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. An Honest Liar
    The film deserves to be seen, and admired, for its own revelations, and for its unlikely, yet deeply affecting, transformation into a story of abiding love that, in its own turn, involves a deception. At the age of 86, Mr. Randi is a small, gnomish figure who walks with a cane. What seems entirely undiminished, though, is the power of his mind, driven more than ever by the dictates of his heart.
  2. The Meaning of Hitler
    This ambitious and mutedly angry film also assumes an ironic tone in examining the Hitler phenomenon from angles political, sociological, psychological and, very intriguingly, cinematic.
  3. Soul Kitchen
    Who knew this German-born Turkish filmmaker could perpetrate a delirious farce-in German and Greek with good English subtitles-that doesn't flag for a single one of its 99 minutes?
  4. Hail Satan?
    It’s a fascinating documentary about ragtag political activists making fundamentally serious mockery at a high level of media savvy. It’s about jujitsu as performance art — turning an opponent’s outrage to one’s advantage; about deadpan as dramatic technique, and about the damnedest strategy you could imagine, summoning up Satan as a champion of religious freedom.
  5. Amrum
    Amrum is a stirring example of how childhood reminiscence can stand for so much more.
  6. The Whistlers
    The tutoring sessions progress from whimsical to intriguing to captivating, even though Cristi and his confederates don’t really do very much with their secret code. Good stories thrive on details. The specifics here are abundant, and so charmingly preposterous — or maybe not, who knows? — that they command your rapt attention.
  7. Midnight Special
    A beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure.
  8. Occupied City
    Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history—or, for that matter, to the present that treads forever in its shadow.
  9. Tickled
    What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.
  10. Brothers
    A drama of uncommon moral complexity, unexpected humor, convincing transformations (for good and bad) and, best of all, vibrant, unpredictable energy. In a movie landscape littered with dead souls, here's a live one.
    • Wall Street Journal
  11. The Last Station
    The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.
  12. Margin Call
    As such, it's chilling and enjoyable in unequal measure. Entertainment predominates, but entertainment with smarts, and a well-honed edge.
  13. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God creates a reality that is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and remarkable for its buoyancy and grace. It’s a film from the hand of a master.
  14. Listen Up Philip
    A very entertaining black comedy for very mysterious reasons.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Holy Mountain
    A landmark of visionary filmmaking pitched somewhere between magic ritual and surreal burlesque.
  16. Wonder Woman
    Caught up in the coils of Princess Diana’s hot lasso, I am bound to tell the truth: Wonder Woman is wonderful, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment. She is also learned, charmingly funny and, for a goddess, touchingly human.
  17. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    The age when such images held firm positions in the culture may be over, but Mr. Corbijn’s film has given it a glorious and stirring elegy.
  18. (500) Days of Summer
    An exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.
  19. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    The distinction of this lovely, if slightly tentative, debut feature is its willingness to set forth mysteries of the human heart without solving them; everyone's fate stays unsealed.
    • Wall Street Journal
  20. Spencer
    Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.
  21. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    This portrait of a failing marriage is one of the summer's great discoveries, and a marvel of mercurial intimacy.
    • Wall Street Journal
  22. The Revenant
    I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.
  23. No Sudden Move
    It’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure.
  24. Stronger
    Director David Gordon Green, working with screenwriter John Pollono’s adaptation of the book by Mr. Bauman and Bret Witter, maintains a brisk pace. There’s barely a maudlin moment, which is remarkable given the subject matter.
  25. September 5
    September 5 is tough, rough, messy and gritty, in the tradition of American cinema from the decade in which it takes place.
  26. Pavements
    Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves.
  27. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    A survey of the week wouldn't be complete without a left-handed salute--not to be confused with a backhanded compliment--to the gleeful rubbish of Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
  28. Bernstein's Wall
    Mr. Tirola has fashioned a portrait of the man that is engaging if not exactly revelatory, and occasionally a little broad in its attempt to fill out the social context, with footage of Hitler, Vietnam and the KKK coming in sweeping succession early on.
  29. Obvious Child
    Yet the heart of the film lies in what it manages to say, without boldface or italics, about how hard it is for Donna, like so many of her anxious cohort, to make genuine connections, to break free of narcissistic constraints and become a stand-up grown-up.
  30. Iris
    I regretted it most when the temporal hopscotching took me away from Ms. Winslet's portrait of the writer as a young sensualist, madly smitten by words and life.
    • Wall Street Journal
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »