The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. Baby Driver
    Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.
  2. The Bad and the Beautiful
    This is studio-system product at its juiciest and most sophisticated, full of insights into the mess behind the art.
  3. Sabaya
    As a journalistic depiction of the rescue operations as they happen, Sabaya brims with heart-pounding tension and immediacy. But given the access obtained and Hirori’s connection to the people and the land where this grim chapter in modern history is unfolding, the superficial handling of pivotal aspects of the story is disappointing.
  4. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    It's undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
  5. Last Train Home
    Sometimes the story is so much like a fiction feature-complete with explosive family arguments and pointed cross-cutting between the free-spirited Qin and her beaten-down folks-that it feels exploitative, as though Lixin were turning real people into characters.
  6. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Fitting for a film backed by the groovy sounds of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, the biggest myth Crip Camp is out to bust is that disabled people aren’t sexual beings.
  7. Persona
    Persona doesn’t really benefit from too much thought. It’s a visceral experience that’s best felt, accepted, and left alone to rattle around in your subconscious for years to come. Rest assured that it will.
  8. One Fine Morning
    One Fine Morning is about people, family, friends, lovers, their disappointments, and their passions. It’s bitter and sweet, but mostly bitter. It’s lovely, but mostly not autobiographical.
  9. The Double Life of Veronique
    The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.
  10. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.
  11. No Other Choice
    No Other Choice ends up a laudable mixed bag, a lot of morbid fun with committed performances and beautiful composition that meanders long enough that its rage peters out.
  12. My Father's Shadow
    As the memory fades into history, My Father’s Shadow blurs into documentary footage, which then blurs with wishful thinking. It’s formally ambitious for such a contained film, but grants this small-scale story the well-considered gravity of something held close to the heart.
  13. A Real Pain
    There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material.
  14. Walkabout
    Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.
  15. Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
  16. The Green Knight
    Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.
  17. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Damon's minimalist style is key to why the Bourne movies have become an oasis from other blockbuster action fare.
  18. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    This is the most epic of the Harry Potter movies, the one that finally dispenses with side-quests and open-ended plotlines and offers up all the final payoffs.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted Jul 14, 2011
  19. Take Shelter
    Writer-director Jeff Nichols re-teams with his "Shotgun Stories" star Michael Shannon for his second feature, Take Shelter, which has a similar setting, but a different mood. Nichols is still concerned with family legacies, and the ways people in smaller communities relate to each other, but Take Shelter is slower and smoother, deliberately developing a mood of creeping dread.
  20. The Salesman
    "Death Of A Salesman" does indeed figure into the story, as the film’s main characters, a married couple, are playing Willy and Linda Loman in an amateur production. On the whole, however, this starkly confrontational melodrama has more in common with the Charles Bronson classic "Death Wish," even if it’s angry words rather than bullets that go whizzing across the screen.
  21. The Pianist
    Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great director's imagination.
  22. Dahomey
    Assessing this move from the perspective of the pieces themselves—including an elaborate carved throne, a towering statue of King Ghézo, and metallic markers of death—as well as the recipients of these revenants, Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.
  23. Get Out
    Wildly entertaining.
  24. City of Life and Death
    The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.
  25. West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
  26. California Split
    Robert Altman’s most overlooked gem.
  27. Amy
    Winehouse was a complicated artist who deserved a nuanced, honest look at her life. In lesser hands, Amy could be a feature-length E! True Hollywood Story, but Kapadia treats his subject with respect and heart.
  28. The Edge of Heaven
    Akin divides The Edge Of Heaven into thirds, and ends the first two sections with emotionally devastating scenes of violence, before easing into a third section that deals with the repercussions and lessons learned.
  29. The Savages
    The frequent outbursts of comedy help alleviate a tone that's appropriately muted and sad, and Jenkins should be credited for refusing to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation.
  30. Birds of Passage
    Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote.
  31. An Education
    An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.
  32. Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
  33. To the Ends of the Earth
    Beginning as an offbeat, fish-out-of-water travelogue, To The Ends Of The Earth gradually incorporates elements of an adventure movie, self-reflexive film shoot, and even musical melodrama. By the end, it’s no less than one of the most moving films Kurosawa has ever made.
  34. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.
  35. The Treasure
    Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.
  36. The Rider
    More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.
  37. Varda by Agnès
    As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.
  38. Out of the Past
    Quintessential noir.
  39. Close Your Eyes
    Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.
