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. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    He (Herzog) emerged with a breathtaking tour of art that, in its formal sophistication, dynamism and rhythmic lines, looks as bold and new as Cezanne's work must have looked in the 1860s.
  2. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.
  3. The Dark Knight Rises
    Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
  4. The Princess of Montpensier
    At times, "Princess" resembles a widescreen Hollywood western, with exhilarating Steadicam shots of horsemen galloping across broad plains and corpse-strewn fields.
  5. The Trip
    Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Buck
    You don't have to be a horse nut to fall for Buck, one of those rare documentaries whose subject is so inherently fascinating that a fictional character could hardly compete.
  7. Tabloid
    McKinney, a woman whose spellbinding and baffling presence - nay, performance - in Tabloid more than lives up to her recent off-screen antics.
  8. Life in a Day
    Life in a Day is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement.
  9. The Artist
    The Artist is anything but mute, with a lush orchestral score and a little sonic wink at the the end; fewer movies this year reward listening - and watching - so lavishly.
  10. Movie 43
    Movie 43 is a near masterpiece of tastelessness. The anthology of 12 short, interconnected skits elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height.
  11. Looper
    Thanks to the assured hold Johnson exerts over this ingeniously structured game of cat-and-cat, we'll go anyplace he has in mind.
  12. Donnie Darko
    Appealingly, the movie has a certain lightness -- like the aforementioned butterfly -- which makes its foreboding qualities surprisingly user-friendly.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Attack the Block
    In the end, police descend on the block at the very moment their presence becomes irrelevant. They misinterpret everything; locals watch as they blame all the wrong people. Soon their flashing lights will drive away, and the block will go back to taking care of itself the best it can.
  14. Senna
    Senna is what film critics might call a TMSI movie, as in: Trust me, see it.
  15. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    A riveting, moving and beautifully animated film.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Tucker benefits from a sweetness not found in many of its peers, which unlike "Shaun" often lean too heavily on cynicism and gore.
  17. Undefeated
    Absorbing, inspiring and terrifically entertaining, Undefeated earns its title: It's a winner all the way.
  18. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    A must-see for any student of history, political rhetoric and film poetics at their most vagrant and revelatory.
  19. Argo
    This captivating, expertly machined political thriller jumps through every hoop the naysayer can set up: It's serious and substantive, an ingeniously written and executed drama fashioned from a fascinating, little-known chapter of recent history.
  20. Oranges and Sunshine
    It's powerful, gut-wrenching stuff, and it doesn't need tarting up.
  21. Pina
    The result is a panorama of emotion, in which one dancer exhibits pure joy and another severe aching. As Bausch notes early in the film, words alone cannot describe something, nor can dance. One medium has to pick up where the last has left off. The disembodied words seem to get to the heart of that idea.
  22. The Forgiveness of Blood
    It's a thriller that feels like a documentary.
  23. Silver Linings Playbook
    Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.
  24. We Have a Pope
    By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.
  25. The Wolverine
    A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Marley
    Marley, the new documentary about reggae icon Bob Marley opens on April 20 - of course. That date - often referred to as 420 - has been, since the 1970s, a time for people to gather to consume or celebrate pot. It has become an unofficial marijuana holiday, and Bob Marley has become the unofficial saint of marijuana.
  27. Polisse
    Polisse is hard to watch at times, but it's also hard not to.
  28. The LEGO Movie
    There are so many things to like about The Lego Movie: a great voice cast, clever dialogue and a handsome blend of stop-motion and CGI animation that feels lovingly retro, while still looking sharp in 21st-century 3-D. But the best thing about this movie... is its subversive nature.
  29. The Sessions
    Thanks to Lewin's light but assured touch, The Sessions never wears its theological preoccupations heavily, instead allowing transcendence to creep up on the audience quietly.
  30. Penguins of Madagascar
    The screenplay by John Aboud, Michael Colton and Brandon Sawyer has a fizzy, pop-culture pizazz, tempered by a distinctly vaudeville sensibility. It’s smart, but not brainy; dumb, but never inane.
  31. Simon & the Oaks
    Simon and the Oaks is not merely the story of two boys from opposite sides of the tracks. It's also a larger meditation on life's hardships and what endures: love, art and civilization.
  32. The Flat
    A quietly brilliant study in cognitive dissonance, The Flat is a documentary look at Holocaust denial, but not the kind you might think.
  33. Mud
    This is where a filmmaker’s taste and reflexive sense of balance makes all the difference. Southern culture may be on the skids in Mud, but Nichols’s sensitive portrayal is gratifyingly on the level.
  34. A Place at the Table
    The problem, as “Table” shows, isn’t that the next meal never comes. It’s that when it arrives, too often it is filled with empty calories.
  35. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    The Reluctant Fundamentalist will likely make some people mad because of the way it holds the United States responsible for the repercussions of its actions in the world. Like Changez himself, the film has a complicated relationship with the superpower.
  36. American Hustle
    The warmth that courses through American Hustle makes it irresistible, with Russell’s affection for his characters and his sharp-eyed evocation of their recessionary times, honoring their struggle, however dishonest, rather than denigrating it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Venus and Serena
    The documentary also reveals the sisters’ almost symbiotic closeness. They live together most of the year, cook together, do karaoke together and joke about how difficult it would be if one chose to get married.
  38. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
    Here's a science fiction movie where the special effects are in the background. And the effect is, well, rather special.
  39. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    Part drug comedy, part psychological drama, the movie is slight, but only superficially so. As the closing credits role, we’re left not with a sense of a day at the beach, but of what might be swimming out there, in the dark of the abyss.
  40. Fill the Void
    The movie confounds at times with its aversion to clearly explaining each relationship and ritual, but ultimately that makes each realization seem more like a new discovery.
  41. Cutie and the Boxer
    It’s a wonder how Cutie and the Boxer, in less than an hour and a half, manages to say so much about love, life and art. Movies twice as long are often half as eloquent.
  42. Big Hero 6
    It’s a movie that’s as fun to watch as it is funny. But the real appeal of Big Hero 6 isn’t its action. It’s the central character’s heart.
  43. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    He was many things, the documentary reveals, but self-serious was not among the late writer’s lengthy list of descriptors.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Great Beauty
    [Director Paolo Sorrentino] collects scenes of superficial extravagance and eccentricity, then finds the deeper yearnings they conceal.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Immigrant
    Gray directs this handsome and evocative film with emotional restraint, making its archetypal title character a living individual whose moral journey is never simple.
  46. Dirty Wars
    The film is a documentary, pure and simple. But the movie, by director Rick Rowley, plays out like something of a murder mystery.
  47. Blackfish
    It’s upsetting and scary to watch the footage of orca attacks collected in Blackfish, a damning documentary about the treatment of the animals by marine parks.
  48. Kill Your Darlings
    In this tale of longing, loss and regret, it isn’t always possible to know who’s deluding oneself, or someone else. But then, it isn’t always possible to know that in real life either.
  49. Chef
    There’s nothing terribly profound about Chef. But its message — that relationships, like cooking, take a hands-on approach — is a sweet and sustaining one.
  50. Big Men
    Boynton’s most impressive feat in Big Men is how she takes an impossibly convoluted scenario, makes sense of it and tells a story that’s riveting on its own but also serves as a parable about greed and human nature.
  51. Thanks for Sharing
    It’s surprisingly wise, funny and affecting, thanks in part to a sensitive script, and in part to a strong ensemble cast.
  52. Still Mine
    It’s nice to be reminded of what old people look like, since they are, at least in movies these days, ever more invisible.
  53. Child's Pose
    A compelling, complex, confounding film.
  54. Muscle Shoals
    A mesmerizing documentary.
  55. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    "Him” and “Her” make for a remarkably powerful film experiment, retaining the insights into relationships of “Them” while filling in many of its invisible storytelling fissures.
