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. Grudge Match
    A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.
  2. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    As history, The Butler’s parade of famous moments and figures is superficial to the point of trivialization, reducing years of turmoil to glib sound bites. But in its square, melodramatic way, the movie has a serious point to make.
  3. Muppets Most Wanted
    The Muppets are creatures of indulgence, and their sense of humor is one of excess. Muppets Most Wanted is a mess of a movie, but anything tidier would be a poor fit.
  4. Inescapable
    It’s a deeply confused movie, sometimes productively so.
  5. She's All That
    You have to give She's All That points for unironically staying true to its genre in its purest form, one Kevin Williamson-like bit of dialogue aside.
  6. I'm So Excited
    After establishing a jaunty tone with its candy-colored, Saul Bass–style opening credits, the film racks up a high strain-to-laugh ratio; there’s a sense Almodóvar can’t quite keep track of all his gags.
  7. Future Weather
    First-time writer-director Jenny Deller has assembled a superb cast, with Madigan in particular making the most of her character’s no-nonsense flintiness.
  8. Kiss of the Damned
    Like a lot of the retro-horror films that have popped up on the art-house and festival circuits over the past several years, Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss Of The Damned is more about mood and texture than plot.
  9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    This might be the best week for The Reluctant Fundamentalist to open or the worst, but the timing doesn’t matter when the powder is damp.
  10. No Place on Earth
    This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.
  11. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    It’s hard not to feel that there’s something missing from Don’t Stop Believin’, though. The movie doesn’t necessarily need to be dark, but Diaz barely touches on the downside of the Internet age — such as the nasty messages Pineda received from racist Journey fans — or how it feels to sing someone else’s words in someone else’s voice, night after night.
  12. The Silence
    From moment to moment, The Silence can feel a bit pokey, as it divides its attention among a host of characters and never builds up much urgency about the fate of the second victim, whose body hasn’t been found.
  13. 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.
  14. Fruitvale Station
    Putting a human face on a public tragedy that already had a human face, Fruitvale Station plays like an uncomplicated eulogy, with little more to say on its subject than “what a shame this bad thing happened.”
  15. The We and the I
    The problem with The We And The I: Gondry is focused more on moments than on the film as a whole.
  16. Unfinished Song
    Unfinished Song is basically two movies inelegantly stuffed into one. Both are about aging — its setbacks and second chances — but only one of them feels like an honest exploration of the topic. The better half of the film is a kinder, gentler cousin to 2012’s "Amour."
  17. Haute Cuisine
    Narrowness of focus keeps the movie from becoming bloated with self-importance, but it also leaves it feeling a little inconsequential.
  18. What Maisie Knew
    If the idea is for the audience to feel similarly yanked around, then What Maisie Knew succeeds wildly, but it fails to bring much insight to what essentially amounts to a massive parental guilt trip.
  19. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    Though it might be unreasonable to expect Karel and Manera to succeed where others have failed, simply punting on the amount of autobiography in Roth’s novels seems like a cheat. Sticking to what’s on the page pays off, especially with regard to Roth’s undervalued late novels, but also means he has them just where he wants them.
  20. Interstellar
    It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.
  21. 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.
  22. Eden
    For as studiously as Griffiths avoids cheap exploitation, the film has an overall structure that isn’t as far removed from a Roger Corman “women in prison” movie as it appears.
  23. Viola
    It’s a pleasant, negligible wisp of a movie, notable mostly for what it suggests of its director’s potential.
  24. My Brother the Devil
    Director Sally El Hosaini, who also wrote the screenplay, proves better at introducing dilemmas for her characters than at resolving them.
  25. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    One of the better aspects of Search is that with Spock out of the action, the rest of the crew gets a chance to fill up the vacuum of his absence, and we get a much stronger sense of Kirk, Uhura, Chekov, McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu as a family unit, and not just a bunch of people who work together.
  26. Venus and Serena
    What comes across most strongly is the genuine, overpowering love these two women have for each other, even when they’re in direct competition.
  27. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    Gregory’s wife, Cindy Kleine, is a skilled filmmaker, but she’s no Louis Malle, and her documentary Andre Gregory: Before And After Dinner is nowhere near as elegant as "My Dinner With Andre" or "Vanya On 42nd Street." Mainly, the movie lacks focus.
