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. Transcendence
    Moderately entertaining, periodically draggy, Transcendence is not as wacky-visionary as “The Matrix,” or nearly as lyrical as “Her.”
  2. The Railway Man
    Firth is very good at playing racked men of high principle. He’s so well cast as Lomax that, at times, he’s almost too perfect in the role. He’s still the best thing about the movie.
  3. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Jim Jarmusch has made a vampire movie, but, as you might expect, not just any old vampire movie. “Twilight” fans will not be amused, but Jarmusch’s usual coterie of art-film followers will likely find the movie his best in years.
  4. Hateship Loveship
    Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.
  5. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.
  6. The Unknown Known
    Although the movie goes way back into Rumsfeld’s career, it is the Iraq section that is the most noteworthy – and disappointing. Morris elicits virtually nothing revelatory from Rumsfeld.
  7. Alan Partridge
    It’s a flurry of good gags and bad. The good ones are worth sitting around for.
  8. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    If we must endure yet another spring-summer cycle of comic book superheroes, this movie at least delivers the wham-bang goods (recycled though they may be).
  9. Finding Vivian Maier
    Maier is a great artist who discounted adulation entirely. Her life was a masquerade; her genius, quite literally, was unexposed.
  10. Cesar Chavez
    Biopics about civil rights icons are usually staid affairs. Cesar Chavez, directed by Diego Luna, is no exception.
  11. On My Way
    Director and co-writer Emmanuelle Bercot doesn’t go in for a lot of plot, and the film’s one-thing-after-another trajectory, at least for a while, is engagingly shaggy.
  12. Enemy
    Movies about doubles are, almost by definition, creepy, but Villeneuve, not to be outdone, piles on the weirdness. He’s big on spider imagery, but the web is flimsy.
  13. Ernest & Célestine
    The enchanting French-Belgian animated feature Ernest & Celestine is so liltingly sweet and graceful that, a day or two after I saw it, it seemed almost as if I had dreamed it.
  14. Bad Words
    Bad Words does to spelling bees what “Bad Santa” did to Santa Claus.
  15. Particle Fever
    Particle Fever doesn’t prompt us to say: “Gee, these superbrains are just like us, except for the brains.” The film allows for our awe. It also demonstrates that science is the most human of activities, with all that that implies.
  16. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave.
  17. Bethlehem
    The movie doesn’t delve especially deeply into the psychology of double-agentry, and the shifting viewpoints between Israelis and Palestinians flattens the drama instead of broadening it.
  18. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    I’m not sure that anybody coming to this film to witness her for the first time would necessarily pledge eternal allegiance. Still, she’s sui generis, and in the theatre world, as in life (yes, there is an overlap), that counts for a lot.
  19. The Lunchbox
    The Lunchbox, the debut feature from Indian director Ritesh Batra, has such a sweet premise that I sincerely hope it doesn’t get remade with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
  20. Omar
    The film works best as a straightforward melodrama set in an anything but straightforward world.
  21. Non-Stop
    It’s all fairly entertaining and eminently disposable.
  22. Child's Pose
    A lousy title for a marvelous movie.
  23. Frankie & Alice
    It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.
  24. The Last of the Unjust
    There is no need for Murmelstein to break down here. In The Last of the Unjust, it’s as if the whole world is weeping.
  25. Winter's Tale
    If only there was less mush and more meat in this stew.
  26. The Monuments Men
    It’s like an over-the-hill gang variant on “The Dirty Dozen,” except not as much fun as that sounds.
  27. 12 O'Clock Boys
    It’s to Nathan’s credit that he doesn’t negate the allure of dirt-bike riding as an escape hatch from inner-city woes.
  28. Labor Day
    We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.
  29. Gloria
    Gloria is a starting-over story that never quite picks up a head of steam. Lelio paces the action as a series of sketches, and the hit-or-miss quality of the material makes for a bumpy ride.
  30. Visitors
    I’ve never been able to figure out if Reggio is an artist or a con artist. Perhaps, in some ways, he’s both. He has claimed in interviews that he intended to make a movie about “the wonders of the universe.” Whatever he’s made, for better or worse, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
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