Washington Post's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 6,014 out of 11478
  2. Mixed: 3,069 out of 11478
  3. Negative: 2,395 out of 11478
11478 movie reviews
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  1. Kicking & Screaming
    If its made-for-TV sensibility explains its chaotically blobby shooting style, it doesn't clarify a plot so painfully padded that it looks for laughs in strange digressive asides regarding bratwurst and coffee.
  2. Lords of Dogtown
    Has all the energy and spontaneity of a bowl of waxed fruit. If watching "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching "Lords of Dogtown," which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.
  3. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Visually undistinguished, narratively inert, populated by a cast of charmless child actors, "Sharkboy and Lavagirl," with any luck will fade quickly from theaters, memories and Rodriguez's own Things to Do Today list.
  4. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    After watching this movie, which stars Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates and Gabriel Byrne, I was moved only to find my own bridge to leap from.
  5. The Perfect Man
    Baby, when you walk out of a movie thinking, "Say, that Heather Locklear was pretty darn good," the movie's got some problems!
  6. Herbie Fully Loaded
    Here, by its cooperation with the Disney factory, NASCAR says it's also warm 'n' cuddly, and that if you love your magic bug, it'll repay you with victory. Why does it allow itself to be co-opted by a story that diminishes the skills, experience and talent it takes to win?
  7. The Island
    If you find yourself at "The Island" I have only three words of advice: Vote yourself off.
  8. The Dukes of Hazzard
    So loud, so long, so dumb.
  9. Pretty Persuasion
    A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.
  10. The Brothers Grimm
    Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.
  11. Venom
    Reprises all the tedium of slasher flicks.
  12. Dear Wendy
    It's a diatribe from beginning to end.
  13. Waiting...
    It's lewd, crude and socially irredeemable.
  14. Elizabethtown
    It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.
  15. Manderlay
    Even the basic look of the film -- it was filmed on a stage with every shot set against a bleak, dark backdrop -- underscores the filmmaker's position as master manipulator, in a laboratory, looking down at his mice running through his maze.
  16. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    The tale grows only more toxic with time.
  17. When Do We Eat?
    The most persistent question asked at When Do We Eat? will probably be "When do we leave?" This abrasive Passover comedy-drama is extremely difficult to sit through, and if its makers weren't all Jewish, it would be considered anti-Semitic.
  18. Click
    A crass physical comedy of unrelenting irrelevance with a gag or two amid the many other examples of bad taste, extrapolating toward infinite on the theme of remote control reality.
  19. The Holiday
    This overproduced romantic comedy doesn't even qualify as fluff; it's flat, featureless plastic.
  20. Thr3e
    Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.
  21. Fired!
    It's a shame Allen fired her from that play. After all, then she might not have had the time to make this documentary.
  22. Pathfinder
    Makes "Conan the Barbarian" seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.
  23. The Salon
    The comic equivalent of microwaved leftover food -- and pretty stale at that.
  24. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    Surely the dullest of Hollywood's many comic-book-derived summer movies, "Silver Surfer" is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica.
  25. Shoot 'Em Up
    It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?
  26. Halloween (2007)
    A film that contains dialogue so nasty and stupid, you'd swear (right along with the characters) that the booker for "Jerry Springer" wrote it (Zombie did).
  27. Never Back Down
    Sitting through this is groan-inducing enough, but it's spiritually depressing to watch Djimon Hounsou, who deserves better.
  28. The Strangers
    I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.
  29. Mother of Tears
    This lurid celebration of shock, schlock and the shamelessly perverse finds the 67-year-old grandfather of torture porn scraping the bottom of his admittedly limited creative barrel.
  30. Punisher: War Zone
    Anyone with a modicum of good sense -- or a weak stomach -- will take it as a warning to stay the heck away from this literally and figuratively deadly "War Zone."
  31. Bride Wars
    Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying.
  32. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.
  33. Double Jeopardy
    Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.
  34. Down to Earth
    For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.
  35. The Guys
    An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.
  36. Pavilion of Women
    Bland as a fortune cookie and as trite as the message inside.
  37. Fast Food Fast Women
    Fast Food Fast Women is "Sex and the City" in Payless shoes. An incoherent jumble of characters and situations.
  38. Passion of Mind
    You won't feel enlightened, just let down
  39. The Wash
    The story here is just not particularly amusing.
  40. Greenfingers
    Ought to have been called "The Sap Also Rises."
  41. Novocaine
    A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.
  42. Price of Glory
    Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.
  43. 8 ½ Women
    Intentionally defies categorization and explication.
  44. The Story of Us
    Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.
  45. Lost Souls
    It's a loose reassembly of plot points from "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist" that never achieves the emotional intensity of either.
  46. Trixie
    Although the hallmarks of Rudolph movies can be found everywhere -- they don't add up to the usual magic this time.
  47. Duets
    A conceptual train wreck, with half an idea scattered like disaster debris all over the screen.
  48. The Crew
    When a burning rat is the funniest thing in your movie, I think you're in big trouble, even in Miami.
  49. Play It to the Bone
    As dull as the decor in a Motel 6.
  50. Naqoyqatsi
    Pretentious, ponderous and redundant -- You may not need linear narrative to create a great movie, but you do need some original ideas.
  51. Crush
    Oddly off-balance, estrogen-powered dramedy.
  52. Half Past Dead
    Here, common sense flies out the window, along with the hail of bullets.
  53. Summer Catch
    A trite, bantamweight "Bull Durham," hasn't a single line, gibe, gesture or twist that hasn't already been chewed up and spat out in many a movie baseball dugout.
