Christian Science Monitor's Scores

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For 4,492 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 'Round Midnight
Lowest review score: 0 Couples Retreat
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,780 out of 4492
  2. Mixed: 1,361 out of 4492
  3. Negative: 351 out of 4492
4492 movie reviews
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  1. Human Resources
    This superbly acted, expressively filmed story offers a rare blend of compelling drama, ethical awareness, and sheer human emotion.
  2. Goya in Bordeaux
    The meandering story doesn't gather much momentum and Vittorio Storaro's camera work is less awesome than usual.
  3. 30 Days
    The comedy as a whole is very slight.
  4. Bait
    The comically tinged action is as lively as it is brainless, and it revels in violence a bit less eagerly than many thrillers of its ilk.
  5. Urbania
    The story evokes a lot of varied emotions, but none runs more than an inch below skin deep.
  6. Duets
    Too crisp and calculated to match the moods of its wild and woolly characters, and its interwoven subplots lead to predictable outcomes.
  7. Paragraph 175
    Victimization of homosexuals during the Holocaust era has often been overlooked. Epstein and Friedman lucidly recount this woeful history, with help from Everett's articulate narration.
  8. Almost Famous
    Fugit gives a starmaking performance as the teenage reporter, and Crudup and Lee are excellent as the band's lead guitarist and singer, respectively.
  9. Pola X
    Carax's cinematic imagination makes it worth viewing by movie buffs with a sense of adventure and a tolerance for explicit sex.
  10. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Tavernier's compassionate views and long filmmaking experience shine through this eloquently acted drama.
  11. Nurse Betty
    Zellweger is as charming as ever, and it's good to find LaBute working with a script by writers who don't fully share his crabbed, cramped view of human nature.
  12. Solas
    Splendidly acted, sensitively directed.
  13. The Watcher
    The picture's real interest lies in detailing the villain's sadistic crimes, though, and this is rarely fun or edifying to watch.
  14. Titanic Town
    Michell treats the Irish troubles of the 1970s with clear-eyed compassion, and Walters's performance ranks with her best.
  15. Madadayo
    Wordy, wearying drama.
  16. Bring It On
    The story is as simple as the average football cheer, but the dialogue has amusing echoes of "Clueless," and Dunst and Bradford make a mighty cute couple.
  17. Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire
    Henderson steals the show as an elderly African-American man befriended by one of the main characters.
  18. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    The archival and interview footage is priceless.
  19. The Original Kings of Comedy
    Sometimes they're truly hilarious; sometimes they're lazy enough to milk laughs from scattershot vulgarity.
  20. Steal This Movie
    This superficial treatment makes so many dubious decisions - oversimplifying issues, for instance, so there'll be more time for high-flying emotion - that 1960s veterans may be moved to protest rather than praise.
  21. The Cell
    The action is as grisly as it is surrealistic.
  22. Bless the Child
    Often trite and predictable but grudgingly likable in the end.
  23. Cecil B. DeMented
    The comedy is frantic and tasteless in the usual Waters mode, but it takes telling potshots at the Hollywood establishment, which isn't nearly so open about the tackiness of its products.
  24. The Replacements
    So vulgar and incoherent that even Hackman's gifts can't score a touchdown.
  25. An Affair of Love
    Baye and Lopez are excellent, as always.
  26. Aimee & Jaguar
    Färberböck has directed the story with a canny blend of liveliness and taste.
  27. The Tao of Steve
    Logue's magnetic performance is the movie's main virtue, supported by a good secondary cast and a sharply written screenplay.
  28. Saving Grace
    Blethyn's lively acting and some visually amusing moments lend spice to this minor but engaging comedy.
  29. Better Living
    Not even veteran talents like Dukakis and Scheider can surmount the artificial dialogue, arbitrary plot twists, and wan humor of this disappointing comedy-drama.
  30. Space Cowboys
    The story takes a while to get started, but the acting is lively, the special effects are snazzy.
  31. Hollow Man
    This is fatuous twaddle with a nasty, misogynistic edge.
  32. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    The star's over-the-top energy isn't enough to make this hopelessly vulgar, numbingly repetitious farce worth watching.
  33. Girl on the Bridge
    Although the story slips into clichés despite its offbeat subject, Leconte's cinematic style is fresh and vigorous, and Auteuil remains one of France's most engaging actors.
  34. Wonderland
    The ensemble acting is impressively in tune; and Michael Nyman's surging score adds an extra measure of emotional power.
