The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Café Society
    Woody, now in his 80s, narrates the movie, which lends it a vaguely, symbolically autobiographical slant.
  2. Our Kind of Traitor
    Director Susanna White, on only her second feature, jazzes up the proceedings to match the skill of actors like McGregor, Harris, and Skarsgård. Most notable is her smart use of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.
  3. My Big Night
    My Big Night, pitched in a state of perpetual frenzy, whiffs out in its ending.
  4. The Duel
    Blessed with solid supporting character work and several scenes of genuine good fun, the movie manages to make its nearly two-hour run-time pass by easily enough, but not so much so that the seams on this patchwork quilt don’t still show.
  5. Sun Choke
    The film doesn’t always work as a genre exercise, but it’s a winner as a character study, in large part because of how committed Hagan is to playing Janie’s derangement. Casting directors in search of the offbeat should take note.
  6. Under the Gun
    Tragic anecdotes put a human face on this still-polarizing issue and serve Soechtig and Couric’s broad argument in Under The Gun better than any heavy-handed music cues and animated statistics ever could.
  7. Dog Eat Dog
    An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.
  8. I, Daniel Blake
    The movie is plenty affecting when it sticks to credible, low-key difficulties faced with weary decency; there was no need to crank the pathos up to 11 and throw a full-scale pity party.
  9. The Unknown Girl
    The Unknown Girl isn’t just their first bona fide thriller. It’s also the first Dardenne film in more than 20 years that could reasonably be described as less than exceptional, even a little clumsy.
  10. Loving
    While one would have to be an unabashed bigot not to be moved by the Lovings’ plight, concluding that it’s not so easily dramatized requires no such prejudice. Quiet dignity in the face of adversity doesn’t make for an enthralling couple of hours.
  11. Blood Father
    Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
  12. Endless Poetry
    Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.
  13. Mimosas
    Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation.
  14. Zero Days
    The film does the job; it holds your attention. Overall, though, this is a classic “Say, why not read a book instead?” situation.
  15. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    At its best, The Thoughts That Once We Had functions like a kind of film-buff mixtape, queuing up one magic moment after another. But the quasi-academic aims of the project mute Andersen’s passion; the director must have felt he needed a respectable framework for his cinephilia, but the personal component often seems directly at odds with the Deleuze component.
  16. The Phenom
    The Phenom is merely well-acted and well-made, rather than heart-stopping. There are worse fates for a sports movie, to be sure.
  17. Morgan
    The director, Luke Scott (son of Ridley), doesn’t exactly elevate this material, but he does see it through. The voice of Brian Cox goads the action into Bourne territory to counter its "Ex Machina" overtones, but the movie works best when it riffs away from its antecedents into even more pitiless territory.
  18. Nerve
    Like most films about technology, Nerve will endure as a time capsule, fascinating future generations with either its prescience or its quaintness.
  19. Anthropoid
    Dramatically, it’s not much of a movie, but if you just want to know how things went down, it’s certainly a more exciting précis than Wikipedia’s.
  20. Carnage Park
    Keating keeps the story tight, giving the audience enough twists and turns to keep the ride fun.
  21. Marauders
    Marauders is like a sophomoric college essay: It’s full of interesting ideas that get bungled in the execution.
  22. Atomic Blonde
    This can be pretty fun, but also tiring in stretches; Leitch’s fetishistic interest in clothes, scar tissue, furniture, and different shades of mood lighting and lens flare gives some of the action-less portions of Atomic Blonde a glazed-over, narcotic pace.
  23. Wicked
    Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.
  24. Rough Night
    To compare Rough Night to another relatively recent female-led comedy, the film incorporates its violence with less tonal whiplash than in the 2013 Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy "The Heat," not only because of the tone set by the hard-R dialogue, but also because the dead body jokes are more "Weekend At Bernie’s" than anything.
  25. Summertime
    Everything onscreen still feels credible, but forbidden-love stories are as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Summertime had briefly seemed to promise something more mercurial.
  26. Bleed for This
    Bleed For This looks at Vinny Paz and sees only unshakable determination, and though there’s a certain queasy, even darkly comic thrill to seeing the man (courageously? foolishly?) bench press his injuries away, Teller can’t make much of a character out of nothing but raw conviction and a spectacularly crappy mustache.
  27. League of Gods
    It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.
  28. Their Finest
    But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.
  29. Klown Forever
    On Curb, it’s Larry David’s neuroses that drive his frequent public humiliation. In Klown, the problem is more that Casper and Frank can’t keep it in their pants.
  30. My Blind Brother
    With its three leads all having appeared repeatedly in the small-town setting of "Parks And Recreation," My Blind Brother sometimes feels like an alternate-world appendix to that beloved show.
  31. Fences
    Washington gives a magnetic, layered performance, backed by a largely superb cast, most of whom reprise their roles from the Broadway revival of Wilson’s classic. But the film itself is eluded by the epic qualities of the original text, which play directly to the captive space of the theater.
  32. Into the Inferno
    As fun as Herzog’s highly imitable voice can be, this particular film arguably works best when he remains quiet and simply stares at the fiery void.
  33. Darkest Hour
    There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.
  34. Free Fire
    Fun, often funny, but about as disposable as an empty clip. We already have a Guy Ritchie. We don’t need another one.
  35. Blair Witch
    Blair Witch will make popcorn fly. But it won’t make anyone believe.
  36. Frantz
    Beer and Niney do solid work, but their sensitive efforts can’t quite breathe life into a story that no longer seems terribly relevant.
  37. I Called Him Morgan
    When it’s all done, More and Morgan remain ciphers, and not the type whose intangibility is evocative of something greater. All we have are the known facts, and that is all that I Called Him Morgan provides in the end.
  38. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    Fans of both non-action Asian cinema and stifling bureaucratic nightmares, your long wait is finally over.
  39. Sleepless
    It might not be Donald Westlake, but it does its thing: meaningless, nonstop violence and movement, enacted by a large cast of characters who are only looking out to survive into the next scene.
  40. Yourself and Yours
    Viewers who cherish ambiguity will have no trouble finding plenty of it here, as Hong never explicitly tips his hand regarding this woman’s disputed identity.
  41. XX
    The four participating directors were all given complete creative freedom for their films, limited only by budget and running time. The fact that three of them have to do with motherhood is a coincidence, a thematic near-miss that’s emblematic of the film’s main disjointed weakness.
  42. Trash Fire
    While it doesn’t include any literal blazing piles of garbage, Trash Fire is spiteful and unpleasant from beginning to end, using every technique at its disposal — from stinging dialogue to grotesque prosthetics to morbid black comedy — to make the audience uncomfortable.
  43. Burn Country
    The result is more of an interesting thesis than a compelling drama, but it’s anchored by Rains’ sturdy performance as a man whose open-minded curiosity about his new home disengages his natural wariness, for both better and worse.
  44. Buster's Mal Heart
    Buster’s Mal Heart is indie sci-fi at its most abstract, taking elements of more populist, influential films like "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" and filtering them through philosophical exchanges and coolly stylized compositions to produce something that’s somehow simultaneously more weighty and more slight.
  45. Your Name.
    There’s admittedly a certain pleasure in the deft fake-out that Shinkai executes here—most viewers will automatically make an assumption that’s ultimately proven wrong—but it comes at the cost of overall narrative incoherence.
  46. Wilson
    It’s a gamble, building a comedy around a character this boorish.
  47. Uncle Kent 2
    A short running time and an amiable tone kept Uncle Kent from ever becoming a chore, but aside from one hilariously awkward ménage à trois scene and a poignant final shot, the film was so slight that it almost dared the audience to get anything out of watching.
  48. A Wrinkle in Time
    Only Reid and Pine feel like they’re playing fully imagined characters, and DuVernay wrestles with how to make the overstuffed material both contemporary and timeless.
  49. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The Holocaust drama The Zookeeper’s Wife is handsomely made, well-acted, and lacking in much nuance.
  50. Everything, Everything
    The film does have its charms. The outside world, when we do reach it, is as gorgeous for the audience as it must appear to someone seeing it for the first time.
  51. The Wall
    In its best moments, The Wall is just a movie, a tense and nasty black-box thriller that conveys its politics through the microcosmic stakes of its life-and-death scenario. Pity that when the characters open their mouths, they sometimes unleash some very heavy-handed artillery, their speech coated too often in cliché.
