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. Transit
    Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?
  2. Under the Silver Lake
    Enabling and mocking paranoid obsession at the same time might sound incoherent. In this hilariously demented spin on L.A. noir, it’s simply honest.
  3. Hereditary
    It’s a supremely effective gauntlet of supernatural horror that’s also, at blackened heart, a grueling domestic drama about how trauma, resentment, and guilt can seep into the roots of a family tree, rotting it from the inside out.
  4. Persona
    Persona doesn’t really benefit from too much thought. It’s a visceral experience that’s best felt, accepted, and left alone to rattle around in your subconscious for years to come. Rest assured that it will.
  5. The Irishman
    The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.
  6. Shirkers
    The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Miami Blues
    Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie.
  10. For a Few Dollars More
    While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.
  11. The Hit
    The script by Peter Prince occasionally errs too much on the side of opacity, but the few revelations that do come are deftly handled. It’s a meditation on death, and in the end, it belongs to Hurt.
  12. The China Syndrome
    Ultimately, Lemmon's performance is what makes The China Syndrome work: The script contains its share of technical jargon and clunky exposition, but his subtle transformation from complacency to anger to panic tells the story in raw emotional terms. The China Syndrome is ultimately a story about how the potential for human error can trump science and reason, and few actors have ever been as unmistakably human as Lemmon.
  13. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jesus Christ Superstar
    However dated stylistically (everybody’s dressed, to put it baldly, like hippies) it remains immensely powerful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Little Mermaid
    A fun, albeit unspectacular, animated movie, filled with Disney staples like cute animal characters, a scenery-chewing villainess, and a small-nosed pixie heroine who yearns to travel to distant lands and marry a large-nosed hunk prince.
  16. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The film's greatest achievement is transforming his supposed acts of deviancy into disease-of-the-week uplift, not to mention a moving love story, an irreverent black comedy, and an intellectually compelling study of an artist at work.
  17. Cold War
    Pawlikowski, who doesn’t waste a shot (nor compose one that isn’t a work of art on its lonesome), creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.
  18. Real Genius
    Martha Coolidge's bright, whimsical Real Genius can credit part of its substantial and richly deserved cult following to the fact that nothing has changed: Raunchy, lowbrow teen comedies are forever in vogue, and SDI is still an impossible, money-sucking political mirage.
  19. Climax
    There’s a spontaneity to Climax—a naturalistic immediacy born of its exceptional, energetic cast of unknowns, firing off entirely improvised jokes and insults and threats.
  20. Deliverance
    Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.
  21. Asako I & II
    This is a film that, through its deceptively mellow means, manages to plumb the depths of what it truly means to love amid the uncertainties of self, others, and everything else besides.
  22. Burning
    Burning actually justifies its running time by slowly building paranoid atmosphere before an explosive, hauntingly ambiguous finale.
  23. The Wicker Man
    The Wicker Man ultimately succeeds on the strength of its powerful imagery, its increasingly chilling tone, and its final, sudden shock.
    • The A.V. Club
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Even though the movie was, in a lot of ways, a glorious mess, it turned out to be a huge success on just about every level.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Regeneration
    It might, in fact, be the best straight-to-DVD action movie ever made. And the fact that there’s any competition for that title should tell you that times have changed.
  26. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.
  27. Paper Moon
    Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.
  28. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Throughout, the documentary offers glowing praise of Fonda that falls just short of fawning. Frankly, it’s difficult not to be impressed. Seventy-eight at the time of filming, the formidable Fonda personifies courage and strength in her interviews, even as she reveals tremendous vulnerabilities.
  29. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    With humor that cuts through a deep undercurrent of sadness, Baker Boys captures the rinky-dink milieu of second-rate lounges, where patron kibitzing threatens to drown out the piano-tinkling of the paid entertainment.
  30. The Landlord
    The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.
  31. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side Of The Wind is ultimately about an artist’s fear of seeing a reflection of his own sublimated desires — the way that art hides as much as it reveals about its maker. We’ll be debating it, defending it, reappraising it for a long time to come.
  32. Being There
    Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.
  33. Breathless
    But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Wild Bunch
    While the movie may be a Western—one of the best Westerns ever made, in fact—it’s also an action movie, one that was crucial to action movies becoming what they would eventually be.
  35. The Price of Everything
    The master stroke of The Price Of Everything is that it asks the viewer, in Cappellazzo’s words, to see the intricacies of the art world and the way those two seemingly oppositional forces — the financial side and the creative side — are inextricably intertwined.
  36. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.
  37. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    For Wang, the strictly personal is the building block for everything else—whether it’s the well-worn groove of a long-term relationship or a Chekhov pastiche performed by a woman wearing a samovar as a hat.
  38. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    What’s so grand about Ruben Brandt isn’t its story or the characters, which are both abstractions. It’s the animation—the detailed artwork, so dense that it warrants repeat viewings.