  35. The Wind Will Carry Us
    A full-fledged masterpiece.
  36. New Waterford Girl
    Balaban's superb performance blends with Moyle's mostly understated directing to produce an uneven but sometimes enchanting comedy-drama.
  37. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Riveting stuff.
  38. Two Women
    Heart-pounding melodrama.
  39. Alice et Martin
    This drama is richly photographed and enhanced by Binoche's steadily appealing performance.
  40. What Lies Beneath
    A few scenes indulge in overstated hokum or thriller clichés, but Pfeiffer is first-rate and several sequences are suspenseful enough to deserve that overused adjective, Hitchcockian.
  41. Rififi (re-release)
    Among the picture's many surprises is a superb robbery scene filmed in a near-total silence that contrasts exhilaratingly with the noisy flamboyance of more recent films in this venerable genre.
  42. Les amants criminels
    Its eventual failure to make sense indicates that it's intended more as a surrealistic fable than an ordinary sex-and-violence adventure.
  43. The Five Senses
    Traveling from the tragic to the comic, this multifaceted film is richly acted and imaginatively directed.
  44. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    The picture is a little too pretentious to achieve its artistic and emotional goals, but its ambition and imagination are impressive at times.
  45. X-Men
    The mood is awfully dark for an escapist fantasy, though, and the high-tech mayhem gets repetitious.
  46. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    The best scenes capture the blend of irony, melodrama, and real emotion that distinguishes Fassbinder's most memorable pictures.
  47. Chuck & Buck
    The acting is excellent.
  48. The Kid
    The result is fine fantasy fun.
  49. All the Rage
    Its ideas are worth pondering, but as a movie it's less memorable than its interesting cast suggests.
  50. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    There's lots of atmosphere and information to be gained, but stay away unless you can tolerate graphic plunges into the wildest kinds of youthful excess.
  51. Shower
    Superbly acted, cleverly written, sensitively directed.
  52. But I'm a Cheerleader
    As featherweight as its title, but Lyonne gives a winning performance and the mischievous story packs a few good laughs.
  53. The Perfect Storm
    Dive right in if you're looking for an old-fashioned entertainment that delivers corny romance, turbulent action, and enough wave-churning seascapes to make "Titanic" seem landlocked.
  54. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    Crammed with show-biz jokes that younger kids won't fathom, but the action is so quick and colorful that they probably won't mind.
  55. Trixie
    The acting is solid and the heroine's quirky dialogue is amusing for a while. But repetitious writing and a weakly constructed story turn the promising premise into a disappointing mishmash of crime, politics, and show business.
  56. The Patriot
    What might have been a treat for history buffs and a refresher course for the rest of us turns into just another occasion to watch Gibson shoot guns, swing tomahawks, and wreak other kinds of havoc on enemies we've been primed to hate.
  57. Me, Myself & Irene
    Carrey gives an awesome comic performance.. Look out for huge amounts of deliberately disgusting, gross-out humor, though.
  58. Chicken Run
    The suspense isn't exactly breathtaking, but there are some mighty fine laughs in this clever Claymation cartoon.Family fun for all.
  59. Titan A.E.
    Unabashed "Star Wars" clone.
  60. Shaft
    The plot is a shameless plea for vigilante violence, and the dignity of the black hero is outweighed by the ethnically marked evil of his Hispanic antagonist. Beneath its crisp veneer, much of the movie is a high-energy hymn to hate.
  61. Jesus' Son
    The latter element joins with Crudup's excellent acting to make this deliberately scruffy tale a worthwhile experience if you can handle its explicitly sordid subplots.
  62. Humanité
    Dumont's cinematic style is aggressively physical and philosophical at the same time. It irritates as many viewers as it inspires, but it prompts more thought than ordinary movies ever do.
  63. Butterfly Tongues
    A powerful ending lends a strong emotional charge to this prettily filmed drama, but too much of the story is taken up with romantic clichés about the everyday challenges of childhood.
  64. Sunshine
    The filmmaking is uninspired and Fiennes inexplicably plays three different characters with exactly the same acting style.
  65. Love's Labour's Lost
    It's all very colorful, but the movie's diverse elements clash as often as they cooperate.
  66. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    How did a dignified pro like Duvall get stuck in this fender-bender?
  67. Grass
    A revealing, often amusing, sometimes disturbing look at the history and politics of marijuana use in American society.
  68. Passion of Mind
    The acting is sincere and the camera work is pretty, but this art-movie variation on "The Sixth Sense" doesn't have enough energy to fulfill the high promise of Berliner's previous picture, the enchanting "Ma vie en rose."