  52. The Belko Experiment
    The Belko Experiment teeters between “fun,” gory brutality and a more seriously disturbing variety — the latter epitomized by the film’s centerpiece, a chillingly organized process of elimination that echoes mass shootings and historic Final Solutions in equal measure.
  53. 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.
  54. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    In another self-reflexive move, Far From Home transfers the real dilemma back to the filmmakers: The character comedy is great fun, and the action spectacle often feels like their responsible burden.
  55. The Party
    The shining star of this little community is Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), who’s put together an intimate gathering of friends to celebrate her recent promotion to Shadow Minister for Health.
  56. Between Us
    Between Us is most compelling when it’s putting Feldman and Thirlby one on one, to talk about or around what ails their characters, in revealing tête-à-têtes or confessional voice-over.
  57. Don't Knock Twice
    The new supernatural horror film Don’t Knock Twice benefits greatly from the direction of Caradog James. He takes a story that almost immediately plunges viewers into an unexplained and messy mythology and, for the better part of an hour, manages to distract from its weaker aspects by implying something far more interesting. Unfortunately, then the third act happens, and the spell is broken.
  58. Wonder
    The film features some of the most clichéd aphorisms about kindness and inner beauty this side of an inspirational wall hanging. But honestly? It could have been a lot worse.
  59. 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.
  60. Red Sparrow
    It’s about halfway between "Atomic Blonde" and a Focus Features late-summer thriller, which more or less fits the Francis Lawrence aesthetic. He brings to this material what he brought to "The Hunger Games": a sense of style that feels constrained by obligations to hit a certain number of plot points.
  61. The Greatest Show on Earth
    There's not much juice to the movie's central romantic triangle between money-minded boss Charlton Heston and his two star attractions, dueling trapeze artists Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde. Still, Jimmy Stewart does some appealingly subtle work as a clown on the run from the law, and DeMille's narration has a charming, corny, true-life-adventure quality, as he hypes the circus as a life-and-death proposition.
  62. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    It’s pleasantly baffling to discover that not only is Hotel Transylvania 3 easily the best film of the series, but it also feels more at home thematically on a cruise ship than its predecessors did at a haunted Transylvanian castle.
  63. Sandy Wexler
    Maybe it’s a question of drastically lowered expectations finally working to Sandler’s advantage, but Sandy Wexler is disarming in its charms.
  64. Donald Cried
    The film’s gradual shift from broad yuk-fest toward something closer to indie drama (while still striving to be funny) isn’t wholly successful; it’s difficult to achieve the catharsis of, say, Kelly Reichardt’s "Old Joy" when you start out like "Napoleon Dynamite." But at least Avedisian tried.
  65. Detroit
    It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished.
  66. Landline
    Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.
  67. Berlin Syndrome
    This tedious kidnapping drama doesn’t have anything especially insightful to say about Clare’s ordeal, which makes watching her go through it an even more trying experience.
  68. Wind River
    Driven by another of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ murmuring folk soundtracks, Wind River turns out to be the weakest of Sheridan’s loose trilogy — the one with the thinnest characterizations and the toughest time disguising its subtext as plainspoken townsfolk rapport.
  69. Beatriz at Dinner
    The movie, which marks the belated reunion of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, who previously collaborated on "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," insists on letting its characters behave like, well, characters. And that’s what makes it frustrating in retrospect.
  70. Novitiate
    Betts appears to have started out with a rather mundane idea and then stumbled, over the course of her research, onto something much more fruitful. The result is as intriguing and frustrating as that suggests.
  71. Trophy
    It’s also slightly unfortunate — though admittedly no fault of director Shaul Schwarz (assisted by Christina Clusiau) — that Trophy covers a lot of the same ground as did recent Netflix documentary "The Ivory Game."
  72. Marshall
    This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.
  73. Super Dark Times
    Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.
  74. The Other Side of Hope
    In that respect, it may be self-conscious to a fault. Plotted with typical shagginess, it lags as it tries to treat its two protagonists equally; they may be kindred spirits, but Khaled’s fears of deportation and his search for Miriam are a lot more urgent than Wikström’s mid-life crisis. But in drawing the two men together, the film creates a simple, persuasive metaphor.
  75. The First Purge
    Wringing genre thrills from headline atrocities, The First Purge is at once crass and provocative in its timeliness—in Blumhouse’s toolshed, it’s the sledgehammer to Get Out’s scalpel.
