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. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Photos, clips from Eisenstein’s own films and from newsreels, and the director’s erotic drawings are spliced in or sometimes projected over the background, but the overloaded visual plane only underlines the fact that Eisenstein In Guanajuato never moves anywhere; eventually, it becomes stultifying. It’s a movie jumping in place.
  2. Our Idiot Brother
    Rudd ably carries the film while retaining a light touch, though even with Rudd in the lead, it's still a featherweight trifle, an afternoon nap of a feel-good comedy.
  3. 9
    It’s a perfectly functional, fairly scary kids’ film, with plenty of craft and creativity to keep adults occupied. But with a story as sophisticated as its visuals, it could have been much more.
  4. Where Do We Go Now?
    What the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances.
  5. The Guys
    In spite of some affecting moments, the film never quite works. It's too theatrical, perhaps unavoidably.
  6. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.
  7. Overnight
    As Overnight progresses and its title grows increasingly ironic, it paints a mesmerizing portrait of a profane, overbearing monster engaged in a drawn-out act of professional suicide.
  8. See How They Run
    Ultimately, See How They Run is too reverent to its forebears and too toothless in its satire to elevate beyond an overly self-aware genre exercise—competent enough, but all too eager to shoot any attempted subtlety dead where it stands.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Delta
    While the structure of The Delta—sort of a tag-team narrative that begins with Gray and switches to Chan halfway through—is an intriguing touch, this gritty film never follows through on the issues it raises.
  10. Kill the Messenger
    It’s an interesting approach to a fascinating story — yet it still can’t fully break free of its initial limitations.
  11. Good Ol' Freda
    The impression left is that of a movie bending over backward to not let its subject tell her life story.
  12. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    Jeff begins with its protagonist discussing a Hollywood movie and ends by embracing the worst excesses of commercial American filmmaking, but there are enough moments of magic and wonder in the interim to make it worthwhile.
  13. Breathe In
    The result puts a handful of good actors on autopilot, maneuvering around Intro To Screenwriting character beats, occasionally accompanied by sappy piano music.
  14. Actor Martinez
    It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    Kudrow and Sorvino aren't really given a script to work with; most jokes consist of the two women being vacuous together.
  16. Young Rebels
    The documentary is short, vividly shot, and packed with interviews in which desperate young men and women let loose their personal philosophies. In fact, there's so much philosophizing that there's not much time left for rap.
  17. Saludos Amigos
    Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale, joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and entertain, but fails on both counts.
  18. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Its insights are modest, but modesty is a virtue for a low-key comedy this doggedly unpretentious.
  19. The Angry Birds Movie 2
    The Angry Birds Movie 2 is the very definition of empty-calorie cinema—bright and shiny and satisfying enough for a few fleeting moments until it’s balled up and thrown in the trash. It’s also fast-paced, interesting to look at, and notably less irritating than the original, which is all you can really ask of a film like this one.
  20. Midwinter Break
    Midwinter Break is most interested in the realities of long-term relationships—with unfaced trauma and graceful forgiveness alike—more than concrete absolutes, which is what makes it a valuable meditation on the imperfection of marriage.
  21. Daybreak
    It maintains a strong enough sense of squirmy humanity that its characters' epiphanies and emotional growth feel both hard-earned and richly deserved.
  22. Meatballs
    The movie has a lumpy shape, and its jokes are often obvious and crude, but it’s a lot sweeter than the other raunchy comedies of the era.
  23. American Casino
    The film doesn’t come to life until too late in the game.
  24. Sweet Bean
    What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.
  25. The Kill Team
    Its depiction of toxic masculinity and bloodthirstiness within the U.S. Army is blunted by an overly passive lead performance and a lack of specificity in its storytelling.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. Trumbo
    Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.
  29. The Importance of Being Earnest
    The film seems content with the more modest ambitions of a romantic comedy, albeit one with unusually potent wit and intricate construction. The old Ealing could never have afforded Parker's deluxe treatment of the material; the new Ealing seems to have forgotten the benefits of economy.
  30. Together
    Miles away from "Farewell, My Concubine" in form and function, with thinly defined characters and unreflective attitudes about urban values vs. country values, the film would be impossible to identify as Chen's if his name weren't in the opening credits.
  31. Reconstruction
    Reconstruction doesn't evoke much emotion beyond cool ennui. At that, the film excels.
  32. The Clearing
    It never adds up to much. There's a fair amount of fine acting (with that cast, how could there not be?), but it's in the service of a story that bubbles without ever boiling.
  33. Massoud, the Afghan
    A series of non-answers isn't enough to build a documentary on, especially when they're strung together by insufferably self-congratulatory voiceover narration (de Ponfilly plays up his agony over whether documentary filmmaking helps or hurts its subjects) and corny stylistic effects.
  34. The Many Saints of Newark
    Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.
  35. The Last Five Years
    For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.
  36. Any Day Now
    Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.
  37. Mary Queen of Scots
    By focusing on Mary (the subject of its source material), the film feels lopsided, especially without any other interesting characters apart from Elizabeth.
