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. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    Good fun -- more fun than in the original -- punctuated by some lines of admirable awfulness.
  2. The Devil Wears Prada
    Mistrustful of its audience, it's full of actors -- apart from Streep -- playing broad attitudes rather than characters. Crafted like a high end TV show, it's a sort of video Vogue -- lite, brite and trite.
    • Wall Street Journal
  3. Violent Night
    There are many smart comic ideas in Violent Night, but they are scattered unevenly throughout, the villains are dull, and most of the imaginative energy goes into devising spectacularly gory murders involving the distressingly off-label use of Christmas paraphernalia.
  4. The Cured
    That's a pretty good notion, though nothing comes of it because the first-time filmmaker, David Freyne, has so many undigested ideas on his plate-guilt, innocence, bigotry, forgiveness, atonement and, if you please, a replaying of IRA strife.
  5. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    Mr. Ritchie has fashioned a simple, meat-and-potatoes action thriller, in the same category as “12 Strong” (2018) and “Lone Survivor” (2013). Yet unlike those films, this one is pure fiction, which both untethers it from reality and imbues it with a certain free-floating meaninglessness.
  6. Shanghai Knights
    A machine for killing time, and it does so fairly painlessly.
    • Wall Street Journal
  7. Evolution
    The special effects are variable, but even when they're good they don't have much impact because Evolution, with its self-trashing spirit, turns moviegoers into bemused bysitters.
    • Wall Street Journal
  8. Limbo
    Written, directed and edited by Ivan Sen and shot (also by Mr. Sen) in black-and-white, the film is spare, sunbleached and serious in its study of people long neglected and abused. Yet the drama is thin, and the mystery halfhearted.
  9. Shot
    The split screen has a downside: It punctuates the lopsidedness of the script by Anneke Campbell and Will Lamborn, Miguel’s story being far less convincingly written than Mark’s.
  10. Beau Is Afraid
    I respect a film for being as daring, original and personal as this one is, but by the third act it starts to feel like an extended therapy session about mommy issues. The final sequences are more embarrassing than exhilarating.
  11. All or Nothing
    This feelbad movie makes you glad when it's over.
    • Wall Street Journal
  12. Must Love Dogs
    Short on dramatic energy, Must Love Dogs settles for a cheerful drone.
    • Wall Street Journal
  13. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.
  14. Snow Dogs
    Snow Dogs isn't subtle, to say the least, but it's a serviceable city-slicker-in-the-frozen-sticks comedy for kids and undemanding adults.
    • Wall Street Journal
  15. Fair Game
    Most of the scenes depicting the couple's domestic life are borderline-banal, and they miniaturize the political drama that plays out partly in public, partly in the shadows but almost always in a middle distance just beyond emotional reach.
  16. Uglies
    This is a kid’s movie for kids and may find a fervent audience among them, thanks to the way it conforms to the idea that virtue, hope and integrity are the exclusive purviews of youth.
  17. Where Do We Go Now?
    An absurdist fantasy on a solemn theme, Where Do We Go Now? suffers from a serious clash of styles, but it's also brave and startlingly funny - at one point verging on "Mamma Mia!" - when it isn't bleak or shocking.
  18. Dracula
    Lush romanticism, bloody action and a certain winking distance from the material keep Mr. Besson’s picture vivid if not quite compelling.
  19. Howard
    The Ashman story itself is the stuff of a Broadway musical. It just needed some music—what’s here is doled out in penurious and unsatisfying morsels.
  20. Inception
    By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.
  21. 3:10 to Yuma
    The strengths of the first "3:10 To Yuma" were enhanced by its proportionality -- an intimate story told in 92 minutes. The story is no bigger in the new version, which goes on for 117 minutes. And it's certainly not better.
  22. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Ms. Blanchett can do no wrong, and does none here, though the movie around her, a popcorn-worthy sequel to the 1998 "Elizabeth," often lapses into opacity or grandiosity.
  23. The Armstrong Lie
    The Armstrong Lie wears thin before it's over; the wafer-thin nature of the cyclist's personality can't sustain a two-hour running time.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beerfest
    Ok, so maybe you don't absolutely have to have a Y chromosome and be 14 years old (or have the mind of a 14-year-old) to appreciate the freshmanic humor that is Beerfest. But, oh, does it help.
    • Wall Street Journal
  25. Wall Street
    Wall Street is a silly, pretentious melodrama that panders to the current fascination with insider trading. [10 Dec 1987, p.1]
    • Wall Street Journal
  26. Secret Window
    Secret Window has an ending that lets one of our most reliably interesting actors pull out all the stops. But getting there from a good beginning followed by a slow, repetitive middle is a test of resourcefulness for him and a test of patience for us.
    • Wall Street Journal
  27. The Independent
    An undercooked serving of political skulduggery that nevertheless provides a showcase for the magnetic Jodie Turner-Smith. Like most of the cast, she’s better than the material.
  28. Atlas
    You can’t say too many nice things about “Atlas.” You wouldn’t want to encourage people. And yet this cacophonous, big-budget, Jennifer Lopez-powered movie/videogame just might offer up a justification for humanity, while at the same time suggesting we need one.
  29. Tower Heist
    The type of film with which Mr. Ratner has claimed to be infatuated is itself like a caper - it requires precise execution. Tower Heist is more like that 10-story Snoopy, as he drunkenly bobs along Central Park West.
  30. Straight Outta Compton
    With a running time of 147 minutes, the film not only runs low on energy toward the end — internecine battles can’t compete with the early excitement of gifted young kids making it big on a national stage — but turns ploddingly sentimental in its sudden focus on Eazy-E’s painful decline, and death, from AIDS.
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