey than its destination. Resurrect Dead does offer a convincing but anticlimactic "solution" to the Toynbee tiles, but the elements along the way are what make it an engaging film.
  17. Pariah
    There are times when even its subtleties seem predictable, when it questions dramatic conventions that indie films have already questioned, like the temperament of movie-parents whose children fear coming out of the closet. Yet the film has an abiding sweetness that's ultimately irresistible.
  18. Les Miserables
    The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.
  19. Anna Karenina
    If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    The Man Nobody Knew is far better with matters of the public record than with matters of the home, which may sum up its subject better than any talking-head interview.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    American Teacher
    The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it's impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.
  22. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    Made with affection and access but not enough structure.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Klitschko
    The film acknowledges that the only great opponents left for the pair to face may be each other, but the question of whether they'd ever fight is rendered moot by the time it's actually addressed at the end.
  24. Pina
    It's also representative of Pina's major flaw: the inability of artists to get out of their own way.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    5 Star Day is a middling indie, but it offers evidence of how far a synthetic setup can get just by allowing characters to react and reflect.
  26. The Look
    There are very few light, casual moments in The Look; even when Rampling pops into a deli to buy a sandwich, we hear her in voiceover talking about her demons. An hour and a half of this is frankly exhausting.
  27. Ender's Game
    Though it can’t overcome the source material’s problematic themes — namely, Card’s intentionalist morality, which prizes a character’s ideals over their actions — or its all-too-convenient characterizations, the film manages a sustained sense of momentum and tone that is rare for a contemporary, big-budget movie.
  28. RED 2
    Like its predecessor, it’s a one-joke movie; the difference is that this time around, the joke is better.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Knuckle
    It's an involving but frustrating peek into a private culture involved in a self-defeating cycle of violence and mythologizing.
  30. Addiction Incorporated
    The heart of Addiction Incorporated is what happened after DeNoble was canned and later emerged as a key witness in news reports, courtrooms, and Congressional subcommittees. Bound by a non-disclosure agreement, DeNoble operated like a character in a real-life John Grisham thriller.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Perfect Sense
    The perseverance of McGregor's restaurant, in spite of its apparent inutility in the changing world, ends up having more poignancy than his parting and reuniting with the glowering Green.
  32. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Just as Marston's scrupulous attention to local custom and devotion to social realism recall the work of John Sayles (Lone Star), his occasionally enervating style also recalls Sayles at his worst.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lawless
    A thoroughly familiar-but flavorful and rousing-shoot-'em-up set among Prohibition bootleggers.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lads & Jockeys
    By giving the boys onscreen room to be goofy and immature, Marquet makes the film something warmer than a formal study in discipline and being made to grow up before their time.
    • 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.
  36. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.
  37. Detachment
    For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
  38. Paranormal Activity 4
    The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
  39. The Island President
    The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.
  40. 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.
  41. Keyhole
    Keyhole's flashes of actual B-movie coherence are enough to make longtime Maddin-watchers wonder if he could've played this material straighter, with more of a plot and fewer reveries.
  42. Peeples
    If Peeples had more bite, it might pass for an underhanded critique of its producer’s work.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Putin's Kiss maintains a wry distance that unnecessarily trivializes the shocking act that finalizes Drokova's parting of ways with Nashi, but the melancholy of her disillusionment remains. Underneath all this heated discussion of democracy in Russia, it becomes clear, there may not be much actual democracy at work.
  44. Cirkus Columbia
    Like its characters, who can't believe their stable nation could be threatened by ethnic unrest, Cirkus Columbia looks to the past, evoking the kind of unreal, vaguely politicized tales that were once the lifeblood of arthouse cinema.
  45. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    For a documentary supposedly focused on fans-it's right there in the title-Comic-Con Episode IV gets awfully distracted by the star power of professional smartasses like Smith and industry titans like Lee.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Free Men
    It's an uplifting tale, if one that gets to a slow start and muddles through scenes of exposition for longer than seems necessary before finally getting to its sequences of action and suspense.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Elles
    Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger.
