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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.
  2. Happy Death Day
    It’s a reasonably clever spin, but not much more than that; once the novelty of the genre swap wears off, you’re just watching another inferior variation.
  3. The High Note
    The characters’ overall niceness makes the movie pleasant in the moment—and easy to shrug off as a fantasy.
  4. Henry Johnson
    Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.
  5. Eden
    Eden winds up yoking Howard’s more domesticated movies with his thwarted-adventure narratives. The suspense lies in whether certain characters will figure out whether they’re on a bold, one-off exploration or the cusp of a sustainable new life—and whether humanity on the whole is any good at telling them apart.
  6. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    Within its limited scope, the film celebrates Conti's peculiar dreams and earnest intensity without dipping into condescension.
  7. Penance
    The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.
  8. Prime
    Greenberg and Thurman are both engaging, but they can't quite compensate for their characters' shallowness. Streep, on the other hand, just can't stop compensating. Her oy-vey-can-you-believe-the-kid-and-his-shiksa performance is all studied mannerisms with no real heart.
  9. Jimmy P.
    Casting two great actors as doctor and patient helps a little.
  10. Knives and Skin
    Puts a forward-thinking feminist bent on the Riverdale school of neon Twin Peaks fetishism
  11. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Too often, The Next Level passes off callbacks to gags from its predecessor as jokes, all while presuming that viewers have an unhealthy familiarity with the Jumanji canon.
  12. Moana 2
    It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.
  13. Rising from Ashes
    Too bad, then, that Team Rwanda’s inspiring rise to prominence and eventual course triumphs are so thinly sketched that the film leaves the audience wanting more, in the most frustrating way possible.
  14. Mean Girls
    The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.
  15. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    As a sketch of the twilight of a great artist, The Farewell has merit, but the sketch would be better used as the background to a mural.
  16. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The fact that the story makes sense at all remains Coppola and his butchers' sole achievement.
  17. Risk/Reward
    For all the film's aggressive crosscutting, the individual stories would work just as well apart as together, because they pack less cumulative power when yoked awkwardly into one sweeping statement.
  18. I Am Chris Farley
    As a thoughtful examination of its subject’s life, I Am Chris Farley has its moments, but it plays more like a loving tribute than documentary, as if a bunch of his friends got together to tell stories. In that way, it succeeds, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the picture isn’t complete.
  19. Ask the Dust
    Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.
  20. First Snow
    Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.
  21. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington’s fifth feature — his best-known previous film was 2009’s equally gormless "Harmony And Me" — will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.
  22. The Equalizer 3
    There is nothing new here narratively, save the setting (shot with picturesque beauty by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), the names of the characters, and the details of the offense for which the evil doers will have to pay.
  23. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.
  24. Southbound
    Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.
  25. Shrek the Third
    Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.
  26. The Finest Hours
    As charming as the early scenes are, The Finest Hours doesn’t really come together as a love story, either, and Affleck’s scenes on the tanker are too abbreviated to really sink in as great survival drama.
  27. The Trust
    When it comes to the disposable VOD fare that Cage and Travolta have made a side career out of indiscriminately embracing, minor pleasures are a major improvement.
  28. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    The new English track is predictably clumsy, but the story and images overcome it.
  29. The Tree
    Yes, the idea that the tree/father is literally tearing this family apart is way too blunt, but Gainsbourg and Davies sell it by playing the scenes naturally, with minimal histrionics.
  30. The Seagull
    He’s (Mayer) assembled a terrific cast and mostly stayed out of their way, but the result still feels frustratingly arm’s-length, lacking the odd electricity of Louis Malle’s semi-staged "Vanya On 42nd Street."
  31. City of Ember
    Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.
  32. The Night Before
    The Night Before isn’t Rogen’s funniest movie. Minute for minute, it doesn’t have as many laughs as "Superbad," "Neighbors," or "This Is The End," among others. But it does contain one of Rogen’s funniest performances, as Isaac navigates a very long and very bad drug trip, a responsibility-free Christmas gift from his wife.
  33. Hotel Artemis
    We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.
  34. Undisputed
    A triumph of craft and narrative economy, the darkly funny Undisputed is as lean, mean, and skillful as its competing heavyweights.
  35. May
    May represents something rare and unfashionable-–a smart, twisted little slasher comedy that doesn't skimp on the gore.
  36. Ocean's Twelve
    What it retains is a playful sense of style, that combines with an anything-goes spirit.
  37. Our Man in Tehran
    The story can’t help but work — even when its directors are beating viewers over the head with the message.
  38. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.
  39. Freakonomics
    Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.
  40. Away We Go
    Though Away We Go lacks the screwball unpredictability of something like "Flirting With Disaster," it compensates with a unexpected depth of feeling, a novelist’s (or memoirist’s) sense of detail, and a panoramic view of what home means.
