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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  1. Person to Person
    It’s a film of ephemeral pleasures, adorned in a rich variety of voices, non-verbal gestures, and speech patterns: unfussy, unrushed, at times very funny.
  2. Nancy Drew
    Once the rote mystery elements take over, the film devolves into a second-rate whodunit for kids, but even then, Roberts' irrepressible cheeriness and curiosity in the face of danger proves too adorable to resist.
  3. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    What this film provides is easy charms; luckily, those come plenty.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ABCs of Death 2
    Omnibus features are by their nature uneven, so it’s to the benefit of the ABCs Of Death series that the creative constraints (26 short horror films, each one pegged to a specific letter of the alphabet) encourage brevity.
  5. The Siege
    As a nail-biting thriller, The Siege is too confusing, and as a thought-provoking social drama, too confused.
  6. Knight of Cups
    Malick’s tricks may be aging, but every world still looks new through his eyes.
  7. 30 Days of Night
    Which is more interesting: Vampires fighting over the potential long-term blowback of their Alaskan buffet, or a couple of exes bonding under duress? Seems like an easy decision, but 30 Days Of Night makes the wrong choice.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Immortalists
    Would that the film encouraged some deeper thought on the matter instead of inviting viewers to gawk at the subjects as if they were freak-show attractions.
  9. Irrational Man
    Though Irrational Man’s existentialist moral crisis is mostly hokum, the movie still has a whiff of charm, thanks to a handful of good one-liners, a little misdirection, and Phoenix’s off-kilter performance, which completely ignores the rhythm of Allen’s speech in favor of naturalistic mojo.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Sex and the City
    Ultimately, Sex And The City serves as a glitter-laced love letter to its fans, which is really all it needs to be.
  11. Goal! The Dream Begins
    How much viewers care about what happens in Goal! is directly proportionate to how much they care about soccer, because decent execution aside, there's an underdog fantasy movie just like this one for every sport.
  12. Inside
    Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.
  13. The Promise
    For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.
  14. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    This is a space opera animated not by joy but insecurity—the anxiety, evident in almost every moment, that if it’s not very careful, someone might feel letdown.
  15. The Art of the Steal
    Buried underneath the movie’s many layers of pulp fluff and knucklehead comedy is a compelling take on why people are drawn to familiar, generic pleasures—self-aware caper comedies, for instance. Perhaps it’s buried too deeply for its own good.
  16. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    While it doesn’t operate at its full potential, Spivet nonetheless offers a bracing risk: a kid adventure with danger alongside its whimsy and sadness alongside its reassurances.
  17. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Like "The Aristocrats," Looking succeeds smashingly both as a comedy and as a savvy deconstruction of comedy.
  18. Quarantine
    Dowdle manages a few nice shocks and some neat moments of pitch-black gallows humor, but Quarantine nevertheless feels awfully familiar, and it grows less convincing with each passing moment. At its worst, it abandons realism entirely and flirts with gory kitsch.
  19. Being Flynn
    Weitz's sense of play and the Badly Drawn Boy soundtrack each give Being Flynn an enjoyable lightness; meanwhile, the curdled, hidden rage lurking within both Flynns gives it an equally enjoyable edge.
  20. Lucky Number Slevin
    It's all superficially enjoyable, right up to the point where the big picture starts coming into focus and it's not worth looking anymore.
  21. Rounders
    Rounders is such a smart, tough little film that its strengths override its fairly serious weaknesses.
  22. Unmade in China
    As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.
  23. Unfriended: Dark Web
    It’s a patently ludicrous story. The storytelling, though, remains clever and grippingly singular, again finding creative ways to progress the narrative without cheating the locked-vantage format.
  24. Shooter
    Fuqua keeps the action moving efficiently, but he doesn't know when to stop piling it on, and eventually, Wahlberg's army of one becomes more a comic-book vigilante than a righteously disgruntled patriot.
  25. Annabelle Comes Home
    For the most part, it works. True, the haunted objects are silly at times, but unlike The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home is only funny when it’s supposed to be. And it’s enjoyable because of its clockwork efficiency, not in spite of it.
  26. Robin Hood
    Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.
  27. The Emperor's New Clothes
    When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.
  28. Donnybrook
    Here, Sutton is working with actual characters, played by professional actors, and his instinct is to flatten them as much as possible.
  29. The Wiz
    The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.
  30. Flightplan
    But coming on the heels of "Red Eye," which is nothing if not an efficient thrill machine, Flightplan can only look conspicuously flat by comparison.
  31. RocknRolla
    As is the norm for Ritchie, Rocknrolla is also too long, too coolly violent, and too populated by characters who all talk like they've been reading the same pulp novelist.
  32. The Mauritanian
    It’s revealed that the evidence against Salahi, who admits only to training with the formerly CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen in an al-Qaeda camp back in the early ’90s, consists of summaries of reports and confessions, which neither side is supposed to see. But instead of rising to the challenge of such potentially abstract subject matter, the film opts for clichés: file boxes, lawyer talk over fast food, the classic confrontation in a poorly lit parking lot.
  33. Imaginary Heroes
    It looks good. It seems to work. It occasionally coheres into a priceless moment. But in the end, the pieces don't all fit together as they should.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    A disarmingly enthusiastic documentary about how its subject eventually found his own way into orbit.
  35. Broken
    Doggedly manipulative and yet consistently affecting, Broken piles on the miserablism to almost unbearable effect.
  36. Aladdin
    Ricthie’s Aladdin feels sluggish in comparison to the fast-paced original. Even the songs suffer; the direction of the musical numbers is surprisingly unimaginative and turgid, to the point that even surefire showstoppers like “Prince Ali” and the mighty “A Whole New World” end up succumbing to lackluster staging and uncomfortable performances.
  37. Keeping Mum
    Keeping Mum never really gets going, and it inches to the finish line like a narcoleptic turtle.
  38. Piranha 3-D
    Piranha 3D realizes its guilty-pleasure camp potential for about a minute and a half, proving yet again that there's no concept so foolproof filmmakers can't screw it up.
  39. John Dies at the End
    It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.
  40. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    There's little here that's especially cage-rattling or side-splitting. Ultimately, Allah only made these guys mildly likable.
  41. The Forever Purge
    In The Forever Purge, we’re told a story that a battered nation has heard a lot—a sermon of immigration and class warfare that’s too heavy-handed to say anything its prospective audience hasn’t been told on countless social media feeds over the last few years.
  42. Emancipation
    A drama that aches to connect with the George Floyd era is more like amped-up misery porn, a Will Smith vanity project that pales next to more accomplished films about Black suffering that better remind us of our nation’s ongoing shame.
  43. Ma
    Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster.
  44. Jungleland
    Earnest fraternal affection is the main attraction in Jungleland, director Max Winkler’s moody road-trip movie by way of a bare-knuckle boxing drama.
  45. Vanity Fair
    Either a radical reinterpretation of the source material or a mammoth failure of nerve. Whichever the case, it makes for a tremendously dull film that gives Witherspoon little to do except pose against a pretty backdrop.
  46. Tea with Mussolini
    While Zeffirelli couldn't have assembled a more capable cast, none of them, except Cher, are given characters colorful enough to make the film worthwhile; almost everyone gets lost amidst the Tuscan scenery.
  47. De-Lovely
    If Porter's songs are so timeless, why does the movie sound like something that might have played on VH1 five years ago?
  48. Ricky
    The frisson between the two halves is intriguing for a while, but it leaves the film feeling adrift.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    That's What I Am
    It's a dogged family entertainment determined to teach lessons about tolerance and how it should be extended to everyone, even redheads, gay people, and kids with cooties.
  50. Race with the Devil
    A near-exact cross between Rosemary's Baby, Duel, and The Parallax View, Race With The Devil has problems getting over the flat, TV-style direction by Cleopatra Jones director Jack Starrett, but it gets by on engaging drive-in goofiness, even if it's tough to swallow the idea that mid-'70s Texas swarmed with Satanists.
  51. Palmer
    The best thing that can be said about Palmer is that it’s innocuous: overlong and sentimental, but rarely annoying.
  52. Monster Hunt
    Monster Hunt combines a lot of qualities from the other items on the all-timer’s list: epic action, elaborate special effects, broad comedy, and a style that could best be described as “exhausting.”
  53. Palindromes
    Palindromes becomes a strangely compelling fractured fable, a grim cinematic fairy tale heightened by Nathan Larson's delicate, bittersweet score.
  54. We Have a Ghost
    Closure is inevitably attained, of course, but at a cheapened cost that dramatically lessens the impact of its main characters’ journeys. And that’s truly dispiriting.
  55. Lilo & Stitch
    If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.
  56. Lost Highway
    A slow, ponderous, ultimately unsuccessful exercise in cerebral nihilism.
  57. Apres Vous (After You)
    It's sweet, but way too silly.
  58. Flag Day
    Thankfully, Flag Day isn’t another disaster, though neither is it anywhere near the vicinity of Penn’s best work.
  59. In the Grey
    It’s Ritchie in fun-workhorse mode, more businesslike than Operation Fortune but fleeter than Fountain Of Youth.
  60. We Are Marshall
    It's uplifting, but shallow.
  61. The Phantom
    A second-rate film about a third-rate superhero played by a C-list actor.
    • The A.V. Club
  62. The Dead Thing
    A well-crafted, slow-burn art-horror offering that falls somewhere between doomed character study and moody ghost story, the movie exudes an unerring confidence in its own skin. It’s not an eager group of individual showcases or a proof-of-concept for another project, but a creatively executed rumination on universally relevant themes.
  63. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    They essentially replace the book's blank spaces with gaping plot holes and laughable clichés.
  64. Bliss
    Bliss approaches its aesthetic with a straight-faced intensity, pummeling the viewer with woozy handheld closeups and violent bursts of montage until you feel like maybe you might have been dosed somehow on your way into the theater. The only irony here is that Begos says it’s his most personal movie to date.
  65. Penguins of Madagascar
    Frenetic and frequently funny, Penguins Of Madagascar represents the DreamWorks Animation franchise style — which boils down to self-aware, but naïve, talking animals who learn kid-friendly life lessons — at its most palatable.
  66. Fatherhood
    There could be something to say here about how comically low society’s expectations for fathers remain. The movie also briefly, incisively captures the new-parent contradiction of desperately needing help while wanting to be left alone, free of unsolicited input. But director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) keeps making odd choices for what, in a single father’s life, requires comic or dramatic emphasis.
  67. The Better Angels
    As an impression of a Terrence Malick film, The Better Angels is technically faultless, unimprovable. All that’s missing is the soul.
  68. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Even at a hefty 142 minutes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hasn’t the time for its surfeit of plot, nor for the sprawling ensemble of supporting characters caught in the sticky web Webb weaves.
  69. Passionada
    Milos and Rossum are like Iberian "Gilmore Girls," only with an ocean view and without the clever dialogue.
  70. New Suit
    The sturdy premise delivers little in the way of actual laughs.
  71. Benji
    Shot in widescreen in New Orleans, this new Benji looks burnished and luxe in comparison with the visibly threadbare original, to which it pays several nods for the fans.
  72. Knock Knock
    It’s the kind of vanity-free, dignity-be-damned performance that Nicolas Cage regularly delivers, and by the time Keanu is bellowing hysterically about free pizza, the urge to surrender becomes difficult to resist.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Late Bloomers
    As a portrait of aging, Late Bloomers is a little too easy, but its cast makes it worth a look, even so.
  74. On a Magical Night
    Despite its welcome breezy and surreal qualities, On A Magical Night has more psychological shortcuts than insights.
  75. Beyond Outrage
    Of all the great actor/directors, Kitano has probably come the closest to creating a style that parallels his approach to acting.
  76. Rent
    Yes, Rent is the movie about AIDS, heroin addiction, homosexuality, strippers, marijuana, cross-dressing, and bisexuality audiences can take their grandparents to go see safe in the knowledge that any lingering trace of danger or authenticity has been carefully removed by director/co-writer Chris Columbus.
  77. Renfield
    Though Nicholas Hoult is charming as he struggles to find inner strength, Renfield lives or dies by Nic Cage camping it up. And he delivers.
  78. Free State of Jones
    Ross may not be a great director, but he has written some very good screenplays, none of which sprawl out like this one.
  79. Sharp Stick
    Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    Mr. Popper's Penguins reins in its rubber-faced star, leaving most of the rote physical comedy (and overabundance of fart jokes) to his nonhuman counterparts, comprised of a combination of CGI and real penguins.
  81. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    Though Sandel relies less on exasperating, rubbery digital effects than Rob Letterman, the DreamWorks Animation vet who helmed the original, his direction of the monsters and mayhem is never more than workmanlike, racing joylessly through a shaky plot that barely holds attention.
  82. A Good Woman
    The trick to staging Wilde is to hint at the gravity beneath the witticisms. A Good Woman barely even gets the witticisms out, though it does contain Wilde's line about people being either tedious or charming.
  83. The Killer Inside Me
    Affleck is the perfect actor for this role, though he’s a little too mush-mouthed to do the voiceover narration required of a noir.
  84. The Rocker
    Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.
  85. Finding Your Feet
    Pitched to the weekday-matinee crowd, the insipid British retirement-age comedy Finding Your Feet doesn’t have much to recommend it apart from its grossly overqualified cast, led by Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall.
  86. Resistance
    Resistance is like a maudlin Robin Williams vehicle inorganically fused with a by-the-numbers wartime thriller. In place of showbiz clichés, there are tacky WWII-movie tropes.
  87. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.
  88. The Tender Bar
    The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck
  89. Bachelorette
    While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.
  90. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    The film is even less than the sum of its genre trappings.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Muppets from Space
    The cavalcade of guest spots does give viewers the rare opportunity to see Andie MacDowell getting punched in the stomach by Miss Piggy, as well as the chance to watch Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes reject the amorous advances of a wise-cracking prawn, but they also undermine Muppets From Space's attempts to transcend its dull, plodding shenanigans.
  92. Dog Eat Dog
    An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.
  93. Valley Girl
    Despite the occasional one-liner that lands and the commitment of a game cast, this Valley Girl’s charms are blotted out by its noisy neon brightness. By the end, even a fan of the original may feel dread instead of glee at the rise of synth on the soundtrack, announcing yet another interminable musical number.
  94. Gnomeo and Juliet
    Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.
  95. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.
  96. Wanderlust
    The effortlessly charming Rudd - who is never funnier here than when trying to psych himself up for a tryst with commune-dweller Malin Akerman with a series of increasingly preposterous voices - and an attractive, game supporting cast nearly sell the warmed-over material.
  97. Hypnotic
    Hypnotic isn’t just refreshingly straightforward for Rodriguez, but for Ben Affleck too.
  98. The Moment
    The Moment doesn’t meet the gold standard of self-pitying emptiness set by The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, but it does share with that movie the sense that the gorgeous surface is performing a kind of vamping at the behest of a music-video-thin story.
  99. Target
    Dillon comes off as a whiny, unlikable brat, the premise's comic potential goes unrealized, and the spy stuff feels familiar and halfhearted. Good as he is, Hackman can't transform the second-rate into a masterpiece.
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