Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Scores

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For 2,931 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Peter Pan
Lowest review score: 0 Mindhunters
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,824 out of 2931
  2. Mixed: 872 out of 2931
  3. Negative: 235 out of 2931
2931 movie reviews
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  1. Three Monkeys
    Ceylan has an unerring gift for camera placement, and his slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely -- at times, too much so, with the characters constrained by his poetic perfection.
  2. The Last House on the Left
    Iliadis is more visually sophisticated than Craven was in 1972 and works hard to sustain the mood and tension while still hitting the audience with blunt scenes of wincing violence. (It gets grisly and grotesque enough for gore hounds.)
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Race to Witch Mountain
    After an excellent setup, the movie becomes bogged down in chase scene after chase scene on its way to its inevitable ending.
  4. Watchmen
    The casting clicks; the visuals have leaped right out of Dave Gibbons' original panels; the action is brutal, stylish and well-staged, and -- with most of the major characters, themes and symbolism are retained in an abbreviated form -- the 2 1/2-hour film makes an enjoyably esoteric Cliff's Notes version of the book.
  5. Phoebe in Wonderland
    There's an unconvincing warm, fuzzy happy ending, in which recognition is treated as cure and understanding heals all. But, until then, Phoebe in Wonderland is an involving and empathetic drama of mothers and daughters.
  6. Everlasting Moments
    Everlasting Moments both is a tribute to Larsson -- a relative of the director's wife, Jan (author of the original story) -- and a love letter to the art of photography.
  7. Gomorrah
    It's all about waste and destruction, and not just the toxic waste -- illegally dumped in landfills -- that is poisoning the farmland and the aquifers in the region.
  8. Two Lovers
    Joaquin Phoenix is as good as he has ever been in James Gray's Two Lovers, a discomfortingly honest drama about the frustrations of love and desire.
  9. Under the Sea 3D
    As dazzling as they come, a visual pageant of strange undersea creatures hunting and scavenging and floating across the screen.
  10. Coraline
    A classic fairy tale with a contemporary sensibility and a spooky horror under the candy-house fantasy.
  11. Fanboys
    A hilariously spry effort from an equally unpromising premise.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Shopaholic
    If cheesy, feel-good riches-to-reason romantic comedies are yours, this is your fix. It's a harmless indulgence that, like shopping, may make you feel good for the short term, but later you'll need more.
  13. The International
    For all its impressive set pieces and breathless momentum, it's neither passionate nor urgent.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Taken
    Accomplished if misguided thriller.
  15. New in Town
    It resorts to a story line so predictable that its willingness to go so earnestly into unoriginal territory is doubly disappointing since its first half had so much more going for it.
  16. Inkheart
    Inkheart feels a little confused in its tone and direction, but only a little, and I appreciate the way it both celebrates the power of literature and reminds us that stories have a life beyond the page, even if they are only in our hearts and minds.
  17. Hotel for Dogs
    The movie's political and moral points -- and theme about creating family however you can find it -- elevate it above the average kids movie.
  18. Defiance
    It's an exciting action spectacle and a thoughtful, cumulatively moving family drama.
  19. Revolutionary Road
    The results are being billed as a reunion of the "Titanic" star team, but anyone expecting a similarly gushy romantic idyll is in for a shock: it is an uncompromisingly dreary view of two self-deluded people incapable and unwilling to understand one another.
  20. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    With his usual intelligence, technical virtuosity (the reverse-aging effects are astounding) and storytelling panache, director Fincher gives the film a power and unity that make nearly three hours go by in a flash and pulls its diverse elements together to be something unique for a Hollywood movie -- a true spiritual experience.
  21. Last Chance Harvey
    It's a pleasure to see mature portraits of adult characters who put their vulnerabilities on the line. I enjoyed my time in the company of these strangers.
  22. Marley & Me
    Looks to be this season's family animal comedy.
  23. Valkyrie
    The movie works like a clock. A few minor quibbles aside (the casting of Hitler, for instance), Valkyrie is a highly intelligent and deeply engrossing historical drama and, frame for frame, the year's most suspenseful nail-biter.
  24. Waltz with Bashir
    What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
  25. The Class
    The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.
  26. Seven Pounds
    A movie that plays better if you know nothing about it going in.
  27. The Wrestler
    It's bleak, credulity straining and often stomach-turning, but it definitely works as a heart-tugging character study, and Rourke's performance as the has-been title character is golden.
  28. Timecrimes
    There's a dark and demented little psychodrama of self-inflicted madness beneath the narrative contrivances. Vigalondo's direction makes it work more like a waking nightmare than a genuine experience, and he gives it the quality of madness.
  29. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Surprise! The remake is not a heresy. It's a decent enough stab at being what the old movie was to its time, following the same basic plot, full of respectful references to its model, updated with a gallery of fairly imaginative special effects.
  30. Doubt
    The film's added enigma makes the play's title even more appropriate, but it results in a more ambiguous and perhaps less satisfying dramatic experience.
  31. Gran Torino
    This movie seems even rougher around the edges than much of his past work. Still, it's hard to resist.
  32. Che
    It's all about Guevara's education as a revolutionary and his development as a leader in the jungles and in battle.
  33. The Reader
    The Reader is significant because -- like another film opening today, "Valkyrie" -- it asks us to see not just the Jews but the whole German people as victims of the Holocaust, and to view Nazism as more a product of explicable ignorance than inexplicable evil.
  34. Wendy and Lucy
    It's a tender, tough, uncompromising film, photographed with a disarming directness and seeming simplicity that looks almost naked next to the dramatic constructions of most films. It just makes her precariousness all the more real.
  35. Frost/Nixon
    Throughout, it's clouded -- for me at least -- by a nagging sense that it's straining too hard to build the media clash into more of an historic event than it was.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Cadillac Records
    The movie's biopic aspect is multiplied by the sheer number of players who made Chess the first family of Chicago blues, R&B and rock 'n' roll...That all of them were later inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame attests to their enormous influence on popular music and culture.
  37. Milk
    Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Bolt
    As the voice of Bolt, John Travolta does a fine job and Disney star Miley Cyrus is fine as well, but neither one can overcome the lack of personality in their scripted characters.
  39. Australia
    Jackman, who stepped in after a cranky Russell Crowe walked away in a salary dispute, strikes just the right chord as a scruffy romantic hero.
  40. Quantum of Solace
    The movie is a relentlessly enjoyable star vehicle and a hard-charging action-o-rama full of the usual Bondian elements, for the most part well done. It's one of the year's better action films.
  41. A Christmas Tale
    The most emotionally rich and cinematically thrilling film I've seen all year, a film that pulses with human life in all its terrible and beautiful irrationality.
  42. Slumdog Millionaire
    This is Boyle's fullest, most satisfying work and an audience-pleaser that deserves to be a big hit.
  43. JCVD
    An inspired melding of action thriller, satire and biographical drama through the looking glass of a funhouse mirror.
  44. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    The film shoehorns in every memorable character from the original film.
  45. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    Zack and Miri is funny, and Rogen is a natural as Smith's alter-ego, spewing profane dialogue like he was born to it.
  46. Changeling
    Changeling doesn't care if you love it or hate it, it makes no compromises to fashion and it's charged with that unmistakable assurance of a master filmmaker at his creative peak.
  47. I've Loved You So Long
    For all its moodiness, despair and disconnect, I've Loved You So Long is all about acknowledging human error and embracing ties -- to family and life -- that can't be undone.
  48. Let the Right One In
    It's a little long and dissipates some of its power in an unfocused subplot, but the skewed sensibility of the film is both innocent and feral and offers a smart and satisfying reworking to the familiar genre. An American remake is already in the works.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Synecdoche, New York
    Although obviously a stretched and lightly drawn caricature -- the cerebral writer is obsessed with his work, has metaphorical skin problems, can't have sex without weeping, etc. -- Cotard is real. Or as real a representation of an artist as we're likely to get in this biopic age.
  50. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Despite the cultural and artistic differences among the contributors, the overall production design maintains a unified tone, helped in part by Laurent Perez's eerie soundtrack.
  51. W.
    Seems a much more even-handed and thoughtful take on the man than anyone might have expected.
  52. Max Payne
    A dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualizes better than he dramatizes.
  53. Morning Light
    Vividly captures the joy of sailing.
  54. The Secret Life of Bees
    It's the strength of the actresses and their nurturing community that makes this Eden so satisfying.
  55. Body of Lies
    As good as it is in pieces, its protagonists are distancing, its story is tangled, its film-noir cynicism is oppressive and unglamorous, and it just doesn't leave us with the satisfying unity of the kind of great movie it wants to be.
  56. Dung che sai duk
    It's a little visually precious and obscure but still a marvelously wistful film of regret and retreat, in which even the magic wine of forgetfulness erases only the memories, not the pain.
  57. City of Ember
    It scores few points for originality, but it's a fuzzier, less pretentious and more enjoyable movie.
  58. Happy-Go-Lucky
    While it's being sold as "an effervescent comedy," Happy-Go-Lucky is nothing of the sort. It's rather grim, the laughs are few.
  59. Religulous
    Stylistically, Religulous is very much like a Michael Moore documentary, in that most of the scenes have a comic structure, end with a punch line and are designed to make Maher-the-interviewer look sane and rational while his subject comes off as a complete fool.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Let's call this "High Fidelity Nano." It's a little bit less in every way, lighter and cuter than its archetypal elder, but it might just fit your present lifestyle all the better. Who needs to go back to the polysyllabic spree of John Cusack channeling Nick Hornby when you have Michael Cera making awkward emo look so lovable?
  61. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    It's hardly a must-see laugh riot, but it is a good chuckle, and it does its job well.
  62. Blindness
    Meirelles adds another perspective, that the epidemic might be a good thing if, by being thrown into the darkness together, we may once again recognize the human family to which we all belong.
  63. Flash of Genius
    An uncompromising and ultimately chilling look at individual creativity trampled by corporate greed, and its timing could not be more appropriate.
  64. Rachel Getting Married
    True to the characters and their conflicts, the resolution is neither neat nor expected. True to Demme, it's honest and generous and very human.
  65. Ballast
    Hammer filmed on location with local nonactors. Their lack of polish is evident -- Smith's inexpressiveness, though part of his character, is simply blank at times -- but their conviction can be just as powerful.
  66. Eagle Eye
    The movie is so engrossing as an intellectual puzzle and such a solid thriller in every other department that it's probably actor-proof.
  67. Ghost Town
    Ghost Town reworks "Ghost" as a romantic comedy with a miserable hero who sees dead people and is really annoyed by them.
  68. Appaloosa
    An old-fashioned Western with all the classic elements -- buddy loyalty, stalwart heroes, despicable villains, plenty of gunfights and marvelous wind-scoured desert landscapes -- marked by some modern ideas about relationships.
  69. Battle in Seattle
    Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?
  70. The Duchess
    Provided you don't take it seriously, it makes for an addictively entertaining diversion that's as hard to stop watching as the books are to stop reading.
  71. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Contrary to its title, Virtual JFK is less a counter-history of the Vietnam years than a tribute to John F. Kennedy's stubborn resistance to a military that pressured him to go to war on six occasions during his short presidency.
  72. Burn After Reading
    One of the Coens' more playful projects, much lighter and significantly slighter than "No Country for Old Men" or "Fargo," but it's put together with such perfection that you can't help but be won over.
  73. Mister Foe
    Were it not for its pat resolutions, Mister Foe might deserve a mention alongside such classic psycho-sexual thrillers as "Vertigo" and "Peeping Tom." Instead, Mackenzie has reined in the strangeness to deliver a conventional, if better than average, mystery.
  74. Ping Pong Playa
    Yu has a good time making fun of white people, in particular a pair of rival ping-pong teachers who seem inspired by the gay villains in the Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever."
  75. Year of the Fish
    An eye-opener for those unfamiliar with the tribulations many immigrants endure on their road to American citizenship. And yes, it is also a fairy tale, but not all fairy tales are for children.
  76. Traitor
    A tough, taut, mostly well-executed morality parable and thriller that explores some of the bitter ironies of this strange religious vendetta in which America unwittingly finds itself.
