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. The Believers
    John Schlesinger has directed Mark Frost's screenplay with great technical skill, constructing highly charged suspense scenes. Robby Muller's cinematography also stands out. The violence is disgusting even by recent standards, though, especially since much of it is aimed at children. And the portrait of a barbarous Afro-Hispanic religion will hardly ease tensions in this time when racism and xenophobia are already rampant. [12 Jun 1987, p.21]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  2. The Edge of Love
    The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.
  3. The Living Daylights
    Bond is impersonated by 007 newcomer Timothy Dalton, who does little that's identifiable as acting, although he looks the part. Come back, Sean, all is forgiven!
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Harrelson is effective, but the film isn't helped by the inevitable comparisons to the far superior "L.A. Confidential" and "Bad Lieutenant" movies.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Duchess
    A lumbering number that takes its identity as a costume drama quite literally.
  6. The Hangover Part III
    The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.
  7. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.
  8. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    The result is this metabiography that says almost nothing about the great photographer's life or art.
  9. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.
  10. The Interview
    Even if the film were sharper, even if it was made by satirists on the order of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern in their “Dr. Strangelove” days, I would still argue that greenlighting such a film is a blunder. The exercise of free speech does not exempt one from the consequences of stupidity.
  11. 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.
  12. Red
    Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?
  13. The Tenants
    The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.
  14. One Day
    The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.
  15. Hannibal Rising
    Thomas Harris adapted his own bestseller and Peter Webber, who previously directed "Girl with a Pearl Earring," had the unenviable task of trying to give this glop, which is too gruesome to be campy, a high gloss. It should be called Man With a Severed Head.
  16. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    Judged by the standards of ordinary filmmaking, it's as strange, suggestive, and surreal as other Lynch pictures have been. Judged by the standards of Lynch's own career, however, it's amazingly stale and second-hand… [and] contains not a single moment of genuinely felt emotion. [1 Sept 1992]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  17. Wanted
    Violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilized, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?
  18. From Paris with Love
    Amid all the mayhem, there is Paris in all its faded-light glory. Is the movie worth seeing as a travelogue? Only if you are (a) a masochist, (b) a terrorist, or (c) desperate.
  19. Fool's Gold
    The treasure hunt in Fool's Gold is, of course, meant to be about more than money. But the only reason for this movie to exist is to make money.
  20. No Small Affair
    If these talented people had worthwhile things to do, No Small Affair would be no small movie. But the action has many weak moments, and the subplots are trite, especially when the trendy bachelor-party scene arrives. Too bad the screenplay, by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy, doesn't live up to the cast or to Vilmos Zsigmond's careful cinematography. [13 Nov 1984, p.47]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  21. Tammy
    The still youthful-looking Sarandon playing a grandmother is a jolt, especially since she doesn’t resemble the doddering roustabout she’s supposed to be playing. Maybe that’s why the director Ben Falcone (McCarthy’s husband and, with her, the film’s co-writer) gives Sarandon a full head of gray hair.
  22. In a Better World
    It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.
  23. The Lone Ranger
    Hammer plays the Lone Ranger as a clueless, stolid square, and the resulting contrast with Depp’s cartoonishness isn’t odd-couple funny, just blah.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Another Stakeout
    Another Stakeout boasts a fine cast, but the writing is so uneven and the plot so poorly developed that the film's few amusing moments get lost. The talents of Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez seem wasted on this lumbering farce.
  25. Just Go with It
    A fumbling comedy directed by Dennis Dugan that could have benefitted from surgical reconstruction. How about some liposuction to siphon off all those lame jokes?
  26. Mamma Mia!
    Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.
  27. New York, I Love You
    Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.
  28. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.
  29. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    The only saving grace is that this time around, the script (yes, there is one, and it was concocted by Ehren Kruger) has occasional wisps of lucidity, and Bay delivers – overdelivers – on the mayhem.
  30. In the Land of Women
    Soppy, schematic weepie.
  31. Be Kind Rewind
    No doubt Be Kind Rewind will soon make its way to – um – DVD.
