The A.V. Club's Scores

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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
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  1. 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.
  2. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Video veteran Sanaa Hamri directs with smooth competence, and the leads all go pleasantly through their paces, but there are no surprises.
  3. Chéri
    The film is a sumptuous, handsome portrait of a woman poised fearfully on the brink of decline, yet too proud to grab at rescue.
  4. Friends with Benefits
    Romantic comedies - and this is one, in spite of its phony irreverence - turn largely on star power, and theirs is transcendent, whether they're casually trading one-liners on the streets or doing running commentary on their sexual escapades. They'd have been better off staying in bed.
  5. Sade
    In keeping with his concept that the mind and the body are inseparable, Sade builds to an extraordinarily powerful centerpiece when the two come together, fusing fear and desire, pleasure and pain, innocence and enlightenment.
  6. The Blood of My Brother
    Whatever The Blood Of My Brother's journalistic weaknesses, it's valuable as yet another view of what may end up being the most thoroughly documented war ever waged.
  7. Banana Split
    The problem with Banana Split isn’t the surface phoniness or lazy comedy but the fact that the movie doesn’t offer any insight into its ostensible subjects—among them break-ups, female friendship, and teenage jealousy
  8. The Last Exorcism
    Aided by strong performances from Bell and Fabian, Stamm deftly plays with the boundary of fact and fiction, though his game might have worked better with a little more grounding in verisimilitude.
  9. Citizen Ruth
    A deft, three-dimensional performance from Dern, playing an almost entirely unlikable character, aids incalculably in exposing what happens when political factions lose touch with the realities of the issues for which they claim to provide answers.
  10. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    Galifianakis' magnetic performance suggests murky psychological depths the film doesn't have the substance to plumb.
  11. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.
  12. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two does a nice job getting way behind the scenes of a non-stop, sometimes grotesquely glamorous life.
  13. Reel Paradise
    The Piersons are warm, funny people, and most of Reel Paradise shows them comically bickering with each other and laughing at the absurdity of the whole project.
  14. loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies
    The documentary dashes any lingering hope that Pixies would ever record a new album, even though it makes no definitive statement to that effect.
  15. Human Capital
    It’s the kind of sprawling, everything’s-connected moral tapestry that reached its nadir with Paul Haggis’ inexplicable Oscar winner Crash—not remotely as dire, thankfully, but with many of the same fundamental flaws.
  16. Howl
    The trouble with the film is that it often feels too respectable for its own good, preserving the facts of yesterday's rebellion while leaving it firmly in the past. Happily, Ginsberg's words still cut recklessly through the years.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Whitewash
    A more dynamic character or script would have gone a long way to help audiences find their way through this storm.
  18. The Hunter
    The movie fumbles badly when it's time to turn those actions toward resolution, forcing an ending that seems both arbitrary and cruel. At under 80 minutes, the movie is terse enough that it could do without trumped-up events.
  19. The Eyes of My Mother
    The Eyes Of My Mother is a grotesque, depraved genre movie with the skin of an art film pulled tightly over its bones. If Ingmar Bergman had helmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.
  20. 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.
  21. Hot Tub Time Machine
    Engaging enough, but its characters’ path to redemption would be more satisfying if it weren’t greased with authentically ’80s-style casual sexism, gay panic, and frat-comedy clichés.
  22. Noble
    The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.
  23. Revolution #9
    Though woefully oblique and underdeveloped, writer-director Tim McCann's Revolution #9 attempts the difficult task of burrowing into the fractured mind of a modern man who loses his grip on reality.
  24. The Komediant
    The Komediant's most deeply moving aspect lies in its misty memories of the glory years of the Yiddish theater, when an ethnic group rallied against its attempted decimation by forming allegiances and openly celebrating its culture.
  25. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    In McKay, Ferrell has found an unusually simpatico collaborator for the type of humor that's made him a comedy force: outsized, unexpectedly sweet, and unrelenting.
