The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,412 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: 5,570 out of 10412
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10412
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10412
10412 movie reviews
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  1. Beast
    For a singularly outlandish and specific premise, this is a film that lets its audience experience the horror right along with the characters on screen. This is cinema as spectacle distilled down to its rawest form, where basic storytelling leads directly to visceral and emotional catharsis.
  2. Delia's Gone
    James does a decent job with what he’s been given, but it’s never clear exactly what the movie hopes to do with his character. Is this just another crime and punishment retread? Or is it meant to serve as a metaphor for dealing with grief while disabled? It’s too broad to work as the latter, and too unhurried for the former.
  3. The Immaculate Room
    Despite its thrilling central performances and its sleek production design, The Immaculate Room has more ideas than it can hold together, and emerges, quite ironically it must be said, as quite a muddled mess.
  4. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    The imagery runs backward and forward, gets freeze-framed, goes through different filters, and is blown up, reduced, diced, and re-assembled like playing cards. But director Bianca Stigter fully commits to this formalist dare—and it pays off tremendously.
  5. Spin Me Round
    Spin Me Round is a nice-try attempt at a shapeshifting, fish-out-of-water rom-com that was probably funny in the room—but in the end, it doesn’t quite come together as a movie.
  6. Orphan: First Kill
    Offering the winning combination of a subversive spin on a well-established villain, Orphan: First Kill is a gnarly, wild and absolutely demented ride.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Day Shift
    Suffice it to say that Day Shift is not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s a damn good time for a night at home on the couch: sometimes all you need is Jamie Foxx in a Hawaiian shirt and Snoop Dogg as a black cowboy, slaughtering hundreds of vampires with swords, shotguns, gatling guns, garlic grenades, and decapitating roundhouse kicks.
  8. Emily the Criminal
    Here Plaza sacrifices her signature irreverence for a bone-deep frustration that feels all too relatable, even ordinary, resulting in the most true-to-life performance of her career.
  9. Mack & Rita
    Visually, fusing the story with a warm, contemporary aesthetic makes it a pleasant enough affair. But ultimately, Mack & Rita is a passable work at best for Aselton (Black Rock and The Freebie serve as better showcases for her creative voice), and consequently, it’s unlikely to lead to her soon swapping chairs with the director of the next big-budget blockbuster.
  10. Fall
    Even on the couch, with the ability to hit pause, it reaches heights (ha!) of quintessential B-movie greatness, causing exactly the kind of discomfort that elicits verbal rebukes.
  11. Summering
    Summering may be a breezy little trip through the nostalgia of youth, but its stabs at deeper meaning are woefully immature.
  12. Secret Headquarters
    Between all the cool gadgets—a vintage VW van serving as The Guard’s G-Mobile being the best of them—a devoted cast and a well-meaning spirit, you desperately want Secret Headquarters to be a fun and swift adventure like the one Joost and Schulman clearly conceived on paper. But that imaginary film is unfortunately trapped somewhere inside this clumsy wreck, waiting for its superpowers to be restored.
  13. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
    Despite briefly losing its balance, Stay On Board sticks the landing, crafting a story of self-love and determined self-actualization that many pre-transition queer folks will find aspirational.
  14. Luck
    The movie’s slipshod reasoning and grating rhythms suggest strongly that Lasseter’s ignominious professional defenestration (he was driven from his perch in 2017-18 amidst allegations of sexual misconduct) has impacted his storytelling judgment, the expertise and skill level of people who wish to work with him, or both
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Prey
    Trachtenberg strips the Predator franchise back down to its core elements—the ruthlessness of this alien species and the ingenuity of humanity when confronted with nearly impossible odds. In concentrating on character and location, he backs off of the world-changing repercussions of the franchise’s immediate predecessors, creating an involving and tense character-driven experience whose strengths rely on narrative simplicity and a compelling lead in Midthunder.
  16. Easter Sunday
    Easter Sunday, for all its faults, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland of unfocused potential.
  17. They/Them
    The moments when it succeeds at commenting on continuing anti-LGBT travesties feel like a landmark of queer cinema, proudly planting a pride flag in the horror genre’s fertile fields. Unfortunately, They/Them’s biggest stumbles come from a crisis of identity—not in its characters or queer themes, but in the genre conventions it employs, misunderstanding the opportunities its storytelling affords.
  18. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Reijn, whose last directing effort was Instinct, the Netherland’s 2019 Best International Feature Film Oscar submission, directs with a loose, improvisational energy. If she keeps too loose a grip on the reigns, occasionally letting scenes meander, there’s another surprise or biting line of dialogue to get things back on track. While there’s plenty of blood and nasty kills, Reijn is not here to provide a true horror film experience.
  19. I Love My Dad
    Morosini, though, is smart enough to know that just grossing us out for 95 minutes is not a movie. So he tries to make his film dramatically credible. This proves more difficult, as he has nothing new or insightful to say about father-son relationships or the pernicious possibilities of social media. But managing to push the squirm-inducing envelope while still getting us to root for a reprehensible dad becomes its own sort of twisted achievement.
  20. Bullet Train
    Leitch’s talky, violent hit man movie, with Brad Pitt at the center of an over-cranked ensemble cast, reminds us why Hollywood has all but abandoned attempts to copy the successes of Tarantino and Ritchie. This film is not just bloated, tedious, dim-witted, and glib, it’s also redundant.
  21. Vengeance
    Among some of the movie’s heady notions the movie attempts to assay are the idea and consequences of people living in their own highly individualized spaces; the question of whether any truth can be embedded in pure intuition; and the empty distractions of collapsing civilization, in which culture is relegated to increasingly meaningless fragmentary morsels.
  22. Purple Hearts
    Purple Hearts would be a lot more interesting if it interrogated the specific moments of weakness that attract Cassie to Luke, but that’s far too complex an idea to explore in this kiddie pool of sentimentality.
  23. Paradise Highway
    As intriguing as the combination of Binoche and Grillo might sound, it would be much more impactful if they shared the screen for more than a handful of scenes. As such, the movie begins with a bang, but it ends with a whimper.
  24. Resurrection
    Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
  25. Thirteen Lives
    Howard’s film winds up as a rote retread, transitioning from headline news to big-screen snooze.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    DC League of Super-Pets
    Co-writing with John Whittington, director Jared Stern pulls off a near-impossible feat—creating a film that’s great for kids, entertaining for pretty much any adult taking kids to the theater, and close to perfect for those parents out there who also happen to be massive DC fans.
  27. A Love Song
    On the surface, there’s little more simple than a story of two people trying to make a connection. On an emotional level, however, few things are more complicated. Like life, A Love Song offers no easy conclusions—just simple realizations. In expert hands, that’s enough.
  28. 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.
  29. Not Okay
    This deceptively frothy yet incisive little film asserts that even if the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, redemption can’t be claimed in public spaces. Rather, it has to be earned in private, and sometimes, forgiveness isn’t necessarily the most virtuous next step—especially since healing takes time. For these mature observations alone, we have no choice but stan a peerless Quinn.
  30. My Old School
    Cumming is magnificent in this role, mastering the exact rhythm of Brandon’s speech while also interpreting his emotions with a naturalism that blends seamlessly with testimonials from former students and instructors.
  31. Nope
    What Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?
  32. Anything's Possible
    Anything’s Possible may be flawed for what it fails to fully develop around the edges of its story, but the central relationship that holds the film together is so compelling that the rest hardly matters.
  33. Alone Together
    While we may soon tire of movies using the pandemic as a narrative catalyst (if we haven’t already), Katie Holmes’ Alone Together feels vitally of-the-moment at a time when so many films are ignoring the poignancy of that moment altogether.
  34. Persuasion
    Despite these modern constraints, Cracknell’s adaptation crackles with life. Especially with an effervescent actress and hunky actor delivering compelling performances—in Johnson’s case, sometimes directly to the camera—this funny, poignant and enrapturing film gives ingenious new power to some of the Jane Austen’s greatest hits.
  35. The Deer King
    Though the recipe of a feudal setting with fantasy and myth-making elements ought to be strong, the mixture is off, like a handsomely plated sandwich where the ingredients are more bland than anticipated.
  36. This Is GWAR
    For all the documentary reveals about the band, it leaves you asking further questions, and wanting much more—an apt metaphor for a band that created an impressive legacy, and yet whose members rarely came to a consensus.
  37. She Will
    It’s the film’s mercurial nature, its hazy dreamlike logic, that makes it so extraordinary.
  38. The Gray Man
    Gosling’s one of those actors for whom a recurring action hero role somehow feels long overdue, and the Russos have taken advantage of more than just his good looks and smoldering gazes.
  39. Don't Make Me Go
    Even for a movie obsessed from the outset with its destination, Don’t Make Me Go mostly takes a road to nowhere.
  40. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    Reckless cultural insensitivities aside, Stone and Hopper’s writing is simply not smart or funny. Poop and fart jokes comprise the core of their repertoire, and if you’re curious how reliant the film is on this material, Paramount is literally handing out whoopee cushions to promote the film.
  41. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Newman’s film gets enough right to be just as solid as a summer cinematic distraction as Owens’ book was as beachside literature. The atmosphere and beauty of the Carolina marshes are masterfully captured, and it bears repeating that Daisy Edgar-Jones is a magnetic leading presence, investing Kya with equal parts relatability and spiny distance for a character that seems to have leapt from the page, whole and vivid.
  42. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    In the tradition of Britain’s class comedies, what makes Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris comes down to the difference between, say, your average fashion designer and someone like Dior: with a pattern, anyone can make clothes—but in Manville’s hands, she stitches together something magical.
  43. Fire of Love
    Positively swollen with vulnerability in addition to an infectious curiosity about the world, it’s the type of film which leaves the trajectory of your day inarguably changed—colors a little brighter, feelings a bit rawer, reflections a bit heavier.
  44. The Road to Galena
    It is a movie of tropes and clichés that argues, with generic earnestness and a near-total lack of surprise, that the city is a corrupting influence compared to the nurturing, sun-drenched simplicity of the country.
  45. Murina
    The look (and sound) of Murina are mesmerizing.
  46. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    The issues the movie attempts to tackle—parental expectations, heartbreak, anxiety over choosing the right path—have all been addressed better in other films.
  47. The Forgiven
    Discrimination, exoticization, willful ignorance, poorly disguised disdain for local customs—you name it, these vacationing Westerners have it.
  48. Code Name Banshee
    In the end, Code Name Banshee doesn’t have interesting ideas about who its characters are, or even wish to be. It’s a cliché-driven, rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets, nothing more.
  49. Both Sides of the Blade
    This movie is not particularly good. One seizes upon highlights from the sideline when what’s happening front and center is just so dull.
  50. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Even with Ragnarok looming large in this film’s rearview mirror, Waititi’s work here marks an important and exciting untethering of MCU films from their obligations to a larger mythology—even if this one almost certainly carries much significance for the future.
  51. The Princess
    A yawningly simplistic and roundly inconsequential action movie, The Princess lacks, on a narrative level, the certitude and clarity of purpose of its title character.
  52. Accepted
    Accepted ultimately arrives at a conclusion about the harmfulness of the “model minority” narrative without necessarily deploying the exact term, as it highlights the fact that these inspirational stories about marginalized people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps are often used to allow systemic inequities to fester.
  53. The Sea Beast
    Overall, the narrative, performative, and visual splendor of The Sea Beast are enough to vastly outweigh minor issues in presentational consistency. This is a richly realized nautical world, with the animation team expressing an obvious love for the adventure stories that inspired it and a passion for telling a story as hopeful as it is exciting.
  54. Mr. Malcolm's List
    It’s a pleasant enough diversion, that will likely be best remembered for colorblind casting done right.
  55. Love & Gelato
    Love & Gelato is basically the professional equivalent of a work-study program, the type of movie which affords young actors the opportunity to cut their teeth on uncomplicated material within the well-manicured confines of an easily prescribed genre.
  56. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Ultimately, The Rise Of Gru exerts a negligible impact on the Minions’ canonical journey. If nothing else, the film serves as a reminder of the characters’ cartoonish charms, both literally and thematically, and their transcendent appeal.
  57. Press Play
    Press Play is a smart melding of high-concept and relatable romance—not the least of which is because this type of young love has a high replay value, just like the music we often associate with and attach to these formative years.
  58. Beba
    It can be overwhelming at times, and it’s true that Huntt’s deeply rooted powers of introspection can sometimes curdle into self-absorption. But her lacerating honesty and restless, searching spirit make Beba a virtuoso bomb-drop of a documentary.
  59. The Man from Toronto
    For a character-driven “mistaken identity” comedy that lives or dies based on the humorous interactions between two A-list leads, its lousy script barely constitutes life support.
  60. Elvis
    Unfortunately, what audiences get from Luhrmann is simply excessive: his fast-cutting super-montage style overpowers the subject matter, and the result is an impressionistic, jumbled highlight reel of Presley’s many accomplishments, despite vivid recreations by actor Austin Butler as The King.
  61. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    Beavis And Butt-head Do The Universe is pretty much what you expect—and it’s, uhhhhh, pretty cool.
  62. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Ultimately, Marcel’s clever creators reward our willingness to believe he and his world are real, while offering an opportunity to look at our own world from a different perspective.
  63. The Black Phone
    Answer the call of The Black Phone if you dare. Just be aware that, much like the severed cord dangling underneath the device, there’s a crucial disconnect between the provocative ideas that it sets up, and what it ultimately delivers.
  64. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet is very much a “not for everyone” type of movie, but even people unwilling or unable to connect with it must recognize that it isn’t simply weird for weirdnesses sake. Beyond the obvious theme of the artist’s eternal struggle with those who offer patronage only to start shortening the leash, there’s a frank look at just how strange it is for people to come together to make art in the first place.
  65. Brian and Charles
    Frequently hilarious and never lacking in heart, there’s plenty to love about this story of an offbeat, cabbage-loving weirdo and his three-meter-tall mechanical son. Even if it’s a bit thematically slight and doesn’t quite stick the landing in congealing what themes it does have into a cohesive whole, sometimes all that’s necessary is an offbeat sense of humor and a weird enough premise to make a lasting impression.
  66. The Good Neighbor
    The only benefit the soul is likely to get from watching this is the comforting knowledge that you, the viewer, are not any of the people onscreen. Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching them be bad, of course. But it’s a detached kind of fun.
  67. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    These veteran performers make these two characters likable and, more importantly, fully knowable, and through them Jerry & Marge Go Large fully breathes.
  68. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    It’s a sexually frank and intimate story told in a pleasingly mainstream manner that avoids greeting card clichés and empty “girl power” posturing.
  69. Bitterbrush
    Bitterbrush director Emelie Mahdavian allows you to tag along with two range riders, listen in on intimate conversations, and bask in spectacular and sometimes unforgiving nature as you observe their way of life.
  70. Spiderhead
    With nimble performances, slick polish, dark-pitched wit, razor sharp sentiments, and a Yacht Rock-infused soundtrack, the film proves a seductive high.
  71. Official Competition
    Consistently amusing, if about a reel too long, it’s a tightly controlled, low-boil send-up of the acting process.
  72. Father of the Bride
    It’s surely a crowded canvas. But Alazraki and Lopez joyously melt all the ingredients into a hearty hotpot of generational clash, cultural conflict, patriarchal one-upmanship and domestic chaos, allowing the uniqueness of both the Cuban and Mexican cultures to shine through in their Latinx tapestry, rendered through production designer Kim Jennings’ sumptuous sets.
  73. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Cha Cha Real Smooth has an unforced charm and lack of guile that’s refreshing and stops just short of being precious and ingratiating.
  74. The Lost Girls
    After watching, you may well wish that Peter Pan could be re-copyrighted to be kept out of the hands of anyone inclined to make this much of a mess of it.
  75. Lightyear
    What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.
  76. Unhuman
    If you’re a fan of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, scribes of the later Saw sequels and the Feast trilogy, you know what to expect from them: gore, vomit, red filters, and maybe a half-clever plot twist. If you’re not a fan, it’s best to stay as far away as possible from Unhuman, a cheap-looking, awkwardly calibrated horror-comedy which only the team’s truest devotees could love.
  77. Jurassic World Dominion
    There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.
  78. I'm Charlie Walker
    It is a bewildering misfire which roundly illustrates the differences between a historically under-told story which arguably should be amplified and a movie that actually does a good job of accomplishing that task.
  79. The Righteous
    It’s steeped in a grave sense of portentousness that burrows under your skin. The issue is the weighty script, bleak and heavy with apocalyptic consequence, which contains undeniably intriguing notions that are often not satisfactorily explored or don’t quite cohere.
  80. The Phantom of the Open
    Directed by Craig Roberts, this achingly British offering (its opening lines involve the request for a cup of tea—no milk, six sugars) is a pleasant movie of smaller stakes that, for better or worse, sidesteps inspiration in favor of more laidback reflection.
  81. Hustle
    While not a total slam dunk, Hustle plays admirably with a lot of passion, artistry, and intelligence.
  82. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s a film that is functioning on a very specific artistic wavelength that requires one to buy into it completely in order to fully appreciate its delights. Whether that specific frequency is too obtuse for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts for ’70s sci-fi is up for debate, but the curious would best be served to experience this strange new world for themselves.
  83. Neptune Frost
    There’s little about it that is realistic, but it has points to make about the real world.
  84. Fire Island
    As much a documentary-like depiction of the titular queer haven as it is a real-deal romantic comedy, Fire Island’s real love letter is to the experience that is Fire Island.
  85. Benediction
    There’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry.
  86. Watcher
    Without spoiling, this is one movie where it’d be extremely interesting to know what happens five minutes after the final scene. But while the subsequent events may be up for vigorous debate, the film’s message is crystal clear: Screw you if you ever doubted a woman afraid for her safety.
  87. A Chiara
    Though the path to its conclusions is at times more plodding than meditative, the finale is a subtle, emotional twist of the knife that makes the journey worth taking.
  88. Crimes of the Future
    Nothing about it makes a lick of sense, but there’s a surreal flow to it all that, in the moment, carries you from scene to scene.
  89. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    The Bob’s Burgers Movie can’t functionally change too much about the characters’ inside the animated snow globe that is its serialized namesake, so instead it picks them up, plays with them, and then puts them back like you would a Kuchi Kopi or Horselain.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Lux Æterna
    Cinephiles will grin at Noé’s references to Dreyer, Godard, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder, and everyone with functioning eyesight will stare agape at the closing lightshow, but the experience won’t lead to substantive post-movie conversations as Irreversible and Climax did.
  91. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Downtonians will likely feel all too happy to visit this cast of characters again, and here Fellowes reminds us how we got so invested in their lives in the first place.
  92. Emergency
    It’s easy to imagine Williams taking this story and crafting either a boisterously funny, obstacle-filled mad dash to the hospital or an indignant, op-ed baiting thesis on post-George Floyd America. Instead, he turns down the heat and blends the two, creating a buddy comedy of errors shot through with an ever-darkening undercurrent of racial commentary.
  93. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    Rather than major fits of laughter, chuckles of acknowledgement pepper the audience’s viewing experience, at least for folks over the age of 25.
  94. Hold Your Fire
    Forbes’ film is a fine tribute to him, and a fascinating glimpse at a different, but not distant, past.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Firestarter
    The best thing that can be said about this new iteration of Firestarter is that it at least gave us a new score by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. The rest feels like a waste of a talented cast and crew that somehow, against all odds, makes the 1984 film seem like a staggering achievement in the realm of King adaptations.
  96. Senior Year
    Painfully simplistic in its execution, which frequently undervalues its clever set-up, and featuring unlikeable, poorly drawn characters, the movie works overtime to make the audience actively dislike it.
  97. Monstrous
    Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a more stillborn finished product, an exercise in tedium which checks the barest boxes of “completed movie” and possibly delivers unknown benefits for some of those executive producers, but otherwise offers nothing that might engage an audience.
  98. The Innocents
    Childhood is hard, and childhood grudges run harder. The Innocents pulls no punches in turning that fact into horror.
  99. Pleasure
    “Shocking” is a word that gets thrown around too frequently. But it’s all too fitting for Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, a graphic, gripping, and unflinching drama charting the rocky rise of an ambitious newcomer to the adult film industry.
  100. Top Gun: Maverick
    Joe Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) matches his well-established architectural precision with suitably nostalgic but never pandering emotionality, while Cruise commands the screen in a performance that leverages his multimillion-dollar star wattage to brighten the entire film.
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