Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 4,534 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Wolf of Wall Street
Lowest review score: 0 Joe Versus the Volcano
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,923 out of 4534
  2. Mixed: 982 out of 4534
  3. Negative: 629 out of 4534
4534 movie reviews
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  1. Letters to Juliet
    It's unapologetic schmaltz, deftly directed by Gary Winick (Tadpole) as if it really meant something.
  2. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    With raw shock and a riveting Uma Thurman absent this time, Nymphomaniac: Volume II is a metaphoric limp dick.
  3. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    A moviegoer has to be a scholar in the now-convoluted cosmology that powers these Potterverse expansion-pack prequels or abandon all hope of understanding a fraction of what’s happening — and even a lot of die-hard Harryheads may find their hippocampus getting seriously taxed while trying to catch up.
  4. Triple Frontier
    Somewhere along the road of development hell, the movie settled for delivering standard-issue jolts for jocks.
  5. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Miller's monochrome palette, splashed with color that shines like a whore's lip gloss, doesn't startle as it once did. It's like running into an ex-love and realizing that, damn, the thrill is gone.
  6. Lucy
    Remember "Limitless," the 2011 thriller in which Bradley Cooper becomes a whirling killer dervish from a drug that lets him access 100 percent of his brain? Well, Lucy is basically the same movie with Scarlett Johansson in the Cooper role. It's not a good trade-off.
  7. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    I never rooted for them as a couple, never felt a chemistry in their bond. And in a romance, even one with tragic notes, that really is the end of the world.
  8. Dolores Claiborne
    Despite Bates' mastery at bringing unexpected depth to unhinged characters, Dolores is a few pints low on chills and challenge.
  9. The Photograph
    The Photograph comes down with a teary case of "The Notebook," laying on flashbacks that yank us out of the present, where our stars live, and into a past riddled with sentimental clichés.
  10. Pumpkin
    After a lively start -- the sorority sisters, shaken by the slightest imperfection in themselves, cannot cope with handicapped athletes -- the film smooths its rough edges and reduces complex characters to sitcom stooges. Call it an opportunity missed.
  11. Internal Affairs
    Just what we didn't need: another kick-ass cop flick in which we know the guys are macho because they rough up their wives and the gals are hot because they totter on spike heels like hookers.
  12. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    It's too bad. Jones deserved better than a biopic with a TV-movie heart.
  13. Rendition
    What a cast, indeed. And what a bust as persuasive drama.
  14. On the Road
    A dash of Tarantino might have juiced up Walter Salles' wrongheadedly well-mannered take on Jack Kerouac's 1957 Beat Generation landmark. Kerouac's semi-autobiographical novel comes to the screen looking good but feeling shallow.
  15. Black Widow
    Credit is due to Pugh and Johansson, most of all, for proving, in the movie’s opening chunk, that their foes-then-friends dynamic could satisfyingly hold an entire movie.
  16. The Lost City
    As is, The Lost City is less of a lost opportunity than something happy to stick to its middle lane and bide its time.
  17. The Corruptor
    What you get in this cop drama is NYPD Blue lite. That's not bad. In fact, it's compulsively watchable. But there are no leaps, just fits and starts.
  18. The Last Movie Star
    An opportunity missed.
  19. The Four Feathers
    It should have been an old-fashioned rouser, and sometimes it is. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson (JFK) lights the battle scenes like action paintings. But Kapur weighs down the tale with bogus profundities.
  20. Runaway Jury
    Hackman and Hoffman, old pals in their first film together, make a lively business of their one scene together -– in a toilet, no less. The rest you can flush.
  21. Labor Day
    The pie looks delicious, but Labor Day feels stale.
  22. Domino
    Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.
  23. How to Train Your Dragon
    Debate all you want about whether this movie actually teaches you how to train a dragon. What this movie is actually trying to accomplish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is how to train their audiences to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again.
  24. Ma
    So it’s a kick to see Spencer dig into the title role in Ma, a Blumhouse scarefest that tries but rarely lives up to the irresistible dynamo at its center.
  25. X-Men: The Last Stand
    Last stand? My ass. Billed as the climax of a trilogy, the third and weakest chapter in the X-Men series is a blatant attempt to prove there is still life in the franchise.
  26. Big Time Adolescence
    It’s the kind of film that works well if you don’t feel like getting off your couch. Zeke would definitely approve.
  27. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence always takes the lazy way out. You go along for the ride because Hart and Johnson promise something they can't deliver: a movie as funny as they are.
  28. Jay Kelly
    While it has its share of highlights...there’s a lot of celebrity malaise and hot air masquerading as insight here.
  29. Real Steel
    Sugar Ray Leonard helped with the motion-capture, and it shows. Good stuff. But the tear-jerking in Real Steel is as shameless as its product placement. We're being hustled.
  30. No Strings Attached
    What's in this cliché grab bag for moviegoers? Well, Portman and Kutcher are a cute mismatch. She's short to his tall, sassy to his sweet, etc. I dried up here. So does the movie.
  31. Basic
    Their (Travolta/Jackson) teamwork was classic. Basic breaks up the team. What's up with that?