  26. Two Brothers
    The tiger footage in Two Brothers would make for a solid nature documentary, but because the animals are shoehorned into a narrative, they've been anthropomorphized to death.
  27. Road to Singapore
    Road To Singapore isn’t as funny or as cleverly self-referential as what would come later; it became a hit largely due to the fast-paced, partially ad-libbed repartee between the two stars, which was unlike anything that movie audiences had heard before.
  28. Changeling
    Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along.
  29. Simon Killer
    Simon Killer is a sensual experience that asks the audience to question what it sees and hears. In that way, Campos takes all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation, and shows how they can shade into madness.
  30. Knock at the Cabin
    Knock At The Cabin is a harrowing and intense home invasion thriller that feels like a step in the right direction for Shyamalan.
  31. The Summit
    The proceedings somewhat sidestep the issues of risk and responsibility—including the raised, but never fully tackled, question of whether others should have gone back to try to save their fellow, trapped compatriots—that seem most in need of investigation.
  32. Invisible
    Invisible is undeniably compelling, as Bojanov visits and revisits these people over a period of years.
    • 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.
  34. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    If there’s anything tying together the detours and roadblocks that comprise Big Holiday, it’s the film’s big, bold, screaming celebration of human difference.
  35. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    Three Of Hearts seems like an unwieldy mating of two films: one a glossy documentary about the fictionalized perfection that three lovers and a director wanted to believe in, and another about the all-too-human truth.
  36. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Messy and muddled in its presentation and messaging, Kiss Of The Spider Woman needs more than just compelling performances to raise this project to the level of esteem granted to its predecessors from 30 and 40-odd years ago.
  37. Rob the Mob
    The scowling Pitt proves no match for the Tony-winning Arianda, whose brassy, thick-accented positivity could probably cut down the gangsters as mercilessly as any gun. While the pair is robbing the mob, she’s stealing the movie.
  38. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    Derives almost all of its very modest power from its relationship with its better half. McAvoy, turning up the broody charm, isn’t to blame. The trouble is that Conor’s drama, set against the backdrop of a lonely Manhattan, looks even more generic than Eleanor’s.
  39. Rocky Balboa
    Watching Rocky Balboa go through the usual paces does trigger a few helpless waves of nostalgia, especially once Bill Conti's famed score kicks in and Stallone sticks it to a few sides of beef. But audiences needn't be responsible for helping an over-the-hill actor through his midlife crisis.
  40. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    Verbinski knows when to break out the stunning action sequences and when to let his characters dominate the film, and he handles both modes expertly.
  41. Jimmy's Hall
    Jimmy’s Hall is one of [Loach's] clunkers: Footloose set in 1930s Ireland, basically, with jazz in lieu of Kenny Loggins.
  42. Lunacy
    Svankmajer's nihilistic story isn't for everyone, but he skillfully manages its disturbing execution in ways no one else could, and he brings it across in a darkly comedic way that encourages simultaneous laughter, horror, and thought. If that isn't art, what is?
  43. David Hockney: The Colors of Music
    A pleasant but fairly dull documentary that's long on affability and taste, but short on human drama and compelling conflict.
  44. 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.
  45. V/H/S/94
    File 94 somewhere between the inspired, crowd-pleasing bloodshed of the second film and the series-low ineptitude of the third, V/H/S Viral.
  46. The Grace Lee Project
    She acts amazed by her own work, in hopes that we'll be too. To help the matter along, Lee underscores the action with a Mickey Mouse score, cutesy animation, and a relentlessly chipper tone. Her technique is pretty much everything that's wrong with documentary filmmaking today.
  47. Green Zone
    For the first time in Greengrass' career, the politics too often get ahead of the action, so points that might have been subtly embedded in the story are instead laid out like a left-wing editorial.
  48. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    Comparisons to "Taxi Driver" are unavoidable and mostly unflattering to Mueller's film, but Assassination engages more directly with the political fissures of the time, which deeply divided the nation.
