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. The Redeem Team
    Knowing the score in advance is no obstacle to reveling in The Redeem Team, a documentary about motion, emotion, motives and a mission.
  2. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    Stephen King fans will respond immediately to the atmosphere writer-director John Lee Hancock creates at the outset of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone—a world of perpetual autumn and incipient unease, a white-clapboard Maine where the chill gets into the bones and the soul.
  3. The Last Out
    The story that directors Sami Khan and Michael Gassert tell so intimately is certainly about skirting the law. But it’s also about baseball, in which there aren’t always fairy-tale endings.
  4. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    The Greatest Beer Run Ever is far too interested in having a good time to get too heavy about a bygone American argument, but there are truths to be found in the film, by peering through its various fogs of war.
  5. Bros
    A case can be made that it’s gutsy and honest for Mr. Apatow, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Eichner to place such an obnoxious (and recognizable) figure as Bobby at the center of a rom-com, but as we saw in “The King of Staten Island,” comedies about jerks work only if they’re funny, and Bros isn’t.
  6. 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.
  7. Blonde
    At two hours and 47 minutes, Andrew Dominik’s pseudo-biography is one long slog into sadness and more-than-predictable tragedy, despite a touching portrayal by Ana de Armas and the deliberately artful and often startling filmmaking of Mr. Dominik.
  8. The Anthrax Attacks
    It’s a fast-paced whodunit, despite the answers to its central mystery being either memorable, or Google-able, but the reasons why may amount to spoilers. So reader beware.
  9. Catherine Called Birdy
    Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet
  10. Lou
    Sometimes you just want a crazy action movie to kill an evening, and “Lou” fits that bill. Just don’t expect to be thinking about it tomorrow.
  11. Don't Worry Darling
    It suffers from a major structural problem, which is that in its endlessly padded middle section it coyly refuses to get to the point until it exhausts the audience’s patience, then sprints through a late explanation that deserves more careful consideration.
  12. See How They Run
    As directed by Tom George from a script by Mark Chappell, See How They Run hits like a watered-down cocktail rather than a bracing belt of intrigue.
  13. The Woman King
    Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?
  14. Pinocchio
    The Blue Fairy may have brought life to Pinocchio, but no one here is delivering anything particularly fresh. Or alarming. For that, we wait till Christmas.
  15. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.
  16. I Came By
    Mr. Bonneville, having a well of viewer good will on which to draw, makes a perversely convincing villain, the extent of whose offenses are progressively appalling.
  17. Samaritan
    They can give the film’s characters physics-defying acrobatic skills. But they can’t provide anyone much motivation.
  18. The Good Boss
    The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.
  19. Breaking
    Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.
  20. The Innocents
    The Innocents features some superb kid-acting, which doesn’t just entertain and convince but embellishes the malevolent intelligence (call it sociopathy) at work in Mr. Vogt’s story.
  21. Spin Me Round
    Though very funny at times, and refreshing in the way it keeps us guessing, Spin Me Round is only partially successful.
  22. Beast
    Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.
  23. Rogue Agent
    It wants to fly away, though in one sense it does show restraint: There’s enough going on in Rogue Agent to have fueled an eight-week PBS mystery series. Economy, in the world of fictionalized espionage, is quite decidedly a virtue.
  24. Emily the Criminal
    Caper movies rely heavily on how well they build plausibility into the doings of professional scam artists, but Emily the Criminal scores poorly on that front.
  25. Inu-oh
    Those who’d like to take their more mature children to an animated feature with considerably more imaginative richness than, say, “DC League of Super-Pets” will find that the Japanese anime movie “Inu-Oh” fits the bill: How often do you get a chance to take in a medieval rock opera? But an imaginative hook isn’t everything.
  26. Bullet Train
    Rumpled, hangdog and literally kicked around, Mr. Pitt wears indignities the way Marilyn Monroe sported a potato sack; he’s delighted to make a joke of his appeal. With him as his canvas, Mr. Leitch elevates visual whims into art
  27. Thirteen Lives
    If you stick with it through the somewhat plodding first half of this overly long retelling, you’ll be rewarded with a rousing final hour.
  28. We Met in Virtual Reality
    While certainly a curiosity, We Met in Virtual Reality—a pandemic-inspired documentary filmed entirely within a social platform called VRChat—is also revelatory, if not entirely ennobling of the human condition.
  29. DC League of Super-Pets
    The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.
  30. Vengeance
    Mr. Novak comes up with so much funny dialogue and so many intriguing ideas that I mostly forgive the creakiness of his plotting. The basic mechanics of the whodunit seem to elude him, and he leaves important matters dangling at the end. But questioning the failings and prejudices of his tribe (Mr. Novak grew up in greater Boston, went to Harvard, worked in Hollywood, and has also written for the New Yorker) has provided him with a wealth of material.
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