Wall Street Journal's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Select another publication »
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 2.7 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
view
per page
  1. Life or Something Like It
    Every now and then, though, a movie comes up with a scene of surpassing stupidity, and then builds from that defining moment to a climax of perfect ineptitude. Life or Something Like It is such an achievement.
    • Wall Street Journal
  2. Wild Hogs
    Wild Hogs, which includes a cameo by a live revenant from "Easy Rider," gives a bad name to carpe diem, but could have been worse; the trip might have started from Bangor.
    • Wall Street Journal
  3. Van Helsing
    Nothing's alive in this trash-heap travesty of warm-weather entertainment, despite the frenetic pace.
    • Wall Street Journal
  4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
    One of the least appealing movies I've seen in a while.... When a member of the audience belched loudly, that got the biggest laugh of the day. [17 June 1986, p.E26]
    • Wall Street Journal
  5. Untraceable
    This joyless thriller runs the gamut from unconscionable through unwatchable to unendurable.
  6. Pain & Gain
    Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.
  7. Identity Thief
    Watch the trailer, if you must, but spare yourself the full experience: Identity Thief steals time.
  8. Redacted
    The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration.
  9. Hancock
    Any notions of demolishing black stereotypes -- and what else could have possessed Mr. Smith to do this? -- are dashed by the coarseness of it all, and by the narrative incoherence; a surprising plot twist turns a sloppy action-comedy into a totally different movie, and an even worse one.
  10. 15 Minutes
    If Detroit had produced an equivalent lemon, we might have been seeing the world's first one-wheeled, square-tired car with no cooling system, steering wheel or brakes.
    • Wall Street Journal
  11. Eight Crazy Nights
    An appallingly tedious Hanukkah comedy that must have bubbled up from the Porta Potti of his subconscious.
    • Wall Street Journal
  12. Boat Trip
    This comedy is harmless, too, when measured against the vast array of harms that the world has to offer. It's also stupid, strident, witless, pitifully inept and bad for what ails you.
    • Wall Street Journal
  13. Rock the Kasbah
    No one doesn’t love Bill Murray, but his melancholy torpor can wear thin in the best of circumstances, and these circumstances are pretty close to the worst. The cast includes Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson, Danny McBride and Scott Caan. No one escapes unscathed.
  14. An American Affair
    I have no idea how such shameless prattle found its way to the screen.
  15. Manderlay
    Hate is too strong an emotion to spend on such a clumsy, bloodless broadside against human foibles in general and American follies in particular.
    • Wall Street Journal
  16. Collateral Beauty
    A movie that means to be uplifting but turns out to be insufferable.
  17. The Call of the Wild
    Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.
  18. Funny Games (2008)
    In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.
  19. Jack Reacher
    Jack Reacher, which Christopher McQuarrie directed from his adaptation of a Lee Child crime novel, is not just another dumb thriller. It's almost peerlessly self-important, weirdly incoherent and eerily smarmy. It's also mysteriously inept, considering that Tom Cruise plays the title role.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    Unspeakably ghastly sequel to the merely ghastly original.
    • Wall Street Journal
  21. A Guy Thing
    Designed as a disposable commodity, it's a film I'd dispose of with no further ado, except for what it says about minimum standards in a certain tacky niche of the movie business, as well as for what it suggests, in its lunkheaded way, about the perils that marriage may pose.
    • Wall Street Journal
  22. Welcome To Marwen
    The results are mind-numbingly immense, joylessly violent and utterly lifeless.
  23. How Do You Know
    No need to belabor the awfulness of this film, a romantic comedy devoid of romance - instead of chemistry there's the flow of reverse magnetism - and lacking in comic timing, let alone comic content.
  24. Storks
    The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.
  25. Bedtime Stories
    As a PG-rated film opening on Christmas Day under the Disney banner, Bedtime Stories would seem to promise fairly wholesome family entertainment. What it delivers is the glitzy allure of a hotel setting, smarmy double entendres, Ferrari lust, Beverly Hills bling and pneumatic babes -- one of the characters is a surrogate Paris Hilton.
  26. The Cat in the Hat
    An abomination, impure and simple.
    • Wall Street Journal
  27. Ender's Game
    Not only does Ender's Game have many scenes in zero gravity, but this zero-sum fiasco has zero drama, zero suspense, zero humor, zero charm and zero appeal.
  28. Because I Said So
    This film bespeaks a truly startling mistrust of the movie audience, and, what's more, a disrespect for the feature film medium. Yes, of course it was conceived as an unpretentious entertainment pitched mainly to girls and young women. Yet that doesn't explain the nightmarish quality of the finished product.
    • Wall Street Journal
  29. Dumbo
    Disney’s new Dumbo is one ponderous pachyderm, a live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with a grim tone and a dead soul. It’s astounding that Tim Burton and his colleagues could have created such a downer from a long-beloved source of delight.
  30. Olympus Has Fallen
    Olympus Has Fallen is no fun at all. To the contrary, it soon grows tedious, odious and oppressive.
  31. The Other Woman
    Lest my own reaction be misconstrued, let me explain that I didn't like a single one of these insufferable narcissists, the kid included.
  32. The Love Guru
    The road taken by The Love Guru could hardly be lower, and leads nowhere.
  33. Greed
    The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal.
  34. Henry Fool
    I found it insufferably fatuous and damned near interminable. [26 Jun 1998]
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 12 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Cocktail
    This one could bring back Prohibition.
    • Wall Street Journal
  36. Blacklight
    Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.
  37. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    One of the strongest arguments yet for making sequels illegal.
    • Wall Street Journal
  38. Speed Racer
    This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.
  39. Youth
    From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.
  40. In Secret
    Whatever possessed the people who made this film to believe its ponderous style would appeal to contemporary audiences? One answer may lie in a variant of the mostly true proposition that no one sets out to make a bad film. No one chooses ponderousness as a goal; it comes unbidden, with deadly earnestness.
  41. View from the Top
    All the same, it's a feat to find the lowest common denominator at 40,000 feet; View From the Top would be perfect as the first in-flight offering of the new Hooters airline.
    • Wall Street Journal
  42. My Boss's Daughter
    Moronic. idiotic. Insulting. Pathetic. But enough with the sweet talk.
    • Wall Street Journal
  43. Love the Coopers
    Watching this film is like being trapped inside a snow globe — no air, no warmth, no life — while the death of drama unfolds.
  44. Jumper
    Jumper, based on the novel by Steven Gould, re-defines -- downward -- the notion of dreadful. It does so by dispensing with everything a movie needs for a shot at being merely awful. Dramatic development? None. Entertaining dialogue? Ditto. Internal logic? Puhleez. Intriguing characters? No characters, thus no intrigue. Interesting performances? Essentially none, though with an asterisk.
next
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »