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. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    On a moment-by-moment level, the action in Birds Of Prey is compelling, drawing more from the Hong Kong style of unbroken takes designed to show off the choreography than the chaotic quick cuts of most American blockbusters.
  2. Happy Death Day 2U
    The happy surprise of Happy Death Day 2U is that it does find ways to tweak the formula of its predecessor, to break the cycle of franchise redundancy.
  3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
    Hooper's abrasive satire on yuppiedom and excess, centering on a brilliantly deranged Dennis Hopper as a Texas ranger looking to avenge the death of his invalid brother, stands out for its unbridled gore and comic mayhem. It just isn't terribly fun to watch.
  4. Tyrel
    Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.
  5. The Mule
    In some ways, The Mule represents a late-period version of classic Eastwood, in that it’s even pokier and more workmanlike than his best work, and sometimes downright strange.
  6. Antlers
    The film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best.
  7. The Grief of Others
    It’s every bit as human-scaled as the filmmaker’s other work — but also, in its noble restraint, a little less involving.
  8. Continental Divide
    Continental Divide should have marked Belushi's tentative, encouraging first step towards quirkier, more substantive roles and films. Instead it, and Neighbors were more of a dead end.
  9. Peter Pan
    Though Barrie's stories are about a rite of passage into adulthood, Disney's Peter Pan treats the issue superficially, retreating from the dark places of movies like Pinocchio in favor of amped-up tomfoolery.
  10. Shoah: Four Sisters
    Perhaps Four Sisters is best considered a parting gesture from Lanzmann, ensuring that, in his body of work at least, these four “sisters” should endure as more than just a footnote.
  11. Annabelle Comes Home
    For the most part, it works. True, the haunted objects are silly at times, but unlike The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home is only funny when it’s supposed to be. And it’s enjoyable because of its clockwork efficiency, not in spite of it.
  12. Native Son
    The early stretch of the movie is its strongest, as Johnson lays out the bric-a-brac of Bigger’s life, which involves a good deal of code-switching, and carefully tweaks the novel’s key relationships, updating the condescension of his employer’s rich-kid daughter, Mary (Margaret Qualley), to a new era of white guilt and microaggressions.
  13. This One's for the Ladies
    Gene Graham’s humanizing, scrappy, documentary portrait of the black men and women of exotic dancing offers more than mere titillation.
  14. Rust Creek
    Screenwriter Julie Lipson’s well-written, naturalistic dialogue helps pass the time, as does Michelle Lawler’s lovely scenic cinematography. But although what we get instead stands on its own merits, this survival thriller could have used a few more thrills.
  15. The Wedding Guest
    It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.
  16. Triple Frontier
    Triple Frontier becomes a fascinating sustained exercise in absurdist triage, as one mishap after another forces the men to decide whether they’re prepared to throw away obscene amounts of money in order to save their skins.
  17. Buffalo Boys
    Buffalo Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain, which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.
  19. Little
    Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.
  20. Pink Flamingos
    Almost anyone could dig up and film someone with the ability to lip-synch using his a**hole, but it takes genius to set the scene to Surfin' Bird.
  21. 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.
  22. Wine Country
    While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.
  23. Big Time Adolescence
    A debauched but heartfelt coming-of-age story about impressionable teenage boys and the imperfect male role models who influence them. Davidson’s most important skill is his ability to share the spotlight and create real chemistry with his co-stars.
  24. Tora! Tora! Tora!
    The careful balancing of the two sides produces its own interesting effect, however, showing how war goes from possible to inevitable, whatever the wishes on either side. Had Tora! Tora! Tora! taken the notion a bit further, it might have created a portrait of escalating tension chilling enough to rival its carefully orchestrated climactic bombing raid.
  25. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    If Brügger shares the doubts of Williams and other Hammarskjöld conspiracy theorists about Operation Celeste (in all likelihood a hoax, though not a Soviet one), he doesn’t let them get in the way of a good story. As for the latest official U.N. inquiry, its report is due sometime this year. But then, can you really trust it?
  26. The Death of Dick Long
    Billy Chew’s screenplay takes at least one important lesson from the best of both crime movies and small-town portraits: The characters, however minor or ridiculous, seem to lead lives that started well before the movie and will continue long after. Well, except for Dick himself. He’s gone.
  27. Honey Boy
    This is actually a fairly conventional indie drama.
  28. Official Secrets
    Things perk up when Fiennes belatedly appears, and while this isn’t one of the performances he’ll be remembered for, by any means, he delivers a fine moment of utter disgust at the government’s naked corruption in the film’s very last scene. Ending on that note feels right.
  29. Run
    A psychological thriller with frustratingly little to say about the trenches of the human mind, Run nevertheless satisfies as a taut and titillating get-out movie that lands somewhere between HBO’s "Sharp Objects" and "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?"
  30. I Am Mother
    So many truly disturbing revelations pile up in the final half hour or so that processing the relevant information leaves little time for raw emotion. Swank’s nameless character, in particular, remains a pencil sketch. Still, there’s no question that Sputore can direct a movie.
