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. Nights and Weekends
    To some extent, if you've seen one Swanberg film, you've seen them all; Nights And Weekends contains the usual mix of frank, awkward sex scenes and couples talking passive-aggressively around each other.
  2. Better Than Chocolate
    The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.
  3. Advantageous
    As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.
  4. Lemon
    Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.
  5. I Smile Back
    Silverman tackles the role with total conviction, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her play a similarly unhinged character in "Take This Waltz" — or, for that matter, anyone who’s seen her perform live.
  6. Tower Heist
    In the end, Tower Heist isn't a black Ocean's Eleven or a bold leap forward for feature-film distribution, just a passable piece of commercial entertainment that falls closer to product than art.
  7. Sarah's Key
    Veers in and out of conventionality, and ultimately sinks into it at the end. But first, it deals with old types in new ways, raising issues as it raises hackles.
  8. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo fades into the sidelines of his own movie, and that may be why the mournful finale of Battle feels so canned, like a roiling tide of crocodile tears. Eleven years ago, Jackson earned the fond, seemingly endless farewells of The Return Of The King. His Hobbit series has only one ending, and it comes not a moment too soon.
  9. The Silent Twins
    In The Silent Twins, the Gibbons sisters are let down by a script that undercuts the unique circumstances of their lives with familiar and ultimately less compelling storytelling tropes.
  10. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Between Two Ferns meanders; it invents often-pointless conflicts between its characters; it sometimes feels like a film casting around desperately for an emotional hook to rest itself upon.... It’s also deeply funny, surrounding a talented comedian with other talented comedians and letting them riff off of each other for a feature’s worth of length.
  11. Don't Move
    There's nothing cute, cloying, or playful about the lovers in Sergio Castellitto's opaque romantic drama Don't Move, but in their way, they're as incomprehensible as the stars of any gimmicky comic love film.
  12. Army of Darkness
    It’s just pure pleasure for 81 minutes, and that’s it.
  13. All Is True
    Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.
  14. Winter Solstice
    The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.
  15. Champs
    As a documentary, Champs feels a bit punch-drunk — weaving from one idea to the next while never quite zoning in on any particular target for too long.
  16. Amnesia
    Schroeder was reportedly inspired to make Amnesia as a tribute to his mother, who left Germany not long after the Nazis came to power and never wanted to return; he even shot the film in the house where she lived for many years (which was also a major location in his 1969 debut, More). But neither he nor his co-writers managed to prevent their ostensible subtext from swamping the text.
  17. The Manor
    As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.
  18. Battle Beyond the Stars
    Battle Beyond The Stars has a charm that belies its low budget and opportunistic origins.
  19. Humane
    It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.
  20. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    What a pity, then, that almost no imagination has been expended on the narrative.
  21. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    It wants to humanize the plight of the disabled, but it undermines its worthy aims by presenting its leads as martyrs and saints.
  22. Godzilla vs. Kong
    There may be a moral somewhere in Godzilla Vs. Kong about hubris and greed, but really, this movie knows you came to see monsters punch each other. And monsters punching each other you shall get.
  23. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Some good Bob Dylan songs are called in to underline the big moments, but end up eclipsing them instead. There's more drama and insight in a snippet of "One More Cup Of Coffee" than the entirety of Jack & Rose.
  24. Go for Sisters
    Like much of the later work by writer-director John Sayles, Go For Sisters is overlong, style-less, and dramatically undercooked.
  25. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    Though it sets out with noble intentions, What’s Love Got to Do With It is inelegant and reductive. It’s a well-meaning but misguided film that ends up playing into the same prejudices and preconceptions its characters are meant to be challenging.
  26. No Hard Feelings
    Jennifer Lawrence proves, once again, that she can carry a film by the sheer force of her on-screen magnetism and performance agility.
  27. Doctor Sleep
    For as much as the story concerns leaping into other people’s heads, Flanagan never quite gets into Danny’s; his tortured grappling with his memories is abstract at best, McGregor’s mostly functional performance failing to offer the necessary window into that process.