  40. A Canterbury Tale
    A Canterbury Tale is a strange little movie, overlong and even shrill at times, but with a point to make that belies its slightness.
  41. Eighth Grade
    What makes this coming-of-age film special is that it’s at once harsh and humanist: a perceptive, realistic comedy about tweenage life that’s also rich in compassion, that scarcest of junior-high commodities.
  42. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    A documentary that doubles as a comic thriller, and it’s as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
  43. Kings & Queen
    Though frequently dazzling, Kings And Queen proves that a bunch of punchy singles don't necessarily make an album.
  44. The Novice
    The filmmaker, who also co-edited The Novice, depicts Alex’s freshman year in quick-cutting, frenetic, anxiety-ridden fashion, with composer Alex Weston’s string-heavy score properly ratcheting up the tension and Fuhrman gamely acting like a harried but dedicated ball of nerves.
  45. Girlhood
    "Boyhood" has the natural endpoint of its lead growing into a young adult, while Girlhood stretches out in front of Marieme, an uncertain path into a haze.
  46. Offside
    It's a sports film unlike any other, and a political film that makes the personal profound.
  47. Kiki's Delivery Service
    Kiki's slow pace and light-on-conflict plot may surprise kids used to American animation, but it's difficult not to be won over by the film's endearing characters and beautiful animation, as well as a storyline that stresses the values of independence and friendship.
  48. The Ornithologist
    Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.
  49. El Dorado
    It’s not that Hawks’ style rescues El Dorado; it’s that it integrates all of these problems, producing a movie that feels effortlessly complete and consistent, despite being, frankly, all over the place.
  50. Sleeping Beauty
    The elaborate, gothic-inspired designs look great, and the supporting characters—most notably the three good fairies and the Joan Crawford-like villain Maleficent—liven up the proceedings despite the bland hero and heroine.
  51. Mona Lisa
    His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare.
  52. Easy Rider
    Many of the movies made in the wake of Easy Rider were more accomplished, more sophisticated, and more aesthetically mature. But Easy Rider itself still feels vital, because it was made by people who’d spent years learning what couldn’t be done, before deciding to do it anyway.
  53. Knocked Up
    No one writes for ensembles better than Apatow, and his players are all skilled at giving his work a loose, improvisational feel.
  54. The Quiet Man
    Shot partly on location in Ireland and designed in the lushest greens ever squeezed out of Technicolor, The Quiet Man is a movie that isn’t about a whole lot, but yet seems to contain so much—from Wayne’s easygoing charisma to the notoriously protracted climactic fight to the febrile, film-noir-like flashback to Sean’s boxing days.
  55. Turtles Can Fly
    Turtles Can Fly creates a haunting reminder that collateral damage can't always be measured in casualty rates, and that it goes on long after the news cameras have left the scene.
  56. The Departed
    When a director of Scorsese's caliber is working at the top of his game, it's a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place.
  57. Yes
    Lapid’s garish maximalism will surely isolate some filmgoers, but the satire of Yes! works best when it’s fearless—unbothered by the genocidal regime it captures.
  58. Festival Express
    The sociological angle of Festival Express is a narrow one--perhaps too narrow--and doesn't overwhelm the film's real selling point, which is some of the best-looking and best-sounding footage of counterculture icons ever screened.
  59. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    It IS a little obvious, but that's the way it goes with spiritual enlightenment. The film's lessons are plain--spoken aloud, even--and deal with the close relationship between what can be shed in this life and what binds people to the world in spite of their best efforts to purify.
  60. April and the Extraordinary World
    This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.
  61. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    After establishing an atmosphere of nearly unbearable dread, Alfredson keeps thickening and chilling it.
  62. The Wild Robot
    With its unexpectedly moving sights, remarkable voice ensemble, and pure clarity of humanist vision, The Wild Robot emerges as a stunning achievement.
  63. Support the Girls
    Set in a tacky Hooters-style sports bar called Double Whammies, Andrew Bujalski’s delightful new comedy, Support The Girls, more than lives up to its winking/earnest double entendre of a title.
  64. Half Nelson
    Gosling excels at playing contradictory characters like this one, having kick-started his career as a Jewish neo-Nazi in "The Believer," but here, his inner turmoil rarely gets vocalized. It's a remarkably subtle performance.
  65. Cat People
    The horror is fueled by sexual frustration, repressed passion, and the everyday anxieties of marriage and urban life, and it plays out in a noir-lit New York filled with everyday people. No fan of gothic castles, Lewton brought horror home with Cat People.
