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. White Wedding
    Jann Turner's shiny, happy crowd-pleaser gleans a tiny shred of substance and social relevance from its exploration of racial and class politics in a post-apartheid South Africa that's still very much split across race lines.
  2. Sea Fever
    It’s well-acted and reasonably intelligent, but also derivative enough to compare unfavorably to plenty of stone-cold classics.
  3. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Were Mandela solely interested in that early chapter of its subject’s life, when he was reluctantly turning to violent tactics in the war on apartheid, the film might have achieved a uniquely complicated perspective. Alas, the first passage is just a portion of what turns out to be a typically sprawling, bloated biopic.
  4. Brothers at War
    It’s practically a feature-length infomercial for the military.
  5. Saw X
    Fans who tune in mainly for the insane timeline twists won’t get them, but otherwise, this is the most satisfying Saw installment since the first three. Also, be sure to stick around for a mid-credits scene.
  6. RED
    Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.
  7. Citadel
    Citadel is plenty scary: a bare-bones man-against-his-worst-fears white knuckler, shot through deep, menacing shadows.
  8. Goosebumps
    Though it revives at least a dozen of Stine’s most popular beasts and fiends, the new Goosebumps movie rarely recalls the old preteen page-turners for which it’s named.
  9. Magic Farm
    Magic Farm muddles the self-probing spirit of its predecessor, developing a reliance on cringe-inducing ketamine jokes and Brooklynite strawmen in lieu of engaging with the political misdeeds it casually refers to.
  10. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
    While the guys are enormous, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera is lighter than the first movie. Cranking his personality to make Big Nick more morally palatable, Gudegast emphasizes the likability of his motley crew throughout, not the moral gray areas of law enforcement.
  11. Rules Don't Apply
    Aside from Beatty’s performance, the only consistent thing the movie has going for it is ineffable strangeness; it seems to be trapped at the bottom of the chasm that separates its subversive aims from its nostalgic pursuits.
  12. Interview with the Assassin
    Smartly conceived and meticulously executed, if too slight and gimmicky to have much resonance.
  13. Spartan
    Using simplicity as another form of deception, Mamet lays out a hand of three-card monte for the audience to see, then tricks it into guessing falsely. In this case, it's worth getting fooled out of a little cash.
  14. Cellular
    The film works by putting the accelerator to the floor and never looking in the rear-view mirror.
  15. Happy, Happy
    The characters remain governed by what they've been told about themselves for years - that they're ugly, devious, mean, low-class, or silly - until a fresh set of eyes changes what they see in the mirror. Knowing this mutual moment of stark self-awareness is coming doesn't make its arrival any less powerful.
  16. The Other F Word
    The film's juxtaposition of punk-rock fashion and cozy domesticity proves neither comic nor revelatory. It is, however, adorable, though not adorable enough to compensate for the film's damnable lack of focus.
  17. Rolling Papers
    At its best, Rolling Papers is like a paean to old-fashioned journalism, with its curious, intrepid writers — backed by well-heeled publishers — diligently finding and piecing-together important stories in the public interest. If Dickman had really wanted to be clever, he could’ve called this movie "Potlight."
  18. Analyze This
    A funny, tightly plotted, well-conceived comedy that transcends both Crystal's '90s curse and its horrible title.
  19. Mrs. Hyde
    Like Bozon’s other films, Mrs. Hyde just comes across as randomly odd, throwing together a bunch of disparate, individually intriguing elements and hoping they’ll add up to something cohesive and satisfying. As usual, they don’t.
  20. The Power
    The movie’s period spookiness and its #MeToo outrage have virtually nothing to do with each other, diminishing the efficacy of both and making it feel like a tract.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Kumaré
    Even at a slim 84 minutes, that arc is padded out with side explorations of acoustic therapy and alien-abduction communes that dilute the film's focus and only make it seem like the filmmaker's aware there just isn't much there there.
  22. Vice Is Broke
    For as much as Huang tries to go for a more freewheeling approach, treating his interviews like off-the-cuff conversations taking place in bars and restaurants, Vice Is Broke isn’t that intimate or revealing.
  23. Benny's Video (1992)
    Haneke's schoolmarm tendencies come to the surface in Benny's Video, which implicates the media for desensitizing people to violence.