  28. Fade to Black
    Beyond offering a valuable look at Jay-Z's creative process, the behind-the-scenes material complements the concert footage, showing the work that allows Jay-Z to entertain tens of thousands of fans live.
  29. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    While director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the stage production) often uses the opened-up space of the movie well, he doesn't always avoid some of the common pitfalls that come with adapting plays.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Silver Bullets
    The line between "highly personal" and "navel-gazing" varies depending on one's feelings toward the person offering up the serving of self-contemplation, but Silver Bullets' introspection feels earned.
  31. J. Edgar
    Eastwood's prim, respectful biography presents Hoover in turn as a muddy political metaphor, a lesson in self-mythologizing, and a case history in repression, but never particularly as a man.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    Unlike the whimsical, slapstick-driven shorts on which it’s based, this feature-length adaptation adds an obligatory emotional arc that feels at odds with the zany spirit of historical time-travel tales.
  33. The Cartel
    The Cartel frequently veers into the realm of black comedy, as Bowdon uncovers instances of nightmarish teacher behavior, but the dark comic elements would be better served by deadpan detachment.
  34. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.
  35. Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
    When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.
  36. The Railway Man
    Along the way, The Railway Man accumulates some power and insight, but it’s also hard to shake the feeling that a complicated first-person account has been given the Weinstein treatment.
  37. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    It isn't a biography of the legendary photographer, and it's not exactly an essay. Mostly, Bütler fills the screen with Cartier-Bresson's photographs while people explain their greatness.
  38. Extraordinary Tales
    Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    Follow That Bird isn’t really the most memorable movie in terms of music or storyline—there’s a reason you don’t remember any of the songs from the movie like you do the ones from Sesame Street, the show—but it contains moments, both comical and tragic, that are absolutely indelible.
  40. Pretty Problems
    The humor in Pretty Problems isn’t often laugh-out-loud funny, but the observational satire is astute: it highlights how charity may be a performative act for donors, but that makes the need no less urgent for recipients, while acknowledging how far wealth distances some people from reality.
  41. Sing
    It turns out that Sing’s myriad irritations are a lot more eclectic than its long, long playlist of pop hits.
  42. Deja Vu
    Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people's intelligence.
  43. Lizzie
    Putting Kristen Stewart and Chloë Sevigny on screen together was a wonderful choice—one that doesn’t deserve to be drowned in a torrent of confusing, implausible, and just downright dull ones.
  44. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Thompson's cast is too large for her to make the best use of her ingenious story-structure.
  45. Cocaine Cowboys
    Ultimately, Cocaine Cowboys' lesson isn't that crime doesn't pay, but that it maybe pays too well.
  46. The Playroom
    More than anything, The Playroom feels like an excuse to explore this retro house from a child’s point of view—which is perfectly okay, provided no one breaks the spell by talking.
  47. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a slog, confused about the artist at its heart and stuck on unconvincing ideas about his art.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fight or Flight
    Hartnett is the one element that makes the whole thing bearable. Yet he still isn’t enough to make it enjoyable, at least in any sustained way.
  49. Heartbreaker
    Heartbreaker relies far too heavily on the charm and attractiveness of romantic leads whose chemistry is lukewarm at best to sell a groaning collection of rom-com clichés.
  50. The Lovebirds
    The dynamic between this screwball couple is half affectionate and half exasperated, and there are enough funny lines sprinkled throughout—a personal favorite: “documentaries are just reality shows no one watches”—to keep the laughs coming. But while The Lovebirds are sparkling conversationalists, as the plot gets more convoluted, the champagne starts to go flat
  51. On the Basis of Sex
    It’s an impressive journey unimpressively retold, relying on overly familiar biopic tropes about the difficulty of being a woman in the man’s world of the 1950s.
  52. Beyond the Gates
    It’s not intensely scary, but it is faithful to its ’80s influences, right on down to the deadbeat dad.
  53. Run All Night
    Even though he never gets a grip on the over-complicated plot, the director hasn’t lost his knack for those elemental qualities that make a good action flick.
  54. The Black Cauldron
    While more grim than most Disney films, it's not bleakness that gets in the way of The Black Cauldron succeeding; unmemorable protagonists, annoying sidekicks, an awkwardly episodic plot, and animation that ranges in appearance from impressive to cheap to unfinished take care of that.
  55. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    No Restraint misses a lot of opportunities, like the chance to contrast Barney's work with artists working on a lower budget, or to examine his positive and negative influence on modern art, or to break down an economic model based on selling off the pieces Barney discards along the way.
  56. Finian's Rainbow
    I found much to like and dislike about Finian's Rainbow, from forest sets that look unmistakably like an Astroturf showroom to a bloated running time made even longer by a musical prelude and intermission.
  57. We Own the Night
    Whatever the case, We Own The Night plays like a masterpiece because it skillfully appropriates actual masterpieces, not because it earns the label on its own merits.
  58. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    It's more like watching a typical animated-shorts collection - a few highlights, a lot of clinkers - than like watching an actual movie.
  59. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    The most consistently funny studio sequel in some time, and the rare blockbuster that actually delivers on what it promises.
  60. Signs
    For a big-budget Hollywood feature, the film places an unusually high amount of stock in the audience's imagination; not since "The Others" or "The Blair Witch Project" have so many shocks been indirect or kept teasingly out of view.
  61. The Front Line
    The action in The Front Line is bloody and tense, but the movie also reduces war to its simplest terms, defining it in terms of the reluctant soldiers who know that only accidents of birth and location determined which side of the battlefield they inhabit.
  62. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Hur invests the period setting with an eye-popping opulence that's meant to highlight the elite decadence that came before the fall, but his Dangerous Liaisons isn't particularly sophisticated on a political or historical level.
  63. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    The first Dead Snow included a salute to the classic Sam Raimi gearing-up montage, with its quick cuts and abrupt zooms; it was a cute nod, but nothing more. Red Vs. Dead does the same thing, but concludes the montage with a long, static shot of the Zombie Squad watching as the cash register at the hardware store churns out an endless receipt for all the tools they’ve purchased. That’s an actual joke, which is what the first movie lacked.
  64. Kandisha
    The question is whether Kandisha’s intriguing elements are strong enough to cancel out its more uninspired ones. For Bustillo and Maury completists and seasoned fans of monster movies and ’90s horror who are accustomed to cherry-picking cool elements from forgettable films, the answer is yes. For the rest of the viewing public, summoning this demon probably isn’t worth the pain.
  65. Bridget Jones's Baby
    In other words, 12 years have elapsed since the last Bridget Jones movie. A skinnier, more put-together Bridget isn’t necessarily a more interesting character; she’s a little more "Sex And The City" this time out, however incrementally.
  66. Elvis & Nixon
    As much as the movie sidesteps biographical conventions with its narrow frame and playful tone, it can’t avoid a separate cliché that plagues this sort of material: Elvis & Nixon is basically a diverting TV movie given a theatrical release.
  67. The Final Girls
    This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.
  68. Cars 3
    The best thing that can be said about Cars 3, the studio’s dispiritingly formulaic return to a world of talking jalopies, is that it isn’t another feature-length showcase for the limited comedic stylings of Larry The Cable Guy.
  69. Moonlight Mile
    Hoffman and Sarandon work well together, and Gyllenhaal, who's carved out a niche for himself as the new face of internalized conflict, fits nicely into a role Hoffman would have made a meal of 30 years ago.
  70. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Overall Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is as shallow as a puddle of Dom Pérignon spilled on the bow of a luxury yacht. That’s the joke, you see.
  71. The Dead Lands
    The problem with this kind of universal narrative is that, like the cult of the golden ratio, it emphasizes formulas at the expense of those expressive qualities that actually make art and entertainment.