  32. The Dressmaker
    Kate Winslet can do anything ... except save this movie from quirky overkill.
  33. The Core
    The Core -- with its by-the-numbers plot and performances -- isn't offensive, just unblushingly tacky and derivative.
  34. Return to Paradise
    What if director Joseph Ruben didn't resort to B-movie suspense tricks? What if the fine cast wasn't saddled with a shamelessly contrived script by Wesley Strick and Bruce Robinson? Then Return to Paradise would be a better movie, that's what if.
  35. Blood Diamond
    DiCaprio is terrific, but he can't save this lecture from the shame of using Africa as a vehicle for another white man's redemption.
  36. Rob Roy
    You always know where it's going even as it meanders for two and a half hours getting there.
  37. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    The Death Cure plot is the essence of rehash.
  38. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Sollett, hoping for a "Before Sunrise/Before Sunset" vibe, sadly settles for a soggy aftertaste.
  39. Capone
    Aside from Hardy’s full-on commitment, Capone seems too dramatically dull and laborious to support its ambition as a subversive biopic or a deeply personal take on public vilification.
  40. Lemon
    You can accuse Lemon of a lot of things. False advertising in the title, however, is not one of them.
  41. Snowden
    What's your take on Edward Snowden: A patriot deserving of a presidential pardon? A traitor deserving of execution, as Trump believes? Something in between? In Snowden the movie, in which a fiercely committed Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the title role, Oliver Stone removes all doubt. He's Saint Edward.
  42. Jobs
    Jobs is a one-man show that needed to go for broke and doesn't. My guess is that Jobs would give it a swat.
  43. The Oath
    In trying to show what a heartless heap our partisan world has become — and could be heading towards — The Oath suddenly just turns into a mess of its own. This is not what we signed up for.
  44. Set It Off
    The four actresses supply enough humor and heart to light any movie’s fuse, even this cliched retread of Thelma and Louise. Like the characters they play, the sisters deserve better.
  45. Simon Birch
    Admirers of Irving's sprawling tome are sure to find Birch a botch.
  46. Criminal
    Here's the problem: The movie was made just four years ago by Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky. It is called "Nine Queens," and it is vastly superior to this blah U.S. remake from director Gregory Jacobs.
  47. Assault on Precinct 13
    By playing it safe, the new Precinct leaves the audience sorry and restores thirteen to its place as the unluckiest number.
  48. Life
    Let's hope that Ridley Scott follows his own blueprint better in the upcoming "Alien: Covenant." The dull and derivative Life is no competition. It's DOA.
  49. An American Pickle
    Still, a movie that even glancingly grapples with questions of ethnic and spiritual identity, past and present, is hardly hack work. It’ll do in a pickle.
  50. Hitch
    Will Smith has an easy charm, and this labored romantic farce works it hard. Too hard.
  51. Wet Hot American Summer
    Lulls aside, Wain and Showalter deserve camp kudos for getting the details right.
  52. Mean Girls
    Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.
  53. Bee Season
    Fine directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel take a detour into mumbo jumbo.
  54. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I.
  55. Dicks: The Musical
    You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.
  56. Now You See Me 2
    If you fell for the 2013 original — and surprisingly, many did — then Now You See Me 2 has got your number. For the rest of us, however, this longer, louder sequel adds up to what one character calls "a sack of nada."
  57. The Life of Chuck
    Hiddleston’s soft shoe gives you a glimpse of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. The movie surrounding it, however, seems determined to make the extraordinary seem as bumper-sticker simple and banal as humanly possible.
  58. Love and Monsters
    This is a perfectly fine postapocalyptic mash-up that really is just the sum of its parts, and nowhere near a gleeful, shriek-inducing whole. For some, that might be considered a feature. For the rest of us, it’s most definitely a ginourmous, gaping-jawed bug.
  59. The Lion King
    What’s missing? Let’s start with intangibles such as heart, soul and the faintest hint of originality.
  60. Head of State
    Doesn't seem directed at all; you half expect the actors to crash into each other. Still, give me the attempted satire of Head of State over the racial stereotyping of "Bringing Down the House" anyday. You can feel a mind at work when you watch Rock.
  61. Endings, Beginnings
    Though the movie stalls frequently before it finds its balance, Woodley makes us care.
  62. The Brothers Grimsby
    It's the strafing satire that's MIA.
  63. You People
    The film can’t figure out if it wants to be a love story or social commentary, and ends up doing neither very well.
  64. This Boy's Life
    De Niro's decision to make Dwight a loony from the get-go throws the delicate symmetry of the story out of whack.
  65. The Deep End of the Ocean
    The film ultimately gives in to a case of TV-movie blahs.
  66. The Switch
    It's subpar sitcom.
  67. Alita: Battle Angel
    Now, after a deluge of comic book epics and other CGI-filled sci-fi fantasies, the movie feels like it’s way past its sell-by date. Alita: Battle Angel looks ready to rock, but time has sucked the life out of the party.
  68. The Extra Man
    Kline finds every nuance of mirth and melancholy in this wonder of a role and rides it to glory. You can't take your eyes off him.
