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. Ben-Hur
    As Judah Ben-Hur – full names, please – Huston is serviceable, but he’s a finer actor than this costumed kitsch allow him to be. As Judah’s boyhood best friend and adoptive brother, Messala, against whom Judah will eventually square off in the Roman Circus, Toby Kebbell has even less to work with than Huston, and he bears a disconcerting resemblance to motivational guru Tony Robbins.
  2. War Dogs
    War Dogs ends up being no better than its protagonists at delivering the goods.
  3. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t really about how passion trumps art. It’s about how life is more important than art.
  4. Little Men
    Director Ira Sachs, who co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, has a plangent feeling for the small-scale travails of “ordinary” people – who, of course, are only ordinary on the surface.
  5. Suicide Squad
    Writer-director David Ayer doesn’t have the right graphic technique for a comic-book-style jamboree – he’s strictly a noirish-pulp guy – and the characters, all of whom are promisingly introduced, fizzle fast.
  6. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    I will never be comfortable with the concept of Bosch as charming prankster. Just one look at the paintings will cure you of that notion.
  7. The Little Prince
    The computer-animated portions that function as a real-world framing device are more tedious than fanciful.
  8. Indignation
    For a movie featuring so much emotional discord, Indignation has an overly cautious tone: It could have been made in 1951. I realize that this effect is largely intentional, but that doesn’t altogether excuse it.
  9. Gleason
    The documentary Gleason, a big Sundance hit, is difficult to watch – and that’s the point.
  10. Jason Bourne
    Other welcome faces include Alicia Vikander as a CIA analyst who has a better bead on Bourne than her superiors; Julia Stiles, in a repeat appearance as the spy’s former contact; and Riz Ahmed as a Silicon Valley billionaire.
  11. Star Trek Beyond
    I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.
  12. Ghostbusters
    All I can say is, I certainly hope this dreary, bleary comedy doesn’t end up serving as a referendum on anything. That would be a disservice to women, not to mention movies.
  13. The Infiltrator
    On its own limited terms, The Infiltrator, like its hero, delivers the goods.
  14. Life, Animated
    What the film is ultimately about is the extent to which love and caring can help turn a life around for a person deemed beyond reach.
  15. Our Little Sister
    Kore-eda has a gift for portraying goodness that is quite rare. He does so without a whisper of banality.
  16. Our Kind of Traitor
    Which is not to say the movie is anything less than diverting. It’s just that diverting is often all it is.
  17. The BFG
    The result is that the wonderment, with nothing serious at risk, seems lackluster.
  18. Les Cowboys
    With all this working against it, Les Cowboys strikes a fresh chord. The rise of jihadism has infused this revenge scenario with (all too literally) new blood.
  19. Wiener-Dog
    The mordancy of this movie will not surprise Solondz devotees, but unknowing audiences expecting a raunchy teen comedy from the film’s title should be forewarned. This is not “American Pie” in a kennel.
  20. Free State of Jones
    In supporting roles, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, the equally valiant house slave Newton makes his common-law wife, and Mahershala Ali as Moses, the leader of the renegade slaves, provide some powerful moments.
  21. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    The film’s most joyous performer is the bagpiper Cristina Pato, known as “the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia,” who is such a powerhouse that she could probably upstage the Rolling Stones (in their prime).
  22. Finding Dory
    There are some rollicky moments in Finding Dory, which comes 13 years after the markedly better “Finding Nemo,” both directed by Andrew Stanton.
  23. Viktoria
    Vitkova’s direction is big on long lingering shots of dreariness. With a 2-1/2-hour running time, that’s a lot of dreariness.
  24. Genius
    My worst fears were confirmed almost from the start. In order to inject some pep into the proceedings, Law has been encouraged to play Wolfe as a motormouthed rhapsodist who seems less inspired than unhinged. He’s exhaustingly exuberant.
  25. Time to Choose
    What separates Charles Ferguson’s Time to Choose from the many other documentaries about climate change is that, after dutifully presenting many of the usual horrifying climate statistics, it lays out a series of possible solutions, already available, to the crisis.
  26. Me Before You
    The only real acting in this movie comes from Janet McTeer and Charles Dance as Will’s aggrieved parents. They bring some ballast to this blubberfest.
