Wall Street Journal's Scores

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For 3,944 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Les Misérables
Lowest review score: 0 The Limits of Control
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,102 out of 3944
  2. Mixed: 1,197 out of 3944
  3. Negative: 645 out of 3944
3944 movie reviews
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  1. TÁR
    Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.
  2. The Boy and the Heron
    The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.
  3. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.
  4. Before Sunset
    It's "My Dinner With Andre" for the relationship generation.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    Rendering all of its materials with a self-protective tongue-in-cheek tone, Star Wars is fun. But if the movie appeals to the child in all of us, it also may seem to the adult within a good deal less delightful. There's something depressing about seeing all these impressive cinematic gifts and all this extraordinary technological skills lavished on such puerile materials.
  6. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Ms. Gladstone draws a lot of sympathy as the modest, helpless Mollie, but like everything else here her performance suffers from inertia. She spends the bulk of the movie mired in illness and despondency, and her look mirrors how I felt as I watched: numb and trapped.
  7. The Power of the Dog
    Insisting on the significance of its themes, the film dispenses one emotion at a time while it creates a pervasive atmosphere of dread. Yet there’s no air in the atmosphere, not much life in the brooding landscapes.
  8. A Serious Man
    What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie?
  9. About Dry Grasses
    About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.
  10. Up
    I'm still left, though, with an unshakable sense of Up being rushed and sketchy, a collection of lovely storyboards that coalesced incompletely or not at all.
  11. Mulholland Dr.
    Watching this surrealist silliness, I would have welcomed the sight of a geezer on a riding mower.
    • Wall Street Journal
  12. Robot Dreams
    It’s a feel-good fable of companionship that is just a little too simple, in both its sadness and its sweetness.
  13. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Needlessly long, visually drab and not just a foreign-language film, with English subtitles, but a film that's ostensibly foreign to our experience. That said, there are compelling reasons to see it.
    • Wall Street Journal
  14. Caught by the Tides
    The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.
  15. Good One
    It feels mostly believable but a bit too obvious, as the meaning of the movie seems to shrink in its final minutes to fit a theme. Still, as a debut, “Good One” is good enough, a sensitively performed drama of a journey into the wild.
  16. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.
  17. I Saw the TV Glow
    There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.
  18. The Pianist
    Astonishing visually and problematic dramatically.
    • Wall Street Journal
  19. The Wild Robot
    This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.
  20. The Dark Knight
    Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note.
  21. I'm Still Here
    Much of it has a potent force, thanks in large part to the performance of Ms. Torres.
  22. Children of Men
    Bloated adaptation of P.D. James's thoughtful, compact novel.
    • Wall Street Journal
  23. Sinners
    The great sin of “Sinners” is that, for all the audacity of its conception, it finally collapses into the familiar.
  24. Sirât
    Visually epic, sonically relentless and otherwise fatuous, the film has a dramatic inertia occasionally punctuated by eruptions of utter catastrophe—a series of shocks that leaves you singed, shaken and not much better for it.
  25. Hamnet
    As dry and matter-of-fact as Ms. Zhao was in Nomadland, which won her Oscars for best director and best picture (as she was one of its producers), she is the opposite here, driving her actors to maximal emoting. The movie purports to dip into the deep well of Shakespearean magnificence but emerges only with a ladle full of greasy schmaltz.
  26. Mystic River
    If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.
    • Wall Street Journal
  27. Universal Language
    The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.
  28. A Little Princess
    For all its rich trappings, A Little Princess is impoverished at the core. [18 May 1995, p.A14]
    • Wall Street Journal
  29. Hugo
    Visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon.
  30. The LEGO Movie
    The Lego Film has a specialness all its own. There's never been a hodgepodge quite like it.
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