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. Loggerheads
    A little less earnestness could have done this movie some good.
  2. Annabelle: Creation
    Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.
  3. Ira & Abby
    It's still a mixed bag with a lot of cutesy awfulness to wade through, but the acerbic ending is enough of a punchline to suggest that Westfeldt understands what a joke this kind of film can be.
  4. Black Box
    Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.
  5. Stuck on You
    Though it's still too reliant on a sloppy, gag-a-second style, Stuck On You gets through the arid stretches by leaning on some winning performances, most notably from a hilarious Seymour Cassel.
  6. Daddio
    There’s candor and insight here. But, much like Girlie and Clark, Daddio remains stuck despite the appearance of movement.
  7. Rolling Family
    Still, after an hour and a half of exquisite photography and mushy action, audiences may well ask the unspoken question that plays across the faces of the Rolling Family clan right before the closing credits. Was it worth it?
  8. The Names of Love
    The American romantic comedy has grown distressingly moribund lately, but anyone looking to freshen up the genre a bit need look no further than Michel Leclerc's The Names Of Love.
  9. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    What’s perhaps most telling about the artist himself is a later-in-life project he builds in his cluttered backyard, a sort of funhouse ride through his own psyche.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fierce Creatures
    Cute lemurs and a couple jabs at corporate a--holery can't save Fierce Creatures from its manic malaise.
  11. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    Leitman gets some wonderful tall tales from her subjects, who open up like they've been waiting for years for someone to come along and ask, and she complements it with punishing footage of their exploits.
  12. Bug
    Friedkin's latest rivals his Druid horror flick "The Guardian" for sheer lunacy--Bug remains disconcerting, real, and raw. It poignantly suggests that some lost souls would rather be crazy and doomed than alone.
  13. Oswald's Ghost
    Late in the film, Stone interviews Norman Mailer, a one-time conspiracy-believer who eventually wrote a book that tried to get inside Oswald's head, explaining how Oswald's story is America's story. In less than a minute, Mailer describes the documentary Stone should've made.
  14. The Cursed
    Even when Ellis ramps up the suspense with crosscutting and monster mayhem in the final half-hour, The Cursed has trouble maintaining nail-biting intensity for very long
  15. Joshy
    While it is something of a comedy, Joshy is also serious, and its comic actors follow suit.
  16. Lan Yu
    The connection between Hu and Liu seems more scripted than real, founded on musty allegorical clichés about innocent country folk and corrupt city slickers.
  17. Ramen Shop
    If you can tolerate a little saccharine piano music and ethereal backlighting with your food porn, Ramen Shop is an appetizing little bite of multicultural foodie edutainment.
  18. The King
    It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.
  19. A Glitch in the Matrix
    A Glitch In The Matrix unfolds as a flood of exposition and conjecture, accompanied by a gaudy infotainment montage of video-game footage, movie excerpts, and computer-animated recreations.
  20. Abigail
    Once intended as a remake of Dracula’s Daughter, Abigail evolved into its own thing, and fans of original horror ought to applaud. The former, honestly, isn’t all that great; the latter, figuratively and literally, dances rings around it.
  21. Destroyer
    At the center of it all is Kidman, the indisputable heart of the film, whose all-in performance elevates Destroyer above a well-made cop drama and into something special.
  22. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Stays unrelentingly pleasant, but affability is a poor substitute for laughs or chemistry.
  23. The Mudge Boy
    An auspicious debut for writer-director Michael Burke, the film makes a superb actor's showcase for Hirsch as well as Guiry.
  24. Ararat
    Though typically engaging, Ararat occasionally suffers from what's previously been a virtue in Egoyan's filmmaking. His distancing techniques, rather than sharpening his ability to deal with a subject that lends itself to high emotion -- sometimes just seem distancing.
  25. The Last Mountain
    There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Dragon
    Yen's strengths have never been in his expressiveness, and Dragon plods when it centers on dramatic struggles, then leaps exhilaratingly to life whenever the fighting begins.
  27. Sleight
    All the comic-book elements are accents; what we’re really watching is the highly conventional, highly familiar tale of a good guy trying to extricate himself from a bad situation, the life of crime he’s fallen into to provide for his family. There is a formula here. It’s just had a Tony Stark suit of armor thrown on top of it.
  28. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Even when caught in a rut, Anderson's obsessive vision still yields many exhilarating surprises.
  29. I Am a Sex Addict
    Zahedi isn't afraid to put himself out there, even when his thoughts and actions are profoundly unflattering; his self-effacement makes the film a reflection on narcissism and misogyny rather than an exercise in both.
  30. Scream 2
    When the suspense setpieces do come, many of them are staged with considerably less imagination—with cheap jolts underscored by an intrusive score—than would be expected from director Wes Craven.
  31. The Ice Harvest
    Ramis is at his best when dealing with men facing a soul-defining crisis, and he finds plenty to work with in Russo and Benton's script, which offers Russo's trademark blend of colorful characters and slow-building dilemmas. The Ice Harvest finds them all operating in top form in as dark a territory as they've ever explored.
  32. On Chesil Beach
    On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.
  33. All the Light in the Sky
    Large-scale anxieties about the future of the environment mingle with the characters’ small-scale anxieties about the present. The effect of this interplay will probably vary from viewer to viewer. As with Swanberg’s production methods, a lot depends on what you bring to the movie.
  34. The Rental
    Much of the first half of the film plays like a straight drama, establishing the conflicts simmering between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setup is so credible, in fact, that it’s doubly disappointing when the thriller elements do finally materialize and then promptly fail to thrill; it’s as if someone snatched the remote and changed the channel to a half-assed slasher starring the same characters.
  35. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    At two and a half hours, Warriors Of The Rainbow has the shape of something weightier than the simplified good-vs.-evil movie it actually is.
  36. Seven Veils
    Egoyan’s film is at once stylish and slipshod, a film that is both gorgeously shot—haunting shadows, deep colors—and inelegant in its themes of sexual trauma and assault.
  37. The Interpreter
    Made with an intelligence and craft that's increasingly rare in Hollywood thrillers.
  38. 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.
  39. The Monkey
    The Monkey is at its weakest when it tries too hard to explain what’s happening, either on a plot or on a thematic level. (The narration can be especially detrimental in this way.) And it’s strongest when it abandons its search for meaning and does a silly dance in the face of Death itself. A dry, mocking one though it might be, The Monkey is ultimately just a laugh.
  40. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Mostly The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stays focused on the cutesy, low-stakes personal journeys of its English characters, characters it would be hard to care about if they weren't brought to life by actors who give the film substance and gravity it doesn't otherwise know how to earn.
  41. The Bad Batch
    Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible.
  42. Rams
    Western Australia’s sunny, arid expanse makes Colin and Les’ endless, pointless rivalry seem small and petty, rather than deeply rooted in the landscape itself.
  43. Bad Milo!
    :ike a lot of intentionally shoddy or derivative movies, Bad Milo! can’t overcome what it’s trying to be. It’s neither focused enough to work as straight parody, nor outrageous enough to be appreciated for its excess; it’s a movie about butt monsters where butts are never shown.
  44. The Great Water
    Had the orphanage years been the first chapter in a longer story, The Great Water might've stretched toward a finish as unforgettable as its start.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Negotiator
    One of the best by-the-numbers thrillers you'll see this year, thanks to a hot-shot cast.
  46. Lamb
    Throughout Lamb, Laurence makes sure that every one of the character’s bad choices makes sense. That’s what makes the movie so sad.
  47. Lucy
    It comes across, instead, as a directorial flight of fancy, an imaginatively goofy take on an already goofy idea, exaggerated by Besson’s blunt style and an uncommonly fast pace.
  48. The Devil Wears Prada
    Sometimes actors get parts so rich that they almost can't help but make meals of them. Playing a frosty, high-powered editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep turns the role into a four-course dinner and shows up with her own dessert...But it's hard to care about what's going on whenever she's offscreen.
  49. Hello I Must Be Going
    The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.
  50. 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.
