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. Dogman
    There’s a link between this Marcello and the Marcello played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci’s seminal “The Conformist,” a functionary ripe for corruption in Mussolini’s Italy. Both men are mesmerized by power, and both movies pose, in different ways, the same question — what happens when no one stands up to tyranny? In the Dogman’s case, another question presents itself. What happens if someone finally does? The answer is surprising, and, like the whole of Mr. Garrone’s film, eerily memorable.
  2. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Movies are seldom flawless and don’t have to be. This one speaks more eloquently to how a spell can be woven rather than broken.
  3. Rain
    Through exquisite details, evocative music and bold dramatic strokes -- including a tragedy that transcends the melodrama it might have been -- Rain renders this family's life in its full dimensions.
    • Wall Street Journal
  4. Get On Up
    All the more remarkably, then, this flawed but startling biopic stars another performer, Chadwick Boseman, who fills Brown's shoes with a dynamism that transcends imitation.
  5. Blitz
    Mr. McQueen seems consciously to be shedding his past style—the icy minimalism of “Hunger” and “Shame” and the scarifying gauntlet of his Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave”—in a bid to make a big, warm-hearted, conventional holiday-season tear-jerker. Yet the film . . . will strike many viewers as a bait-and-switch exercise.
  6. The Brink
    What The Brink does best is show the missionary zeal that sustains this eccentric warrior — “this gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk” is how he says he was perceived during the 2016 campaign. The film lets him speak for himself, which he does with wry charm, combative zest, scary certainty, unquenchable energy that can’t be explained by all the Red Bulls he gulps, and an ego undiminished by adversity.
  7. Shazam!
    It’s terrific fun, and none of the things that were threatening to turn DC Entertainment into the cinematic equivalent of a black hole. Just when the world needs a superhero with a gift for silliness, here he is in a movie whose best superpower turns out to be a good heart.
  8. The Damned
    It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.
  9. Mrs Henderson Presents
    One of the wittiest comedies to come our way in a very long time.
    • Wall Street Journal
  10. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    Morgan Neville’s documentary is a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these fractious times when they live in concert with one another.
  11. Vesper
    The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.
  12. Prisoners
    There's a near-sacred history in Hollywood of non-U.S.- born directors providing fresh perspectives on America. Miloš Forman. Alfred Hitchcock. Ang Lee. Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder. For Prisoners, a stress-inducing trip into child abduction, the director is Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who gives us an American "hero" guaranteed to push many buttons, many times, and who might not have been allowed to be quite so awful, under a different director's lens.
  13. Amélie
    An endearing film, and a fascinating one.
    • Wall Street Journal
  14. Batman Begins
    Batman Begins summons up moments of great eloquence and power. If only its cast of characters was as fully inhabited as its turbulent city.
    • Wall Street Journal
  15. The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte hosts the Tonight Show
    Ms. Richen has a problematic subject for a documentary, and the problems extend beyond the limitations of footage. She needs to sell the event, thus her lineup of marginally relevant characters gushing about it.
  16. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Entertaining but highly conventional documentary.
  17. The Barbarian Invasions
    The film grows on you too, a later-stage version of "The Big Chill" that starts schematically and ends as a stirring celebration.
    • Wall Street Journal
  18. Dior and I
    A fascinating procedural with a fitting climax.
  19. Sundown
    Through no fault of Mr. Roth’s, his character isn’t interesting enough to sustain our involvement in the story. Neil’s detachment doesn’t intrigue us, it only detaches us in our turn.
  20. Companion
    It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.
  21. A Complete Unknown
    Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.
  22. Friday Night Lights
    For all its energy, fine performances and dramatic confrontations, Friday Night Lights substitutes intensity for insight, dodging the book's harsher findings like a dazzling broken-field runner.
    • Wall Street Journal
  23. Ordinary Love
    The film’s strength lies in the performances — two fine actors elevating their roles from the touchingly mundane to the suddenly momentous.
  24. The Bikeriders
    There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.
  25. Swimming Pool
    Charlotte Rampling is the best reason, though far from the only one, to see Swimming Pool, a mesmerizing mystery, plus a wonderfully sensuous fantasy.
    • Wall Street Journal
  26. Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story
    It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    The narration, aided by a terrific score, does streamline the storytelling, and adds to it a faintly sardonic top note.
  28. Public Enemies
    Marvelously detailed and meticulously crafted, an elegant evocation of Depression-era America and its fascination with crime. What the movie lacks is any sense of elation--it’s joyless by choice.
  29. Sisu
    Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.
  30. Tsotsi
    Presley Chweneyagae's Tsotsi makes his presence deeply felt. In a world of heedless children wielding guns, his tale is a heartening one.
    • Wall Street Journal
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