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 Birth of a Nation
    What Mr. Parker has committed to the screen is a righteously indignant, kinetic and well-acted film — Mr. Parker, as Turner, delivers a fierce, complex performance. At the same time, his film is remarkably conventional. The framing and the camera movements are all very routine, even dated; one would have said it looks like television, before television gained its current lustre.
  2. Deepwater Horizon
    It’s ultimately a genre film with all that implies, meaning omissions, simplifications, conventional heroics, dramatic banalities and, given the narrative’s limited scope, little sense of the event’s complex causes or its environmental cost.
  3. American Honey
    I don’t know how Ms. Arnold works the magic she does with her actors, whether amateur or professional — Mr. LaBeouf inhabits his role with sly charm and explosive ferocity — but it’s an expansion of what she started doing more than a decade ago in her remarkable “Wasp.”
  4. The Lovers and the Despot
    You may harbor doubts as well, but the story on the whole appears to be true, and the integrity of the documentary suffers little, if at all, from its co-directors’ decision to illustrate some of the more extravagant aspects of the lovers’ journey with charmingly sleazy clips from commercial potboilers that Shin, who died in 2006, had made in South Korea.
  5. Queen of Katwe
    It’s family entertainment in the freshest sense of the term, a biographical drama, based on a true story, that vibrates with more colors — emotional as well as visual — than I can name.
  6. Storks
    The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.
  7. The Magnificent Seven
    Ethan Hawke is appealing as a polysyllabic coward of some complexity, but Mr. Washington has been stripped of his usual verve and grace. Sometimes you can catch him going slack, like a man looking for the exit.
  8. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    The substance is enchanting.
  9. Snowden
    Snowden is mostly flat, overlong, unfocused and didactic.
  10. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Of all the performances in a patchy production, only one achieves perfection. We get to see it through the modern medical miracle of ultrasound.
  11. Sully
    Clint Eastwood and his collaborators have made one of the best aviation movies ever, although “Apollo 13” — also starring Tom Hanks — comes very close.
  12. Yoga Hosers
    Mr. Garman’s showcase has very little to do with anything else, but he’s a pal of Mr. Smith’s and, at the very least, his performance is a filet of wit amid a heaping helping of comedic byproduct.
  13. Morgan
    A mixed bag of a thriller that exploits two primal fears—of artificial intelligence, and precocious children.
  14. The Light Between Oceans
    Everything in The Light Between Oceans is deeply felt and dramatically precise, in a way that seems destined to become profoundly personal for each and every viewer.
  15. Mia Madre
    The upshot is an emotionally satisfying fusion of the mixed up and the magical.
  16. In Order of Disappearance
    There’s much amusement to be had in the film. Very little of it stupid.
  17. Hands of Stone
    Jakubowicz has made a muscular, messy and vulgar film based on a life that has been all those things.
  18. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Mr. Herzog’s film may not be a model of organization, but I loved every meandering minute.
  19. Kubo and the Two Strings
    The first and last things to be said in this limited space about Kubo and the Two Strings are that it’s a showcase for some of the most startlingly beautiful animation in recent — and not so recent — memory.
  20. Hell or High Water
    By turns funny, elegiac and thrilling, it’s a tale of brotherhood and family that takes in the harsh beauty of the land, the elusive nature of right and wrong and the quirky delights of human connections in a time of bewildering change.
  21. Anthropoid
    A bad movie with a good title.
  22. Pete's Dragon
    Mr. Lowery is very good with actors, and he lets much of his film unfold at a pace that may, in these frenzied times, seem rather leisurely. I thought the pace was fine, and admired him for giving his characters time to breathe. Elliott breathes fire, and the film around him breathes humanity.
  23. Florence Foster Jenkins
    The movie is a pleaser, for the most part, even though the attitude it takes toward its subject is often problematic.
  24. The Little Prince
    It’s a paradox, then, as well as a pity, that the film loses its way at precisely the point when the new story starts to merge with the old one, and the Little Girl meets a character called Mr. Prince.
  25. Little Men
    I was riveted by the performance of Paulina García, the great Chilean actress who plays Tony’s beleaguered mother. To watch her is to see exactly how less can be more. Instead of acting, she allows her character to reveal her thoughts in words that are all the more powerful for being few, far between and softly spoken.
  26. Suicide Squad
    In a word, Suicide Squad is trash. In two words, it’s ugly trash.
  27. Indignation
    Indignation is very much the sort of venture Mr. Schamus has often championed as a producer — ambitious and provocative, a must-see for anyone who cares about independent film.
  28. Gleason
    Gleason is so powerful in its cumulative effect that it should be accompanied by a consumer advisory — something along the lines of “This documentary may cause sudden alterations of mood and attitude.”
  29. Jason Bourne
    Bourne used to be an anguished amnesiac. Now he remembers who he is, but this fourth episode of the franchise forgot to make him human.
  30. Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice really shines as an improv procedural, a film that celebrates, in illuminating detail, the skills and anxieties of this showbiz subgenre.
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