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 2.7 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
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  1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    Quirky touches, dry wit and first-rate characterizations make “The Bone Temple” a rare treat and one of the finest zombie movies I’ve seen, not to mention a major improvement from last summer’s third entry in the series.
  2. The Martian
    What’s so fascinating about the film is that it truly turns on the solving of problems, and its chief solver, stuck on Mars, manages to be so funny, interesting and infallibly likable that you’re invested in his predicament at every moment.
  3. The Last Temptation of Christ
    Mr. Scorsese has created a Judea that is dusty and harsh, where visions in the middle of a night seem like. Some of the visual compositions are dizzyingly beautiful; the Crucifixion scene couldn't be more masterful, or heartbreaking. [11Aug 1988, p.1]
    • Wall Street Journal
  4. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Someone makes a jokey reference to the cartoon contrivance of “Scooby-Doo,” and the comparison is brutally apt.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Shows how a dedicated man ensured that great music could always be heard at its best.
    • Wall Street Journal
  6. Wendy and Lucy
    In a minimalist film of muted emotions, Michelle Williams gives as lovely a performance as a moviegoer could ask for.
  7. The Testament of Ann Lee
    The Testament of Ann Lee is primarily a film about the pull and power of belief. Delivered in a style that evokes its historical moment while also cutting across time to the present, it lands with the enthralling, incantatory force of urgent prayer.
  8. The Wrestler
    Director, Darren Aronofsky, and the writer, Robert D. Siegel, have turned the story of this washed-up faux gladiator into a film of authentic beauty and commanding consequence.
  9. The Hours
    The links and resonances remain largely abstract -- to understand them isn't necessarily to be moved by them -- while the individual dramas of those three lives are often stirring, and the three starring performances are unforgettable.
    • Wall Street Journal
  10. Coup 53
    Whether or not Darbyshire’s admission is the bombshell Mr. Amirani says it is, his account is a chilling commentary on a dark chapter in Middle East history.
  11. The Secret in Their Eyes
    A drama that transcends cleverness. This beautiful film, directed with subtlety and grace by Juan José Campanella, really is about moving from fear to love.
  12. King Coal
    Filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, a native of the state, has done a breathtakingly expressive job of capturing the strangeness, the beauty and the devastation of her homeland in the poetic, entrancing documentary King Coal.
  13. Good Time
    Containing as much forward motion as any film in recent memory, Good Time is as heartbreaking as it is exhilarating, and that’s no small thing.
  14. Everlasting Moments
    This exquisite film by the Swedish master Jan Troell is about seeing clearly, and fearlessly. It's also about subdued passion, the birth of an artist and a woman's struggle to live her own life.
  15. Perfect Days
    Though not a bad movie, exactly, Perfect Days is a bit too much like a ready-made rendering of a good one, replete with a number of great songs that give scenes a semblance of emotional force.
  16. Theeb
    You’d never know Theeb was a debut feature from Mr. Nowar’s confident technique, and I found it astonishing, given the perfection of the performances, that all but one of the actors were Bedouin villagers who had never acted before.
  17. Incendies
    Denis Villeneuve's screen adaptation of a play by the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad tells a story-masterfully-of courage, cruelty, family mysteries and a chain of anger that can only be broken by love.
  18. Nine Queens
    An accomplished and enjoyable Spanish-language debut feature by Fabían Bielinsky.
    • Wall Street Journal
  19. Incredibles 2
    Plenty good enough as exuberant entertainment with elegant graphics, plus a showcase for female superempowerment.
  20. Totally Under Control
    The most shocking scenes speak for themselves, the ones in which Americans deride, upbraid and physically attack one another over the wearing of masks. That’s when Totally Under Control functions not as a polemic but a mirror, and the picture isn’t pretty.
  21. Gleason
    Gleason is so powerful in its cumulative effect that it should be accompanied by a consumer advisory — something along the lines of “This documentary may cause sudden alterations of mood and attitude.”
  22. Casino Royale
    Daniel Craig isn't merely acceptable, but formidable. His Bond is at least the equal of the best ones before him, and beats all of them in sheer intensity.
    • Wall Street Journal
  23. Saraband
    Bergman's Saraband is sublime.
    • Wall Street Journal
  24. Ad Astra
    To lavish too much praise on Mr. Pitt’s performance would be to somehow suggest he isn’t already among the best actors on screen. He is. Between this film and the current “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” he could and should be a double Oscar nominee next year. If he’s not, it doesn’t mean his performance in Ad Astra isn’t an epic one.
  25. Love & Mercy
    Both Mr. Dano and Mr. Cusack, by contrast, find as many notes as they can in portraying their troubled character, though they’re clearly limited by the schematic writing and insistent direction.
  26. Chess Story
    Chess Story is a nerve-scraping exercise in grand deception.
  27. American Honey
    I don’t know how Ms. Arnold works the magic she does with her actors, whether amateur or professional — Mr. LaBeouf inhabits his role with sly charm and explosive ferocity — but it’s an expansion of what she started doing more than a decade ago in her remarkable “Wasp.”
  28. You Hurt My Feelings
    Movies about the mini-problems of normal people are vanishingly rare these days, mainly because it’s hard to make normal people seem interesting enough to be worth the price of a ticket. Ms. Holofcener has more than managed that, in a thoroughly engaging conversation-starter of a film.
  29. Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
    The film may not take quite as many chances with the documentary form as Armstrong took with the opening cadenza of “West End Blues” (recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five in 1928) but it is a daring work, a worthy and affectionate statement about the most important single figure in American popular music, 20th Century Division.
  30. Monrovia, Indiana
    In the realm of documentary films, as in the news media, polemicists are ascendant, but Frederick Wiseman isn’t one of them. For the past half-century, since his first film, “Titicut Follies,” he’s been an observationist. Not an observer, which carries a passive connotation, but a filmmaker who’s made a distinguished career of observing in a particular way — closely, calmly, shrewdly and systematically, with an eye to the institutions and social structures that shape and reveal people’s lives.
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