  24. They Came Together
    Seeing clichés mimicked this skillfully is plenty hilarious.
  25. The Music Never Stopped
    The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.
  26. To the Stars
    As writer Shannon Bradley-Colleary and director Martha Stephens embark on a love story so subtle, it isn’t really a love story at all. In some hands, that would be intriguing. Here, however, it’s just lukewarm.
  27. Moving On
    This Paul Weitz project may be a reminder that good chemistry and stellar leading ladies can only get you so far.
  28. Isn't It Romantic
    It’s a feature-length in-joke for fans who will always pause if My Best Friend’s Wedding pops up during a lazy Saturday afternoon channel-surfing session, but who ultimately consider rom-coms a slightly shameful guilty pleasure.
  29. The Columnist
    Overall, this is a sophisticated take on over-the-top material, arch but not quite Serial Mom-style campy.
  30. The Decline of the American Empire
    With nothing at stake dramatically, much less cinematically, Arcand leans heavily on brow-raising repartee to carry the load, but his naked contempt throws a wet blanket over all the frank sexual anecdotes and observations.
  31. Red Dragon
    Norton is a strong lead in an overwrought, mediocre film that trumps even Hannibal in its mercenary shamelessness.
  32. The Beaver
    While The Beaver starts with Gibson in "What Women Want" slapstick mode, it eventually goes to such exaggerated, extreme places that it becomes as much of a must-watch train-wreck as Gibson's own real-life situation.
  33. Manic
    Honest and moving.
  34. Norman
    Chances are, Norman would have seemed like a retread whenever it came out, but it does the movie no favors to release it in the shadow of "Terri" and "Submarine," both far more compelling portraits of high-school loners, and both released to DVD in the last few weeks.
  35. The Iceman
    Alternating scenes of the psycho-as-family-man with an increasingly grisly and desperate series of hits, it makes for a surprisingly monotonous sit for a movie that also features a killer named Mr. Freezy.
  36. The Aeronauts
    On the whole, The Aeronauts is a pretty good small-scale adventure movie. It’s also a pretty dull everything-else, the unceasing flashbacks providing multiple instances where telling might have been preferable to showing.
  37. Little Joe
    Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.
  38. All Day and a Night
    Cole had a key part in one of the biggest game-changers in Black cinema this decade: a co-writing credit on Black Panther. But where that film was expansive and forward-thinking, this one feels like a throwback—and not in a good way.
  39. Trust
    With a little tweaking, this easily could have veered into grindhouse exploitation or mindless wish-fulfillment, but Schwimmer's detached, theatrical approach to his material makes it is more cerebral than visceral, and more Steppenwolf Theatre than Charles Bronson.
  40. Night Always Comes
    Prolific TV director Benjamin Caron‘s self-serious movie keeps digging itself into a hole, first with its narrative, then with its heroine’s increasingly lurid backstory, until, like that heroine, it can’t claw its way out.
  41. Under the Silver Lake
    The pervasive but almost offhand menace is supplied by Mitchell’s impeccable, widescreen mise-en-scène; the ordinary dread he locates in an unglamorous, mundane L.A.; and the way even the film’s comedy seems perched on the edge of unease.
  42. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Yes, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is extremely silly. For its first 30 or so minutes, it also manages to be fun.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    Credit Baumbach, credit the filmmakers, credit no one giving a damn anymore - for what's yet another hyperactive talking-animal children's movie, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted is uncommonly rewarding, and a potential future stoner's delight.
  44. 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.
  45. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Perhaps it was inevitable that a movie about the ultimate stoner would be undone by fuzzy execution and lack of ambition.
  46. Gifted
    Call it a dumbed-down "Good Will Hunting."
  47. Lone Survivor
    For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.
  48. Smallfoot
    It’s still mostly just a time-passer for younger kids — and, absent a strong point of view, as much of a hedged bet as its narration-and-song opening.
  49. Treasure Planet
    With much more success than last summer's formula-bound "Atlantis," Treasure Planet finds the common ground between classic Disney animation and newfangled action-adventure films.
  50. House of Gucci
    Ridley Scott's melodrama about the Italian fashion family has its moments, but not enough of them.
