Washington Post's Scores

For 11,478 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Oppenheimer
Lowest review score: 0 Dolittle
Score distribution:
11478 movie reviews
    • 37 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The movie loses many opportunities for stronger emotional resonance — the Sonic the Hedgehog films succeed far better because of their strong focus on character relationships. Yet, while watching this movie, I was reminded of the beginning of cinema.
  1. The resulting film offers a unique and revealing — but fundamentally incomplete — perspective on the ongoing war in Gaza.
  2. This month’s Statham movie is titled “Shelter.” And as these things go, “Shelter” is more Shake Shack than it is McDonald’s. It resembles his other genre movies in the basic form and idea, but it’s a much more high-end and satisfying version.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The sheer earnestness of director Ugo Bienvenu’s elegiac, even mournful tale feels as appealingly anachronistic as its lush 2D animation.
  3. McAdams again proves she has real comedic chops that this island, and Raimi’s direction, have only sharpened.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    At 160 minutes, “Magellan” is one of the shortest and most accessible of Diaz’s films, which for the past decade have tended to fall between four and eight hours...But the scale of the film remains resolutely epic, in part because Diaz is patient and in part because he’s insistent on telling this story of conquest and domination on his terms.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.
  4. Almost every narrative choice is ludicrous. And yet, “Mercy” is also a hoot and a half.
  5. At minimum, “All That’s Left of You” is a thoughtful exploration of how trauma can both fracture and bond a family. But for those who need it, the film serves as an urgent reminder of how ignorance and passivity undermine what it means to be human.
  6. If you go for this kind of fare, you’ll have a good time. If you don’t, you’ll probably find it off-putting.
  7. Fiennes anchors the film with his remarkably layered performance, relishing Kelson’s eccentricities while conveying the underlying anguish of a man losing his grip on what his life once was.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” we are given the rare chance to watch an exploration of a religion born instead of female pain.
  8. Riveting and darkly comedic, the film nimbly conveys the tragedies of buying into the American Dream.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Here, [Park] takes a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” and applies it to his home country with malice aforethought. The result is an entertainment that draws blood.
  9. In some ways, this dramedy, directed by Bradley Cooper, is a familiar story about midlife crises and marital dissatisfaction, but it quickly swerves in a fresh direction, resulting in a movie that’s both resonant and hilarious.
  10. Listening to “Sweet Caroline” feels like a hug — warm and fuzzy to some, smothering to others. Watching Song Sung Blue has a similar effect.
  11. The Plague does an exceptional job of making viewers share in Ben’s growing sense of dread.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    None of this would work were it not for the swaggering, high-wire performance of Chalamet.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From its opening shakedown to its final takedown, “The Secret Agent” wanders a world consumed by corruption.
  12. The plot simply doesn’t have enough juice.
  13. Goodbye June is a sweet but bland Christmas film that relies too heavily on its talented cast to make up for its narrative shortcomings — a surprising choice for actress Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, until you take note of who wrote the screenplay.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.
  14. What a pleasure it is to witness a masterful storyteller at work, and to see Craig lead a franchise he so thoroughly enjoys.
  15. Eternity might start out strong, but its plot eventually runs out of steam.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, the film is a literal revelation. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There’s a lot to like about “Jay Kelly,” the unexpectedly sweet new film from director Noah Baumbach. It’s beautifully shot, bustles with strong performances by a roundly endearing cast and indulges in an old-Hollywood elegance well-suited to its story: the late-life crisis of its titular megastar, played — embodied, really — by George Clooney.
  16. In the end, “Rental Family” is a movie that gives viewers a lot to ponder — about loneliness and family, about the importance of truth and the comfort of white lies — even if the delivery mechanism proves imperfect.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why.
  17. The film honors Hujar not by impersonating him, but by doing exactly what he did in a different medium: demanding we look long and hard at the world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” — an uncanny homage to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and, specifically, the making of his 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless” — balances its fervor with a stunning cinematic undertaking. Put simply, lovers of “Breathless” will be left so.
  18. The movie is more than an admonition for the living; it’s also an achingly bittersweet love story about caregiving.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Brit who brought us such violent delights as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver” has just the right mixture of empathy and impishness to turn King’s cautionary tale into a would-be blockbuster with integrity.
  19. An astonishing lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence keeps Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” from falling apart — which is ironic, given that the new film depicts her ripping at the seams.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series. Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.
  20. This meditation on life is a 102-minute respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There is a ritualistic, even tribal, quality to DaCosta’s telling that suggests a truth to the story untethered to time or place: Any woman confined like Hedda is will strive to escape, one way or another.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    It Was Just an Accident ends twice. Both times, its brilliance can take your breath away. That is, what breath you have left by the third and fourth acts of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s latest relentless road trip, wherein the destination isn’t a place or a thing, but a masterful commentary on power.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    It’s a viciously smart and disturbingly funny abduction tale, primarily confined to a grubby basement but with a purview that extends from the inner sanctums of the memory to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The movie does not demystify a rarefied world, or paint an emotionally accessible portrait of the artist, but rather assembles a somewhat stuffy compendium of literary references and insider-y bons mots aimed at tickling theater aficionados.
  21. It’s a bold, claustrophobic movie that wouldn’t work without Byrne.
  22. Ultimately, as is made overwhelmingly clear, this is a film about forgiveness. So allow us to extend the same grace to some clunky writing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    You’re astonished to see how fully actualized Candy was as a performer in his short time, but you’re also left with the heartbreak of all that was left unrealized by his untimely passing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.
  23. This internal struggle transforms “Roofman” from what could have been a run-of-the-mill heist movie into an intriguing character study, even if it falls just short of success.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, which is just fine as the story goes, but not exactly a kinetic position for a star.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.
  24. Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One Battle After Another isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres the director makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.
  25. The story manages to put a smile on your face from time to time, despite the gloom of its humor. It avoids happily-ever-after almost as strenuously as it works to remind us: You’re not in Hollywood, hon, but Hampden.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The grand subject of “Splitsville” is the virtues and pitfalls of unconventional relationship structures, and it’s never more inspired than when it’s finding surreal ways to convey the insecurities such arrangements may awaken.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.
  26. Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Making memories it ain’t. But making 89 minutes of your life disappear almost painlessly has its place, too.
  27. A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” is as bleak a warning as you’ll find in theaters this year, cautioning against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.
  28. Architects who are already working to make architecture more sustainable and humane will roll their eyes at the last few minutes of commentary. But they won’t regret having seen “Architecton,” which is a raw, beautiful and demanding essay on the fate of our collective home.
  29. It’s a larky bunch of malarkey, laced with just enough moral complexity — washed down with car chases and capers — to set your own tush a-twitching.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting.
  30. Candid, pitiless and deeply humanistic, Fleifel’s portrait feels simultaneously timeless and urgently new.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.
  31. Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.
  32. To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.
  33. What makes My Mom Jayne remarkable is how Hargitay manages to move forward from the big reveals. This isn’t just a fact-finding mission for her, but a long-overdue reckoning.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    This is a movie to see and a director to watch.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If the point of the documentary is to make clear to viewers how special Walters was and how dynamic she was and how influential she was, it also made clear how irreplaceable she was, at a time when her talent at extracting information and confessions is needed more than ever.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.
  34. There’s no better time for a throwback than summer, and “F1 the Movie” is here to send audiences to a blissful era before constant cape slop, when the movies were loud, their stars were hot and the male main-character energy was flowing with exhilarating abandon.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Adapted by Flanagan from King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent.
  35. Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.
  36. Dragon imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.
  37. The script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending.
  38. At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.
  39. Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

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