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. Birders: The Central Park Effect
    In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."
  2. Mother
    Bong's style is comically tart even in the film's most noirish moments.
  3. Fill the Void
    Implicit in this film is a simple truth: The sheer force of artistry has the power to convert outsiders into insiders. I left Fill the Void feeling privileged, however briefly, to have been brought into this world.
  4. Searching for Sugar Man
    This is a real-life fairy tale with a remarkably happy ending.
  5. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    Roddam's minor but imaginative 1979 movie.
  6. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Magical movie, which has brilliant fun with the contrasts between film and theater, love and infatuation, reality and fantasy.
  7. Zodiac
    In Zodiac, working from a script by James Vanderbilt, Fincher has decidedly toned down his act. His straight-ahead, methodical direction isn't as flagrantly unsettling as much of his previous work, but it's more psychologically layered. In this film, for the first time, we feel for his characters when they bleed.
  8. The Thin Blue Line
    A fact-filled study that's also a full-fledged work of cinema art. [2 Sept 1988]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  9. Run Lola Run
    Tykwer's style gives the movie an explosive energy that never quits, marking him as the most ingenious new talent to hail from Germany in ages.
  10. Black Swan
    A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.
  11. 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.
  12. The Devil's Backbone
    It's imaginatively filmed and builds a sense of brooding emotional power.
  13. Bird
    Bird isn't an easy film, and it doesn't always make an effort to be likable. But it's a dazzler - at least as good as "Round Midnight,'' and that's saying a lot.
  14. 28 Weeks Later
    The ending is a set-up for yet another sequel: Can "28 Months Later" be very far away?
  15. The House of Mirth
    Wharton's old-school compassion and Davies's taste for artfully wrought melodrama make an unusual but ultimately successful combination.
  16. Top Gun: Maverick
    Top Gun: Maverick is a perfectly tolerable time-killer, and I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone, but I just hope these won’t be the only kinds of movies that bring audiences back to the theaters.
  17. Starting Out in the Evening
    Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.
  18. Princess Mononoke
    More thoughtful and varied than the average Hollywood cartoon.
  19. Full Metal Jacket
    What makes the film stunning is less its metaphorical scheme than its cinematic style. Always a matter of flowing camera movement, Kubrick has photographed much of the action with long "traveling shots" that capture time and space as a seamless whole, not fractured into the bits and pieces of standard editing techniques. [26 June 1987]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  20. Head-On
    Superbly acted.
  21. The Witches
    The scenes of magic and mayhem are peppered with sly surprises, and Anjelica Huston plays the wildest wicked witch since Dorothy got back from Oz.
  22. Lightning in a Bottle
    See it with an open heart and a tapping toe.
  23. The Deep End
    The same story was told vastly better in the 1949 melodrama "The Reckless Moment."
  24. The Taste of Others
    Why does affection sometimes grow between people who seem to have little or nothing in common? That's the tantalizing question running through this capably acted comedy-drama
  25. A Bug's Life
    The story is amusing and the animation is first-rate, but there's less sparkling originality than in "Toy Story."
  26. The War Room
    There are thrills and cliffhangers galore, even though everyone now knows the outcome of the tale, and chief wheeler-dealer James Carville emerges as a zesty screen personality. [12 Nov 1993, p.12]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  27. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    It melodramatizes everything and yet its overall effect is something more than melodrama.
  28. Blue Jasmine
    Allen is content to have Jasmine, babbling to herself, waft into a psychoneurotic, Antonioni-esque haze that seems preordained by her class and her predicament. Her cry for help, if you wipe away all the artifice, resembles nothing so much as a plea for her charge cards to be reinstated.
  29. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Hellboy II comes across as an original. But being original is not always the same thing as being wonderful.
  30. Please Give
    Only Rebecca Hall comes through with a genuineness that rises above Holofcener’s doodlings. Her scenes with Guilbert resonate because, in the end, Rebecca is the only character in the movie who seems to care about anything other than his or her own – take your pick – bank account, complexion, weight, guilt. In this company, she’s practically a saint.
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