  77. Death Race
    This new version has absolutely none of the distinctive tongue-in-cheek black humor that was the keynote of its model and the trademark of its original director, Paul Bartel.
  78. Hamlet 2
    A frequently amusing and consistently outrageous but ultimately tiresome farce.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Rocker
    The most surprising thing about The Rocker is how enjoyable it is.
  80. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    The movie goes down very easily.
  81. Henry Poole Is Here
    This may sound like a satiric comedy, and its intriguing setup carries a faintly comedic tone, but the movie becomes more straight-faced as it moves along and ends up being a fairly serious examination on the nature of, and necessity for, faith.
  82. Tropic Thunder
    Some of the writing is very smart, its strain of show-business satire is dead-on and often hilarious, and some of the performances have an insanity and intensity reminiscent of "Dr. Strangelove."
  83. Elegy
    An absorbing but somber drama.
  84. Pineapple Express
    One of the most hilarious and engaging films from producer Judd Apatow's often inconsistent comedy factory, thanks to inspired dialogue, dynamite chemistry between Rogen and Franco and perfectly pitched stoner gags (undoubtedly the result of copious research).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Ferrera walks this fine line between the real and the fairy tale – she's the only one in the film who doesn't seem to equate a good performance with a lot of blinking – and it's fun to watch her outside the confines of her TV character.
  86. Swing Vote
    The thing is far too absurd and broadly played for its own good.
  87. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    The rude naturalism of the opening scenes between Wilson and Jacob recalls the spirited vulgarity of "Clerks," with dialogue that would be hopelessly offensive were it not so funny and true to life.
  88. America the Beautiful
    A wide-ranging, disturbing look at our obsession with our looks.
  89. Frozen River
    Most films about illegal immigration are set on the Mexican border, and Frozen River is free of the stereotypical characters and situations of that familiar setting. It also offers a rare look at modern Native American life, exploring the ambiguity of what it means to say that the laws of the white man cannot be enforced on Indian territory.
  90. American Teen
    An entertaining slice-of-life documentary that gets ever more fascinating as it moves along.
  91. Baghead
    More clever than smart and isn't always emotionally convincing, but the cast brings a palpable, persuasive awkwardness to the social tensions of this not-so-romantic getaway, and there's a sly wit to the way the filmmakers mix and match and upend genres.
  92. Brideshead Revisited
    Bound to seem, at best, a kind of CliffsNotes guide to the novel's highlights, especially if the casting is not all that inspired.
  93. Man on Wire
    An engrossing study in abnormal psychology, an inspirational drama that tells us a determined man really can do anything his mind can envision and is the first film that plays on what could become a phenomenon of the new millennium: World Trade Center nostalgia.
  94. The Dark Knight
    With The Dark Knight, the cinematic superhero spectacle comes closest to becoming modern myth, a pulp tragedy with costumed players and elevated stakes and terrible sacrifices. It's the new gold standard for superhero noir.
  95. Mamma Mia!
    This is an actress (Streep) who can pull off anything -- including a shamelessly kitschy musical.
  96. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    It definitely gives us our money's worth in the sheer volume of its imaginative fantasy creatures and it's that rare superhero-movie sequel that's better than the original.
  97. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    It's harmless fun, and it makes for an often impressive display of the latest generation of computer-wizardry. But the enterprise is utterly void of substance: instantly forgettable and about as enriching as a rerun of "Johnny Quest."
  98. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    The film walks a fine line between contempt for Polanski's crimes and sympathy for his trials and his screwed-up psyche, and it manages both while showing us why he fled the U.S. rather than face the corrupted judicial circus.
  99. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    The film is annoyingly sketchy on Thompson's early years and education, and it spends so much time on his coverage of the 1972 presidential election and his own race for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., that major aspects of his career get short shrift or go unmentioned.
  100. Hancock
    The script doesn't always find the most effective way to the heart of the conflicts and Berg struggles to balance the mix of tones and the conflicts of man and superman, but he never sacrifices the integrity of his characters or their relationships for an easy ending. That alone makes Hancock the most adult of the new wave of superhero dramas.
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