  41. Heartless
    Heartless gets progressively better as it goes along, and benefits from a poignant late cameo from Timothy Spall as Sturgess' beloved father, but it never recovers from a dull first hour.
  42. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is not an entirely coherent film. It is, for the right and wrong reasons, a distinctive and memorable one.
  43. Escape from Tomorrow
    The more outlandish the film becomes, especially in its off-the-rails second half, the less crucial its unique setting seems.
  44. The Greasy Strangler
    It’s not an attractive comparison, but The Greasy Strangler in some ways recalls "The Human Centipede III," in that it raises questions about a filmmaker’s relationship with the viewer. This is a far better and less offensive film than Tom Six’s, but it also comes custom-built to discomfit the majority of its audience.
  45. Glory Road
    Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.
  46. Gemma Bovery
    It’s minor, clever, and essential in the specialized field of Gemma Arterton studies.
  47. 9 to 5
    The movie is surprisingly smart about the politics of the glass ceiling, which keeps Tomlin in a pink-collar supervisor position while every man she trains gets promoted past her. The way Coleman asserts his masculinity with phrases like "cut the balls off the competition," and the way our heroic trio works together to sculpt a worker's paradise—complete with flex-time and day-care facilities—serves as an effective summary of the era's hot-button issues.
  48. We Bought a Zoo
    It's an odd, unsatisfying combination that moves from mopey drama one moment to a reaction shot of a monkey smacking his forehead in exasperation the next. By the end of the film, viewers might understand the monkey's feelings all too well.
  49. No Place on Earth
    This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.
  50. Low Down
    Low Down keeps the histrionics to a minimum, but the inertia of a good man failing to be a good father isn’t enough to sustain nearly two hours of reflection, especially when Preiss consistently suggests that telling Amy’s story from Joe’s perspective would have made for a much better film.
  51. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    One of the better aspects of Search is that with Spock out of the action, the rest of the crew gets a chance to fill up the vacuum of his absence, and we get a much stronger sense of Kirk, Uhura, Chekov, McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu as a family unit, and not just a bunch of people who work together.
  52. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    It's a classic B-movie move of making much out of little, and while Let's Scare Jessica To Death isn't quite a top-rank B-movie classic, it at least offers further proof that all the teen-idol stars and CGI effects—or a logical plot, for that matter—mean nothing if they don't make you scared to turn out the lights.
  53. Everything Is Illuminated
    But the parts of Foer's lively novel that didn't get cut in the script stage have died on the way to the screen. To be fair, it's not an easy novel to adapt.
  54. Stone
    At its best, the film works as a morally freighted film noir, with Jovovich particularly good as a breathy femme fatale who seduces De Niro with a mere change in inflection.
  55. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    What’s frustrating about Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is how clearly it wants to recapture the magic of its predecessors while fundamentally misunderstanding how to approach a sequel set so chronologically apart from the rest of the franchise.
  56. Felon
    Felon's dialogue is overheated and some of its plot twists are preposterous, yet it's still white-knuckle tense, and held together by dozens of small, well-observed moments.
  57. Wicked: For Good
    The intimate highlights are too few and far between in this distended adaptation.
  58. The Invention of Lying
    The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.
  59. Elemental
    Its world building is so vast and so intricate (the city has a Wetro and you can watch films like Tide And Prejudice!) that it overshadows the textured plot about the burdens placed on second-generation kids.
  60. The Holy Land
    One of its great strengths lies in its surprising universality.
  61. Death Race 2000
    It’s all ridiculous and occasionally surreal, but Bartel never loses sight of the unpleasantness; when these cartoons explode, they don’t get to place any more orders with the Acme company. They just die.
  62. 7500
    Just as Tobias can’t escape the tragedy unfolding just beyond the cockpit door, 7500 struggles to overcome some unfortunate and very outdated optics.
  63. The Lords of Salem
    For a rock star and old-movie buff like Rob Zombie, The Lords Of Salem offers a chance to riff on the notion of rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music, while recreating scenes from old Hammer witch pictures. Zombie does both of these things—just not always as expected.
  64. Renaissance
    Some kind of wonderment.
  65. All Good Things
    Here's a story about a man who befriended and eventually killed a Texan while going incognito as an exceptionally frumpy woman, then was eventually nabbed shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich while carrying more than $500 in his pocket. Why underplay that?
  66. One More Time
    The main reason for anyone to see One More Time...is Walken, who brings a lot of life and fine shading to what could’ve been a one-note deadbeat dad type.
  67. Crank
    Its a stupid thrill for a while, but the high wears off, and the anything-goes approach gets headache-inducing.
  68. There There
    If the resulting film feels like little more than the cinematic equivalent of a series of B-sides of varying quality strung together, it at least whets the appetite for the next proper cinematic album that Bujalski releases.
  69. Special
    Special recalls a minor-key "Donnie Darko," but its vision is much more limited, and it sinks into Indiewood cliché whenever it reaches for profundity.
  70. Summer of 84
    The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.