  66. Vincere
    Vincere starts to run dry of stunning visual gambits and become redundant in its second hour, as the madhouse sequences dominate, but Bellocchio’s central premise retains its power and poignancy throughout.
  67. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    With humor that cuts through a deep undercurrent of sadness, Baker Boys captures the rinky-dink milieu of second-rate lounges, where patron kibitzing threatens to drown out the piano-tinkling of the paid entertainment.
  68. The Sun
    The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.
  69. Love and Diane
    Emerges as an improbably hopeful tribute to the human spirit.
  70. About Schmidt
    Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude.
  71. Domestic Violence
    A bit too long. Conceptually, it's sensible to keep the camera running while these women bare their souls, but in practical terms, the gist of some of their stories would have sufficed. Nevertheless, Wiseman has scored another considerable achievement in the documentary form.
  72. The Asphalt Jungle
    The Asphalt Jungle would be considered a heist picture if the mood didn't dictate otherwise. The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor.
  73. Hero
    Brilliant in flashes, thinned out as a whole, the film seems ideal for the DVD revolution, where the greatest hits can be compiled at the touch of a remote.
  74. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    If Ross had embraced anything like a narrative line, would it have taken away from the elemental imagery of his brief, unconventional film? One can’t really tackle life and what it means on both a personal and social level without prying into the people who live it. Ross keeps his distance—and in doing so, keeps Hale County’s potential at an arm’s length.
  75. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    It's hard to film icons like Young as anything BUT icons, but Demme's film gets past the legend, zooming in on Young's aged, heroic face and finding an artist as human as the rest of us.
  76. Mudbound
    If the endgame is tough to bear, the getting there is rarely less than involving, thanks to the sensitivity of Rees’ staging. She’s made an economical epic with an intimate modern soul.
  77. Passing
    As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive.
  78. My Life as a Zucchini
    The movie is a pleasure to look at, and often genuinely sweet, but it’s also akin to scaring the crap out of a little kid for 30 seconds and then smothering her with cotton candy for an hour. Skip the first part and you don’t need the second part, either.
  79. Honeyland
    Though Honeyland is also about what it’s about; in addition to underscoring another inconvenient truth with planetary stakes, the film offers tender, patient portraiture to a woman wholly dedicated to her calling. The melding of the political with the personal has seldom involved so many stingers to the face.
  80. Holy Motors
    It's a glorious dream-epitaph.
  81. Kaili Blues
    Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.
  82. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Deriving endless anxiety from brawny men moving as gingerly as possible, it’s a riveting anti-action movie, one of the most memorable high-concept pictures ever made in Europe.
  83. The Dark Knight
    The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.
  84. Everybody Wants Some!!
    In its funky, aimless, winningly juvenile way, Everybody Wants Some is about as inclusively celebratory as any college comedy in memory: Per its title, it really does want everybody to get some.
  85. Behemoth
    Zhao, who acts as his own cinematographer, has a great eye for scale and contrast, and the less Behemoth points out its symbolism, the more potent it becomes.
  86. The Past
    The result demonstrates that Farhadi, who is cinema’s heir to the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, is so deft at ingenious narrative construction and intricate character development that he can make first-rate dramas in any country and/or language he likes.
  87. Pillion
    Pillion is a film about self-knowledge, and about asserting one’s needs and boundaries without shame.
  88. Black Bag
    For better or worse, the director tucks Black Bag away so cleanly that it’s easy to forget what a good time it is.
  89. One Child Nation
    As wide-ranging in scope as it is horrifying in its particulars, the film does the necessary work of illuminating, for a large audience, a dark chapter of Chinese history.
  90. 24 Hour Party People
    A funny, unexpectedly inspiring story of excess, poor choices, and unwavering high-mindedness, all tied to that quintessential bit of rock wisdom: Icarus did fall, but first he flew.
  91. Vengeance Is Mine
    At times a frustrating experience, Vengeance Is Mine transforms over the course of its running time, Enokizu’s impenetrable nature eventually bottoming out and blossoming into a perverse relatability.
  92. The Three Caballeros
    Where the prequel is weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy, exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity.
  93. Identifying Features
    Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of Identifying Features, which is as painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil.
  94. The Sacrifice
    Though bookended by extraordinarily powerful scenes that play off a potent religious metaphor, the middle section sinks into a morass of ill-defined relationships and uneven performances, which may be blamed in part on culture clash.
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