  27. The Witness
    What The Witness makes clear, especially for people who know very little about the Kitty Genovese case, is that the scenario of 38 apathetic witnesses was a gross misrepresentation of what actually occurred.
  28. Unlocking the Cage
    The filmmakers are clearly on Wise’s side, but they are also eminently fair.
  29. Presenting Princess Shaw
    Princess, as a singer, is the real deal, with a throaty resonance that at times recalls Nina Simone. What Kutiman, whom she eventually meets in Israel, has given her is a newfound and miraculous platform for her talent.
  30. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.
  31. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    The only heartfelt moment of this movie for me came in the end credits, with its dedication to the late Alan Rickman, who provided the voice for the blue butterfly (and former caterpillar) Absolem. What a voice, what an actor, what a loss.
  32. Maggie's Plan
    Writer-director Rebecca Miller never wrests her movie free of its associations with the films of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, and some of it plays like a generic indie film rom-com.
  33. The Nice Guys
    The violence is cartoonishly garish and the yuks are few. Crowe, looking (deliberately I presume) flabby and somnolent, is more dead than deadpan, and Gosling, who appears at times to be doing a Lou Costello impression, is, to put it mildly, not in his element.
  34. Weiner
    What’s clear is that many of Weiner’s supporters within the mayoral campaign stuck with him only because of Abedin’s connection to the Clintons. Hey, it’s politics.
  35. The Lobster
    Lanthimos doesn’t have the directorial energy to stir this thick allegorical stew. Lacking any of the conventional action-thriller movie skills, his deadpan style may be the only one available to him.
  36. Money Monster
    Money Monster turns into an unintentional parody. Investing in this movie would not be a safe bet.
  37. Dheepan
    For most of the movie, Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.
  38. Dark Horse
    A slight but winning documentary.
  39. Captain America: Civil War
    The action, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, is thuddingly effective without being terribly imaginative, but at least it’s not in the clobber-the-audience “Transformers” category.
  40. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    Irons gives a deft performance as a man who is both entranced and flummoxed by his disciple, but the role itself is in most ways skimpily conceived. Hardy’s homosexuality, for one thing, is never really touched upon, as if that would somehow taint the proceedings.
  41. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    A documentary about the alternately celebrated and reviled German-born philosopher who gave us the catchphrase “the banality of evil.”
  42. The Family Fang
    The movie captures so well the push-pull of family dysfunction that, after a while, even the Fangs’ extreme eccentricities seem routine. And that’s the point: The filmmakers are trying to demonstrate that, no matter what we think our family dynamic may be, we’re all on the same strange spectrum.
  43. Elvis & Nixon
    Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.
  44. A Hologram for the King
    It’s a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.
  45. The Jungle Book
    Thankfully, the usual Disney cutesy factor is relatively low, and the script by Justin Marks is more literate than usual for this sort of thing. There are even some end credits that, for a change, are actually funny.
  46. Francofonia
    Sokurov is a playful philosopher. If his playfulness is sometimes juvenile – as in those Napoleon scenes, or, worse, in the scenes of an actress playing Marianne, the spirit of France, exhorting, “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” – at least he’s not stuffy.
  47. Demolition
    The best I can say is that it’s another tour de force for Gyllenhaal, although his intensity isn’t matched by the movie itself, which sacrifices much of its power by too often settling for easy, nut-brain effects.
  48. The Boss
    I persist in believing that Melissa McCarthy is capable of starring in a movie that not only makes a scads of money but is – you know – good.
  49. Miles Ahead
    Miles Ahead is obviously a labor of love, but it falls into the trap of so many biopics about anguished artists – it confuses the anguish with the artistry.
  50. My Golden Days
    Overall this overlong movie is too knowingly coy for its own good.
  51. Fastball
    The sunniness of Fastball leaves out a lot, but watching it can be as pleasurable as an afternoon at the ballpark.
  52. Born to be Blue
    It’s a strange, unsatisfying, fragmented movie, but at its best it belongs in the same unconventional continuum as Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (about Bob Dylan) and “Love and Mercy” (about Brian Wilson).
  53. Sweet Bean
    It’s a delicate little fable that creeps up on you. It seems slight at first, but it’s held together by a performance from the veteran actress Kirin Kiki, playing an older lady who makes supernal dorayakis, that cuts very deep.