  51. Middle Men
    Like Ribisi and Macht's miniature porn empire, Gallo's mildly diverting but overstuffed, underdeveloped opus could use the cinematic equivalent of a fix-it man like Wilson's character to transform its frenetic jumble of subplots and sleazy characters into a cohesive, satisfying whole.
  52. Being the Ricardos
    The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.
  53. Bad Moms
    The performers do sell a lot of this material. Bell is especially funny as a cheery, lonely mom whose litany of childcare responsibilities has cut her off from the rest of the world.
  54. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the title of which should be taken as a warning, knows all too well that its target audience wants more of the same. Heck, some of the songs (“Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” “The Name Of The Game,” etc.) are recycled from the first film.
  55. Life of Crime
    Thing is, though, for anyone familiar with the Tarantino film, this less remarkable picture will totally seem like a prequel, peering back as it does on younger versions of characters audiences got to know in "Jackie Brown."
  56. Thin Ice
    The movie takes some dark, violent turns once Crudup enters the picture, and loses some of its initial soft, regional charm. But Kinnear and Crudup are funny, and the plot does fold together with the kind of cruel logic that these sorts of twist-a-thons often lack.
  57. True Romance
    The Tony Scott version of Tarantino comes out vulgar; the graphic violence and profanity-laced posturing represent everything that the wannabes soon used to exhaust audiences. Nevertheless, True Romance contains so many unforgettable moments.
  58. Hateship Loveship
    This particular character is so thinly written, and so aggressively nondescript, that it’s just a terrible fit for her(Wiig), resulting in a preposterous wish-fulfillment fantasy with an enormous void at its center.
  59. 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.
  60. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    If nothing else, the shaggy romantic comedy Celeste And Jesse Forever establishes that Parks And Recreation's Rashida Jones is a movie star.
  61. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    A harmless feel-good movie that tries to tell audiences what it's like to be a victimized immigrant, and mostly winds up telling them what it's like to have their heartstrings yanked, gratuitiously and often.
  62. Midnight Express
    Midnight Express is at war with itself. Strong when it focuses on the psychological toll of prison, it falls apart when it turns the focus elsewhere, and its depictions of all Turks as swarthy, corrupt, and sadistic is pretty inexcusable.
  63. Standing Tall
    A non-professional making his screen debut, Paradot serves up plenty of volatility, but he never quite succeeds in making Malony seem like a kid with real potential that’s being squandered.
  64. Killing Ground
    Killing Ground comes down to what you want to experience in a horror movie. Granted, all this elaborately constructed savagery is upsetting, so the film succeeds on that level. But without suspense to propel it forward, and without a compelling backstory to deepen the intrigue, upset is all we’ve got.
  65. 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.
  66. We Live in Time
    We Live In Time’s worst sin is making its thin characters so damn boring. They’re so likable and sweet, even their flaws are forgivable.
  67. Heli
    The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    She's Lost Control
    At its simplest, She’s Lost Control is a tale of girl meets boy (where “boy” is the lead’s latest client, Johnny, played by Marc Menchaca), and at its potential worst, just another attempt to probe the line between sex and self though the figure of the sex worker.
  69. Sibyl
    Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    The Immortal Man is not a good entry point into Peaky Blinders for the same reason it is not rewarding for existing fans: It traffics only in the late stages of Shelby’s arc, but offers nothing new to those who have already been there, done that.
  71. Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    Comes from a pure place. Or rather, it comes from a DESIRE for a pure place in a game poisoned by mercenary compromise.
  72. Only the Strong Survive
    But while Only The Strong Survive is essential viewing for soul fans, as a documentary it never makes the needed connections among the artists, their music, and the lives they lead.
  73. The Rundown
    The result rises to the level of mediocrity thanks largely to the magnetic presence of The Rock, who's made a smooth transition from professional wrestling to leading-man status with this and "The Scorpion King."
  74. Life
    Corbijn’s reserved, removed approach gives his stars the space to develop a real chemistry, which makes their characters pleasant company, once they get past their early clumsiness around each other.
