Portland Oregonian's Scores

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For 3,654 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Caesar Must Die
Lowest review score: 0 Summer Catch
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,408 out of 3654
  2. Mixed: 966 out of 3654
  3. Negative: 280 out of 3654
3654 movie reviews
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  1. Let Me In
    The film moves with strange, creepy energy and is populated by characters who delicately walk a line between charm and grotesquerie. It's a treat.
  2. Freakonomics
    Freaknomics is breezy, but you can't help but think it belongs on TV, where the filmmakers would have gotten more time with their subjects and the tone mightn't seem so forced.
  3. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    Starts well, builds drama and then proceeds to fly sort of crazily off the rails.
  4. Buried
    Balanced precariously between a horror film and a war movie, but it's so sly and assured that you can't dismiss the allegorical, even satirical undertones that Cortés teases out of Sparling's conceit.
  5. Howl
    Franco is rather astounding, looking and sounding plausibly like Ginsberg and talking about complex ideas in a genuinely relaxed tone.
  6. Waiting for 'Superman'
    The merits of its arguments can be debated on the Op-Ed pages, but at least the movie makes it clear that they desperately need to be.
  7. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    It offers the small delight of watching a master step back from more ardent work to put together a diverting miniature. And in the scheme of things, that's actually more of an accomplishment than it might sound. Minor Mozart, after all, is still pretty darned good.
  8. Catfish
    To quote a source as authoritative as Francis Bacon -- namely a "New Yorker" cartoon: "On the internet no one knows you're a dog."
  9. Jack Goes Boating
    It's the kind of story that can look pedestrian on paper, but when brought to life this skillfully, proves to be genuinely inspiring.
  10. Never Let Me Go
    The world depicted in Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go is among the more beautiful dystopias in film history.
  11. I'm Still Here
    You've never been quite this close to a movie star, and after enduring the experience you'll likely never want to repeat it.
  12. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    Despite the film's inevitably downbeat tone and occasional repetitiveness, there is that heavenly music to remember -- or to encounter for the first time. You will leave the theater singing, if with a touch of melancholy.
  13. Machete
    What Machete does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment.
  14. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    A twisty, darkly comic story of greed, betrayal and murderous misunderstandings.
  15. The American
    It does a nice job of balancing stillness and action, but it hits weakly when it hits at all and falls short of the small grandness to which it aspires.
  16. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    The film is big and sprawling and moves with fiery energy -- there's little or no exposition or explanation between scenes or episodes, yielding a breakneck pace.
  17. The Last Exorcism
    I cared enough about these characters to follow "Exorcism" to tense and occasionally goofy places, even if the setup proved a bit stronger than the payoff.
  18. Centurion
    If I believed in the concept of "guilty pleasures," I'd classify "Centurion" as one, but I think I maybe just kind of enjoyed it.
  19. The Tillman Story
    Amir Bar-Lev shows in the absorbing, eye-opening and sometimes enraging film The Tillman Story, if there was one thing that you could count on Pat Tillman to do it was speak his mind: loudly, intelligently, and often in salty, pointed language.
  20. Soul Kitchen
    There's a breeziness to Soul Kitchen, good performances by Moritz Bleibtreu as Zinos' slippery brother and Birol Unel as his fanatical new chef, and a peppy soundtrack.
  21. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    Wright and company do a splendid job of distilling it down to a fresh and entertaining joyride of a film.
  22. The Expendables
    Brainless, witless, inept, ugly and crude,
  23. Eat Pray Love
    Eat Pray Love is magazine-spread self-help bullcorn with the highest possible production values, and I wasn't having any of it.
  24. Animal Kingdom
    Frightening stuff, and made all the more so because of how matter-of-factly by writer-director David Michôd plays it.
  25. The Other Guys
    The Other Guys finds McKay back to trying something wildly ambitious with his comedy, and largely succeeding.
  26. Cairo Time
    The plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, but Cairo Time works on an emotional level and is a hassle-free way to sample Egypt.
  27. Middle Men
    What could have been a complex portrait of a flawed man dealing with the perils of success ends up far less interesting.
  28. Flipped
    A charming Rob Reiner film that more or less works as intended.
  29. Lebanon
    Lebanon isn't as resonant as the haunting mix of autobiography and animation in "Waltz with Bashir," which dealt with the same war. Still, the film's fresh craft promises more from a director who turns the tiniest possible of settings into a sobering metaphor for the madness of a larger world.
  30. Dinner for Schmucks
    With Paul Rudd as the would-be mocker and Steve Carell as the mockee, and all manner of new supporting characters and plot lines thrown in, and much less energy, delight, wit, humor and fun than the original was able to muster without any evident strain. There's the occasional bubble, I confess, but almost no delight.
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