  54. Remember
    The plot, as it unwinds, is increasingly eye-poppingly preposterous, but it holds you anyway, not only because of its outlandishness but because Plummer, against all odds, brings pathos and dignity to a role that doesn’t deserve him.
  55. Lolo
    It’s all meant to be funnier than it is.
  56. Marguerite
    You can laugh at her, but the film doesn’t encourage you to do so. Giannoli, with his co-screenwriter Marcia Romano, is asking us to take Marguerite’s passion as a value in itself.
  57. The Wave
    The Wave, directed by Roar Uthaug, is pretty good. It’s also pretty strange. At least for American viewers – and Norwegians, too? – experiencing all these familiar disaster movie tropes in a Scandinavian setting, even on a relatively low budget, can be weirdly disorienting.
  58. Knight of Cups
    Knight of Cups isn’t quite as fancy-flimsy as “To the Wonder,” which, as I remember it, consisted mostly of Ben Affleck gazing dazedly at wave formations, but it’s close enough.
  59. Embrace of the Serpent
    Not nearly as great as Herzog’s films, or as monumentally deranged as Coppola’s, it nevertheless casts a spell of its own. It’s one of those films that, at least for me, grows in the memory.
  60. A War
    At heart, Lindholm may be more of a documentarian, a glib documentarian, than he realizes. He goes with the surface of things.
  61. Deadpool
    It seems less irreverent than self-congratulatory.
  62. Mountains May Depart
    It does leave you with something, though – a deeply wistful mood, if not a full experience. It bears out the sadness in a line from Tao earlier in the film: “Nobody can be with you all through life.”
  63. Rams
    Rams confirms what I have long maintained: Often the best films come from the unlikeliest places.
  64. Hail, Caesar!
    The film is often​ sharp and amusing, but it’s a doodle in the Coen canon.
  65. The Finest Hours
    It’s not just the technique of this movie that is resolutely old-fashioned. So are its attitudes. The film may feature practically wall-to-wall monster storms but undergirding it all is a cushion of straight-arrow sentimentalism. It harks back to a rosy neverland when men were men and women stood by them.
  66. Rabin, the Last Day
    With material this powerful, we shouldn’t have to continually be puzzling out what’s real and what’s staged.
  67. The Messenger
    One of the main rallying points of The Messenger is that birds have “something to tell us” about the environment’s mounting ecological hazards. The canary in a coal mine phenomenon, according to this film, has assumed global proportions.
  68. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    I call it art. And as long as I’m on the subject, I think the Grand Canyon is the greatest sculpture I have ever seen.
  69. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Bay and his screenwriter, Chuck Hogan, adapting the nonfiction bestseller “13 Hours,” by Mitchell Zuckoff and the members of the Annex Security Team, resolutely avoid any overt political inferences.
  70. 45 Years
    If 45 Days is a tragedy, it’s a tragedy without a summation. Despite the ineffably moving speech Geoff delivers to the assemblage at the anniversary party, perhaps the finest piece of acting in Courtenay’s long career, it is not at all clear where these people are headed, or what shoals await.
  71. Anomalisa
    The wonder, the astonishment, is that these puppets are invested with a full range of human emotion.
  72. Joy
    Lawrence is terrific at playing tough, as she also demonstrated in her previous outings with Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook” and, especially, “American Hustle." But maybe it’s time for her to take a rest from him for a while. There’s a lot more to this actress than bold and brassy.
  73. The Revenant
    What The Revenant attempts but fails to do is create a larger vision from all this survivalist mayhem. It’s a useful how-to guide for how to stay alive after a bear attack – or a human attack, for that matter – but it doesn’t soar. It crawls.
  74. Concussion
    If Concussion really stuck its neck out, it would have been the better for it. The film comes on as hard-hitting, but it’s weighted down with protective gear.
  75. The Hateful Eight
    It’s fun for a while to see Kurt Russell hamming it up behind his voluminous mustache or Samuel L. Jackson once again raising rafters by laying down the law. But the film is pointless, even as entertainment, because it builds to nothing more than a comic book blood bath.
  76. Where to Invade Next
    Blithely entertaining but almost completely devoid of rigor.