  49. King of California
    With Douglas, the film's shambling charms slowly catch hold, thanks mainly to his personal magnetism.
  50. Damsel
    With Damsel, the Zellners have made a kind of artisanal thrift-shop approximation of a Western.
  51. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    A well-chosen cast helps make the wild notions convincing, and director Chris Columbus presents it all in an attractive, thoroughly watchable package. But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form.
  52. Master Gardener
    While it doesn’t fare well in comparison, Master Gardener still has enough unique characteristics and performances to stand out as a fine film. It’s just the least successful in this particular trilogy.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. The Ones Below
    The Ones Below is a thriller that exasperates more than it thrills.
  56. Inside Moves
    As an attempt to cash in on the inspirational-underdog-sports-movie model popularized a few years earlier by Rocky, Inside Moves is rather transparent: Morse’s Jerry Maxwell is an even longer shot for stardom than the Italian Stallion. But what’s affecting here is the relationship between Jerry and Roary (John Savage), who is the film’s true protagonist.
  57. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.
  58. The 11th Hour
    The 11th Hour is slick and passionate, but neither persuasive nor helpful; it's a headache of a film directed like an Errol Morris project, but with half the substance. It's clearly preaching to the choir, but even they may find it off-key.
  59. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Offers a concise summary of Burroughs' life and works. Maybe too concise. At a mere 88 minutes, it feels a bit glancing. But as an introduction or refresher course, it gets the job done.
  60. 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.
  61. Unsane
    Most of the thrills here come from watching one of our canniest directors perform rattling wheelchair dollies on a waxed hospital floor while over-punctuating video-noisy close-ups and cheesy music cues.
  62. Bullet Train Explosion
    Despite remaking much of that film (Taisei Iwasaki and Yuma Yamaguchi’s tense score being one of the most successful throwbacks), Bullet Train Explosion abandons the complicating human factors that gave the original its soul. It makes the same mistake as so many modern blockbusters: confusing bigger, louder, and simpler with better.
  63. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    In trying to recapture the spirit of classic '30s screwball comedies, the film too often mistakes manic energy for wit, and it ends on a note of gloppy sentimentality that wouldn't have held water in Old Hollywood.
  64. Undertow
    Undertow may prove the least immediately satisfying of Green's films, but it remains an achievement, emotionally rich and rife with biblical and mythic undertones.
  65. Spring Breakers
    The overall effect is enervating, like a party that grinds on after most of the attendees have either left or passed out. And much like "Kids," the enfant terrible’s breakthrough screenplay, Korine’s film has an unintended moral hysteria, like a warning to parents of what their good girls are doing when they aren’t looking. The message: Keep them locked up. In their bikinis, if necessary.
  66. Stowaway
    The film is strongest when simply exploring the terrible notion of triage among the healthy, with everyone involved fully aware of which individual will be deemed the most expendable.
  67. The Cat's Meow
    Faithfully recreates a bygone era of larger-than-life filmmakers and stars.
  68. Happy Times
    Happy Times doesn't buck the clichés so much as infuse them with feeling, playing off the pleasant, unforced rhythm of two characters who pine for simple companionship.
  69. Open Water
    Writer-director Chris Kentis has dreamed up an ingenious premise, but he botches its execution. Every once in a while, the film stumbles upon a twist that ratchets up the tension, but then haphazardly discards it.
  70. Persons of Interest
    The absence of style can be numbing, but it serves a purpose, positioning the documentary as a public record, not a work of art. As such, the film is eye-opening.
  71. Luz
    In a cinematic landscape where retro throwbacks are predictably bundled around the same small set of nostalgia-friendly filmmakers (we all love Carpenter, but come on), it’s positively invigorating to see a loving tribute to a director’s influences that’s also aggressively avant-garde.
  72. Rio
    Rio could use fresher ingredients and more spice.