  31. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.
  32. American Pop
    All that aside, American Pop is still worth watching. Bakshi may not have perfectly captured eight decades of American music history, but his attempt to do so is often thrilling for reasons other than ambition.
  33. Monster Hunter
    There’s a couple badass heroes with humongous swords, a few big scaly monstrosities, and frequently not much else. The minimalism is consistent with Anderson’s career-long devotion to delivering caloric content with an unlikely combo of classical unities and pounding, insta-dated electronic beats. The movie’s called Monster Hunter—what more could it reasonably need?
  34. Abominable
    The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.
  35. The Competition
    Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.
  36. Ma
    Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster.
  37. By the Grace of God
    Mostly, though, this very empathetic project suffers from an inability to offer anything beyond what one would expect from its synopsis.
  38. The Golden Glove
    Whatever pleasure there is to be found in watching a film like The Golden Glove is in the intellectualizing, and the film does prompt a series of provocative questions about the implicit contract between artist and audience.
  39. The Plagiarists
    Ultimately, it’s the awkwardness that they’re prodding. The Plagiarists isn’t asking why one person would tell a lie, but why another would be so bothered by it — an ambitious line of inquiry for which the film provides more references than concrete answers.
  40. Synonyms
    Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.
  41. Combat Obscura
    Unsurprisingly, the results aren’t pretty.
  42. Police Story 2 (1988)
    Opens with a montage of thrilling clips from its predecessor, then hits all the same notes, harder and duller.
  43. The Art of Self-Defense
    In a movie that often observes male dysfunction with some ironic distance, Eisenberg brings the satire closer to the bone.
  44. Two Plains & a Fancy
    Comedy is complicated and contextual, and the line between intentional and unintentional humor becomes confusing when the former mimics the latter.
  45. 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.
  46. Tell It to the Bees
    What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.
  47. The Perfection
    The Perfection takes deep, fetishistic satisfaction in pushing the envelope, then pushing it some more, building in seductive fits and shocking starts to an orgiastic frenzy of cinematic excess. Is it a progressive movie? Not especially, but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re getting into.
  48. Nightmare Cinema
    Now, Garris’ unflagging enthusiasm for uplifting his fellow creators has found a new manifestation: Nightmare Cinema, a sort of sideways revival of the Masters Of Horror franchise.
  49. Ready or Not
    The charitable reading is that Ready Or Not understands how moneyed entitlement knows no gender — that the only way to break the arbitrary yet destructive grasp of the super-rich is to chop it off, or possibly light it on fire. So no, not a subtle movie. But a fairly satisfying one.
  50. Judy
    It’s an intriguing idea that results in a painfully by-the-books biopic. That being said, a gusty, heartbreaking turn from Renée Zellweger makes the exercise worth sitting through.
  51. 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.
  52. Pain and Glory
    Banderas’ performance is so rich, in fact (he won Best Actor at Cannes), that it creates the illusion of a narrative with real depth and texture—he keeps us invested in Salvador even as the film repeatedly declines to complicate the man’s life any further.
  53. Les Misérables
    While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.
    • The A.V. Club
      • Posted May 20, 2019
  54. Oh Mercy!
    The only real gravitas comes from the reliably excellent Zem, here doing minor wonders with the clichéd role of the good-hearted, unwaveringly calm human lie detector.
  55. Sorry We Missed You
    For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.
  56. The Traitor
    The screenplay — written by Bellocchio in collaboration with several others — has no particular point of view regarding Buscetta, seeming content merely to take us step by step through his two decades as an informant.
  57. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.
  58. Invisible Life
    Much of this is relentlessly bleak and hopeless—true to reality, perhaps, but also repetitious and dramatically inert.
  59. On a Magical Night
    Despite its welcome breezy and surreal qualities, On A Magical Night has more psychological shortcuts than insights.
  60. Fire Will Come
    Quiet, slow-moving, ambiguous character studies might be a dime a dozen on the festival circuit, but there are few that remind us that there are things out there that still feel as big as myth.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lux Æterna
    Cinephiles will grin at Noé’s references to Dreyer, Godard, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder, and everyone with functioning eyesight will stare agape at the closing lightshow, but the experience won’t lead to substantive post-movie conversations as Irreversible and Climax did.
  62. 21 Bridges
    This is a well-crafted, exciting movie, sometimes more impressive for maintaining those qualities in the face of an utterly unsurprising story.
  63. Crawl
    If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama.
  64. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.
  65. Tales of Terror
    Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.
  66. Mike Wallace Is Here
    To be blunt—which Wallace, who died in 2012, always was—Mike Wallace Is Here is fascinating but scattered, and never quite decides what its target should be.
  67. Onward
    Watching Onward, it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe Pixar has overplayed the mundane half of its winning equation. They’ve made a movie about looking for misplaced magic in the modern world that, well, kind of misplaces the magic.