  32. Anonymous
    Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Last Action Hero
    the strongest emotion it whips up is an overwhelming desire to stop your ears against the stupid dialogue, bombastic sound effects, and atrocious music that assaults you every second - courtesy of Dynamic Digital Sound, a diabolical new development in technological overkill. Surely no good movie would feel the need to be so loud. [25 Jun 1993]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  34. The Internship
    There’s a potentially good comedy to be made about old-school guys trying to make a go of it in a youth-dominated digital marketplace, but director Shawn Levy and screenwriter Jared Stern overdose on moronic excursions.
  35. The Greatest
    Not a sterling example of how to make a high-toned weepie, let alone a serious examination of trauma.
  36. Fanboys
    Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.
  37. The 33
    Unearths not only those thirty-three miners but also several thousand tons of clichés.
  38. Youth
    Sorrentino’s magic is all smoke and mirrors. People calling this movie a visual feast must be awfully famished.
  39. The Other Woman
    Practically every gag in this movie, and there are scores of them, is milked dry. When the gags aren’t very good to begin to with, this is a prescription for disaster.
  40. Made of Honor
    The only surprise to me about this movie is that there no jokes about kilts – a serious omission in an otherwise entirely predictable farce.
  41. Going in Style
    It’s a clunky, over-the-hill gang escapade enlivened only by the presence of the three Oscar winners, all of whom are so far beyond the movie’s meager demands that to say the actors are overqualified would be the grossest of understatements.
  42. 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.”
  43. Australia
    The film also seems to end at least four times, which is three times too many. Better yet, it never should have started.
  44. Electric Dreams
    Electric Dreams tries to be as up to the minute as the latest rock video. But it looks more like a tired holdover from the ''psychedelic'' 1960s, another time when frantic visual effects were all the rage, and people rarely stopped to wonder what the point was.
  45. Seven Pounds
    Seven Pounds, coming after "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "I Am Legend," seems like the third in a trilogy of inspirational bummers.
  46. The Tracey Fragments
    It's all a bit like "Girl Interrupted" shattered into a thousand shards, but Page somehow manages to come through with a performance despite the director's distracting technique.
  47. Robin Hood
    I much prefer Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” to all this doomy somberness. Why take the legend so seriously?
  48. The Express
    The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.
  49. Hancock
    What begins as a pretty good comedy devolves rapidly into a high-flown example of Hollywood messagemongering.
  50. Seeking Justice
    The idiocy of the film's conceit is that Simon recruits innocents like Will to carry out these vigilante killings.
  51. Angels Crest
    The best thing about the film is the majestic mountain vistas, shot in Canada. You can practically inhale them.
  52. The A-Team
    It probably won't matter to its core audience that The A-Team doesn't make a lick of sense.
  53. Lula, the Son of Brazil
    The film is more testimonial than drama.
  54. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Since the only really good "Planet of the Apes" movie was the 1968 original with Charlton Heston, I've always wondered why filmmakers can't just leave well enough alone.
  55. Admission
    Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?
  56. Romeo & Juliet
    Hailee Steinfeld’s Juliet is rather lovely and rather bland; Douglas Booth’s Romeo might have stepped out of a special Renaissance Faire edition of GQ.
  57. The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby isn’t simply a classic American text: In Luhrmann’s hands, it’s also the greatest self-help manual ever written.
  58. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.
  59. Miracle at St. Anna
    Clocking in at 160 minutes, this interminable movie comes across like a rough cut. Perhaps Lee believed its length would give it gravitas. The opposite is true.
  60. Confessions of a Shopaholic
    It's not the retro attitudes in "Confessions" that bother me (at least not much). It's the lack of laughs.
  61. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    This is the 10 zillionth film about a friendly-seeming villain invading a contented home, but exploitation of child abuse and baby-stealing make this one a particularly nasty business.
  62. Amazon Women on the Moon
    Lots of filmmakers, lots of opportunities, lots of bad taste, very few laughs. [25 Sept 1987, p.23]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  63. Brooklyn's Finest
    Brooklyn’s Finest does indeed provide a new genre twist. This must be the only cop movie ever made where a character is driven off the deep end by mold.
