Wall Street Journal's Scores

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For 3,942 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 2.6 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: 2,101 out of 3942
  2. Mixed: 1,197 out of 3942
  3. Negative: 644 out of 3942
3942 movie reviews
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  1. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.
  2. Strange World
    The director Don Hall and his co-director and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (who last year collaborated on a slightly less mediocre Disney picture, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) seem to have put all of their effort into gaudy backgrounds, wacky gadgets and strange ancillary monsters instead of into dramatic urgency or conflict.
  3. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    The film is smartly structured, and many viewers will happily cue up a repeat viewing to savor all of the matters that were not as they seemed the first time. The many puzzles and secrets and fakeouts keep things mostly amusing for two hours, and as with the first “Knives Out,” the cast is strong.
  4. Slumberland
    Ms. Barkley comes across as a kid rather than a studio creation. Mr. Momoa gives the kind of unhinged performance of which few would have thought him capable. His prancing about at moments of joy are, in fact, joyous.
  5. The Wonder
    The performers—not just the miraculous Ms. Pugh but Ms. Cassidy; her mother, Elaine Cassidy (who plays Anna’s mother); and Tom Burke, as the journalist-love interest Will Byrne—give memorably complex portrayals in a tale where elements theological, maternal, political and pictorial are transformed alchemically into narrative gold.
  6. Master of Light
    Master of Light is a film not just about art and redemption but a character sorting out his life, and what he truly believes about art.
  7. The Fabelmans
    Understanding that a knockout finish is the most important element, Mr. Spielberg delivers spectacularly in a scene drawn from a real-life meeting. He puts a mischievous twist on his well-earned reputation for sentimental endings by dramatizing an encounter with one of the gods of celluloid.
  8. Spirited
    Fans of Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reynolds have likely never seen them in anything this earnest and tacky before, and are liable to feel somewhere between betrayed and stunned.
  9. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.
  10. Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman
    In a film of grand acting, flamboyant color, vaulting ambition and global conflict, the more slippery gestures contain much meaning.
  11. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    The worthwhile Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me explains much, about the star, the culture and maybe the moment.
  12. The Fastest Woman on Earth
    If you are going to watch a biographical documentary, it’s not necessarily a disadvantage to go in knowing nothing at all about the story. And if you are up to speed on The Fastest Woman on Earth, it’s still an engaging, moving and even shocking documentary.
  13. Good Night Oppy
    Once the two rovers landed, three weeks apart, problems that had never been confronted before in the history of humanity started to become routine occurrences. So did solving them, and the documentary is a warm and well-earned tribute to the brilliant scientists and engineers who did so.
  14. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.
  15. 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.
  16. Call Jane
    There is less artistry to the film than there is sloganeering. Call Jane would be more effective if it stuck to human drama rather than having its characters make sweeping assertions that sound like stump speeches given at political rallies.
  17. Armageddon Time
    If Armageddon isn’t quite what happened economically to the U.S. in the 1980s, Armageddon Time is nevertheless a sincere effort to wring meaning out of memory.
  18. 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.
  19. The Good Nurse
    Isolated brilliance is precisely what helps The Good Nurse shine, and it could hardly be otherwise given the story.
  20. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect.
  21. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    God Forbid may be seen as a seamy peek into a couple’s private life, an exposé about the religious right, or both. But what gives it substance is the history recounted.
  22. Ticket to Paradise
    As it is, Ticket to Paradise is tolerable, but to make it a true pleasure would probably require some priming with a few glasses of arak.
  23. Black Adam
    Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.
  24. The Banshees of Inisherin
    Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, The Banshees of Inisherin is a strangely profound little comedy. It’s one of the few true originals among movies this year.
  25. The Curse of Bridge Hollow
    Granted, the mayhem is inflicted mostly on zombies and other Halloween decorations that have come to life courtesy of the ancient curse unleashed by Sydney. But the casual decapitations and dismemberments transition from vaguely entertaining to annoying, mostly because there’s a lot less story than there are special effects.
  26. Halloween Ends
    Being more ambitious than most films in the horror genre, Halloween Ends also perhaps falls on the wrong side of the divide between being scary in a fun way and being distressingly plausible.
  27. Till
    As Mamie Till, the previously little-known actress Danielle Deadwyler gives an astonishing performance, shimmering first with tenderness and later with the kind of agony no mother should ever have to contemplate, much less bear.
  28. Amsterdam
    To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.
  29. Triangle of Sadness
    The movie is as loaded with fun as it is with social implications. Its broad comedy about the modeling world plays like a deadpan version of “Zoolander,” and its third act has more primal drama than a season’s worth of “Survivor.”
  30. TÁR
    Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.
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