  69. Under the Tuscan Sun
    Just soak up that Tuscan sun and wonder when Lane will get another movie, like "Unfaithful" or "A Walk on the Moon," that will let her really shine.
  70. Murder Mystery 2
    These are movies for those who find the Knives Out franchise too sophisticated and droll, red meat for the Sandler faithful. It’s a movie of small ambitions tailor-made for the small screen. It is exactly what you think it is.
  71. The Grudge
    To start as a genre resuscitation and end up as simply generic — that’s a far more fatal ending than any curse befalling the characters onscreen.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Six Degrees of Separation
    What felt appropriately metaphorical and ruminative on stage becomes somewhat muddled and inane onscreen. The real attraction here is the controlled, charismatic performance by the man formerly known as the Fresh Prince.
  73. Casa de los babys
    The film feels more like a thesis than vivid drama.
  74. SherryBaby
    Sherrybaby is the kind of pretend-arty Sundance thing that gives indie cinema a bad name.
  75. Skyscraper
    What you get is, regrettably and rather surprisingly, something that’s a lot less exciting than the sum of those particular parts.
  76. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Though Exit is often bold and imaginative, it is also curiously lifeless. The screenplay, by Desmond Nakano (Boulevard Nights), which combines the novel’s six separate stories, never adds up to a coherent whole.
  77. Contraband
    Wahlberg could sleepwalk through this role, and does. See this movie and you'll surely follow his lead.
  78. The Quiet One
    To watch The Quiet One at this particular moment in time is to feel that not only is this a highly subjective take, but that you’re being a little jerked around here. Even the most diehard Stones fan is bound to leave feeling a little conflicted. It’s a documentary that lives up to its name in all the wrong ways.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nun
    True horror requires anticipation to work properly, but it’s hard to anticipate anything when everything’s already being thrown at us. The dread dissipates. Our screams become nothing but weary sighs.
  80. The Heart of Me
    There's heart but not much heat in this film version of "The Echoing Grove."
  81. Yes Man
    If you're thinking "yuck," you're right. I added the extra star for Zooey Deschanel, who is so delicious as his honey that you want not to say no to Yes Man.
  82. Joyful Noise
    Lots of talented young singers decorate the scenery, notably Jeremy Jordan (late of Broadway's failed Bonnie & Clyde but soon-to-open in Newsies)who has vocal and acting chops that shine even in this bucket of Glee Goes Gospel cornpone.
  83. Picture Perfect
    Jennifer Aniston is a friend in need of a movie script that will really let her talent blossom. Picture Perfect is too TV-ish and timid a romantic farce to do the trick.
  84. The Catcher Was a Spy
    Boring is the last word you should use for a sports-hero-turned-spy story like this; it's the only one that comes to mind after you've seen the film.
  85. White Men Can't Jump
    What Shelton fails to provide is a coherent structure; the film is wearyingly repetitive. The boys do the same hustle and hurl the same racial epithets as our goodwill dribbles away.
  86. Reservation Road
    Even the best actors -- and I'd rank Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo among their generation's finest -- can't save a movie that aims for tragedy but stalls at soap opera.
  87. The Statement
    Jewison dodges the issues in the script by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) to focus on cat-and-mouse chases that kill interest.
  88. Vanity Fair
    In an effort to blend Thackeray and "Sex and the City," Vanity Fair ends up nowhere.
  89. The Beach
    Colorful and exciting, as far as it goes. But Boyle and Hodge pull back on their usual wit and grit.
    • Rolling Stone
  90. Knight and Day
    It strikes me that their teasing and one-upmanship are more brother and sister at play than lovers in heat. Cruise and Diaz are in it for the action rush.
  91. Soapdish
    The satire loses its edge as the filmmakers wrongheadedly try to humanize this nest of vipers. Soapdish is more fun when it's spitting venom than when it's licking wounds.
  92. Empire of Light
    It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.
  93. Knight of Cups
    Must all films about alienation be themselves alienating? Take a walk on the beach and ponder that one. There's a line between artful and arty, and Malick has crossed it.
  94. Mo' Better Blues
    A film that could have been the first cleareyed view of the jazz world from a black perspective ends as a romanticized fable. For the only time in his remarkable career, Spike Lee has failed to tell it like it is.
  95. Indecent Proposal
    As sexist propaganda, the film is shameless.
  96. Black or White
    Writer-director Mike Binder, who worked beautifully with Costner on 2005's "The Upside of Anger," finds himself on the downside of juggling stereotypes.
  97. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    An exercise anchored to a likable LeBron charmfest, melding multiple forms of animation, recycled cartoon jokes, and the basic plot of the original Space Jam, but with a twist that updates the original for our new, streaming content century.
  98. Submission
    Submission – despite valiant performances from Stanley Tucci and Addison Timlin as the parties involved – lacks the spark it needs to spring to life.
  99. The Indian Runner
    In his debut as a writer-director, Sean Penn shows a sure hand with actors and a knack for setting up a scene visually and dramatically. But he’s a bust at following through.
  100. Hit and Run
    This slapstick road movie feels tossed off by people on a raunchy bender. I mean that as a good thing. The trouble with Hit & Run is that it can't sustain its trippy effervescence.
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