  68. Jawline
    Mandelup does, however, treat both the internet personalities and the fans beholden to them with great respect.
  69. The Fury
    The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.
  70. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.
  71. 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.
  72. Paradise Hills
    This accessibility actually hurts the film, exposing the flimsy balsa-wood architecture under all those frills.
  73. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    While the act of gracefully condensing this big book into a coherent movie is indeed impressive, the truth is that said movie does end up feeling a bit like glorified cliff’s notes, albeit ones enlivened by Iannucci’s gift for volleying banter.
  74. Last Christmas
    As escapist comfort-food cinema goes, this is a stick-to-your-ribs, tryptophan-coma-size helping.
  75. Black Widow
    For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.
  76. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Shang-Chi’s hero is on a journey to become himself, but the movie is lost inside of the machine.
  77. Harriet
    A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.
  78. Our Friend
    It’s sweet and involving and occasionally even moving, but also, in its selective dramatization, a lot easier. Which is to say, it approaches the story itself rather euphemistically, handling the audience with kid gloves by eliding the most unpleasant truths of the family’s experience.
  79. The Other Lamb
    Set in some indeterminate time and place rarely betrayed by modern technology or dress, The Other Lamb mostly operates in the realm of allegory.
  80. Bloody Birthday
    Timeless message: Kids: They’re the worst.
  81. Greener Grass
    Always in control of its deeply bizarre, suburban surrealist tone, even when its story is more like a series of comedy sketches than a feature film.
  82. 1917
    By the end, 1917 has positioned itself as a salute to the sacrifices of those who died for their country. Mostly, though, it comes across as a monument to itself.
  83. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is heavier on the goofery than the relevance.
  84. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
    A pleasant distraction without a lot of payoff. It doesn’t tarnish the original, but it never quite rises to its heights either.
  85. Underwater
    Unlike the best programmers, it never transcends its derivative origins and basic thrills. It’s another movie about thin characters and bland monsters—albeit one that’s better than the norm.
  86. Last Night in Soho
    Let’s just say that Last Night In Soho is giallo in at least one big respect: Like many of those films, it starts off with a strong concept, then crumbles when it’s time to move beyond striking imagery and get down to the more functional aspects of storytelling.
  87. I Lost My Body
    Where it fumbles is in the framing device.
  88. Depraved
    Breaux is able to wring great pathos out of the character of Adam with very few words, which only makes Henry and Polidori’s arguments about ethics, which increase in frequency as the film goes on, seem all the more tedious.
  89. Waves
    Waves felt to me like a bitching soundtrack in search of a movie. Maybe I’ll find one on rewatch.
  90. Chained for Life
    A meta-commentary on filmmaking in general and cinematic conceptions of beauty in specific, the film is clearly enamored with its own cleverness—which isn’t to say that it’s not clever, just that a more clear-headed film could have distilled its ideas better, and been more satisfying as a result.
  91. Fire and Ice
    Surprisingly realistic for an animated film of the time, but it's also as visually stiff and staid as any cut-rate sword-and-sorcery film, and just as formula-bound.
  92. Synchronic
    Synchronic does allow its symbolism to grow relatively organically, but in terms of character arc and parting message, this film is far more conventional than those that have come before. And a little something is lost in these broader strokes, particularly because they seem to have been self-imposed.
  93. Jungleland
    Earnest fraternal affection is the main attraction in Jungleland, director Max Winkler’s moody road-trip movie by way of a bare-knuckle boxing drama.
  94. The Kingmaker
    While researching the project, Greenfield herself thought she might find a “redemption story.” But the film eventually proves to be a far more troubling examination of the Marcoses’ continued political hold in the Philippines.
  95. La Llorona
    What stands out about the film is the pain that lies underneath Bustamante’s placid compositions—an anguished desire for justice that, like the Weeping Woman herself, still cries out to be heard.
  96. The Hottest August
    While it never feels completely defeatist, her film offers scattered snapshots of an uncertain society in its dog days.
  97. Richard Jewell
    Like so many of the works of Eastwood’s long late period, Jewell offers a story without much of an endpoint, with an uplifting coda that feels almost as jarring as the ending of "American Sniper." But somewhere within its surprisingly pacey two-plus hours is a compelling group portrait of ordinary oddballs in cruel circumstances; it relays Eastwood’s appreciation for individuals over masses better than any speech ever could.
  98. Lolita
    Where the book peers directly into despair and tragedy, the film looks away and dials up the comedy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Gus
    While a far cry from Any Given Sunday, it’s amazing how much disbelief one can suspend with a cast that also includes Tim Conway, Dick Van Patten, and Tom Bosley, along with color commentators Dick Enberg, Johnny Unitas, and former Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane.
    • The A.V. Club
    • 42 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Heavyweights
    The lovable losers get one over the pretty people, making incremental improvements to their lives without fundamentally changing what makes them unique—a hallmark of Apatow films to come that’s a decent fit for a family movie.
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