Wall Street Journal's Scores

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For 3,961 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: 2,111 out of 3961
  2. Mixed: 1,202 out of 3961
  3. Negative: 648 out of 3961
3961 movie reviews
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  1. Bird
    Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of Bird don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.
  2. The Piano Lesson
    The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.
  3. Heretic
    Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.
  4. A Real Pain
    It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.
  5. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.
  6. 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.
  7. Here
    The inch-deep approach to history and social issues, the high-concept device, and the trite characters all seem better suited to a different type of movie—such as one of those gee-whiz featurettes shown at the EPCOT theme park.
  8. Juror #2
    Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.
  9. Dahomey
    As a witness to some small rectification and the still simmering problems that surround it, Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.
  10. Conclave
    None of it rings true; those who seek a serious dramatic inquiry into the inner workings of the church should look elsewhere.
  11. Memoir of a Snail
    Mr. Elliot’s script is so rich and gently funny that he could easily have made an excellent live-action feature from it. As it is, though, the animation makes it even more lovable.
  12. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    It simply never comes together with the sort of gathering force that we witness in its own scenes of artistic creation. Mr. Kaphar might yet make a movie that vibrates with the power of a great painting. Exhibiting Forgiveness, though, still feels like a jumbled sketch.
  13. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
    Caligula is still far from great, but it has risen to the level of an enjoyable, intermittently campy soap about ruthlessness, with one or two affecting moments.
  14. Anora
    Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.
  15. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
    The storytelling is first-rate, snowballing along from one outrage to the next.
  16. Woman of the Hour
    Woman of the Hour may be sensational, in the tabloid sense, but it is angry, too, and full of questions.
  17. The Last of the Sea Women
    The Last of the Sea Women is, like its subjects, beautiful and charming.
  18. We Live in Time
    A mawkish core remains, though, and the resulting disjuncture—between the film’s indie style and its sludgy sentimentality—makes the whole effort feel phony.
  19. The Apprentice
    Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.
  20. Piece By Piece
    Borrowing the look of The Lego Movie, Piece by Piece is as bouncy and playful as a room full of rambunctious toddlers.
  21. Salem's Lot
    Mr. Dauberman, abetted by cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”), finds ways to make the Lot both anxious and dour, though the moods don’t always match up with the wobbly storytelling, or help set it on a purposeful path.
  22. White Bird
    Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.
  23. Intercepted
    In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.
  24. Saturday Night
    This kinetic, documentary-style, fly-on-the-wall and in-the-halls tale proves that in the hands of capable dramatists the rack of suspense can be tightened to an almost unbearable degree even when the outcome is known.
  25. Joker: Folie à Deux
    If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.
  26. The Wild Robot
    This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.
  27. Lee
    Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.
  28. Megalopolis
    There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.
  29. Apartment 7A
    There are reasons to watch, principally Dianne Wiest’s outrageous Ruth Gordon impersonation and the presence of the gifted Julia Garner.
  30. The Substance
    The result is impressively if overbearingly grotesque, boasting an ecstatic surface of blood, guts and deformities. But it’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.
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