  54. Holy Smoke
    There's so much wrong with this movie.
  55. Deuces Wild
    Propelled not by characters but caricatures.
  56. The Country Bears
    If you're looking for some good family interspecies entertainment, take the little ones to see "Stuart Little 2" again; in the meantime, you might want to crawl into your cave and sleep through this one.
  57. Pushing Tin
    A fast-paced, twisty-turny, high-fiving, but ultimately spiraling disaster of a movie about air traffic controllers, gets lost in this hyperbolic cloud cover, never to be found again.
  58. Wing Commander: Space Will Never Be the Same
    Cinematic sleeping pill.
  59. Juwanna Mann
    If this sounds like "Tootsie" with a ball, well, it is. Screenwriter Bradley Allenstein should be hauled up in writer's court for his shameless cribbing of that far superior comedy. Someone call a foul.
  60. Snow Day
    There's little here to offend anyone, and even less here to excite anyone.
  61. The Mod Squad
    The story moves so slowly and obviously, you don't even need to be in the theater very much (or your living room when the video comes out) to follow it.
  62. Red Planet
    Pfarrer's screenplay feels older than the Martian hills.
  63. Reindeer Games
    Here's a film that so merrily thumbs its nose at propriety in exchange for visceral thrills, and at probability in exchange for the really cool plot twist, that it checks in as the guiltiest pleasure since "The 13th Warrior."
  64. Vertical Limit
    The characters are as thin as the air at 26,000 feet, and the story as silly as anyone willing to assault K2 in a punishing blizzard.
  65. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    We're only a little spooked, only a little amused and, by extension, only a little entertained.
  66. Tape
    A typical student film with its arty angles, bad lighting and pretentious observations.
  67. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    An exercise in vanity, indulgence and a startling degree of shallowness.
  68. The Third Miracle
    I'd give this movie about half a miracle.
  69. Vampire's Kiss
    Stone-dead bad, incoherently bad... Cage acts as if he has been taking hits off of Dennis Hopper's gas mask. There's no way to overstate it: This is scorched-earth acting -- the most flagrant scenery chewing I've ever seen.
  70. On_Line
    There's something so familiar and commonplace about this story and its characters...it's hard to get particularly thrilled.
  71. The Opposite of Sex
    Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.
  72. I Am Sam
    The movie that Disney uses to explore this premise drips with so much corporate good-neighbor syrup, you might want to wear something waterproof. And Penn's performance is, at best, ripe for discussion.
  73. Uptown Girls
    It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.
  74. Pootie Tang
    A wretch-a-sketch, a two-minute character-based skit (an occasional feature on HBO's "The Chris Rock Show") stretched to a mind-boggling 82 minutes.
  75. Possession
    How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
  76. Hanging Up
    Essentially an extended cutesy session.
  77. Someone Like You...
    Heaven forbid a Hollywood romantic movie have any narrative surprises.
  78. Snipes
    Both a snore and utter tripe.
  79. All About the Benjamins
    It's painful watching a talented thespian diminish himself so. It's clear he did it for the Benjamins.
  80. The Emperor's Club
    It's a simpering, ineffective ersatz-drama, so simple-minded and unrealistic and so full of fussy stupidity, it exiles you.
  81. Lana's Rain
    Clumsily under-written and feverishly overacted, it's as embarrassing to watch as it is perplexing.
  82. Bossa Nova
    Unromantic, nonsexual and hellaciously dull.
  83. The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm
    Allegations of governmental double-talk and cover-ups are, unfortunately, boooring.
  84. Wild Wild West
    A rambling wreck from computer tech and a helluva souvenir –- that is, for those interested in artifacts representing the American movie at its worst.
  85. Here on Earth
    A moldy teenage tear-jerker.
  86. 15 Minutes
    They (De Niro, Burns) look good together. But what a staggering pity they chose such a nasty, hackneyed movie to demonstrate their chemistry.
  87. Lost in Space
    A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.
  88. Hey Arnold! The Movie
    Neither funny nor suspenseful nor particularly well drawn.
  89. How to Deal
    A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.
  90. Godzilla
    The makers of Godzilla obviously devoted so much manpower and time and energy and money to the admittedly fabulous special effects that they apparently had no budget left over for actors.
  91. Basic Instinct
    What we have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos.
  92. From Hell
    Feels razor thin. None of the characters is particularly noteworthy. And the revelations of deep-seated conspiracy in the usual privileged, closed circles are hackneyed and tired.
  93. American Pie 2
    This film isn't so much a sequel to the original "American Pie" as a reduction of it.
  94. Evolution
    Evolution is bad. How bad? Who cares? Do you ask how hot the fire is before running out of a burning building? No, you just run for safety.
  95. At First Sight
    It's sheer piffle, a disingenuous romance with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino that's all sap and no sizzle.
  96. Mission to Mars
    I'm not sure if it was that or the cloying script, but after a couple of hours of spinning around listening to this drivel I felt like I was going to barf.
  97. High Crimes
    All in all, High Crimes isn't worth the crayons it took to write the script.
  98. Ghosts of Mars
    Schlocky, sluggish shoot-'em-up.
  99. Gerry
    The most screamingly obvious reaction to Gerry is: what a load of pseudo-arty you-know-what.
  100. Summer School
    Here are some of Summer School's favorite things: idiocy, illiteracy, irresponsibility, drunkenness, dumbness and debauchery. Piqued? [24 July 1987]
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