  72. Pearl Jam Twenty
    What makes Pearl Jam Twenty a little better than the average fan-friendly documentary is that Crowe focuses on the more significant parts of the Pearl Jam story: not how the group wrote "Alive," but how it's struggled with maintaining artistic credibility while selling millions.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Savages
    Like "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" and "W.," Savages feels like Stone softballing something he should be skewering - in this case, SoCal entitlement and faux-progressive hypocrisy.
  74. Roll Bounce
    Behind the camera, Lee shows a steady hand and saves his best tricks for the big finale, which generates a lot of excitement out of the collision of disco music and some truly impressive skating.
  75. Together
    Only in fits and starts does Together capture the electricity of live performance.
    • 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.
  77. Molière
    A Molière this good deserves a more substantive portrait, but this one will do for now.
  78. The Lie
    The Lie's payoff strikes an unexpected, refreshingly open note that makes this slight little indie more resonant than its scale suggests. The line this couple is about to cross is significant, and the film takes it seriously.
  79. Confidence
    Confidence doesn't provide anything substantial to latch on to: Its twists and turns aren't founded on the trust needed to pull them off.
  80. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    The film's modest charms are ingratiating and sweet, thanks to Colm Meaney's hilariously salty lead performance and a soundtrack that channels the warm spirit of traditional Ceili music.
  81. Jakob's Wife
    Despite the conviction Crampton and Fessenden bring to their onscreen relationship, however, Jakob’s Wife is more successful as a gleeful bloodbath than it is as a character-driven horror-drama.
  82. The Drama
    The resulting film is nonetheless a wonderfully thorny exploration of primordial desires for connection, destruction, and stability. Don’t expect any genuine relationship advice, but also be warned that this is not a glib exercise in aimless edginess.
  83. Dawn of the Dead
    Swarming with zombies on both sides of the camera, the film is unrelentingly relentless, leaving no room for original director George Romero's wry satire on consumerism or his slow-paced, creeping undead.
  84. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Love looks and sounds great, but in depicting N’Dour as a lofty symbol for music’s power to bridge worlds and inspire, it sometimes loses sight of the man.
  85. Ip Man
    As a slice of history, Ip Man is disappointingly simplistic. Yip, Wong, and Yen never develop any real tension between Ip's true story and the exaggerated myth-making of a martial-arts movie. But as an exaggerated, myth-making martial-arts movie, Ip Man is often thrilling.
  86. Black Mama White Mama
    Black Mama, White Mama is a cheerfully sleazy romp made with the easily distractible drive-in audience in mind.
  87. The Forgiven
    Discrimination, exoticization, willful ignorance, poorly disguised disdain for local customs—you name it, these vacationing Westerners have it.
  88. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    It's a difficult balancing act, but Park crafts his layers carefully and masterfully. He's the kind of filmmaker who can meaningfully craft the gory details of an eye-gouging without ever forgetting the message that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
  89. Limitless
    It's a small victory for flash in its eternal war with substance, but in this case, the flash is enough.
  90. Nobody 2
    Though the punches maintain their force in Nobody 2, the sole punchline they support has become a grating dad joke, one that you’ve heard so many times that it’s lost all meaning.
  91. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World, a goofy and fitfully entertaining summer movie, understands and even winks at its place in the pecking order of blockbuster sequels.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    On the Ice
    The performances, all from non-professional local actors, are noticeably uneven, but the film is as much a portrait of a place as it is a narrative, and cinematographer Lol Crawley shoots the white-on-white polar expanses like they're vistas stretching to the ends of the earth-which in a way, they are.
  93. Day Watch
    Like the dream it so closely resembles, it's fairly distracting while it's going on, but it fades into forgettable nonsense by the light of day.
  94. Rubber
    While it's admirably perverse for a "killer-tire movie" to be this snooty, it's about half as clever as it thinks it is.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Michael Collins
    Liam Neeson's performance as Collins is at once stirring and blood-curdling, as befits the role of a man who murdered for a cause he believed was just, but was willing to stop when he believed his objective was reached.
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