  39. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    I discovered that not only is Girls Just Want To Have Fun a delightful party of a movie, it’s an absolutely bonkers party, like someone dosed the punch with ecstasy and mushrooms.
  40. Slut in a Good Way
    Lorain’s film ultimately doesn’t go especially deep in detailing its romantic relationships, its friendships, or any overarching storyline. But Slut In A Good Way is more than the sum of its entanglements; the actors and the camera work so well together that it feels, at times, like a musical.
  41. One Cut of the Dead
    It reinvents the zombie movie.
  42. Knives Out
    Far from empty sleight-of-hand, Knives Out twists its borrowed, rearranged mechanics into a timely, sincere, and ultimately moving celebration of decency in the face of moral failure. To paraphrase one of Blanc’s funnier musings, that’s the donut within the donut hole.
  43. Apollo 11
    Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.
  44. Give Me Liberty
    Mikhanovsky and Austen even allow for genuine budding romance to filter through the struggle, with love operating as a balm for beleaguered souls.
  45. Monos
    Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.
  46. American Factory
    By telling their stories, entertainingly and persuasively, Bognar and Reichert make the case that they all deserve better.
  47. Grand Prix
    Whenever the cars are running, Grand Prix is one of the best studio efforts of the '60s. The film only stalls when it's off the track, which is where more than half of this three-hour epic takes place.
  48. Nomadland
    Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.
  49. Booksmart
    What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.
  50. Parasite
    Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.
  51. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.
  52. The Climb
    There are no sentimental easy answers or shortcuts to uplift in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, it just keeps peddling forward, in the hope that some kind of clarity might materialize at the top of the hill.
  53. Bringing Up Baby
    As Hawks admits, Bringing Up Baby isn’t a perfect film. But there’s an undeniable, ephemeral magic that comes from watching him, Hepburn, and Grant all work together on such a madcap story.
  54. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Milestone’s visual style lacks the flourish of Wellman’s Wings, but it’s no less explicit, as the camera pans across battlefields where dismembered body parts hang from barbed wire.
  55. My Dinner with Andre
    Their talk feels as unforced as it is intense, but even that’s an illusion piled on top of an illusion. The film keeps returning to questions about the nature of reality and the function of performance, whether in theater or in everyday life.
  56. Uncut Gems
    The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it's surprising—and ballsy—that De Palma makes Casualties Of War a full-on De Palma movie, with stylishly suspenseful action scenes, heightened performances, and plenty of moments where Fox takes on the role of a typically impotent De Palma voyeur.
  58. The Naked Prey
    The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.
  59. Black Sabbath
    There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.
  60. Don't Look Now
    Singularly haunting.
  61. The Assistant
    The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure.
  62. Shadows
    Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.
  63. The French Dispatch
    The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.
  64. In My Room
    Written and directed by Ulrich Köhler (and co-produced by Köhler’s romantic partner, Maren Ade, a superb filmmaker in her own right), this droll yet poignant amalgam of the fantastic and the mundane ultimately suggests that while people can dramatically alter their behavior in response to extreme circumstances, on some fundamental level they don’t really change.
  65. One, Two, Three
    Although crafting a comedy about such world-altering topics was bound to be difficult, a master like Wilder could pull it off.
  66. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.
  67. Miracle on 34th Street
    In the battle of the classic Hollywood Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life feels charmingly ancient, fixed in an early-20th-century America that scarcely anyone today remembers first-hand. Miracle On 34th Street feels more modern, with slangy dialogue and naturalistic asides, and a general awareness of how Christmas has become about the intertwined stresses of shopping and selling.
  68. Black Christmas
    Much of the shtick used by Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore was later stolen both by countless hacks and at least one real artist (Halloween director John Carpenter), but few repeated Clark's most devious tactic, accompanying the violence with the sound of the killer's nerve-janglingly maniacal shouting.
  69. Pom Poko
    For all its goodhearted cheer, Pom Poko is a glum indictment of modern Japan's disjunction from the natural and spiritual world. But it strikes a positive final note by implying that those worlds still exist, just out of sight, waiting and flourishing.
  70. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Abortion stories are real, and they take place every day, often so quietly that no one but those closest to the people involved even know they’re happening. The power of Hittman’s film lies in that combination of ordinary suffering and extraordinary strength.
  71. Sneakers
    Tobolowsky, anagrams, blind driving, a jazzy but tense James Horner score—this movie has everything, and it’s all deceptively well engineered.
  72. West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
  73. The Nest
    The Nest’s true star is that cavernous 15th-century mansion, which provides Durkin and Erdély with endless opportunities to carve out sinister voids that threaten to swallow this nuclear family whole.
  74. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s a film comprised of snapshots, glimpses from a hazy evening. But the Ross Brothers understand that these are the moments that paint people in their best, most unguarded light.
  75. Charm City Kings
    Charm City Kings distinguishes itself from similar fare not just through its location and eye-popping bikes but also with the believably imperfect people that populate it.
  76. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It doesn’t offer perfect solutions, only a brand of humor and astute wisdom one might from someone who has lived the life.
  77. Welcome to Chechnya
    What’s perhaps most remarkable about Welcome To Chechnya is the level-headed perspective many of these subjects have about what’s happening to them.
  78. To the Ends of the Earth
    Beginning as an offbeat, fish-out-of-water travelogue, To The Ends Of The Earth gradually incorporates elements of an adventure movie, self-reflexive film shoot, and even musical melodrama. By the end, it’s no less than one of the most moving films Kurosawa has ever made.
  79. A White, White Day
    The film’s true power is elemental, rooted in weather conditions that all but erase the distinction between land and sky, and in the inky darkness of a tunnel traversed by one haggard, trudging figure whose weary body intermittently blocks a sliver of light barely visible at its far end.
  80. After Yang
    Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.
  81. i'm thinking of ending things
    By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?
  82. The Souvenir: Part II
    It’s looser, wilder, funnier, and almost euphorically uplifting, rocketing at increasing speed towards a new life for its main character and directorial proxy that makes the starting premise look almost irrelevant.
  83. A Passage to India
    While it isn't as brilliant as his The Bridge On The River Kwai or Lawrence Of Arabia, Lean's final film is just as meticulously designed, because more than any other filmmaker of his era, he understood how the right hat could say as much about a character —and a society—as any line of dialogue.
  84. Twice in a Lifetime
    An unusually perceptive look at subjects seldom explored in American film—the emotional lives of working-class extended families and middle-aged sexuality—Twice In A Lifetime is especially poignant when documenting the collateral damage the central affair causes to Hackman's wife (a touching Ellen Burstyn) and bitter adult daughter (Amy Madigan).
  85. Trouble in Mind
    Rudolph remains one of American’s film’s most unabashed romantics: Trouble In Mind is so sweetly, smartly, transcendently romantic that Kristofferson’s desperate need to get laid following years of nothing but male company comes off as a soulful man’s spiritual hunger for meaningful human connection, rather than mere horniness.
  86. There Is No Evil
    The film’s as compassionate as it is unsettling, and as provocative as it is poignant.
  87. The Grand Bizarre
    It’s just a constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.
  88. Swing Time
    While the movie’s amusing comedy bits are a little too slow for vintage screwball or farce, its love story has no such limitations. Astaire and Rogers sell their whole relationship through movement, on and off the dance floor.
  89. Lady Snowblood
    A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born.
  90. Collective
    It’s a taut, intense procedural, with a resonant story that simultaneously follows a journalistic investigation and an attempt to fix a fatally dysfunctional medical bureaucracy—all while criminal organizations, corrupt politicians, and rabble-rousing television hosts work in concert to stymie any real reform.
  91. Thieves Like Us
    Remove all the crime-movie trappings—and there aren't that many, once Altman gets through with them—and the film would still endure for its surface alone, capturing the Depression-era South with brushstrokes of language, décor, and radio-plays on the soundtrack.
  92. Woodstock
    Wadleigh crafted a film with a thoughtful flow; it tells the full story of the event, from the paranoia (and eventual acceptance) of the locals to the helpful attitudes (and eventual paranoia) of the throng. [1994 version]
  93. Faces
    Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.
  94. Under the Volcano
    It falls upon Finney to dramatize the inner workings of a man gradually, unmistakably succumbing to oblivion. Finney is up to the task: The pungent poetry of Lowry's prose comes through in his pitch-perfect performance, with its exquisite turns of phrase, boozy bravado, and theatrical panache.
  95. The War Room
    It’s a fascinating time capsule, catching a new, empowered Democratic machine in its infancy.
  96. Hill of Freedom
    It may not be the heftiest or most penetrating entry in the Hong oeuvre, but it’s one of the funniest and probably the most accessible.
  97. For All Mankind
    It’s breathtaking on two fronts: Reinert unearths stunning footage—far removed from the fuzzy copies used as B-roll in other documentaries—that captures the full scale of NASA’s accomplishment. But he keeps that footage grounded in the image and voices of the modest men and women who made it happen.
  98. Salesman
    More than 30 years removed from its theatrical release, Salesman looks less like the story of four traveling salesmen than the story of America itself.
  99. Black Is King
    Black Is King reconfirms a notion that many understood back in 2016 with Lemonade: When it comes to pairing strong, resplendent imagery with equally rousing music, the only person who can potentially outperform Beyoncé is Beyoncé herself.
  100. The Killing
    From the heroes’ complicated planning to the story’s cruel twist ending, The Killing illustrates how human beings have a bad habit of getting in their own way.
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