  75. Beowulf
    Ten years from now, Beowulf may look like the groundbreaking project that helped kill live-action movies, but for the moment, its uncomfortable jokes and fakey rendering of life leave it wedged firmly in the uncanny valley. (Insert your own joke about Jolie's astonishing animated anatomy here.)
  76. The Humbling
    Even, however, if its thunder hadn’t been immediately stolen by "Birdman," which premiered three days before it at last August’s Venice International Film Festival, The Humbling would still look like a folly. Bad timing is the least of its problems.
  77. See for Me
    While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.
  78. White Boy Rick
    Best of all is Merritt, a remarkable find who makes an indelible impression in his very first onscreen role. Giving Rick just the right mix of bravado and awkwardness, he’s like an improbable gene splice of a young Matt Dillon with a young Seth Rogen. Don’t expect him to disappear for 30 years.
  79. The Secret Garden
    The Secret Garden is a mid-tier adaptation, though one with heart and soul.
  80. The Last Mimzy
    If Mimzy serves as a gateway drug that gets "Shrek" fans into classic science fiction, then it'll have performed an invaluable cultural service.
  81. Breakfast on Pluto
    Though he (Jordan) directs with admirable skill, his usual touches don't drive the film--which occasionally threatens to lose its shape.
  82. Spider-Man 3
    So Spider-Man 3's action is superb and its theme fairly weighty. Then why does it feel a letdown from its predecessor? Nearly all the blame rests with director Sam Raimi, who's taken the success of some light slapstick moments in Spider-Man 2 as a cue to get even sillier.
  83. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    Erik Sharkey’s documentary is far less adventurous than Struzan’s own creations, using a straightforward chronological structure and talking-head format to pay tribute to Struzan’s legendary output.
  84. Mom and Dad
    If it doesn’t entirely exploit the potency of its metaphor, there’s still a certain grim fun in seeing Taylor give “family feud” an outrageous new meaning.
  85. Road to Nowhere
    The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.
  86. Mojados: Through the Night
    Raw but riveting front-line journalism. Like any good reporter, Davis knows a fascinating story when he sees one, and he goes to impressive lengths to put himself in the middle of it, taking his viewers along for the bumpy ride.
  87. Unconscious
    While the content is colorful and the actors seem up for the task, a flawed script and Oristrell's unemphatic direction let all the impact dribble away.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unbroken
    Moral and spiritual triumph lie at the end of this hellish gauntlet, but though Jolie is shooting for Christ-like passion and redemption, she only ends up slathering one man’s very real, very morbid struggles in the usual reductive “greatest generation” sentiment.
  89. Into the Forest
    Indeed, there are stretches of Into The Forest during which one could momentarily forget that it’s a survivalist tale at all… or even that it’s taking place in the middle of nowhere, for that matter. The essential becomes irrelevant.
  90. Fuze
    Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident.
  91. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    In their attempt to make rural life look magical, Scott and Pouliot dehumanize their characters, substituting quirks for true individuality.
  92. The Shallows
    A fitfully entertaining mix of offscreen gore and Maxim-esque T&A.
  93. 24 Days
    24 Days is neither subtle nor particularly sophisticated as filmmaking, but its refusal to reduce lived reality to generic tropes is admirable.
  94. Obsession
    The heightened luridness of Obsession does succeed in making Vertigo’s twisty plot seem all the more inessential to that film’s power. What both movies do is cut a tale of murder and madness down to its essence, exploring characters who’ve been damaged by social expectations and their own desires.
  95. Italian Studies
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
  96. A Home at the End of the World
    The result: some intriguing moments, even more intriguing performances, and a film that doesn't quite work.
  97. The Best Man Holiday
    While The Best Man Holiday doesn’t have anything especially original to say on the subject, it’s still refreshing to see a reunion movie set aside the usual themes of aging and reconciliation to focus on how a group deals with death.
  98. Copying Beethoven
    Aspires to the sublime, but it stalls at the merely ridiculous.
  99. 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.
  100. Outlaw King
    The heroes are noble but believable, the villains appropriately loathsome, and the violent clashes, particularly a turning-point castle infiltration, are exciting without indulging in a Gibson-style wallow in torture and gore. But the moments of offbeat personality that animate Mackenzie’s best work are fewer and farther between.
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