  64. Julia
    Swinton's performance, and practically everything else about Julia, seems off – tone-deaf. She plays an out-of-control wastrel who enters into a kidnapping scheme gone horribly wrong, as does the movie.
  65. Money Monster
    Money Monster turns into an unintentional parody. Investing in this movie would not be a safe bet.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    White Irish Drinkers
    The casting of both Riegert and Allen may sound like an "Animal House" reunion, but the two have no scenes together.
  67. Amelia
    Perhaps Nair believes that heroism in our tabloid era has become degraded. If so, she overcorrected. Amelia is so pure in heart that it slides right off the screen.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    A Good Man in Africa
    Sean Connery retains some self-respect as the doctor, but the rest of the movie pulls up very short. [16 Sep 1994, p.15]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  69. Bran Nue Dae
    As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Falling Down
    It's a distasteful jumble that stirs up the worst instincts of its audience by heaping abuse on Bill, encouraging us to identify with him, then prodding us to enjoy his bursts of venom and violence. [1 Mar 1993]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  71. New Year's Eve
    The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.
  72. TRON: Legacy
    Ought to have been state of the art. But there's not a whole lot of artistry to be found in this movie.
  73. Wanderlust
    This movie is "Finian's Rainbow" for dunderheads. Rudd has a few amusing moments talking to himself in a mirror (he's trying to convince himself he's a stud) but he would have been better off talking himself out of this film.
  74. The Muslims Are Coming!
    I kept expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to traipse onto the scene. Alas, he doesn’t.
  75. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.
  76. 42
    The filmmaking is TV-movie-of-the-week dull and Robinson’s ordeal is hammered home to the exclusion of virtually everything else in his life.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Twilight
    A young and as-yet-unformed actor, Stewart is cast in a role she's simply not ready for, and her effort to work hard – exactly what any actor must hide from the audience – is painfully visible in every scene. By contrast, Pattinson is smooth as glass, a born movie star who only needs to slant his eyes to grab attention.
  78. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Blanchett miraculously gives a good performance, even when saddled with lines like this one, to Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh: "In another world, could you have loved me?"
  79. Somewhere
    Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."
  80. Union Square
    The plot slogs along and family secrets are hauled out, each more implausible than the next.
  81. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    Being touted as the first film ever shot in the Smithsonian complex. With any luck, it will also be the last. This is not the best use of our landmarks.
  82. Vantage Point
    How can we take this doomsday scenario seriously when we keep waiting for Bruce Willis to rise from the ashes?
  83. Anna Karenina
    One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."
  84. Reservation Road
    There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.
  85. Young Goethe in Love
    Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.
  86. The Son of No One
    Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Big Miracle
    Stephen Root, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, and other familiar faces lend their support, but it's not enough to overcome the limp, by-the-numbers execution. The film comprises innumerable expository scenes, leavened with uninspired comic relief.
  88. Bachelorette
    As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.
  89. Space Chimps
    Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.
  90. Happy Tears
    This is the kind of movie where life lessons are posted every quarter-hour. (I timed it.)
  91. The Legend of Zorro
    The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked one, made me long to re-watch "Zorro the Gay Blade," the great spoof starring George Hamilton. In that film, the Spanish accents were meant to sound deliberately fake.
  92. Get Smart
    At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?
  93. Watchmen
    Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."
  94. Nancy Drew
    Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.
  95. Near Dark
    Directed by Kathryn Bigelow with lots of dull spots, a few effectively intense moments, and as much gore as the monster genre usually calls for nowadays.
  96. My Life in Ruins
    As a laughing-through-tears jokester tourist, Richard Dreyfuss provides the only moments of real acting, as opposed to overacting, mugging, and scenery chomping.
  97. Quid Pro Quo
    If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.
  98. Harry & Son
    It would take a more expert director than Newman to pull the lumpy Harry & Son screenplay into shape, with its many trite scenes that can't decide whether they're funny or sad or in between. [19 Apr 1984, p.25]
    • Christian Science Monitor
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Razor's Edge
    Director John Byrum's idea of evoking the past is to usher a parade of overblown cliches across the screen. [15 Nov 1984, p.47]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  100. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.
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