  28. Finding Dory
    There’s something a little canned about the film’s emotional arc; the strings show more than they used to on Planet Pixar, even with DeGeneres providing empathy by the gallon.
  29. One Direction: This Is Us
    Mostly, however, This Is Us counts on the musicians to supply the personality—a strategy that makes it feel more like an anonymous mash note than a warts-and-all glimpse behind the curtain. Then again, what warts?
  30. Paradise: Love
    For better and for worse—often simultaneously—few movies have been as unflinching about the ugly, heartbreaking ways human beings can mutually exploit one another for fun and/or profit.
  31. Pompeii
    Fortunately, Pompeii’s second half is tailor-made for Anderson’s established skill set, unfolding over a matter of hours, with many scenes set in and under a gladiatorial amphitheatre that recalls the arenas, subterranean tunnels, and cavernous vessels of Anderson’s best movies.
  32. Short Term 12
    At its best, the film conveys a wealth of compelling details that only an insider, or at least someone who’s done extensive and thorough research, would think worthy of singling out.
  33. Post Tenebras Lux
    The film is never less than fascinating, but it appears to be so intensely personal as to be all but indecipherable to viewers not personally acquainted with the filmmaker, or at least in possession of the press kit.
  34. The Hunt
    None of the complexity of that initial interaction between teacher and lovestruck little girl carries over into the town’s reaction, which closely resembles that of the villagers in "Frankenstein." It’s like watching a deer run from shotguns for two hours — it evokes some sympathy, but that’s about all.
  35. Unmade in China
    As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.
  36. Cutie and the Boxer
    Unfortunately, Cutie And The Boxer feels the need to contextualize — and possibly valorize — the Shinoharas as artists, which detracts from its portrayal of them as a couple.
  37. In a World...
    The movie actually does feature a world — the insular voiceover world — and whenever it strays, it falters.
  38. Europa Report
    As directed by Ecuadorian filmmaker Sebastián Cordero (Chronicles, Rage), Europa Report manages a few striking and intense sequences — most notably, a fatal drift into the endless vacuum of nothingness, filmed from the perspective of the disappearing spaceman.
  39. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6’s considerable graces as an animated film — its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion — are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick.
  40. Augustine
    It’s ironic that a movie about social restrictions is at its best when it restrains itself—that is, when it treats its characters as characters rather than figures, and its plot as drama rather than statement.
  41. Hannah Arendt
    Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.
  42. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    Lian Lunson’s camera allows the music to take center stage via straightforward, graceful compositions—close-ups and medium shots dominate, and edits are kept to a relative minimum—that allow for long, unbroken views of the artists at forceful, mournful work.
  43. Israel: A Home Movie
    Israel’s most interesting — and revealing — footage tends to be the most candid: beach-goers in the ’30s, scenes from family gatherings and celebrations, a coke-fueled celebrity wedding in the ’70s. The commentary gimmick justifies itself in these stretches.
  44. Lone Survivor
    For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.
  45. The Best Man Holiday
    While The Best Man Holiday doesn’t have anything especially original to say on the subject, it’s still refreshing to see a reunion movie set aside the usual themes of aging and reconciliation to focus on how a group deals with death.
  46. Heli
    The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.
  47. Metallica: Through the Never
    This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.
  48. Borgman
    Van Warmerdam keeps things engrossingly ominous throughout, and Bijvoet has a lot of fun with his passive-aggressive creepazoid, but Borgman is both too self-consciously odd and too bluntly punitive to draw real blood.
  49. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    This is a much drier, more reserved affair, though it can be quite powerful on the rare occasions when it allows raw emotion to make its way to the surface.
  50. Dirty Wars
    As a polemic, Dirty Wars is provocative and productively depressing, raising doubts about the effectiveness of military missions that have the potential to create ideological enemies, as well as the degree to which elected officials can—or are willing to—place checks on secret ops. (Obama gets no more points than Bush in any of the matters discussed.)
  51. Wish You Were Here
    A pervasive mood of paranoia and unease overwhelms any immediate understanding of what’s going on. It’s fun to feel lost, at least for a spell.
  52. Blackfish
    Blackfish’s strongest argument against the existence of parks like SeaWorld is how much more gorgeous orcas look in the open ocean than leaping about an oversized swimming pool. And the audience won’t get soaking wet watching them frolic in movies, either.
