The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,411 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: 5,570 out of 10411
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10411
  3. Negative: 1,106 out of 10411
10411 movie reviews
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  1. American Fiction
    American Fiction is an intriguing conundrum. It starts as a sizzling, hilarious satire that manages to sling pointed arrows at most of its targets. However, by trying to become too many things, it ends up sanding the edges off its sharpness. Still, the journey to its denouement remains mostly entertaining.
  2. The Iron Claw
    The chemistry between the brothers is palpable, creating emotional heft behind each victory and defeat.
  3. Origin
    For those who choose to take this riveting journey of discovery, they’ll find this picture gets them to a place of inspiring enlightenment and keeps them in that mindset far beyond the end credits scroll.
  4. Wonka
    In King and company’s capable hands, the care package delivered is a soul-warming cup of cocoa. Sweet yet never saccharine, cute yet never cloying, their hyper-stylized portrait of an iconic literary and cinematic figure is not only powered by the pure imagination that inspires the songs’ spectacle, but it’s also filled with audacious flourishes of charm, whimsy and poignancy.
  5. The Boy and the Heron
    If The Boy And The Heron is indeed Miyazaki’s final film, it can serve as both a victory lap and a plea for a successor to arrive and take up the mantle of trying to make the world a better place through art.
  6. Poor Things
    Poor Things is such a rare combination of talented collaborators working in perfect concert that it’s hard to consider the film anything short of masterful.
  7. Godzilla Minus One
    When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
  8. Eileen
    Oldroyd has crafted a strange and mysterious thriller with Eileen. It’s not entirely satisfying, however it’s also never less than imaginatively conceived and utterly beguiling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    Beyoncé wants to show you the work, the grit, the ingenuity. She wants to show you, as she repeats, her renaissance.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Wish
    Wish is a mess, but there are ways it could be called an innovative one.
  11. Maestro
    If the film is a tad baggy and unruly that seems by design and thus less a critique than an accurate assessment. But overall and while painting so boldly on such a broad canvas (the film spans decades and calls on its actors and make-up department to work overtime in delineating the passage of time) Maestro emerges as a bombastic aria of a biopic befitting its central subject.
  12. Napoleon
    Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins may not seem like the most original film, but the fact that it’s based on actual, if somewhat improbable, events means that it ultimately earns its uplifting perspective, owing largely to Waititi’s heartfelt commitment to the story.
  14. Saltburn
    The handful of explicit scenes feel like they’re included solely for shock value, coming across as schlocky and inert. That’s not to say the performances are at fault.
  15. Thanksgiving
    Packed with memorable kills, knowing winks, and a playful slasher whodunit plot, Thanksgiving is a horror feast worth sitting through, even if it never exactly pushes beyond the bounds of its central hook.
  16. May December
    With May December Haynes has crafted an implausible blend of raw authenticity and stylized histrionics that’s fueled by a curious intellectual inquiry: what role do we play in our own story?
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging.
  18. The Marvels
    Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.
  19. Priscilla
    Unafraid of shattering rose-tinted glasses, Coppola’s film is fierce in its subtlety, relying on Spaeney’s breathtaking performance and the inherent tragedy of Priscilla’s story to deliver a film that’s equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking.
  20. Rustin
    Bayard Rustin deserves to be remembered for the entirety of his being, both as an activist and as an openly gay Black man in a time when it was criminal. As much as Rustin attempts to balance both, it carries the former better than the latter.
  21. Pain Hustlers
    While it’s wildly entertaining to watch a performer walk such a tightrope, at some point you lament that the opioid crisis has been reduced to a circus sideshow.
  22. The Killer
    As The Killer moves through its nearly two-hour runtime, the vapor-high of a tightly choreographed opening sequence and the undeniable pleasure of being comfortably cradled in the hands of a master craftsman give way to a wandering mind.
  23. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers may peg its tale on a truism that can feel trite (you never know what others are going through). But Payne, Hemingson, and its central trio of actors find welcome nuances within that platitude.
  24. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Yes, there are kills, but they’re often as comical as they are scary, and deliberately so. It’s a fun gateway horror movie for kids—and the easily scared who want to test their limits lightly.
  25. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers Of The Flower Moon is as momentous as the country it’s set in and as full of history as the people whose murder it depicts.
  26. Nyad
    If, at the end of the day, Nyad feels like a well-oiled crowd-pleasing sports drama with a heartwarming (if slightly insidious) message about never giving up, that doesn’t blunt its impact.
  27. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    The film gives the audience a front-row seat and a pretty good approximation of what it was like to be there in the thick of it.
  28. The Burial
    The Burial is dramatic yet also funny. It works because it isn’t afraid to be “inspired by” the story’s actual people and isn’t just content to retell the events of this little-known but highly consequential civil court case.
  29. Anatomy of a Fall
    It’s a precise study of how strife and conflict metastasize if left unresolved. And by grounding these fine-tuned dramatics in the guise of a genre picture, it works to profound effect.
  30. 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.
  31. Dicks: The Musical
    This is as broad as comedies get these days. But its shock-and-awe sensibility is somewhat exhausting.
  32. Totally Killer
    Totally Killer is a film full of great talent, great moments, and an infectious sense of fun, which means that even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s an entertaining balance of slasher tropes and time travel adventure.
  33. The Exorcist: Believer
    An exorcism movie may not need to be compelled by the power of Christ, but something about it still needs to be compelling, and slapping the name The Exorcist on a screenplay that reads like a brainstorming session is just not enough.
  34. Fair Play
    What Fair Play gets most right, though, is its headlong dive into the messy complications and charged ambiguity of navigating romance in a fast-changing world. The result is an enjoyably caustic, character-driven drama that connects on multiple levels.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Creator
    The Creator is likely to stand as the most impressive and immersive sci-fi movie of the year.
  36. Spy Kids: Armageddon
    Throw in a few fun set pieces, some dynamic creature designs, and a breezy narrative that zips by before your eyes, and Spy Kids: Armageddon comes away as a film that mostly works.
  37. Expend4bles
    For a property that not only held unlimited potential for sequels galore, but also spin-offs (an all-female Expendables was briefly bandied about), it’s disheartening to see it face such creative bankruptcy. That’s not to say that, in the future, the right marriage of innovative directors and screenwriters can’t revive this flailing corpse and return it to its former glory. Unfortunately, recruiting those miracle workers seems more difficult than any mission any Expendable ever faced.
  38. Dumb Money
    Smart, playful, and perhaps efficient to a fault (there’s only so many times a rap song can be used as a narrative stitch to take us from one character to another), Gillespie’s latest is an enraging David vs. Goliath, ripped-from-the-headlines tale that deserves to be seen to be believed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Conde
    What saves El Conde is the specificity of its subject and the style of its auteur.
  40. A Haunting in Venice
    With mystical elements and a foray into gothic storytelling, A Haunting In Venice could have been much more intriguing. Instead, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green do not vary much from what they delivered in the other two movies.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Leaning into her experience as a screenwriter, Vardalos balances comedy and emotion, and her familiarity with the cultural setting, as well as her affinity for the sprawling cast, reap dividends onscreen. The result is a level of authenticity and depth that wasn’t as evident in the first two outings.
  42. The Nun II
    At least the jump scares are effective, especially in IMAX theaters where the headrests rumble every time Valak makes a sudden move. That, and a couple of decent makeup tricks are pretty much all The Nun II has. The character deserves better, and so do you really.
  43. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Bottoms
    If Bottoms doesn’t land every single punch, we can be happy that at least someone is out here swinging.
  45. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    It might not be destined to join the ranks of teen comedy masterpieces, but in the short term, its ability to nail the right balance of emotional and comedic unpredictability makes it a very pleasant journey, and a must-see for teen movie aficionados.
  46. Retribution
    Unlike Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, what you’re going to get from this box of travel sweets is usually something you can expect. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be effectively tasty in the moment.
  47. Strays
    For what it’s worth, Strays is nominally funny, but in a way that rarely provokes genuine laughs, just chuckles of appreciation. It’s a breezy, inconsequential film that will drip from the wrinkles of your brain like slobber from a chew toy, but as a late-summer distraction, maybe that’s enough.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Blue Beetle
    It’s the cohesiveness among the cast members playing Jaime’s family that lends their performances both authenticity and relatability.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gran Turismo
    Gran Turismo lacks the concentration to feel like it’s really going anywhere. Instead, there’s the nagging feeling it’s just spinning its wheels.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Red White & Royal Blue
    Red, White & Royal Blue, ultimately, isn’t revolutionary. It’s more traditional than not—which means, thankfully, that it’s still a lot of fun.
  51. Heart of Stone
    What’s there demonstrates a modicum of decent world-building, from which filmmakers can hopefully spin-off better, more capably crafted capers.
  52. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    Despite this unevenness, there’s a lot to love in The Last Voyage Of The Demeter for horror fans and casual moviegoers alike.
  53. Meg 2: The Trench
    It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.
  54. Sympathy for the Devil
    Cage may hate that people quote his over-the-top moments out of context, but since this entire movie is one, you can’t really take any of it the wrong way.
  55. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    Quippy, zippy, and punchy, this teen-focused take on everyone’s favorite pizza-loving vigilantes is a refreshing reappraisal of a property that could very well have felt stale in 2023.
  56. Talk to Me
    Though it leans on familiar genre tropes and stylistic conventions, a devastating script and charismatic cast (spearheaded by Sophie Wilde) make Talk To Me a terrifying and pervasively heartbreaking tale of grief.
  57. Haunted Mansion
    The movie at times feels like an eternal cycle of the nine-minute ride, which loses its luster after 123 of those minutes. It offers you this chilling challenge—find a way out! Better yet, refrain from being the mortal foolish enough to enter in the first place.
  58. They Cloned Tyrone
    At first glance, They Cloned Tyrone is a silly satire of early ’70s blaxploitation flicks like Super Fly or Willie Dynamite that adds what writer-director Juel Taylor and writer Tony Rettenmaier call a “... dash of Scooby Doo.” Fortunately, the filmmakers here have something more in mind.
  59. Oppenheimer
    For all this and more, Oppenheimer deserves the title of masterpiece. It’s Christopher Nolan’s best film so far, a step up to a new level for one of our finest filmmakers, and a movie that burns itself into your brain.
  60. Barbie
    The world-building in Barbie is exceptional.
  61. Theater Camp
    It’s constructed from the inside out, all of its characters and energy flowing from a genuine place.
  62. Insidious: The Red Door
    Insidious: The Red Door is not a broken movie by any means. It’s a comprehensible experience, though perhaps less so if viewed as a standalone feature instead of the presumably final chapter of a continuing narrative. But Wilson was tasked with telling a pretty dull story, both in terms of its visceral horrors and its thematic ambitions.
  63. Joy Ride
    Joy Ride is a real blast, offering its sentimentality as a garnish to a road trip that emphasizes the sex in sex positivity.
  64. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    A must-watch for anyone looking for a thrilling summer blockbuster.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Whatever emotional heft the pic may aim to harness is lost amid glib jokes, overly complicated mythic lore, and ultimately, pat platitudes about embracing who you were always meant to be.
  66. 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.
  67. God Is a Bullet
    Cut God Is A Bullet down to a tight 90 minutes, and it might at least consistently deliver the cheap thrills and nihilistic kick it only occasionally achieves.
  68. 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.
  69. Asteroid City
    Because of the structure of the film—the story within the story—none of them feel urgent or especially resonant. There are moments of brilliance both from the performers and from the writing. But they never cohere together into a complete story.
  70. Extraction 2
    As in Extraction, the action sequences are the whole game here, and they do not disappoint.
  71. The Blackening
    The movie is highly entertaining, while being oddly validating and very funny. It cleverly weaves the horror tropes that it rebukes right into the narrative. And it’s done without slipping into parody like the Scary Movie series, where similar notions are skewered more broadly and, with The Blackening now on the table, way less successfully.
  72. 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.
  73. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    It’s an easier-to-follow variation on the template than most of its predecessors, but still one dependent on long-winded exposition dumps. And the character-based material here lacks Bumblebee’s sweetness, coming off as cloyingly manipulative instead.
  74. Flamin' Hot
    Garcia delivers a standout turn as Richard. It helps that he’s not yet a household name, so he isn’t carrying the baggage of any external frames of reference. His earnest and engrossing performance absolutely carries Flamin’ Hot.
  75. The Flash
    It’s sometimes buried under layers and layers of storytelling knots that the film never fully untangles, but the fun is there, and when the film is really working, that turns out to be enough.
  76. Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story
    It certainly captures a side of the man, and maybe that’s all anyone would ask of it. But it’s hard to shake the feeling there’s an even better movie waiting to be made from all this material.
  77. Shooting Stars
    Some parts of LeBron’s professional career are told in truncated form with a few figures left out or combined for cinematic purposes, but that’s it. And the film is better for focusing on relationships rather than on the easy highs of watching fast breaks and slam dunks.
  78. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    That it falls short when it comes to matching the emotional impact of Into The Spider-Verse is further exemplified by a surprisingly abrupt cliffhanger conclusion that instead of sending the viewer out on a rousing high just makes one wonder why such an otherwise sharp franchise is going the route of weaker MCU entries in shortchanging its effectiveness as a stand-alone film to tease a future installment.
  79. The Machine
    Hamill, however, is the MVP, continuing to deliver some of his best work as an older man. When he leaves the action for a spell, the energy leaves the movie.
  80. The Boogeyman
    These are jump scares done right, where the struggle to see what’s there is much more effective than any cheap lurch into frame.
  81. You Hurt My Feelings
    Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a treasure as always, basically plays it straight and is terrific.
  82. The Little Mermaid
    But when it comes to picking out what parts of Ariel’s story to tweak for the new medium, the remake still emphasizes the wrong pieces, consequentially bloating a previously brisk story into a meandering pile of producers’ script notes.
  83. White Men Can't Jump
    The remake of WMCJ, also set in the Black communities of greater Los Angeles, fancies itself as having more on its mind than the original flick, but the ball rarely makes it through the hoop.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Fast X
    The focus inside the avalanche of stunts, asymmetrical plot elements, and mismatched genre tropes is still what Vin, and his alter ego Dom, would call “values.” Faith. Family. Honor. Loyalty. Because Dom is the last of a dying breed.
  85. Master Gardener
    While it doesn’t fare well in comparison, Master Gardener still has enough unique characteristics and performances to stand out as a fine film. It’s just the least successful in this particular trilogy.
  86. The Mother
    It’s decent but a tad too restrained for its own good.
  87. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
    Still is a solid reminder of why Fox is a magnetic camera presence and why he continues to be beloved, both as an actor and an activist for Parkinson’s research. As rote as many celebrity navel-gazing documentaries have become, it’s refreshing to see a film that can still find the strengths of the format.
  88. Hypnotic
    Hypnotic isn’t just refreshingly straightforward for Rodriguez, but for Ben Affleck too.
  89. BlackBerry
    It’s true that an operatic presentation of ruination or consequences wouldn’t fit BlackBerry. But it does feel like the movie misses the chance for some stick-the-landing moments related to the fates of its chief characters. That said, Johnson’s entertaining time capsule does still capture, in its unfussy way, one immutable truth: good times aren’t meant to last forever.
  90. Love Again
    This is after all a romantic comedy, not a romantic tragedy, though you might not realize it since it’s almost devoid of humor.
  91. 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.
  92. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    It’s not just a film, it’s a blaze of glory, and that sense of daring is both the best thing about Vol. 3 and, occasionally, the worst.
  93. Peter Pan & Wendy
    Not unlike other studios’ Peter Pan interpretations, like Steven Spielberg’s Hook, P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan, Joe Wright’s Pan, and Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, Lowery’s version does just enough to make it his own. However, with no real laughs, no genuine thrills, and no memorable scenes, its legacy will soon be forgotten.
  94. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is an excellent movie about a beloved figure who indeed seems ageless and whose story includes the kind of comebacks usually reserved for fiction.
  95. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    This is a funny, sweet, heartfelt exploration of pubescent self-discovery that lives up to its namesake.
  96. Judy Blume Forever
    This is a reaffirmation of the author’s impact and importance to an audience that already agrees with that assessment, leaving the film as unchallenging as it is pleasant.
  97. Ghosted
    There’s a funny notion in Chris Evans effectively playing a damsel in distress, but like everything else in Ghosted, the filmmakers have no idea how to play it.
  98. Evil Dead Rise
    For fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago.
  99. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant offers marginal entertainment value. It’s a film that seems afraid to offer any ideas about its setting and characters beyond the minimum.
  100. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    Little Richard: I Am Everything manages to find the proper balance between grace and respect towards Richard’s legacy and valid criticism of his more unsavory views or ill-conceived exploits.
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