  38. Fightville
    The dramatic stakes are high in Fightville, and Epperlein and Tucker shine a little light on the margins of this marginalized sport.
  39. 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.
  40. Allied
    Zemeckis has fashioned an unfashionable throwback, and if Allied doesn’t land the gut-punch it winds up to deliver, there’s nevertheless plenty to admire in a blockbuster craftsman and two beautiful stars paying tribute to the spirit of an older Hollywood.
  41. Fugitive Pieces
    In many ways, Fugitive Pieces is a beautiful film. But it's a bit TOO beautiful.
  42. Dredd
    Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.
  43. A Sidewalk Astronomer
    Jacobs focuses almost exclusively on Dobson's theories and mission, which he illustrates by contrasting jaw-dropping images of the sun's surface with people ignoring Dobson's entreaties to "Come look at the sun."
  44. The Adjustment Bureau
    It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.
  45. Scream
    The script, from veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt and Castle Rock scribe Guy Busick, leans in to the franchise’s fidgety intelligence, swerving and ducking and winking at the camera like the “meta whodunit slasher” it proudly proclaims itself to be.
  46. C.O.G.
    There are some who have complained that C.O.G. ends too abruptly, but it has the bracing, devastating punctuation of a fine short story.
  47. The White Countess
    As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    American Teacher
    The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it's impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.
  49. Lightyear
    What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.
  50. Overlord
    It’s reasonably good, creepy fun, provided you’re not troubled by fleeting, uncomfortable thoughts like “Hey, that screaming bloodthirsty mutant monster could theoretically be a reanimated Anne Frank.”
  51. Return to the Land of Wonders
    Pachachi doesn't integrate her interviews into any kind of comprehensive portrait of recent Iraq history. They're bunched together randomly, like a collection of vignettes.
  52. GOAT
    The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.
  53. Good Boys
    Yet as with "Booksmart," the summer’s earlier riff on that Apatovian classic, there are times when Good Boys feels a little too nice to actually be uproarious. In more ways than one, it’s the training wheels for a better comedy — a slightly edgier and funnier one.
  54. In the Land of Saints and Sinners
    This is the definition of a B movie; competent, easy to follow, and almost instantly forgettable.
  55. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain would be better-served by more touches of universality, as in the scene where a neighbor woman comforts Huang by saying, "All women go through this." That scene flirts with metaphor. The rest of the film too often descends into harangue.
  56. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  57. Motherless Brooklyn
    This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.
  58. The Whale
    The Whale’s raison d’etre seems to be about being the engine driving Fraser’s long-awaited resurgence. Beyond that there’s nothing much to see.
  59. Great Expectations
    In the end, a thoroughly needless rehash.
  60. Warm Bodies
    For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.
  61. Crawl
    If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama.
  62. With All Deliberate Speed
    At once inspirational and deeply depressing, With All Deliberate Speed, directed by "Hoop Dreams" producer Peter Gilbert, is too candid and forthright about the current state of race relations to allow for the sort of cheery, unambiguous uplift favored by civil-rights documentaries.
  63. Matthias & Maxime
    It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.
  64. McFarland USA
    Of course, it would be even nicer to see this story from a student athlete’s point of view. Beyond the representation issue, it might allow the movie to eliminate its dull and unevenly developed scenes.
  65. Bride Flight
    The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.
  66. Gloomy Sunday
    Gloomy Sunday's success in transcending its own clichés and conventionality -- at least until the morose finale -- is due in part to the story's primal romantic pull, aided by attractive actors who either stare longingly into each other's eyes or cavort in states of undress.
  67. Stillwater
    It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wedding Singer
    Sandler is endearing as a sensitive nice guy, and Barrymore is a cute love interest, but The Wedding Singer fails to deliver the anticipated laughs.
  69. P!nk: All I Know So Far
    If only the documentary following the start of her European tour were half as adventurous as the artist herself. Especially in light of the rollicking aerial pyrotechnics and vocal gymnastics provided by its subject, P!nk: All I Know So Far comes across as downright staid by comparison.
  70. The Nowhere Inn
    Never consistently funny enough to work as straight comedy and too broad to succeed in its somber aspirations, the results are still engaging in their attempts to defy easy categorization. Like St. Vincent herself, The Nowhere Inn keeps morphing into something else.
  71. A Perfect Day
    On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.
  72. Cool Runnings
    Though it certainly has faults, which only the extremely nostalgic could ignore, the film bests its contemporaries through its ability to unite childlike comedy and adult concerns without ever obscuring one with the other.
  73. Mr. Nice
    The result is a film that's long and choppy, with little narrative momentum. And yet at times, Mr. Nice is frustratingly close to brilliant.
  74. In Paris
    Besides the restless style, Dans Paris is remarkable for being more about familial bonds than French cinema tends to be.
  75. Christopher Robin
    Beneath its wistful tone, Christopher Robin supplies the purest wish-fulfillment fantasy that a children’s movie can offer adults: that our childhoods miss us as much as we miss them.
  76. Rooms for Tourists
    It'd be great if Rooms For Tourists had a clearer point, or something significant to say about the human condition, but even in spite of its low budget, cruddy look, and modest aspirations, the movie is art of a kind.
  77. Day of the Dead
    Day Of The Dead is more like Romero's scorching 1973 satire The Crazies, in which anarchy reigns and the very concept of heroes dissolves. The action at the end is lurid, made giddily disgusting by Tom Savini's amazing gore effects, and made gripping by Romero's gift for the cold logic of systemic breakdown. Still, some audiences may give up early, fed up with the shrill claustrophobia.
  78. The Concert
    It acknowledges grief, horror, and loss, but never lets it get in the way of a big, bright laugh.
  79. Wonder Woman 1984
    Wonder Woman 1984 is lively and bright and entertaining enough that it only occasionally feels like it’s going to go on forever. But it’s hard to get past what seems like a lack of consideration—or perhaps concern— for what motivates Diana Prince, or what fans like about her.
  80. Battle in Heaven
    Battle In Heaven is like a serious of artful photographs, except that Reygadas also moves the camera in astonishing and unusual ways, swooping around the conventional x- and y-axes while teasing the audience with what he's about to show. He's got an astonishing technique. Here's hoping that someday he'll use it to make a movie.
  81. Body of War
    Body Of War purposefully depicts an America in turmoil. But it also depicts an America far more capable of living with contradictions than the "Red State/Blue State"-obsessed cable-news pundits would have us believe.
  82. Ophelia
    They’ve created not a bold revision but a bland empowerment tale, devoid of everything that makes Hamlet great.
  83. The Heat
    Part of the point here is to stake a claim on a genre that’s traditionally been a boys’ club, and in that regard, The Heat delivers: In a bonding moment, this odd couple goes on a bender as epic as anything in "The Hangover." Their enthusiasm with weapons should alarm viewers across all demographics and species.
  84. Bad Times at the El Royale
    Unlike the director’s debut feature The Cabin In The Woods, Bad Times At The El Royale isn’t a deconstruction of the neo-noir genre so much as a structurally ambitious example of same.
  85. Machete
    It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.
  86. In Her Shoes
    The whole exercise feels hopelessly shallow and artificial. In Her Shoes is basically a double-date romantic comedy, in which not one but two women find themselves and learn to live and love again, etc. etc., and while it's well-acted on most counts, it's also as plodding as it is obvious.
  87. Tomorrowland
    Bird stages the PG mayhem with his usual grasp of dimension and space, his gift for action that’s timed like physical comedy. He keeps the whole thing moving, even when it begins to feel bogged down by preachiness and sci-fi exposition.
  88. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.
  89. What Would Jesus Buy?
    It's neither conceptually bold nor slyly satirical when Billy dresses up as a Southern evangelical and sings made-up hymns about "the shopacalypse."
  90. Tumbledown
    That Tumbledown sort of works in spite of all its clichés is a testament to the gifts of its two lead actors.
  91. Love Is All You Need
    Cast with winning actors (particularly Molly Blixt Egelind as Dyrholm’s daughter) who seem determined not to distract viewers from the coastal backdrops, Love Is All You Need proceeds in all the expected directions short of actually including The Beatles.
  92. L'iceberg
    The film is striking and often charming, and any movie that places three tall, lanky types aboard a miniature boat named "Titanique" can't be slammed too much. But in the end, it's easier to admire than to love.
  93. On My Way
    This isn’t the kind of movie that’s in a hurry to get anywhere in particular. Still, there’s no need for the journey to be quite so blah.
  94. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    Three Thousand Years Of Longing unfortunately undercuts its own effectiveness as a singular piece, presenting less as a unified vision of an auteur director than a scattershot assemblage of motifs, philosophies, and themes in search of a spine to hold them together.
  95. Darling
    Darling is light on plot and long on style, meaning that horror fans who criticized "The Witch" as “boring” may have a similar reaction here as well.
  96. Protocols of Zion
    Muddled, painfully earnest documentary.
  97. Dark Night
    Dark Night isn’t really a polemic. It’s a mysterious elegy for a community on the verge of a nightmarish crucible.
  98. Jumbo
    This is a slight film, one that peaks early and spends the rest of its runtime shuffling its narrative cards, re-combining the same elements in different ways. But Jumbo still stands out, thanks to a concept and aesthetic much stronger than its story.
  99. At Middleton
    Unremarkable, though hardly unpleasant, the middlebrow middle-age romance At Middleton often plays like a forgotten trifle from the Golden Age of Hollywood studio filmmaking, distinguished more by its competence and affable performances than by any formal or thematic potency.
  100. The Last Sentence
    The continual wobbling of on-screen space, combined with some endearingly awkward attempts at humor (dog reaction shots abound), gives this tony biopic a smidgen of charm, though it doesn’t make it any less tedious.
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