  53. Kill Your Darlings
    The saving grace of Kill Your Darlings is its sordid romantic angle, a narrative thread that pulls the film away from wink-wink allusions and into more serious emotional territory.
  54. Grabbers
    Once the battle is joined in earnest, what began as sharp-edged parody starts to feel more like a cheap imitation, even if it’s still shot through with a few priceless zingers. The tough thing about genre hybrids is that they have to fulfill both genres, and Grabbers only nails one of them.
  55. The Book of Life
    The characters move around in a thoroughly realized universe full of imaginative and beautifully rendered detail. Too bad the rest of it isn’t more interesting.
  56. Pandora's Promise
    The most counterintuitive enviro-doc of the year, Pandora’s Promise makes the case that nuclear power may be the closest thing Earth has to a sustainable, realistic supply of energy.
  57. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    How to Make Money Selling Drugs is breezy fun, even when it eventually turns openly cynical.
  58. Some Girl(s)
    The title’s parenthetical plural sums up the problem with Some Girl(s): Five slow-cook dialogues that reveal the nice-guy protagonist as a super-tool is four too many.
  59. Stretch
    Puerile, demented, and often funny.
  60. Terminator Genisys
    This new Terminator, the first since the dreadfully dreary and Arnold-less "Salvation," is engineered to feel at once eerily familiar and raise-the-stakes fresh.
  61. The Book Thief
    "Life Is Beautiful" may or may not have set a benchmark for tackiness in Holocaust cinema, but The Book Thief offers a hypothetical way in which the former might have been worse: At least it wasn’t narrated by Death.
  62. Hell Baby
    Functions exactly like a sketch movie, using its meager, essentially irrelevant plot as a clothesline upon which to string a series of self-contained bits. At least half of the bits are pretty damn funny, though, and that’s arguably all that matters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    Terms And Conditions may not be a particularly well-made documentary, but it provides a much-needed wake-up call.
  64. Child's Pose
    Sporting a blonde dye job and a haughty, impervious manner, Gheorghiu makes Cornelia a consistently compelling figure, at once monstrous and pathetic.
  65. SPECTRE
    What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise.
  66. My Little Pony: Equestria Girls
    My Little Pony: Equestria Girls continues the appeal of Friendship Is Magic, as the heartening lessons of Ponyville—on friendship, leadership, morality, etc.—transcend its equine-dominated world.
  67. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Just as it’s impossible to capture in a 600-word review what made Calvin And Hobbes so special, no 100-minute film on the subject can really hope to convey its magic either. But Dear Mr. Watterson does its best, relying on choice excerpts of the work and enthusiastic talking-head interviews.
  68. The Artist and the Model
    A wholly fictional tale, and while it has a few lovely, tender moments, there’s a definite feeling of “been there, drawn that.”
  69. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    No one will ever mistake the Jackass franchise for good cinema, but it never aspired to that. It was always about allowing the gleeful anarchy of the TV series to escape the constraints of television — to be more outrageous, gross, and profane than the FCC would ever allow.
  70. Neighbors
    Trouble is, Neighbors rarely exploits its generational war of attrition for big laughs or true insight. And despite a couple of puerile gags, it often feels as domesticated (and fatigued) as its main characters.
  71. Mother of George
    Mother Of George is rarely boring to look at, but it might still have been better served by a starker, less showy aesthetic.
  72. Muscle Shoals
    Although the intriguingly named first-time director Greg “Freddy” Camalier makes the twice-told tales of the film’s second hour watchable, they end up paling in comparison to its essayistic first half.
  73. Inequality for All
    As a primer on its topic, Inequality For All is informative, plainly argued, and — in some of its more poignant anecdotes — suitably enraging.
  74. Escape from Tomorrow
    The more outlandish the film becomes, especially in its off-the-rails second half, the less crucial its unique setting seems.
  75. Willow Creek
    Goldthwait is just having too much fun with his bantering couple and the eccentric, guitar-playing Bigfoot fanatics they encounter; the climax feels like an afterthought, the obligatory mayhem he had to provide as justification for making a shaggy romantic comedy about the cult of Sasquatch.
  76. The Wind Rises
    While The Wind Rises isn’t top-shelf Miyazaki, it features more than enough gorgeous imagery to make his loss feel acute. Studio Ghibli will surely continue without him, but it’ll never be the same.