  48. Payback
    Payback attempts something impressively difficult, but it succeeds primarily in its individual moments.
  49. Delicacy
    The movie is caught between the poignancy of the everyday and the exaggerations of fiction.
  50. Bel Ami
    This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.
  51. Here
    There's a weary soul to HERE, embodied by Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal as two loners who meet in a café and impulsively decide to travel the country together, prompted more by mutual intuition than any meaningful exchange of words.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Late Bloomers
    As a portrait of aging, Late Bloomers is a little too easy, but its cast makes it worth a look, even so.
  53. Noah
    The result is a monolithic slab of Biblical fan fiction, at once deeply serious and seriously silly. It’s a mess, but at least it’s the mess its creators wanted.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Citizen Gangster
    It feels like Morlando is juggling two movies at a time. And only one of them works really well-the one about a disaffected workaday vet avenging himself on the banality of his daily grind.
  55. Death of a Superhero
    Fitzgibbon and McCarten have succeeded in integrating cancer into a slick teen love story, but in the process, they've robbed it of some of its necessary pain.
  56. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.
  57. This Is the End
    Funny is funny, and it would be truly dishonest to deny the big laughs—the spikes of gut-busting inspiration—that the film sporadically delivers.
  58. A Bag of Hammers
    The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.
  59. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.
  60. Union Square
    There isn't much to Union Square, but the movie does understand how people want to love their families on their own terms, forgetting that their families may be the only ones who really know who they are.
  61. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Yet for all the heart and soul the actor pours into his role, watching Dawn still feels a bit like seeing massive, expensive wheels spin in place.
  62. Paul Williams Still Alive
    The footage in Paul Williams Still Alive - old and new - is highly entertaining, even moving. But it's as though Kessler recorded the DVD commentary track first, then made the movie.
  63. Stella Days
    Stella Days' strongest asset is Sheen.
  64. Hello I Must Be Going
    The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.
  65. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Anyone who doesn't already know and care a little about these characters might find the movie a bit thin.
  66. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Its insights are modest, but modesty is a virtue for a low-key comedy this doggedly unpretentious.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Alps
    Lanthimos' skill at orchestrating these tense, creepy, shockingly funny setpieces is just as evident here as it was in "Dogtooth," but too much of Alps is left vague.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    With its slim runtime, the film feels like it should have gone broader or closed in and been just a portrait of the talented, goofy Sano.
  69. Need For Speed
    Need For Speed’s dialogue-centric scenes are often clunky, and its comic relief is at times embarrassingly unfunny, but whenever Waugh shifts his focus to figuring out how to best convey an ingenious practical stunt with the camera, the movie comes alive.
  70. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    It’s good for business but bad for drama, and the inelegantly titled Mockingjay—Part 1 suffers from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. It doesn’t build to an ending so much as just eventually grind to a halt, like a video game demanding more quarters to continue playing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    The true magnitude of this band no longer existing is felt most strongly in these moments, when Shut Up is at its most uplifting and danceable. It's a party Shut Up And Play The Hits decides to leave far too often.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Awakening
    The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.
  73. Rush
    Rush, in other words, is a foursquare sportsmanship movie, offering little in the way of surprises but plenty of earnest, satisfying thrills.
  74. About Time
    The movie is written and directed by the British filmmaker Richard Curtis, who specializes in fantasies — the dozen intersecting rom-coms of "Love Actually" the fairy-tale courtship of "Notting Hill", the endless receptions of "Four Weddings And A Funeral." At a glance, About Time appears to be of a piece with those crowd-pleasers.
  75. 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    10 Years
    10 Years does nothing noteworthy, but it does it well, thanks to its ensemble cast.
  77. Vamps
    Heckerling also struggles woefully with special effects, but even then, she's capable of pulling off a beautiful sequence where Silverstone remembers a specific city block as it's evolved through the ages. Her shambling little comedy never finds a consistent groove, but it's eager to please, and has the ancient gags to do it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Chasing Ice
    As someone who admits to having harbored skepticism about climate change himself, two decades ago, Balog is trying to present an image-based response to all the denialists featured in the news montages scattered through the film, people who scoff at the numbers and lack of scientific consensus on whether global warming exists, and what it entails.