  51. Touched With Fire
    Yet as personal, well-performed, and sometimes lyrical as this material is, Dalio also has a peculiar way of making it all play like a public service announcement—like a feature commissioned for a mental-wellness convention.
  52. Butterfly Kiss
    The final effect is less haunting than was probably intended, but Butterfly Kiss is worth a look.
  53. The American
    He's (Corbijn) a patient, fastidious filmmaker with a great eye-ideal for his subject here-but his austerity doesn't entirely erase the suspicion that he doesn't have much on his mind. His film is a triumph, but it may be a triumph of style over substance.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    Courageous performances from the leads, who have to bear a lot, both emotionally and physically, still can't transform their characters into more than just symbols for contemporary urban loneliness.
  55. Eric Larue
    Though carried by a subtle and strenuous performance from Greer, Eric LaRue‘s intentionally unanswered questions do less to provoke than render the film a collage of well-meaning, half-finished sentiments.
  56. The Way We Were
    Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.
  57. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.
  58. Harmontown
    The documentary Harmontown falls over itself to balance his dark and light sides, with talking heads testifying both to his rare comedic voice and his impossible-to-deal-with irascibility.
  59. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Hoffman (Soapdish, One Fine Day) leads a first-rate cast in an intelligent, fully realized adaptation of Shakespeare's most popular comedy that's at once highly cinematic and true to its source.
  60. Stop-Loss
    Stop-Loss is a human story first and foremost, and Peirce and her stellar young cast ensure that the message never gets in the way of the storytelling.
  61. Trollhunter
    The trolls are the best part of Troll Hunter; they're funny and creepy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    Rather than trying to train something new, How To Train Your Dragon is riding an already proven beast; even its “first flight” has been done before. It can’t reach those old heights, let alone any new ones. And it doesn’t try to, nor does its audience really want it to. For live-action remakes, cruising altitude is the highest they can hope for.
  63. The Good Shepherd
    De Niro made the right choice in making this a film of cold, gray Leiters rather than dynamic Bonds. But he never makes us feel the chill.
  64. Runaway Jury
    Though star-packed to the point of absurdity--juror Luis Guzmán has little to do but nod his head every once in a while--The Runaway Jury doesn't know what to do with its players.
  65. September 11
    Until filmmakers get a little distance, maybe they'd be better off ignoring such projects.
  66. Valhalla Rising
    Valhalla Rising has the misfortune of starting with its best chapter and steadily growing more ponderous from there, dragged down by a religious theme that's as thin as the filmmaking is relentlessly spare. Yet it's a beautiful head trip, too.
  67. Big Miracle
    Kwapis fills small roles with great character actors like Stephen Root, Andrew Daly, Kathy Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, John Michael Higgins, Rob Riggle, and James LeGros, all skilled at making a lot out of a little.
  68. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    Kopple and her team have combed through the hours and hours of those dispatches that Gigi has sent into the world, and from them they’ve pieced together a story very much worth telling.
  69. This Is Our Land
    Belvaux has made a gutsy, discomfiting movie about going along to get along, and just how dangerous that impulse can ultimately be.
  70. We Bury the Dead
    For those looking to delve into more philosophical horror, We Bury The Dead is a thoughtful trek into the unknown.
  71. Grand Piano
    For all its virtuosic showboating, the film belongs as much to its screenwriter, Damien Chazelle, as it does to its director, Eugenio Mira.
  72. Copshop
    Carnahan’s formal proficiency makes for a more sharpened and accomplished piece of work than many modern counterparts attempting to draw from the same well of cheap-o homage. That sense of precision doesn’t detract from the down-and-dirty fun, either; everyone on screen appears to be having the time of their lives gnawing on the rare slab of beef they’ve been thrown.
  73. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.
  74. Ice Age
    Kids won't mind a bit, but adults accustomed to "Shrek" and Pixar will have no trouble spotting what's missing.
  75. The Boxtrolls
    In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.
  76. Rosaline
    Dever is as excellent as ever as the acerbic, quick-witted, jilted ex. She coaxes the hilariousness and heartbreak out of each scene with ease and authenticity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Roadie
    Aside from the entertaining specificity about its setting and its protagonist's profession, Roadie is as disappointingly rote as its standard setup suggests.