  77. Son of Saul
    Of course, on some level, no movie about this subject can fail to move us, and Son of Saul has its share of powerful sequences. I wanted it to be great, though, with a largeness of vision to match the awful immensity of its subject.
  78. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    If the sequels to “The Force Awakens” are as good as this film, that will probably be because they follow the same formula: heavy on the human side, more comedy, less CGI, more fresh faces, and more delightful droids. And, yes, one must pay homage to the Force.
  79. Boy and the World
    It’s lovely, child’s-eye fantasia.
  80. The Big Short
    The actors play their roles to the hilt, but in the end, the role of these investors in extenuating the crisis they took advantage of is played down, as is the disastrous life consequences of all those who were severely hit by it.
  81. In the Heart of the Sea
    If the movie accomplishes nothing else, though, I hope it inspires the curious to actually sit down and finally read “Moby-Dick.” It’s an extraordinary yarn. Really.
  82. The Lady in the Van
    The remarkable thing about Smith in The Lady in the Van is that, even though the role is no longer fresh for her, the performance certainly is. She gives it everything she’s got because, you feel, she wants to honor this character. She wants Miss Shepherd to live on.
  83. Youth
    Sorrentino’s magic is all smoke and mirrors. People calling this movie a visual feast must be awfully famished.
  84. Macbeth
    Marion Cotillard’s Lady Macbeth, however, is a triumph. She seems transfixed by her own capacity for evil, and her mad scene is one of the most unhistrionic, and therefore spookiest, ever filmed.
  85. The Good Dinosaur
    The script is more functional than funny, and the animation, while adept, is not altogether memorable.
  86. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Director Francis Lawrence stages the action sequences, both aboveground and underground, with a modicum of flair, and Julianne Moore as rebel leader Coin gives off some sparks – she’s a reformer with a totalitarian streak – but for the most part there is nothing divertingly new or different about this franchise fade-out.
  87. Song of Lahore
    For me, there is too much rue that goes unacknowledged by the filmmakers. When great musicians must adulterate their art in order to find an audience, I see no pressing reason to cheer.
  88. By the Sea
    Both Jolie Pitt and Pitt have demonstrated their chops in far better movies. I suspect the problem here is that there was no one around to tell them, “Please don’t. Please. Don’t.”
  89. The 33
    Unearths not only those thirty-three miners but also several thousand tons of clichés.
  90. Spotlight
    It plays out all the usual tropes of the investigative-journalism genre – the hot tips, the clandestine meetings, the hand-wringing about ethics, etc. – without adding a jot of novelty.
  91. SPECTRE
    Even a subpar James Bond movie is worth seeing because, well, it’s James Bond. But if one of the most successful and long-running franchises in movie history wants to keep pumping, it’s once again time to change the formula.
  92. Brooklyn
    It’s possible to be heartwarming and tough-minded, as this wonderful film demonstrates. And it’s possible to be both “old-fashioned” and vibrant, too. It’s the best new/old movie in town.
  93. The Armor of Light
    The film is a dual portrait in courage.
  94. Top Spin
    Weary as I am of documentaries built around competitions, this one is charming because the three teens, especially the girls, are so radiantly intense about the sport.
  95. Heart of a Dog
    Anderson works in animation and home movies (Lolabelle “playing” the piano is a wonder), and Anderson’s voice-over narration is closer in quality to song than to spoken word. It’s a confounding, transfixing mélange.
  96. Suffragette
    Gavron’s conventional approach to the material compares unfavorably to the newsreels and stills of the actual suffragettes that close out the film. The harsh reality comes through in that footage in a way that the film as a whole only approaches in bits and pieces.
  97. Beasts of No Nation
    The film in the end seems more of an expertly orchestrated blood bath than a full-scale tragedy.
  98. Truth
    The film basically upholds the verity of the news story while not condoning the sloppiness, and it’s worth seeing mostly for Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance as Mapes, a battler consumed by righteousness.
  99. Bridge of Spies
    Solid and uplifting, but it doesn’t extend Spielberg’s range. Perhaps one day he will make a movie about a historical character whose complexities are not quite so untainted.
  100. Steve Jobs
    For most of its two hours it’s brainy, high-speed entertainment, but the filmmakers are not quite as smart as they think they are. For all its flash and hypertalk, Steve Jobs is an old-school movie in new-style camouflage.
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