  77. The Railway Man
    Along the way, The Railway Man accumulates some power and insight, but it’s also hard to shake the feeling that a complicated first-person account has been given the Weinstein treatment.
  78. Bad Words
    Even when Bad Words is bad in the wrong way, it tends to be bad in the right way, too.
  79. The Double
    Judicious editing helps to maintain the illusion of two actors, though the quick-speaking Wasikowska, as the twins’ flighty, mercurial object of desire, in some ways has the subtlest task—and often steals scenes from her co-star(s).
  80. 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.)
  81. American Promise
    Ultimately, American Promise seems split between a personal perspective and a broader one. It’s a bold experiment that’s also a textbook case of filmmakers being too close to their material.
  82. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is not an entirely coherent film. It is, for the right and wrong reasons, a distinctive and memorable one.
  83. How I Live Now
    Ronan acquits herself nicely. Believable as both a smitten leading lady and a resourceful action heroine, she’s the ideal young-adult starlet — though after this and "The Host," maybe it’s time the actress lent her piercing baby blues to a plain old adult project again.
  84. The Unknown Known
    Tackling another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in The Unknown Known, Morris has finally met his match. The film is illuminating only in its utter lack of illumination — for looking deep into the eyes of someone incapable of letting his guard down and finding, predictably, nothing whatsoever.
  85. On the Job
    It’s a provocative premise, and one that manages to go beyond the usual themes of the crime genre. Too bad, then, it’s forced to share screen time with a humdrum and occasionally heavy-handed police procedural.
  86. Sal
    Despite its modest proportions and chilling finale, Sal is foremost an affectionate tribute, conjuring ample warmth out of relatively little.
  87. Maggie
    The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.
  88. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    While it doesn’t operate at its full potential, Spivet nonetheless offers a bracing risk: a kid adventure with danger alongside its whimsy and sadness alongside its reassurances.
  89. 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.
  90. Hours
    Though a screenwriter by profession, Heisserer proves to be more economical with style than storytelling. Like a few too many contemporary genre films, Hours suffers from flashbackitis, a chronic condition that leads filmmakers to believe that a tragic backstory will add gravitas.
  91. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    Basically, Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? amounts to two men having a mellow discussion about the nature of ideas; it’s formally limited, yet wide-ranging in its material and ambitions. Call it a case of cognitive dissonance.
  92. Some Velvet Morning
    LaBute has always been fond of the last-second rug-pull that re-contextualizes everything, but Some Velvet Morning’s climactic revelation is distinct from those of his previous films in a specific, intriguing way, one that trades brutality for something more poignant. If only the journey to that destination were a bit more flavorful.
  93. Tim's Vermeer
    This is all fascinating for art-history buffs, and while a documentary is the ideal vehicle for illustrating Jenison’s process, Tim’s Vermeer plays more like an extended PBS special than it does a movie.
  94. Weekend of a Champion
    All in all, the original 1972 version of Weekend Of A Champion, which ran a fleet 80 minutes,was probably a thorough if minor pleasure. Unfortunately, that’s not the version now being released. Polanski says that he felt the need to re-edit the picture in order to make its rhythm more palatable to a modern audience.
  95. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    A live-action Hammacher Schlemmer catalog of pseudo-retro novelties, spiced up with self-aware asides and over-the-top violence — slick entertainment, provided the viewer turns off whatever part of their brain is responsible for recognizing and parsing subtext.
  96. White Reindeer
    If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since "Bad Santa," dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills.
  97. Insidious: Chapter 3
    The motif of grief runs throughout Insidious: Chapter 3, which is surprisingly thematically rich for the third installment of a horror franchise. This emotional undercurrent informs the fright scenes, which otherwise lean rather heavily on jump scares.
  98. The Purge: Anarchy
    Retains the original’s premise and politics, but actually puts them to use.
  99. The Boy Next Door
    Plenty of credit is due to Barbara Curry’s deranged script, set in a suburban fantasyland of doofus bullies, junior proms, and middle-class sex fears; it probably isn’t meant to be a Verhoeven satire, but it sure moves like one.
  100. The Raid 2
    The Raid 2 takes a substantially different tack from that of its 2011 predecessor, adding a convoluted plot and only intermittently attending to the sort of acrobatic ass-kicking for which the original became a global smash.
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