ABC News' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 397 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 35% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 In the Heights
Lowest review score: 0 Madame Web
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 39 out of 397
397 movie reviews
  1. Engrave an Oscar for actor-director Bradley Cooper for his heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. Alive with glorious music, the film soars on the undying love the bisexual legend feels for the wife (a never-better Carey Mulligan) who lives with his angels and demons.
  2. Darkness stays on the edges of Hollywood town in Paul Thomas Anderson’s screwball comedy explosion about the serious business of first love. Newbies Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman light up the screen in one of the very best movies of the year. They’re to die for.
  3. Andrew Haigh’s enthralling ghost story concerns a screenwriter (a flawless Andrew Scott) coming to terms with a new love (Paul Mescal) and the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died in his childhood. Watch out for Haigh and his four superlative actors. They’ll get you good.
  4. Hollywood does gloriously right by Judy Blume’s groundbreaking 1970 novel about a pre-teen girl (a stellar Abby Ryder Fortson) in a tug-of-war with puberty and religion. Costars McAdams and Bates exemplify Blume’s refreshing candor. Call it totally irresistible.
  5. Note to Oscar: Make sure a best actress nomination happens for the blazing Penelope Cruz in this emotional powerhouse from director Pedro Almodovar about a Madrid photographer coping with an unplanned pregnancy and a tangled political past.
  6. A peak-form Mads Mikkelsen stars in this hilarious and heartbreaking spellbinder as a Copenhagen high-school teacher who thinks day drinking might sharpen his faculties. The Oscar for Best International Feature belongs right here.
  7. How do I love the film version of the smash Broadway musical, let me count the ways, starting with the way Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande set the screen ablaze as frenemy witches and sets, costumes and songs to die for. Seeing this joyous eruption once is just not enough.
  8. Thank Maggie Gyllenhaal, in a stunning debut as director and screenwriter, for creating one of the year’s very best movies starring the magnificent Olivia Colman as a mother haunted by her troubled past. This, you do not want to miss
  9. Joel Coen’s triumphant film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy astounds on every level, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, two acting titans, playing an aging couple taking their last shot at murderous ambition. There is no way you can take your eyes off them.
  10. For Swifties and newbies, here's the musical event of the movie year. And, yes, you can dance to it as the pop princess uses her all-time top-grossing concert film to show off her talent for artistic reinvention and storytelling in song. What's not to like?
  11. This week’s shocking, out-of-nowhere Oscar nomination for British actress Andrea Riseborough as an alcoholic single mother from West Texas who squanders her $190,000 lottery win on booze turns an indie movie no one ever heard of into an absolute must-see. Prepare to be wowed!
  12. Ignited by career-best performances from Farrell and Gleason, this new classic from son of Ireland Martin McDonagh brims over with dark comic magic and jolts of bloody scary hell. Fasten your seatbelts for a spellbinder that stands high with the best movies of the year.
  13. Creative artistry radiates from every frame of this groundbreaking film from director RaMell Ross who joins with camera wiz Jomo Fray to take us inside the eyes of two young Black men (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) to expose the abuses in a Florida reform school
  14. This unassuming animated gem about a shell (indelibly voiced by co-writer Jenny Slate) trying to find his family shames the bloat of big-studio cartoons by proving good things really do come in small packages. The result is unique and unforgettable.
  15. Polarizing? Sure. But Wes Anderson is a film artist like no other. In defiance of realism, he builds dazzling, minimalist, all-star jewel boxes that are easy to spoof but impossible to equal. This Atomic-age fable about teen space nerds and their parents tinges laughs with genuine feeling.
  16. With Oscar buzz surging for Riz Ahmed, the time is now to check out his virtuoso performance as a rock drummer facing deafness in a riveting, resonant film whose thrashing power and emotional gravity exert a grip that won’t let go.
  17. In her first fiction feature, documentarian Payal Kapadia brings a poetic profundity to this cinematic spellbinder about female sisterhood in a big city (Mumbai) full of societal, economic and political pressures that can force out intimacy and kill the yearning to dream.
  18. Japanese manga master Hayao Miyazaki, 83, came out of retirement for this hand-drawn beauty about his own life growing up in wartime. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here since Miyazaki’s unparalleled artistry shines out of every frame.
  19. If, like me, you enjoy challenges that are emotionally rewarding to puzzle out, then I'm Thinking of Ending Things ranks with the year's best movies.
  20. Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year, starring a sensational Sandra Hüller (heads up, Oscar) in Justine Triet’s spellbinding murder mystery that is really a forensic anatomy of a marriage told through the gripping story of a wife on trial for killing her husband.
  21. Shaka King’s powerhouse about the 1969 murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (an Oscar-worthy Daniel Kaluuya) by the Chicago police with the help of an FBI informer (Lakeith Stanfield) is a new movie classic that speaks to the toxic racism of its time and ours.
  22. Cheers to Scotland’s Charlotte Wells for making the best movie of the year by a first-time writer-director. And cheers to Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio for bringing this heartfelt father-daughter story to such funny, touching and vital life.
  23. You'll laugh, you'll cry and all steps in between at this vital family entertainment with a title that stands for Children of Deaf Adults. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and newcomer Emilia Jones turn this emotional powerhouse into one of the year's best movies
  24. Let’s give thanks for this wicked, whacked-out whodunit sequel. Daniel Craig is back as southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc and all is right with the world as a cast of merry pranksters (yay Janelle Monae) turns murder most foul into comic gold.
  25. You’ve never seen a Pinocchio like this one, a funny, touching and vital masterpiece from del Toro that uses stop-motion animation to create a world of beauty and terror to get lost in. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here.
  26. Anthony Hopkins delivers a master class in acting as a once-brilliant man losing his mental faculties to the plague of dementia. First-time director Florian Zeller turns his modern “King Lear” of a play into essential cinema.
  27. You’ll laugh and cry your eyes out as an emotionally bruised diver learns about life and loyalty from an eight-tentacled mollusk. This Oscar favorite and viral sensation is the year’s most unorthodox and unforgettable love story.
  28. Oooowee, this is one scorchingly sexy thriller. Powered by shining new star Glen Powell, who singes the screen with wowza costar Adria Arjona, this cheeky, somewhat true story from director Richard Linklater adds up to one of the best and most beguiling movies of the year.
  29. Never snap judge a Nicole Holofcener film as a sitcom. Just watch how she steers Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a pitch-perfect cast to dig out the raw feelings colliding under the laughs to reveal a generosity toward human foibles, even when comic darts draw blood.
  30. You’ll never forget the nakedly unafraid performance that Emma Stone delivers in this rowdy and rapturously beautiful blast of feminist whup-ass from director Yorgos Lanthimos. You won’t know what hit you, which is just one reason why I’m rabid to see it again.

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