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. Tombstone
    Tombstone remains a shamelessly entertaining movie, filled with lively turns from virtually every appropriate actor not working on the Costner version.
  2. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    Mark Hamill nails every one liner the writers throw at him (I tried to get as many as I could in Stray Observations, but I’m sure I missed some), and his signature Joker laugh is used to chilling effect throughout the film.
  3. A Perfect World
    It’s material primed for mushiness, yet Eastwood shrewdly marries sentimentality to both self-deprecating humor (including a late bullhorn gag) and darker, more desolate undercurrents.
  4. Deadfall
    Compared to Deadfall, films The Wicker Man, Face/Off, and even Vampire’s Kiss look like Merchant-Ivory productions. It may be a crowded field at the top of Cage’s most entertaining performances, but this one deserves to stand above the fold, if for no other reason than that its general lack of public awareness means a retroactive popular appreciation is long overdue.
  5. Cool Runnings
    Though it certainly has faults, which only the extremely nostalgic could ignore, the film bests its contemporaries through its ability to unite childlike comedy and adult concerns without ever obscuring one with the other.
  6. True Romance
    The Tony Scott version of Tarantino comes out vulgar; the graphic violence and profanity-laced posturing represent everything that the wannabes soon used to exhaust audiences. Nevertheless, True Romance contains so many unforgettable moments.
  7. Careful
    Although longer and more complex than Gimli, thanks to a fine script by Maddin and George Toles, Careful is equally claustrophobic. The director's continued use of minimal lighting, deliberately phony-looking studio sets, and sterile overdubs perpetuates a feeling of blatant manufacture which undercuts any disturbing themes.
  8. King of the Hill
    Boasts one of the most expertly crafted screenplays of the ’90s.
  9. Hard Target
    It’s a sturdy bridge between two markedly different filmmaking cultures.
  10. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
    Out-and-out dud, underlining how far the mighty have fallen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rookie of the Year
    Rookie isn’t a bad movie. It’s also not good.
  12. Hard Boiled
    Plenty of entertaining action movies have been made since John Woo's 1992 Hard Boiled, but really, what's the point?
  13. The Long Day Closes
    What’s uniquely remarkable about The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies’ 1992 return to his own childhood, is how gloriously disorganized its story feels.
  14. Super Mario Bros.
    Super Mario Bros. devotes half its run time to lumbering exposition, yet still makes no f.cking sense. Seldom has a film done such heavy lifting to such meager effect.
  15. Army of Darkness
    It’s just pure pleasure for 81 minutes, and that’s it.
  16. Groundhog Day
    A hilarious and unexpectedly profound comedy.
  17. Strictly Ballroom
    Luhrmann works aggressively for laughs early in the picture, playing up the gaudiness and piggishness of the old-guard dancers in camera angles as extreme and unflattering as a mid-'80s David Lee Roth video.
  18. Body of Evidence
    Evidence tries to one-up Basic Instinct through the sheer quantity and length of its sex scenes, but it backfires.
  19. Man Bites Dog
    It’s a sick piece of work—I felt like a heel for watching it, yet I couldn’t look away, either.
  20. Toys
    If Levinson weren't so intent on cramming whimsy and joy down the audience's throat for two punishing hours, he might very well have succeeded in his very noble ambitions. Whimsy is a tricky thing: too much can become oppressive.
  21. The Muppet Christmas Carol
    The Muppet Christmas Carol may be the most important Dickens adaptation of our time.
  22. Passenger 57
    A film whose each subsequent plot turn makes less sense than the last, Passenger 57 is just about the epitome of clichéd 1990s action nonsense—and as such, it’s the perfect vehicle for Wesley Snipes and his particular brand of over-the-top, don’t-tread-on-me heroism.
  23. Glengarry Glen Ross
    Gets most of its legs from the acting and the dialogue, which has such a rhythmic grace that scenes from the movie can be played and replayed with no loss of thump.
  24. Sneakers
    Tobolowsky, anagrams, blind driving, a jazzy but tense James Horner score—this movie has everything, and it’s all deceptively well engineered.
  25. Brother's Keeper
    A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing. It explores, with mercy and compassion, the paradoxes inherent to the concept of mercy killing, a crime of love rather than hate.
  26. Europa
    Europa has been described as a Kafka-esque fever dream, and while that isn't inaccurate, it's also a cover for the film's confounding narrative, which wends through murky noir plotting, a polyglot of accents and performance styles, and surreal interludes. The best approach is not to puzzle too much over the details, and to marvel at von Trier's technical wizardry, which re-imagines the period through a patchwork of vivid impressions.
  27. Lethal Weapon 3
    The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.
  28. Deep Cover
    As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.
  29. Mississippi Masala
    A wholly original story written and directed by women that thoughtfully explores the complexities of interracial love between people of color.
  30. Porco Rosso
    Porco Rosso was initially conceived as a short film for Japan Airlines, and its roots show in its delight with aviation and the experience of flight, but also in its somewhat shapeless plot.
  31. Bugsy
    Bugsy is part tormented character study, part old-school Hollywood glitz. Its fabulist protagonist acts like he's stuck in a '30s gangster melodrama, but Levinson's lushly stylized film gives his story the A-list treatment.
  32. Night on Earth
    Almost unavoidably uneven, it gets off to a rough start in a segment that relies too heavily on Winona Ryder's charms as a pixieish grease monkey. But it improves as it goes, and in segment after segment, Jarmusch's characters strive, almost heroically, to make human connections, even ones that won't last beyond the moment when they pay their fares.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    My Girl
    It’s an introduction to adolescent viewers of some of life’s most painful events, even if those events aren’t always depicted in the most realistic ways. And therein lies My Girl’s effectiveness.
  34. The Double Life of Veronique
    The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.
  35. The People Under the Stairs
    It’s that intuitive fusion of whiplash-inducing plot twists and political anger that makes The People Under The Stairs so fascinating, even when the humor’s too blunt or the scares too soft.
  36. Homicide
    Television tends to trump movies when it comes to staging richly detailed cop dramas, but David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide is the rare big-screen policier that can stand up to The Shield, The Wire, Hill Street Blues, and Homicide: Life On The Street.
  37. A Better Tomorrow
    Superlative action scenes, particularly a bloody guns-grenades-and-swords finale with a body count to rival the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, help wash away many of the flaws. Action for its own sake may not have been the film's intended point, but it'll do.
  38. 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.
  39. Regarding Henry
    It’s more a misguided, though occasionally retch-worthy, mediocrity elevated by its cast—Bening, as always, is particularly strong—and Nichols’ fluid camerawork. Those elements at times make it seem like a better movie than it really is, but it doesn’t benefit from scrutiny or thought.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Black powder and Christian Slater are cool and all, but real dramatic successes come when a film has both heart and a slate of talented actors who aren’t just leaning on their oversized patchwork capes to tell the story.
  41. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    There’s a hagiographic aspect to Truth Or Dare that’s disquieting even now, especially given that an honest movie about this genuinely groundbreaking tour—which became the model for ambitious pop-star concerts—and the high-school-play-like camaraderie of its personnel would’ve had more lasting value.
  42. Mortal Thoughts
    As a domestic melodrama, the film sometimes plays like The Honeymooners without the laughs, but the push and pull between the flashbacks and the interrogation scenes gain steadily in strength as the case gets harder to pin down. There’s more to these characters—and this movie—than initially meets the eye.
  43. Nothing But Trouble
    No matter how much care and thought went into it it's still disgusting and pointless.
  44. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    The Bonfire Of The Vanities gets a lot of things right but they're largely negated by the colossal things it gets wrong.
  45. Home Alone
    Even though Macaulay Culkin's alternately muggy and inexpressive lead performance hasn't worn well, the supporting turns by Catherine O'Hara and John Candy are especially crackerjack, as is John Williams' buoyantly cartoony score.
  46. The Rescuers Down Under
    It’s a gorgeous, visually ambitious film, full of show-offy setpieces reportedly inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki.
  47. Child's Play 2
    In every way, it hangs together less effectively than its predecessor, but Mancini’s script is smartly self-aware (a recurring theme in these films), and new director John Lafia creates some enjoyably gonzo moments.
  48. Graffiti Bridge
    It's a struggle with quasi-profound ramifications that crystallizes Prince's long-standing obsession with sin and salvation, sex and Godliness, the hungers of the body and the demands of the spirit. Or, at least, it should be. Instead it plays like a cartoon parody of Prince's soft-headed spiritual concerns.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Palace
    White Palace is more than a romance or a bedroom romp or human comedy. It is a lesson in judgments and values, and a glimpse at emotional roulette.
  50. King of New York
    Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.
  51. After Dark, My Sweet
    It’s a pungently atmospheric little sleeper, and one of relatively few genre flicks to portray a mentally unsound protagonist as a recognizable human being—someone who really just has one particular screw loose, such that you might not notice unless you happened to stumble against that particular joint.
  52. The Exorcist III
    Dread this thick stays with you, long after the shock of projectile vomit and masturbation by crucifix has worn off.
  53. Dick Tracy
    Dick Tracy has pop-art elements, imaginatively conceived montages, and a riff on crime-as-business that’s as pointed as the Godfather movies, if more family-friendly.
  54. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    The director has done the original Gremlins one better: Instead of a film with a subversive streak, he's made a puckish act of subversion with a streak of film.
  55. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    What keeps Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! from being irredeemably offensive are Almodóvar’s efforts, however vague and tentative, to undermine his own thesis.
  56. Miami Blues
    Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie.
  57. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    Here’s a film that opens with a man being smeared in excrement and closes with an even more horrifying act of revenge, yet it’s fevered, passionate, and occasionally erotic, at least by Greenaway standards. It’s a film awash in the color red, full of blood, sex, and rage, the rare Greenaway that feels alive as more than a formal or semiotic exercise. You may even catch him storytelling here and there.
  58. Moon 44
    Generic but enjoyable with some nifty low-budget effects work.
  59. Akira
    A landmark production that can be watched with equal satisfaction as a metaphorical psychodrama or as a sheer visual spectacular.
  60. She-Devil
    I found a great deal to like about She-Devil, especially Streep's performance, but it's easy to figure out why it didn't find an audience. It deals with just about everything American film-goers traditionally don't want to think about: old people, fat people, ugly people, nursing homes, class, money, and the ever-present specter of death. Also, it involves a dog dying.
  61. Mystery Train
    It’s a film of odd moments, dry humor, and restless characters, each of whom end the film by departing from Memphis, weighed down by what they’ve taken away from it, even if they can’t exactly define what that is.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Little Mermaid
    A fun, albeit unspectacular, animated movie, filled with Disney staples like cute animal characters, a scenery-chewing villainess, and a small-nosed pixie heroine who yearns to travel to distant lands and marry a large-nosed hunk prince.
  63. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    With humor that cuts through a deep undercurrent of sadness, Baker Boys captures the rinky-dink milieu of second-rate lounges, where patron kibitzing threatens to drown out the piano-tinkling of the paid entertainment.
  64. Sweetie
    Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it's surprising—and ballsy—that De Palma makes Casualties Of War a full-on De Palma movie, with stylishly suspenseful action scenes, heightened performances, and plenty of moments where Fox takes on the role of a typically impotent De Palma voyeur.
  66. Kiki's Delivery Service
    Kiki's slow pace and light-on-conflict plot may surprise kids used to American animation, but it's difficult not to be won over by the film's endearing characters and beautiful animation, as well as a storyline that stresses the values of independence and friendship.
  67. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.
  68. Lethal Weapon 2
    In the wake of Lethal Weapon, producers across Hollywood had started running the buddy-cop concept into the ground, which made 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2 a reminder of how to do this schtick right, with just as much emphasis on loose character interaction as on violent action.
  69. Cutting Class
    A distinctly tongue-in-cheek slasher made in the autumn of the genre’s popularity, Rospo Pallenberg’s (EXCALIBUR) Cutting Class is a lavishly mounted and self-aware take on the genre’s best loved tropes.
  70. Twister
    In the wrong hands, or with a different cast, such quirky material could easily have devolved into a grotesque parade of cartoon freaks. But Almereyda finds exactly the right tone: a loopy, understated deadpan that invites empathy rather than ridicule. Twister has the outline of a broad comedy, but the inspired cast–particularly Amis–brings such conviction to its performances that the drama registers as strongly as the comedy.
  71. For All Mankind
    It’s breathtaking on two fronts: Reinert unearths stunning footage—far removed from the fuzzy copies used as B-roll in other documentaries—that captures the full scale of NASA’s accomplishment. But he keeps that footage grounded in the image and voices of the modest men and women who made it happen.
  72. Miracle Mile
    Miracle Mile is uniquely weird, and one imagines that audiences who caught it in the theater (among the few who did, anyway) walked out feeling shaken by its ending, even in a world where the Doomsday Clock had safely clicked back.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Teen Witch
    Real life is about real stuff, and Teen Witch certainly isn’t. It is a fun escape, though, even now.
  74. Castle in the Sky
    On the lighthearted end of the Miyazaki spectrum, but it features more dashing adventure.
  75. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    There are multiple reasons why Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is such an entertaining movie even now, but the biggest is that Matheson, Solomon, and director Stephen Herek found the perfect Bill and Ted in Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, two young actors with just the right boyish energy.
  76. The Fly II
    The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.
  77. Parents
    The mark of a great horror comedy is the degree to which it delivers the two generally incompatible genres in equal measure. By that metric, the 1989 horror comedy Parents is an abject failure. Sure, the film has elements of both horror and comedy, but overall, the film falls firmly in the horror category. The laughs are few and far between, and once the dread starts creeping in, it intensifies until the final shot.
  78. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Offering memorable imagery and little more, it eventually devolves into distasteful gore for its own sake. It's far less compelling than its no less bloody but far more intelligent inspiration.
  79. Child's Play
    The sequences without Chucky are as stock as they come, and so are all the flesh-and-blood characters around him, but he's still a hugely entertaining mischief-maker, and what he lacks in physical gifts, he compensates for in sneakiness.
  80. They Live
    All this colorful mayhem is mere warm-up to the great rabble-rousing catchphrase Nada delivers when he enters a bank, armed to the hilt: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum."...I love that line as much as anyone else, which is enough to make any cultist salivate like a dog in anticipation, but here's the thing: I wish a better actor than Roddy Piper had delivered it.
  81. Pumpkinhead
    Had Pumpkinhead been made in the silent era, it might now be treated with the reverence granted Nosferatu.
  82. Running on Empty
    The film is first and foremost a family drama, where the politics that led to this predicament take a back seat to the people who find themselves in it.
  83. Eight Men Out
    Detailed and memorable, with attention given to the many personalities and agendas involved, but while it finds sympathy for the men who feel pushed to cheat for money, it offers just as much sympathy for the fans who love the sport, and can’t figure out why their beloved players would betray them.
  84. The Last Temptation of Christ
    The power to provoke may not always have a smoke-to-fire relationship with greatness but with Scorsese's film, a testament of faith that leaves in the question marks, it undeniably does.
  85. Mac and Me
    Everything about Mac And Me is shameless.
  86. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is heavier on the goofery than the relevance.
  87. Wings of Desire
    Though Wings Of Desire has a classic look, its mood and style is New Wave in every sense of the term. The synthesis of deep thought, leisurely pacing, and stunning visuals is in the spirit of work by the young European filmmakers of the '60s and '70s. (Reviewed in 2003 for DVD Release)
  88. Powaqqatsi
    The second film seems less purposeful: The shots of squalor and industrialization-run-amok have an almost random feel. At times, however, it's still incredibly powerful.
  89. My Neighbor Totoro
    Compared to the breathtaking action sequences and elaborate fantasy landscapes of Miyazaki's early features, the genteel, languid Totoro seems at first slight, and even soporific. Yet My Neighbor Totoro may be the most enduring entry in Miyazaki's impressive filmography, because it's so particular about the nuances of human behavior and emotion.
  90. Bright Lights, Big City
    Too bad he's caught in a movie that all too accurately captures the tenor of its time with its slick, superficial, coked-up, money-drunk emptiness.
  91. Babette's Feast
    The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.
  92. Ironweed
    Ironweed asks a lot with its 140-plus minutes of low-key suffering. It feels long, in part because not a lot happens from a plot perspective. Still, its strongest moments linger.
  93. Au Revoir les Enfants
    It's arguably Malle's masterpiece, marked by a shooting style with little wasted motion or complication, emphasizing tiny, memorable details.
  94. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    In three short scenes, this otherwise linear film unexpectedly slips loose from time, portraying a joyous moment, a tragic revelation, and then a long, slow scene that holds both in the balance, letting viewers tip the scale in whichever direction their hearts incline. It's an effect that could only happen in cinema, and it's made all the more stunning by its appearance in a film taken from a by-all-logic-unfilmable book.
  95. Good Morning, Vietnam
    Williams is at his best in Good Morning, Vietnam when he’s pitched between manic and earnest: when he’s reacting to his castmates, who actually are funny. Too much of Good Morning, Vietnam, though, is self-congratulatory without giving any real reason for the applause.
  96. Ghost Chase
    For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.
  97. Tales from the Gimli Hospital
    The filmmaker self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch.
  98. Manon of the Spring
    The pacing is expansive rather than draggy; Berri is in no rush to tear through his story, but the dialogue is generally meaningful and story-critical, and very little goes on that isn't directly relevant to the story's ultimate ends.
  99. Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    I feel like we catch a brief glimpse here of an amazing filmmaker who never quite existed.
  100. The Running Man
    Once things get going, The Running Man just turns into a silly chase movie populated by baddies who look like B-level pro-wrestling villains.
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