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. 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.
  2. Begin Again
    Most of the music is by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, and it’s heartfelt without ever really touching the heart.
  3. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    Who can really differentiate between these films anyway? In the end, they all devolve (evolve?) into clashing, clanging bots.
  4. The Last Sentence
    It’s a big movie, but in an emotional, not a historical, sense. Oftentimes it has the hushness of a chamber drama even when the world is its stage.
  5. Jersey Boys
    The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.
  6. Ivory Tower
    Rossi investigates the increasing use of massive open online courses and other flexible programs and talks to such education experts as Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco.
  7. Violette
    “Séraphine” was haunting; Violette, for all its writhings, is familiar.
  8. Edge of Tomorrow
    Cruise is better than he’s been in a while because he damps down his usual all-intensity-all-the-time MO. He’s best here when his character seems the most scared. And Emily Blunt as a commando legend is indomitable, a credit to her exoskeleton.
  9. The Fault in Our Stars
    The ultimate feel-good movie about feeling bad. And within those limits, it succeeds all too well.
  10. Night Moves
    Night Moves may have a soft, almost dreamy feel, but at the core it’s crucially hard-headed. In its own quiet way, in how it pulls together our utopian ideals and home-grown fears, it’s the zeitgeist movie of the moment.
  11. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    In more ways than one, MacFarlane is trying to outgross Mel Brooks.
  12. Maleficent
    Director Robert Stromberg, making his debut as a director after supervising the visual effects for movies like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Avatar,” lacks the transcendent touch.
  13. We Are the Best!
    One of the funniest and happiest movies I’ve ever seen about early adolescent girls and their wayward, fitful joyousness.
  14. Words and Pictures
    Words and Pictures is a minor effort from Schepisi, but minor Schepisi still trumps most of what’s out there.
  15. The Love Punch
    It’s all third-rate “Pink Panther” stuff, and Brosnan, eager to play down his 007 bona fides, overcorrects.
  16. Blended
    The chemistry may be good, the movie isn’t.
  17. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    I couldn’t follow many of the ins and outs of the time-travel scenario, and I’m not altogether sure that the filmmakers could, either. It doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that the movie is fun. We shouldn’t also expect it to make sense.
  18. The Immigrant
    The Immigrant is reaching for the same thing that Fellini achieved in “La Strada” – the state of grace that arises between people who at first would seem to have nothing in common but desolation.
  19. Million Dollar Arm
    This movie is altogether too nice. I prefer sports movies with more sass and snap, like the films Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham”) used to make, or even parts of “Moneyball.”
  20. Godzilla
    Sometimes, oftentimes, trailers showcase only the good stuff. The actual movie is a pale substitute. Such is the case here.
  21. Fed Up
    Alarmist to an almost apocalyptic degree, the film is nevertheless packed with enough basic facts and figures to give any eater serious pause. Or at least any eater who indulges in sugar.
  22. Chef
    There’s a pretty good movie buried somewhere deep inside the ungainly pastry that is Chef.
  23. Neighbors
    It’s gross, all right, but rarely funny – unless jokes about alcohol-laced breast milk is your thing.
  24. Farmland
    Some of the human-interest stories are compelling, but too much of this film is as dry as a high school classroom presentation.
  25. Ida
    What comes through so powerfully in this movie is a portrait of an entire generation making its way from death throes to new beginnings.
  26. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Overlong and repetitive as it is, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, at least delivers the goods.
  27. Young & Beautiful
    He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.
  28. Walking with the Enemy
    Because most movies about Holocaust saviors feature Jews as victims rather than as rescuers, Walking With the Enemy, by contrast, has a special cachet. But the film is as dramatically inert as its origins are inspirational.
  29. The German Doctor
    Puenzo may have started out to make something more ambitious than an intelligent, real-world horror thriller, but what she did achieve is still commendable. The melodramatics in this movie may be cooked up, but the fears it conjures are very real.
  30. 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.
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