  79. The To Do List
    The film’s as clumsy yet earnest as a nervous first-timer, groping gracelessly in the dark for ecstasy and meaning.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Divergent
    The ultimate irony is that a series predicated on diverse individuals rising up against totalitarian regiment falls so completely in lock step with all other post-apocalyptic young-adult franchises.
  81. 17 Girls
    The insights into girlhood in the opening are coming from the viewpoint of adults, while in a story this strange-but-true, it'd be more helpful to see these kids as they see themselves.
  82. Snitch
    Snitch toys with moral ambiguity and fatalism before losing its nerve and delivering the action-movie goods in a climax that hews closer to fantasy than the keenly observed realism of the film’s solid center.
  83. A Whisper to a Roar
    The film makes a convincing argument that, in spite of some recent setbacks, movements for democratic change are alive and well, but it glosses over the problems that arise once the people have to implement the power they've seized.
  84. Prisoners
    It makes for a compelling viewing experience, thanks to Villeneuve’s formal chops and the uniformly strong performances.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Brooklyn Castle
    Indifferently structured but centered around charming characters, the documentary starts off as a chronicle of the scholastic chess year, but becomes a compelling plea on behalf of the importance of afterschool programs.
  86. The Family
    It’s at its best in the brief moments when Besson plunges into complete, comic-book-panel unreality, as in an early shot where a hitman in a black trenchcoat, black trilby hat, and black gloves emerges silencer-first from behind a wall of smoke. It's the rare occasion when you might wish a director were more over-indulgent.
  87. Oldboy
    For better and worse, Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair.
  88. California Solo
    California Solo doesn't have much story. All of the details above are established in the first five minutes, then the movie becomes a character sketch, carried by its wealth of detail and a fantastic Carlyle performance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Dragon
    Yen's strengths have never been in his expressiveness, and Dragon plods when it centers on dramatic struggles, then leaps exhilaratingly to life whenever the fighting begins.
  90. Ginger & Rosa
    The movie can be affecting at times, and might’ve been even more so if Potter hadn’t made its theme so explicit, via heavy “this is the point” speeches delivered during what’s otherwise a powerful climax.
  91. Buffalo Girls
    Buffalo Girls' main problem is that Kellstein can't seem to settle on whether he's making an inspirational sports movie (complete with triumphant music on the soundtrack during the fights), or an exposé of child exploitation among the Thai underclass.
  92. Like Someone in Love
    Is this the stuff of gripping drama? Not at all. But like nearly all of Kiarostami’s films, it’s the stuff of good conversation.
  93. I Am Not a Hipster
    It succeeds at times in spite of itself, though it ultimately adds up to less than the sum of its sometimes impressive, sometimes insufferable parts.
  94. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    All of McKay’s movies improve on repeat viewings, as they become familiar and meme worthy. If Anchorman 2 seems hit-and-miss now, there’s a significant chance that it will get funnier over the long haul.
  95. Wrong
    It’s a Dada daydream of a movie, but no one who sits through it can complain that they weren’t warned up front.
  96. Tomorrowland
    Bird stages the PG mayhem with his usual grasp of dimension and space, his gift for action that’s timed like physical comedy. He keeps the whole thing moving, even when it begins to feel bogged down by preachiness and sci-fi exposition.
  97. 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.
  98. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World, a goofy and fitfully entertaining summer movie, understands and even winks at its place in the pecking order of blockbuster sequels.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Supporting Characters
    Supporting Characters tends to meander pleasantly from scene to scene, relying on the testy rapport between its two lead actors.
  100. Yossi
    In its superior first half, Yossi sustains a mood of wistful longing and inexorable loneliness as its directionless protagonist lumbers through a grey, joyless existence, but the film threatens to turn into a gay Israeli version of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" once Knoller finds his impossibly gorgeous, persistent dream man.
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