  78. Good Fortune
    Unfortunately, the sharp point of view and creative risk-taking present in Ansari’s acclaimed series Master Of None (co-created with Alan Yang) are nowhere to be seen in this pedestrian comedy full of convoluted plot points.
  79. He Named Me Malala
    A puff piece for someone who doesn’t need one, Malala wraps Yousafzai’s life in media-circuit testimonials and fairy-tale-like animated sequences that stop just short of drawing an aureola of fire around her.
  80. Meet the Robinsons
    Meet The Robinsons takes a large step toward making 3D a sustainable format, the CinemaScope of tomorrow.
  81. Land
    With her square-jawed beauty and exacting gaze, Wright brings intelligence and dignity to her character’s self-imposed martyrdom. It’s a weighty performance from the routinely strong actor. Maybe too weighty: Even in her blunders, Edee is solemn and deliberate.
  82. Stuck
    It's a righteously nasty piece of work, and a rare example of a movie that traffics in B-movie grime without a trace of "Grindhouse"-style self-consciousness.
  83. Nina's Tragedies
    It's not often that good movies have a hole in the center, but Nina's Tragedies labors admirably to develop the strong feelings of longing and heartbreak that unite its damaged souls, however briefly.
  84. Sunshine Cleaning
    There is a time and a place for scruffy independent also-rans like this, and that time and place is the 2 a.m. slot on IFC.
  85. Private
    For all its documentary-style urgency, Private often feels forced.
  86. Word Wars
    Ultimately as fascinating as it is frustrating.
  87. The Polar Express
    As a spectacle, The Polar Express looks remarkable. As a film, however, it's the equivalent of an elaborately wrapped Christmas present containing a nice new pair of socks.
  88. Edmond
    Edmond would probably be completely unapproachable were it not spiked with so much dark wit, much of it coming from Macy's painful naïveté and cheapness, which comes through in negotiations with various women of the night.
  89. Two Lovers and a Bear
    By the time Roman and Lucy seek shelter from a storm in an abandoned military bunker, Two Lovers And A Bear has turned into a horror film in which backstory is the monster.
  90. The Natural
    It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.
  91. The Wackness
    The Wackness' main draw is Kingsley's giddily over-the-top performance as a pothead, and the film delights in showing Gandhi sparking a huge bong or making out with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth.
    • The A.V. Club
  92. Best Worst Movie
    Though it's a ramshackle piece of filmmaking, Best Worst Movie is an honest one, too, staying open to awkward, humbling moments while still making a solid case for the film's immortal badness.
  93. Horse Girl
    Horse Girl’s big weakness is that it can’t decide how much ambiguity to provide its central character, or how seriously it wants to present Sarah’s breakdown (or, if you read the film another way, her awakening).
  94. Enemy
    Enemy dives into material Villeneuve has described as “personal.” But it’s hard to see much more than platitudes in the metaphoric muddle of its plot.
  95. The Manhattan Project
    Though the writing gets unforgivably club-fisted and implausible toward the end, The Manhattan Project shows surprising nuance in dealing with Collet and Lithgow, who are both slow to figure out that there are limits to scientific inquiry.
  96. Drawing Restraint 9
    It's hard to shake the sense that there's less here than meets the eye, but what meets the eye burns with a rare intensity.
  97. The Hero
    A film that generously gives Elliott one of the few lead roles of his lengthy career, but mostly asks him to embody clichés, without providing any sense of how he might improve upon them.
  98. Funny Face
    Donnybrook aside, Sutton has largely devoted his career to mood pieces like Dark Night and Memphis where concept is key. In Funny Face, he puts everything in movie-movie-ish scare quotes—a self-defeating approach for a paean to urban authenticity.
  99. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    Spurlock’s documentary turns out to be the exact thing it is meant to expose: an unfulfilling product passed off as something that’s good for you.
  100. Vanishing Point
    Newman picks up speed and symbolic baggage as the movie progresses, and much of the film’s brilliance lies in the way Sarafian balances the two elements.
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