  76. Actor Martinez
    It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.
  77. Dig Two Graves
    The movie looks superb, especially for its minuscule budget. While Adams is clearly a very promising director, however, his screenwriting chops aren’t so advanced. This is one clunky amalgam of mystery and guilt.
  78. Win It All
    There’s enough disreputable behavior bookending the righteousness, and enough solid jokes along the way, to make the effort moderately entertaining.
  79. The Land of Steady Habits
    In the well-trod territory of fiction about rich men in self-induced emotional crises, the film stands as a worthy, if not exactly groundbreaking, addition.
  80. Trolls World Tour
    In Trolls and the new Trolls World Tour, celebrity voices, high energy levels, nonsensical catchphrases, cross-promotional branding, cover-heavy soundtracks, and overuse of voice-over narration are all jacked up to 11, creating what are essentially marathon-length dance party endings. Yet somehow, this shamelessness gives the whole enterprise a kind of deranged honor.
  81. Mighty Joe Young
    It's all a little silly, and silly in a way that's less fun than the original—due in part to an obvious subplot involving a poacher played by a hammy Peter Firth—but its kid-friendly B-movie charm and the peerless Mr. Young make it worthwhile, undemanding entertainment.
  82. Small Crimes
    Small Crimes, as a film, ultimately errs on the side of being overly vague, perhaps because there simply isn’t any plausible way to get much of the history across via dialogue.
  83. Tout Va Bien
    Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.
  84. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    While Alvarez acquits himself with thrilling action sequences and breakneck pacing, the overall impression left by this “New Dragon Tattoo Story” is one of a razor-sharp blade dulled by the demands of franchise filmmaking.
  85. Battle of the Sexes
    Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.
  86. Band Aid
    You’ll believe you’re watching two people who love each other but no longer know how to live with each other. You may still wish Band Aid better distinguished their relationship.
  87. Stronger
    It’s nice to report that Green, Gyllenhaal, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany hit some grace notes—and plant the germ of some interesting ideas—en route to the expected lifting of spirits.
  88. Rampage
    Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.
  89. Rodney King
    This is the second time Lee has filmed one of Smith’s plays, and like A Huey P. Newton Story, about the Black Panthers founder, it’s more of a valuable document of an event than a full-fledged movie.
  90. Thelma
    Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.
  91. Deadpool 2
    Though bringing in a bona fide action-cheese aesthete like David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) to direct counts as a minor coup, Deadpool 2’s attempts to fight superhero fatigue with self-awareness and meta shock value can become exhausting. Indulgent and uneven, but in spots gruesomely funny, the new film badly lacks the basic momentum of the original’s formulaic plot.
  92. Frozen II
    Frozen II is just an echo, drawing prospective fans in without finding many new notes to hit.
  93. Glass
    For better and worse, it’s unmistakably a Shyamalan movie, with all the clunky plotting and robust, idiosyncratic staging that generally implies.
  94. Vincent N Roxxy
    Vincent N Roxxy, which suffers from many of the same shortcomings that plagued tough-talking Tarantino homages in the late ’90s but distinguishes itself with a satisfying climax.
  95. Better Off Dead...
    What it has in its favor is affability—some owed to Cusack’s gawky young charisma, some to Holland’s goofy tone and lightly surreal sense of humor, and still more to a cast where even the villains are mostly likeable...To paraphrase the opening narration in The Big Lebowski, Better Off Dead is the movie for its time and place. It fits right in there.
  96. Wonderstruck
    For all of the time-warp elegance, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Haynes has authored more of an exercise than a movie: a lovingly assembled flashback pastiche whose emotional core remains oddly theoretical.
  97. Let the Sunshine In
    Perhaps it’s best to approach Let The Sunshine In as a talky palate-cleanser before Denis’ next big genre experiment, the forthcoming sci-fi movie "High Life." In space, one hopes, nobody can hear you blather.
  98. Apostle
    The film introduces interesting themes as though they’ll build to something, only to let them spill out like so much viscera from an especially nasty wound.
  99. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.
  100. The Villainess
    The Villainess delivers all the overstuffed thrills we’ve come to expect from Korean action cinema. But it also strains under the weight of those expectations.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »