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. It’s not in the same league as such Pixar classics as ‘WALL-E’ and the ‘Toy Story’ quartet, but there’s no denying the pure enchantment of the visual, comic and subtextual dazzle in this tale of two sea monsters trying to pass for human boys in 1960’s Italy.
  2. Foodie culture gets hilariously torched as a celebrity chef, acted to pretentious perfection by Ralph Fiennes, holds his customers, except for a deliciously defiant Anya Taylor-Joy, to the fire at his restaurant from hell. It’s all delectably unhinged.
  3. Hugh Grant uses his charm for evil in this surprisingly provocative cat-and-mouse game about the meaning, if any, of religion in a godless modern world. The dreamy romantic Grant of yore has been replaced by a diabolical presence eager to send us all to hell. What fun.
  4. Tom Holland is better than ever in his surprise-packed, third solo outing as a teen hero in a onesie who’s out to save the world and a faltering pandemic box office. But this time the generic thrills are tempered with genuine emotion. Good one, Spidey.
  5. Fueled by performances worth treasuring from Chastain and Sarsgaard, this impossible love story between a woman who can't forget and man who can't remember slowly works its way into your mind and heart. Filmmaker Michel Franco makes sure you’ll be moved to tears.
  6. A sequel always loses the advantage of surprise, but Krasinski eases us out of Covid lockdown by crafting the perfect thriller to get summer audiences back into movie theaters where everything is dark and everyone can hear you scream.
  7. It's basically a pricey home movie in which Adam Sandler spotlights his wife and two daughters. It's also an unexpectedly sweet and sassy surprise. Comic dynamo Sunny Sandler, his youngest, gives nepotism a good name as a Jewish girl on the cusp of womanhood.
  8. Set against the German bombing of London, Steve McQueen stirring WW2 epic misses greatness by failing to fully engage with the starker, deeper implications of seeing war through the eyes of a mixed-race child facing an evil that’s scarily close to home
  9. Spain’s legendary director Pedro Almodóvar freights his first full-length feature in English with tangled subplots, but nothing can dim the artistry of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore who make this death-fixated tale of old friends in crisis feel thrillingly alive.
  10. First-time director Drew Hancock kicks off the young movie year with an out-of-nowhere surprise, a fiendishly funny romcom scarefest that hits the entertainment bullseye and makes a star out of Sophie Thatcher as a hot date (for Jack Quaid) who doesn’t know her own power.
  11. Forget the thin membrane of a soap opera plot— Timothée Chalamet acts and sings the young Bob Dylan to showstopping perfection, catching the famously withholding troubadour in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, always creating and always in the wind.
  12. The cool factor is off the charts as director Jeff Nichols and a trio of sizzling stars—Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy—turns a landmark 1968 photobook about a 1968 Chicago motorcycle club into a vibrant vibe of a movie that vrooms to life on the big screen.
  13. Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are funny, touching and vital as the most recent guardians of a 150-pound Great Dane named Apollo, but the scene-stealing pup scampers off with this slight but irresistible character study and wins a special place in your heart.
  14. You’ve never seen anything in your life like Jacques Audiard’s Spanish musical about violent passions starring Zoë Saldaña, Selena Gomez and trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón in career-defining performances that take a piece out of you. This you don’t want to miss.
  15. Longing for a sweet little surprise that transports you to a place of pure movie enchantment? Then check out the glorious Lesley Manville as a struggling London maid who travels to Paris to fulfill her middle-aged Cinderella fantasy of owning a Dior gown.
  16. The carny scenes of freaks and geeks are undeniably creepy, but director Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory brilliance only comes in flashes as Bradley Cooper and a dynamite cast struggle to build a mesmerizing misfire into the classic it might have been.
  17. With a dynamite cast led by a never-better Jim Parsons, what could have been a dated retelling of a 1968 play about gay men in crisis emerges instead as a funny, fierce and scarily relevant wakeup call to a resurgent threat to marginalized minorities.
  18. As an undocumented Filipina trying to make it as a country singer in Texas, breakout star Eva Noblezada punches through the film's familiar contours to find its beating heart as a timely portrait of the immigrant experience.
  19. Neither a filmed play nor an actual movie, the muddled screen version of August Wilson’s great drama about systemic wrongs against Black America is a mixed bag but also a stirring promise from producer Denzel Washington and his family to preserve the work of a theatrical master.
  20. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Phillips turn this same-sex romcom for the holidays into a gift package that feels quietly and mischievously revolutionary.
  21. Cooper Raiff, who created this Sundance prizewinner, can't hide his feelings for people with disabilities and the challenges that come to those who love them. And I can't hide my feelings for this exuberant gift of a movie starring Raiff and a never better Dakota Johnson.
  22. Want a blast of fun to ease your pandemic blues? No worries. Borat is back in a sequel that can't recapture the cathartic shock of the first but still shows Sacha Baron Cohen as a razor-sharp satirist who knows how to make us laugh till it hurts.
  23. Actor David Oyelowo makes a heartfelt directing debut in a PG adventure about a boy (Lonnie Chavez) in search of a mythic creature who might save his dying mother. Even when the pace drags, the film remains a rare gift for family audiences.
  24. Oh no—not another doomsday thriller! Yes, but hold on and see how director Sam Esmail and producers Barack and Michelle Obama, powered by an exceptional all-star cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon), make you care while frying your nerves to a frazzle.
  25. It’s always a slam dunk when Adam Sandler drops his doofus routine and really acts. And here, as a basketball scout who yearns to coach, he infuses every frame of this formulaic crowd-pleaser with a real-deal love of the game. Hot damn! We have a winner.
  26. Sure it’s hokey, but this fact-based crowdpleaser starring a terrific Toni Collette as a struggling Welsh villager who risks everything on a racehorse she breeds and raises is an underdog story that works like a charm.
  27. Playing the kid sister of Henry Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes, Millie Bobby Brown, just 16, shines her talent on its highest beams and creates a totally irresistible family entertainment.
  28. Despite a sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007 cements his reputation as the gold-standard James Bond of the 21st century and lays down a challenge for anyone—he or she—who dares to follow him.
  29. Is surgery the new sex? Body horror maestro David Cronenberg and a cast led by Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart tackle that question and more in a futuristic sci-fi shocker that will leave you laughing, squirming and—yikes—thinking.
  30. Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this whacked-out meta-comedy that doesn’t always hang together as a movie but cements its gonzo star as the eighth wonder of the world when it comes to highwire acting without a net.

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