  69. Kikujirô no natsu
    Kitano's first major comedy is loose and likable.
  70. 8 ½ Women
    This visually intricate fantasia combines his (Greenaway's) extraordinary cinematic imagination with a story and characters less compelling than those in his best works.
  71. Mission: Impossible II
    Woo's patented pyrotechnics - intricate editing, acrobatic camera movements, slow-motion mayhem - lend intermittent sparks to the violent action sequences, but the two-dimensional characters have little personality.
  72. Luminous Motion
    Fine acting and creative directing lend three-dimensional life to this absorbing story, which blends dreamlike elements with sharply etched drama and touches of pure cinematic ingenuity.
  73. Small Time Crooks
    The plot is lively and the dialogue packs many good laughs.
  74. Center Stage
    Rarely has a dance movie done so many cinematic pirouettes with such a graceful sense of audience-pleasing fun.
  75. Hamlet
    The acting is smart and gritty, Almereyda's visual style has a raw immediacy found in few films with Shakespearean pedigrees, and an eclectic music score adds atmosphere and surprise every step of the way.
  76. Dream of Light
    Visually ravishing -- an exquisite movie.
  77. Into My Heart
    The plot isn't very original, but the acting and dialogue have a low-key realism that packs more emotional punch than a dozen of the standard-issue romantic dramas crowding the independent-film scene.
  78. La Nouvelle Ève
    Viard's energetic acting is the French production's most memorable asset.
  79. Up at the Villa
    The story has old-fashioned characters and situations, and Haas has sensibly filmed it in an old-fashioned way, stressing visual appeal rather than the story's sordid undertones. The acting is excellent, too.
  80. I Dreamed of Africa
    The story is inspirational in a superficial way, but the filmmakers focus so exclusively on their attractive heroine that the picture loses any real connection with Africa.
  81. Gladiator
    Scott's filmmaking is as blunt and bullying as the mayhem it portrays.
  82. Adorenarin doraibu
    Its amiable acting and feisty visual humor make it a must for fans of Japanese film.
  83. Luminarias
    The movie is very small in scale, but the performances are appealing and Fernandez's screenplay casts an interesting light on the main characters' self-images as Latina women.
  84. The Big Kahuna
    Good acting and pungent dialogue.
  85. Frequency
    Emmerich's screenplay gains emotional punch from its sincere concern for family values, but science-fiction fans may be disappointed by the limited exploration of its fascinating time-travel premise.
  86. Bossa Nova
    The story is slender, but the Brazilian settings are exquisite and lilting tunes by Antonio Carlos Jobim cast a spell over the entire enterprise.
  87. The Idiots
    Tries to be daring and iconoclastic but winds up seeming as spoiled and childish as its main characters.
  88. Timecode
    It would be even more impressive if the story and characters lived up to the inventive techniques, though.
  89. Where the Heart Is
    Ultimately, it's more an emotional hodgepodge than a compassionate look at real human problems.
  90. Croupier
    Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg fill the British production with Dostoevskian ironies, and Owen is perfect as the antihero.
  91. The Last September
    The movie doesn't have much more get-up-and-go than the characters, but solid performances and richly textured camera work keep it involving most of the way through.
  92. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    Wants to appear bold and liberated, but it seems awfully solemn about the subculture it explores.
  93. U-571
    Full of old tricks - cuts between worried faces and overheated gauges inching into the red zone - but director Mostow pulls most of them off with conviction and pizazz.
  94. The Virgin Suicides
    An artful blend of '70s detail and dreamlike moodiness makes Coppola's first movie an exceptionally promising directorial debut.
  95. Keeping the Faith
    Norton gives the comedy unexpected sparkle in his directorial debut.
  96. The Specialist
    An astonishing human, political, and historical document.
  97. American Psycho
    A standard-issue slasher movie, stylishly shot, but with little to distinguish it from a long line of "Psycho"-spawned gorefests.
  98. Where the Money Is
    Newman's magnetic face isn't enough to raise this intermittently amusing thriller above the ordinary caper-comedy crowd.
  99. Est - Ouest
    Wargnier chooses a sweeping title and a sweeping topic, then turns everything into half-baked melodrama, heavy on over-the-top emotion but light on subtlety and ideas.
  100. Southpaw
    The picture is more sociologically instructive than emotionally involving, serving as a document of contemporary Irish life rather than an ordinary inspirational story.
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