  71. Keeping Up with the Steins
    What begins as a scathing but loving satire of materialism loses its way once it turns into a warmhearted after-school special about a nice young Jewish boy discovering the true meaning of the bar mitzvah.
  72. Heads of State
    As an action-comedy, Heads Of State is more successful at the former than the latter. It’s a junky, diverting movie, one with major tonal issues and a completely predictable storyline, no matter how many twists and red herrings the filmmakers throw at us. Not sharp enough to be memorable but just well-crafted enough that you wish everyone involved had tried a little harder.
  73. It's a Disaster
    It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.
  74. Chelsea on the Rocks
    The movie’s most enjoyable moments are the brief instances when Ferrara himself intrudes on the scene.
  75. Flawless
    Moore hasn't tackled a lead role since the turn of the century, and judging by her eminently forgettable work here, she hasn't spent that time painstakingly honing her chops.
  76. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    Beneath the surface outrageousness lies a surprisingly, satisfyingly dark little fable about the essentially cannibalistic nature of artistic inspiration.
  77. Daybreakers
    After a while, Daybreakers settles into the lulling rhythms of too many horror movies, as the characters ponder what to do in darkened rooms instead of doing much of anything.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Trishna
    Trishna is in love with India without romanticizing it.
  79. The Book of Clarence
    As an homage to biblical epics of yesteryear, The Book Of Clarence doesn’t have enough grand drama or thrilling set pieces. As a spoof of such films, it loses its nerve and never goes for the full joke. And as a straightforward story of belief, it relies too much on familiar tropes. Thus it ends up being too little of this and that and not enough of its own.
  80. The Gorge
    It’s kind of fun in just how predictable and boilerplate it all is, and The Gorge is never boring. But, frustratingly, it’s obvious that there is a better movie hidden somewhere within it.
  81. Lila Says
    One long tease, not just because it keeps promising sex it doesn't deliver. It teases at deeper themes and cultural commentary.
  82. R100
    It’s easier to define what R100 isn’t than what it is. First of all, despite the presence of ninja dominatrices, it’s not a steamy thriller, and the raincoat crowd should apply elsewhere.
  83. Pet Sematary
    This may look like the same story, but the soul of it is missing — lost on the way out of the ground.
  84. C.H.U.D.
    Perfect for bleary-eyed late-night viewing and pretty much unwatchable at any other hour, it does make for an oddly appropriate refresher course for life under a Republican president.
  85. Paul
    Paul is a little sloppy and a little sappy, but the filmmakers' passion for their subject matter carries it over the occasional rough spot.
  86. Color Me Kubrick
    The film makes funny use of music (particularly Lionel Richie's "Hello") and excellent use of Malkovich, but it literally only has one idea in its head, and when that idea runs dry, it's as lost as Conway is without his plethora of Kubrick masks.
  87. My Wife Is an Actress
    Sadly, that thin premise snaps after a while, and when Wife takes a serious turn, it becomes apparent how little the director has to say.
  88. The Sea Is Watching
    Though the episodic, low-key action bears a resemblance to Kurosawa's Madadayo -- his little-seen, underrated final film -- neither the characters nor the plot lend it even a hint of dynamism.
  89. The Ring
    As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."
  90. How to Grow a Band
    Thile has the charisma, presence, and emotional transparency of a great documentary subject, but How To Grow A Band maintains a respectable distance from its subject that ultimately doesn't work in its favor.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Reconstruction of William Zero
    It’s always easy to see what Bush and Byrne are aiming for with this timely piece of speculative fiction. But their execution is, with rare exception, weakly imitative at best and exasperatingly inept at worst.
  92. The Laundromat
    Perhaps The Laundromat just runs into the limits of trying to merge agitprop and fun. Soderbergh’s assemblage of Hollywood somebodies is the sugar to make the medicine go down; he’s hoping, like McKay, that disguising this dissertation as a stylish, star-studded good time will help its lessons stick. But the result is occasionally as tiresome as an economics professor more concerned with being liked than with teaching you anything.
  93. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The Holocaust drama The Zookeeper’s Wife is handsomely made, well-acted, and lacking in much nuance.
  94. Ezra
    While all of the grown-ups turn in admirable performances, the heart of the movie lies in a staggering debut from newcomer William A. Fitzgerald, a preteen diagnosed with autism and ADHD himself.
  95. Last Letter from Your Lover
    What the adaptation has going for it is two charismatic young stars, Felicity Jones and Shailene Woodley, pitching in to tell an enjoyable but extremely conventional story.
  96. Dreamland
    The film makes the most of its sparseness, using the strong performances of its ensemble cast (including a reliably excellent Margot Robbie) to question the accepted boundaries between right and wrong, citizen and outlaw.
  97. Birds of Paradise
    The real problem is that the film isn’t trashy, soapy, or stylized enough be fun.
  98. Ip Man 3
    As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.
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