  73. The Great Buck Howard
    Buck Howard has a nice feel for its tacky, second-rate show-business milieu--a rinky-dink world of telethons, small towns starved for entertainment, and entertainers whose careers have been in freefall since Hollywood Squares went off the air.
  74. Triangle of Sadness
    It’s a stellar film that hits a rare sweet spot as both mainstream, accessible entertainment, and also an undeniably incisive piece of cultural commentary. And best of all, it will keep you on your toes until the sensational final moment of its breezy drift.
  75. Let Him Go
    Writer-director Thomas Bezucha, adapting a novel by Larry Watson, shows remarkable patience in developing this low-key rescue mission — or maybe he just assumes that he’s courting an older audience who won’t need much prompting to side with Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but will enjoy extra time with them all the same.
  76. Who's That Knocking at My Door?
    The film never jells, but it's the Rosetta Stone for Scorsese's later work.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Batkid Begins
    Miles treats this whole experience with an affectingly genuine innocence—something that the filmmakers, and many of the participants, seem to think can be bottled and sold as a soul-cleansing palliative.
  78. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Well-acted yet strangely inert, Fire explores the messy human emotions of grief, but it'd be a lot more resonant if the guy everyone's mourning weren't so fatally perfect, so unforgivably superhuman.
  79. City of Men
    City Of Men has its share of problems, but being too entertaining isn't one of them.
  80. Freaks
    The film shrewdly keeps us inside Chloe’s head, filtered through her very limited comprehension of her burgeoning and truly awesome abilities.
  81. World War Z
    World War Z bucks the current trend in summer blockbusters by feeling weirdly understuffed. It’s an episodic adventure without enough episodes.
  82. Maria
    The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.
  83. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Despite some compelling performances, this R-rated but genial dramedy is a lot like its protagonist: unconventional, yet playing it safe.
  84. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Doesn't rise to the level of Bujalski's breakthrough feature "Mutual Appreciation," mainly because Swanberg doesn't have Bujalski's eye.
  85. The Foot Fist Way
    Trouble is, the gags just keep finding new ways to make McBride's strip-mall sensei seem pathetic, and the few scattered laughs never justify the cruelty.
  86. Aurora
    Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.
  87. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Based on true events, À Tout De Suite reveals the seductions of criminal life to be something like Stockholm Syndrome for Le Besco.
  88. Split
    Split is funnier, campier, and more freewheeling than anything its writer-director has done — slightly overlong, but reminiscent of Brian De Palma films like "The Fury" and "Femme Fatale" in its refusal to be boring.
  89. Normal
    If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.
  90. Mayor Pete
    Moss spends the better part of a year just trying to get his subject to betray some raw emotion, even going so far as to have Chasten pose interview questions at one point. It’s not as if Buttigieg stonewalls the camera, either. He’s just not, at heart, a very demonstrative guy.
  91. Suddenly
    Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.
  92. I Capture the Castle
    Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.
  93. Blue My Mind
    In many ways, the film is reminiscent of last year’s arthouse horror hit Raw, using monstrous transformation as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening. It’s not as extreme as Raw in its content, though, nor as skillful in its technique.
  94. Alpha
    Alpha has been sold, to some degree, as a family-friendly film, and while it’s too violent and perhaps too heavily subtitled for young kids (or, for that matter, some adults, who may notice how superfluous much of the dialogue is), it’s easy to picture some 10-year-olds taking to its exciting, cornball charms.
  95. Life
    Sluggish, laugh-free comedy (or is it an ineffectual drama?).
  96. The Hole in the Ground
    Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.
  97. L'amour fou
    Like a well-crafted garment, it's seamless. There's plenty of amour, but not enough fou.
  98. The Crazies
    Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.
  99. The Upside of Anger
    The film's outsized ambitions are deceptive: Everything here is less than meets the eye.
  100. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is a universal story, one that captures the thrill of discovering culture, sex, and politics, and the painful twinge of learning that those worlds aren't enough.
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