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. Taken 2
    The director of this jamboree is appropriately named Olivier Megaton.
  2. The Road Home
    Has a graceful simplicity that many will find hard to resist.
  3. Solas
    Splendidly acted, sensitively directed.
  4. Zhantai
    The movie makes up in sweep and splendor what it lacks in psychological depth and dramatic impact.
  5. Midnight's Children
    The film’s political scope is wide, beginning in 1917 and extending for sixty years, and, especially in the first hour or so, the antic, magical tone of Rushdie’s novel is sustained.
  6. Reconstruction
    The influence of Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier looms heavily over the whole film.
  7. Innocence
    This unusual romantic drama is sensitively acted by a well-chosen cast and subtly directed by Cox.
  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. Empathy
    Siegel calls it a talking-heads film about the talking cure, and that pretty well sums it up. The nonfiction scenes are most interesting, and could have easily sustained the whole picture.
  10. Envy
    The movie works fairly well as a pitch-dark comedy, and very well as a dead-on satire of upward mobility and its discontents.
  11. A Tale of Two Sisters
    Quite restrained for what's basically a horror movie, and very well acted.
  12. King Lear
    [Godard's] rehash of ''King Lear'' is peculiar, but it's also that rare thing in the movie world: a genuine original. [22 Jan 1988, p.22]
    • Christian Science Monitor
  13. 28 Days Later...
    It's not a pretty picture, but it won't be soon forgotten by thriller fans with nerves and stomachs steely enough to take its violence in stride.
  14. Nine Queens
    This cleverly structured Argentine heist movie isn't as original or ingenious as it tries to be, but it's fun watching the chicanery veer down one unexpected pathway after another.
  15. Freaky Friday
    Deliciously acted and good-humored to its core, it's one of the summer's very best surprises.
  16. Spider-Man 2
    The sequel is more exciting and surprising than the 2002 original, thanks largely to Molina's excellent acting. Only the strenuously comic scenes fall as flat as one of Spidey's leftover webs.
  17. Something in the Air
    Assayas doesn’t bring out the fiery best in this material, but he’s smart enough to know that revolutionaries like their comforts as much as the ruling class does.
  18. Asylum
    Patrick McGrath's novel provides a solid and suspenseful story, even if it loses much of its bite in Mackenzie's hands.
  19. People I Know
    Pacino's performance in People I Know is the best thing he's done in ages.
  20. Eyes Wide Shut
    Brilliantly filmed in his usual transfixing style, Kubrick's last movie pleads for alertness to the temptations that assail human nature from within and without.
  21. Silence
    Silence, though conceived on a grand scale, is an almost obsessively personal, at times even private, film.
  22. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.
  23. Proof
    But at its highest level of ambition, Proof fails to deliver. The film becomes a psychological whodunit where Catherine is shown to be either a martyr to her father or else his intellectual equal. None of it is terribly convincing.
  24. A Good Woman
    Wilkinson artfully deepens a character who in Wilde's original play was rather boobish. It's a marvelous performance in a pretty good film.
  25. The Slaughter Rule
    This well-acted melodrama paints a convincing portrait of its Montana milieu, and its best scenes suggest real insights into the paradoxical attitudes toward masculinity and sexuality that American men often feel compelled to assume.
  26. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    Doesn't make it a masterpiece, but it's fun. [2002 re-release]
  27. Mary Poppins Returns
    It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.
  28. Lilya 4-Ever
    This grim Danish-Swedish production is socially revealing and artistically creative, both coldly realistic and infused with compassion for its heroine and her youth culture.
  29. 101 Dalmatians
    The story seems awfully far-fetched when real people play the characters, but the canines are cute and Glenn Close was born to play Cruella De Vil, the monstrous magnate who sets the plot in motion.
  30. The Artist
    The Artist is full of homages to many other films. I suppose it will be fun for cinéastes to pick out the references, but not all of them – like the ones from "Citizen Kane" or "Sunset Boulevard" – are especially germane.
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