Wall Street Journal's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
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:
3942 movie reviews
  1. This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.
  2. Star Trek Beyond is better than not-bad. By any earthly standard it’s good.
  3. If you’re looking for something to lift you up and take you away from the tumult and anguish of the moment, seek out Our Little Sister, a lovely new film, in Japanese with English subtitles, that’s going into national distribution this week.
  4. The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it’s meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner: “Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life is no bargain.”
  5. Untold billions are laundered in The Infiltrator, while Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel moves mountains of cocaine into U.S. markets. But the drug of choice here is acting, and the highs in this hurtling, often violent thriller are doubly intense, since two of its stars play flamboyant double roles.
  6. Silly is endangered these days, and normal has come under withering fire from stupendous, yet tedious, visual effects. Busting ghosts used to be a lot more fun.
  7. There’s no secret life because there’s no life, only the promise of pets in perpetual motion.
  8. You’ll want to see Zero Days — just not when you’re counting on a good night’s sleep a few hours later. Alex Gibney’s documentary about cyberwarfare is many things, none of them lulling: a thriller, a detective procedural, a startling chronicle of science fiction transformed into fact, and an urgent plea for public discussion of a new way of waging war that could wreak havoc on a scale akin to that of nuclear weapons.
  9. Ben is the family’s rock, and Mr. Mortensen gives the story unshakable grounding. He’s a star who doesn’t act like a star, yet everyone in his orbit feels his power. He and this strong, adventurous film deserve each other.
  10. The BFG has fizz to spare. It’s an effervescent charmer.
  11. The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.
  12. Asked to define his job, Zappa gives a simple answer with convincing sincerity: “I’m an entertainer.” Simplicity gives way to intriguing complexity as the film covers other things Zappa was.
  13. Strong acting often lends authenticity to writing that lacks it, and Mr. McConaughey is, to be sure, an exceptionally strong actor. Yet this screenplay is so arid in its didacticism, so pallid in its would-be passion, that it defeats his efforts and our involvement.
  14. Has its share of misfired jokes and pseudo-mythic sequences that semi-fizzle. All in all, though, it’s majestical nonsense that is anything but nonsensical.
  15. What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.
  16. Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it’s compulsively, preposterously and steadfastly funny.
  17. Suffice it to say that the film is a must-see for fans of the man (who, like many of his gifted colleagues, has given up on what’s left of the Hollywood studio system) and a should-see for anyone who cares about how movies are made, as well as how, in certain near-miraculous cases, really good movies get made.
  18. Morgan Neville’s documentary is a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these fractious times when they live in concert with one another.
  19. All ups with no downs, it’s a motion picture in the truest sense of the term. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I loved every one of its 72 minutes.
  20. The Witness is remarkable for its emotional impact, and its clarity. The picture that emerges isn’t perfectly clear; the whole truth will never be known, Bill Genovese says. What he has made known, though, is valuable.
  21. There’s plenty to enjoy in the film, starting with a pair of affecting performances by Clémence Poésy and Laura Birn, and ending with a perverse twist on the notion of blissful parenthood.
  22. The good news is that Mia Wasikowska is back in the title role, bright-spirited and skillful as ever, but she’s burdened by the manic direction of James Bobin, working from a dramatically inert script by Ms. Woolverton.
  23. The previous episode, “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” was as fresh and enjoyable as this one is semicoherent and dispiriting.
  24. Ms. Miller proves to be an original, setting her comic characters in motion like mini-planets that spin in eccentric but overlapping orbits.
  25. A consistently entertaining, frequently violent and generally slapdash action comedy.
  26. Weiner, an extraordinary documentary feature about the disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner, has it all — the surreal spectacle of contemporary retail politics, the sizzle of media madness and the mysteries of psychodrama.
  27. It’s the film Hesse deserves — lively and concise, though calmly comprehensive; thoughtful and essentially serious, but with a witty appreciation of the oddity, recklessness and absurdity that its subject valued; rich with history, and beautifully made in its own right.
  28. Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.
  29. Mr. Clooney’s prancing, dancing and clowning for the TV camera feel tame and vaguely self-conscious when measured, as they will be, against the calculated craziness of his role’s model, Mr. Cramer, who usually manages to seem simultaneously shrewd and stridently unhinged.
  30. Where Dark Horse shines brightest is in its portraits of individuals, and of a town raised up from the depths of economic despair by the promise of one of its own making good.

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