The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,413 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: 5,571 out of 10413
  2. Mixed: 3,735 out of 10413
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10413
10413 movie reviews
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  1. To Catch a Thief
    Thief is giddy with eye candy, but the scenery is always secondary to the screenplay, which well serves the blinding star-power on display.
  2. The Lobster
    Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.
  3. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.
  4. Breaking the Waves
    What Von Trier arrives at is a complex, contemporary, and deeply moving exploration of faith.
  5. The Squid and the Whale
    It's an unflinchingly raw and honest look at a family splitting apart, and it seldom strikes an unconvincing or inauthentic note. Though it surveys rocky adolescent emotional terrain from the safe distance of adulthood, The Squid And The Whale still resonates with the sting of a fresh wound.
  6. Winged Migration
    Settles into pleasant monotony and repetition, without any narrative arc or purpose. Seasoned bird-watchers, however, may find that the sensory overload leaves them close to spiritual nirvana.
  7. Rebels of the Neon God
    Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.
  8. School of Rock
    Though tagged as the director's bid for commercial success, School Of Rock is as philosophical in its own way as "Slacker" or "Waking Life." It was made by people who not only know the music well enough to create magnificent flowcharts around it, but also understand how a simple, soul-stirring rock song can seem revolutionary.
  9. Star Trek
    Gripping action and vulnerable heroes writ large. It boldly goes somewhere different and makes it hard to leave the film not hoping for a return voyage soon.
  10. They Live by Night
    It's a strikingly poetic first feature, more about the naïve romance between young hoodlum Granger and his reluctant nursemaid Cathy O'Donnell than it is about robbing banks and dodging cops.
  11. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is an entertaining and crowd-pleasing monster movie, one that leaves you wanting more—and once you get over wondering what a subtler and more accomplished director might have done with this material, it’s not hard to let yourself be won over by its charms.
  12. The Namesake
    It's well-acted and filled with striking compositions, but director Mira Nair has trouble with a different kind of balance.
  13. Frances Ha
    Above all, Frances Ha is a wry and moving portrait of friendship, highlighting the way that two people who know everything about each other can nevertheless grow apart as their needs change.
  14. C'mon C'mon
    Mills’ core insight remains the same in every film: We’re all screwed up to some degree, all constantly improvising, all doing the best we can with relatively few guidelines. That’s not especially innovative or profound, perhaps, but seeing it refracted through a connection that movies tend to ignore lends it a certain sparkle.
  15. Hunger
    Hunger may be criticized for being willfully arty, or for reducing a complex political situation to a broadly allegorical vision of martyrdom, but it's never less than visually stunning.
  16. Howl's Moving Castle
    Miyazaki's animated adaptation of Jones' book is a charming and thoroughly absorbing treat.
  17. A Hijacking
    While the improvisatory movement of the camera helps create a sense of ambiguous tension in the scenes where the crew interacts with the pirates, it also undercuts several more overtly dramatic moments. However, this shortcoming of filmmaking imagination is largely redeemed by the pessimistic wallop of the movie’s ending.
  18. Black Sabbath
    There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.
  19. Crimson Gold
    Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.
  20. Small Things Like These
    Small Things Like These instead functions as a parable about how minor acts of kindness can be the strongest defense against powerlessness in the face of corruption. It’s a moral poignant in its simplicity, if also a bit lacking in how utterly uncomplicated and even expected it is.
  21. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Yet in his despair, there's something Kudlow misses, and it's what makes Anvil! as moving as it is hilarious.
  22. The Trip
    Make no mistake: The Trip is a fine, funny movie. But there's no reason why it couldn't have been even finer and funnier.
  23. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    With shades of Carrie, Harry's magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy.
  24. Michael Clayton
    In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.
  25. Downfall
    Downfall's overstuffed melodrama juggles countless subplots and a small army of characters who manage to make an impression in spite of limited screen time.
  26. 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.
  27. The Spectacular Now
    If Ponsoldt can step beyond the 12 steps, he might make something truly spectacular.
  28. My Man Godfrey
    One of the first and still among the best of the '30s screwball comedies, My Man Godfrey serves up absurdist romance and light social commentary in a fizzy mix that benefits from director Gregory La Cava's willingness to indulge improvisation, a trait he acquired from friend and frequent collaborator W.C. Fields.
  29. Sator
    Sator is an effective exercise in what the horror genre does best, underscoring awful truths—in this case, dementia and generational trauma—by making them explicitly monstrous. What Graham understands is that there are few things scarier than the ultimate fragility of the human brain and everything contained within
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    It's a sweetly queasy film that suggests the spirit that sustains us, the demons we hide from the world, and the monsters that prey upon us in the dark might all be variations on the same beast.
  31. Rams
    All Iceland all the time, and while it failed to snag a foreign-language Oscar nomination (after winning the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes last year), it does its country proud.
  32. Certified Copy
    Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).
  33. Night Moves
    Filled with shadows both literal and figurative, Night Moves elegantly combines the hard-edged pessimism, crackling banter, and all-consuming darkness of classic noir with the paranoia and bitterness that characterizes so much '70s cinema.
  34. Nuts!
    Ultimately, this isn’t a film about goat balls at all, but the willingness of millions to believe that some slick-talking demagogue knows more about what’s good for them and their families than someone with actual qualifications.
  35. Challengers
    Challengers remains an entertaining movie thanks to its complicated characters who are played by actors on their way to becoming sparkling screen stars.
  36. Pig
    Like the animal itself, Pig is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.
  37. 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.
  38. Marjorie Prime
    The most stylish thing about it is the eerie original music by Mica Levi, the art-damaged noise-popster-turned-composer who previously scored "Under The Skin" and "Jackie."
  39. Sorry We Missed You
    For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.
  40. Steve Jobs
    The tension between Boyle’s restless energy and Sorkin’s tendency to run in place drives the movie.
  41. Marley
    That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.
  42. The Agronomist
    Driven by Dominique's personal magnetism, The Agronomist is a haunting, inspirational valentine to free speech and human resilience.
  43. Touching the Void
    At its heart, Touching The Void contends with the physical and spiritual dilemma of facing the unknown and overcoming paralyzing fear in order to emerge reborn on the other side. But the film's appeal is even more fundamental than that: It's just one of those stories that catches the breath, no matter how often it's told.
  44. Le Havre
    Kaurismäki has a narrow vision, disarming and sweet, yet utterly predictable, and there's little distinction between the films he's directing today and the films he directed 30 years ago. They have the wrong kind of timelessness.
  45. 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.
  46. From Ground Zero
    With little in way of organization, From Ground Zero can oscillate frustratingly between styles, artistic ambition, and production quality.
  47. Araby
    The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.
  48. Sound of Metal
    Sound Of Metal is nothing without its sound design. It’s a story about music and deafness—both auditory phenomena—and its success depends on being able to put you into the main character’s beat-up Converse. The film does accomplish that, thanks in part to its unique, first-person approach to sound.
  49. Embrace of the Serpent
    One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.
  50. Da 5 Bloods
    Spike Lee’s cultural messaging for once fails him in the politically muddled Da 5 Bloods. With the film, Lee offers his submission to a history of bloodied, masculine Vietnam War movies. Sadly, he’s more concerned with making a Vietnam movie that looks Black than one that actually takes on the complexities of Blackness, war, and global imperialism.
  51. Side by Side
    What's most valuable about Side By Side is how comprehensive it is in documenting how the art form changed.
  52. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The Last Black Man plays like a poetic portrait, part tender ode and part cartography of lived experience, bringing a nuanced and hard-earned perspective to the screen.
  53. Days of Glory
    Days Of Glory isn't subtle in its exploration of the racial politics of warfare, but its grim, cynical portrayal of young men considered worthy enough to die for a foreign country, yet unworthy of being treated as equals, proves bluntly powerful.
  54. My Summer of Love
    Pawlikowski's off-balance compositions and affection for odd close-ups suggest the influence of Wong Kar-Wai, but the film's low-key observational spirit owes as much to Mike Leigh.
  55. Isle of Dogs
    If this is a superficial tribute, it’s also an affectionately dense one. Most accurately, what we’re seeing is an Andersonian alternate universe: a Japan as old and new, real and unreal, steeped in pastiche and invented from scratch as the brownstone New York of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
  56. Read My Lips
    For as long as director and co-writer Jacques Audiard focuses on the central relationship, his stylish film stays on steady footing.
  57. The Return
    In its dramatic shift from the real to the allegorical, the ending of Andrey Zvyagintsev's auspicious debut feature The Return is likely to leave many viewers scratching their heads.
  58. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Mysteries Of Lisbon is an odd kind of epic: It's digressive and even trifling at times, and though a large cast wanders through the frame, the individual scenes tend to be focused on just two or three people, having winding conversations about political intrigue and affairs of the heart.
  59. Approaching the Elephant
    The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.
  60. Certain Women
    Like a lot of really strong short story collections, Certain Women is greater than the sum of its parts, even if one of those parts is also significantly greater than the others.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary
    The camaraderie among these strangers tossed together by fate is inspiring, as the competition gives way to good sportsmanship and, ultimately, good will.
  62. Frozen River
    If the role brings her more recognition and work, all the better, but Leo certainly isn't lobbying for it. She doesn't show off. She just does what she's always done: Reveals a character for who she is, nothing more, nothing less.
  63. Superman
    Effective both as Superman and as the bumbling Clark Kent, Christopher Reeve still seems ideal for the part, if for no other reason than his ability to summon up a convincing sense of intensity when charged with saving the world.
  64. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    Little Amélie submerges itself in fantastical ecstasy and melancholy with a magic all its own.
  65. Love Is Strange
    Setting several scenes to the famously poignant plinks of pianist Frédéric Chopin, Love Is Strange never achieves the sheer emotional resonance of "Make Way For Tomorrow"; it’s gently affecting, not deeply heartbreaking — in part because Sachs builds to a less devastating punctuation than McCarey did.
  66. La Ronde
    The characters are sketchy by design, but the set design is wondrously opulent, and Ophüls cleverly picks up on Schnitzler's central theme, about how sexual desire erases class distinctions.
  67. Blow-Up
    Blow-Up defies analysis by design, given that it's about an artist who makes messes and cleans them up only in part, leaving behind the splatter that interests him. Antonioni follows a similar methodology, making strict interpretations of Blow-Up pretty pointless, and certainly less enjoyable than soaking up the mod decadence and ennui.
  68. Tess
    Not as radically stylized as Polanki’s violent Macbeth, Tess is literature rendered in consummately classical terms.
  69. The Assassin
    Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling.
  70. In Jackson Heights
    The sheer variety of humanity that Wiseman documents keeps the film lively, and he finds plenty of terrific subjects.
  71. Late Marriage
    A daring and immediate debut feature for Koshashvili, Late Marriage could lead two likeminded people to opposite conclusions, and that may be its greatest strength.
  72. The Twilight Samurai
    The film is a bit of a slog, but in the end, it's a slog worth taking, thanks to a strange, moving ending that reduces the samurai era's codes of warfare, class, and honor down to two men meeting face to face.
  73. Madeline's Madeline
    Madeline’s Madeline, the third feature from writer-director Josephine Decker, is a self-devouring thing: a movie about artistic process that doubles as a document of—and even a commentary on—its own artistic process.
  74. Requiem
    Though its heroine's mysterious seizures and blackouts are terrifying in the way they undermine her quest for self-determination, Requiem isn't a horror movie so much as a thwarted coming-of-age story, like "Carrie" without the bloody reckoning.
  75. Captain Phillips
    More often that not, however, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios.
  76. 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.
  77. A Hero
    Part of the movie’s brilliance is in how it questions the very concept of a good deed.
  78. The Northman
    At least from an ambition standpoint, Eggers’ devotion pays off in heaps. The Northman offers a lot to enjoy in what is a lot of movie. It features both see-it-to-believe-it “fuck yeah!” gruesomeness in its 10th Century tale and the kind of historical and mythical attention to detail to be expected from Eggers
  79. Neruda
    Despite those superficial similarities, though, Neruda is ultimately a very different film than "Jackie," and arguably the bolder of the two. Its palette is darker, even as its sensibility is less somber, more playful.
  80. Blancanieves
    Berger also shows a dark wit and a faith in old-fashioned melodrama that puts Blancanieves more in the camp of Pedro Almodóvar than Guy Maddin’s golden-age pastiches. (And aside from being silent and a period piece, the movie has almost nothing in common with "The Artist.")
  81. Deaf President Now!
    Deaf President Now! honors that struggle, even if the polished packaging doesn’t always possess a similar righteous fury.
  82. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    The body means different things for each of them, and Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy.
  83. 3 Godfathers
    The fairy-tale-like 3 Godfathers casts Wayne as one of a trio of outlaws charged with caring for a baby, and discovering responsibility and perhaps his soul (the two go hand-in-hand for Ford) in the process.
  84. Stranger by the Lake
    As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.
  85. Ten Canoes
    Like a lot of folk tales, Ten Canoes peters out into something more prosaic than profound, but it flows like water, and has a deceptively gentle pull that proves hard to escape.
  86. The Stranger
    Ozon’s The Stranger keeps the spirit of its source material alive as a timeless warning in a modern world of stark polarization, ongoing colonialism, and plenty of Meursaults ignoring the suffering of others.
  87. Gilles' Wife
    An impeccable minimalist drama that's tailored specifically to Devos' expressive capabilities, which say more than the sparse dialogue.
  88. The Maid
    Even at its most upbeat, The Maid is something of a tragedy.
  89. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.
  90. 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.
  91. Hold Your Fire
    Forbes’ film is a fine tribute to him, and a fascinating glimpse at a different, but not distant, past.
  92. Sicario
    It’s an uncommonly bold gambit, expressly designed to frustrate people who want to see a strong woman deliver a righteous ass kicking. The progressivism here is instead rooted in futility and despair, which provides much more of a valuable shock to the system.
  93. Bacurau
    As a statement on American entitlement and the intersection between capitalism and colonial terror, it’s a frying pan to the back of the skull: clunky but powerful.
  94. The Honeymoon Killers
    That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.
  95. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Arijon's choice to film the survivors returning to the Andes with their children pays huge dividends, leading to an ending that puts the real meaning of their ordeal in moving terms.
  96. A Thousand Cuts
    The movie is loaded with moments meant to generate shock and outrage, but it could use more shoe-leather procedural scenes, showing in detail how Ressa’s team goes about investigating the police’s abuses of their constitutional authority.
  97. No Home Movie
    Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.
  98. Another Year
    The performances are winning, the story is surprising without relying on unlikely twists, and the relationships are the richest and most nuanced since Leigh's "Secrets & Lies."
  99. At Berkeley
    An exhilarating, four-hour immersion in life at the University Of California campus.
  100. Blade Runner 2049
    This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.
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