Wall Street Journal's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
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:
3961 movie reviews
  1. “Dogs” is a beguiling recreation of one irrepressible childhood. The movie is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, but always invitingly candid and relatable. In its specificity it winds up being universal: As children, we really were odd little beasts, weren’t we?
  2. May end up being the surprise delight of summer ’25.
  3. Superman can be a myth, a god, an American emblem or a symbol of the overachieving immigrant, but making him a schmo who’s so weak he’d be in deep trouble if it weren’t for his ridiculous dog feels like a dizzyingly dismissive choice.
  4. It may be a historical documentary, but it has blinkers on.
  5. It is a very personal documentary, a designation that can connote the good, the not-so-bad and the distinctly uncomfortable. My Mom Jayne has it all, including a puzzle that Ms. Hargitay pursues throughout.
  6. At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.
  7. Here’s a brilliant idea for a rock documentary: Catch up with a band in the creaky fog of middle age, long after the hits. A certain toll has been exacted, a certain humility achieved, and yet the story is not yet over.
  8. If Sorry, Baby isn’t exactly an assured debut, it nonetheless has a sincere purpose, thoughtfully expressed.
  9. Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.
  10. “F1” is a fun, exciting, predictable popcorn picture so formulaic it even contains a reference to formula in its title.
  11. Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.
  12. Though the movie is consistently fun and has some clever ideas to go with its marvelous look, its story is thin and episodic, without much in the way of momentum.
  13. Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.
  14. Director Mark Monroe’s nearly two-hour Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is the most exhaustive exploration thus far.
  15. Sex
    When the movie stays more on subject, it can be engaging, and it helps that cinematographer Cecilie Semec has a talent for mining the mundane act of people talking to each other for visual interest.
  16. The movie generally looks great, thanks also to Dominic Watkins’s expansive production design, yet it thinks very little of its audience and comes across as a pee-wee “Game of Thrones.”
  17. Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.
  18. The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.
  19. The movie is like a two-hour trailer, with one viscerally intense fight scene following another, filmed as usual for the series in long, fluid takes to maximize the wow factor.
  20. The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.
  21. If Bono is melodramatic, Mr. Dominik is an enabler. Thom Zimny’s matter-of-fact direction of another paternally damaged rock star’s concert confessional, “Springsteen on Broadway,” let its star’s charisma shine through. “Stories of Surrender” is more like an epic of self-parody.
  22. Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past.
  23. Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.
  24. It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.
  25. Ms. Piani is too scattershot a storyteller for the eventual, inevitable romance to feel earned.
  26. The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.
  27. What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.
  28. It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.
  29. With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.
  30. Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.

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