  56. Philomena
    At its core, this clever, wrenching, profound story underscores the tenacity of faith in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Evil may be good, story-wise. But virtue, at its most tested and tempered, is even better.
  57. Under the Skin
    With long, quiet takes in which he simply observes Johansson wordlessly taking in the world around her, Glazer infuses the everyday modern world with a surpassing sense of strangeness and doom.
  58. Great Expectations
    Thrillingly told, compellingly acted and beautifully shot.
  59. Le Week-End
    In the capable hands of these fine filmmakers and actors, even its most bitter observations about life and aging are nearly always reliably balanced by moments of warmth, understanding and out-and-out screwball humor.
  60. 1,000 Times Good Night
    1,000 Times Good Night has moments of both startling violence and breathtaking beauty.
  61. Tracks
    For all its simplicity, Tracks the movie is a poignant, deeply emotional story.
  62. Let's Get Lost
    At the most fundamental level, the real Chet Baker is a kind of nowhere man. He's too insubstantial for Weber to levitate him into greatness. This fact is the source of the film's dramatic tension, and Weber, to his credit, seems to have realized it.
  63. Finding Fela!
    [A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.
  64. The Babadook
    The feature debut of writer-director Jennifer Kent is not just genuinely, deeply scary, but also a beautifully told tale of a mother and son, enriched with layers of contradiction and ambiguity.
  65. The Overnighters
    The Overnighters is commendable for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it allows complex issues to remain complex.
  66. Obvious Child
    There are as many awkward, discomfiting sequences in Obvious Child as there are interludes of genuine fun and romance. The result is a movie that feels risky and forgiving and, despite its traditional rom-com contours, refreshingly new.
  67. 20,000 Days on Earth
    20,000 Days on Earth isn’t so much a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, looking back on his life, as it is a meditation on the art of storytelling.
  68. Documented
    As agenda-driven as Documented is, it also is a deeply engrossing self-portrait.
  69. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    The film serves an effective marketing tool after all, with some lively footage and funny interviews. It’s just too bad viewers can’t see the actual play.
  70. The Case Against 8
    A sprawling yet engrossing documentary.
  71. It Follows
    It Follows sticks to you — yes, even outside of the theater — with a grim unshakability that is at once stylish, smart and deadly serious.
  72. Wild Tales
    Szifrón handles the tone and presentation masterfully.
  73. Code Black
    Code Black is a powerful and quietly damning film. While training his lens narrowly on the heroic workers in a single emergency department, McGarry has made a broad indictment of a system that is badly in need of surgery.
  74. The Big Easy
    The Big Easy, starring Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid, is the sexiest, most companionable movie of the summer. Set in New Orleans, it's an amiable, loping, goof of a movie, with charm to burn and not a thought in its head.
  75. The Crow
    If he had to die so soon, this movie is the best and most appropriate sendoff Lee could have hoped for.
  76. A Summer's Tale
    Like most of Rohmer’s movies, A Summer’s Tale is comic, humane and much more complicated than it seems at first. The fresh-faced actors, realistic dialogue and naturalistic performances suggest a casual approach, but as the story progresses, the filmmaker’s control is increasingly evident.
  77. The Martian
    What’s being marketed as a sober, straightforward sci-fi drama (the words “Bring him home” superimposed on an unsmiling Matt Damon inside a space helmet) is instead a smart, exhilarating, often disarmingly funny return to classic adventures of yore.
  78. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    In viewing the same tale retold from two mutually exclusive vantage points, we become aware of how “Him” and “Her” deepen and enrich certain aspects of the story, adding contrast and, at times, contradiction, to the whole.
  79. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    A gorgeous, magical and melancholy fantasia about the joy and pain of human existence.
  80. While We're Young
    Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.
  81. Fort Bliss
    In Myers’s capable hands, and with a powerful, vanity-free performance by Monaghan, Fort Bliss joins “Coming Home” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” as a movie deeply in sync, not just with the military characters it depicts, but also with the civilian world that awaits them with such confoundingly mixed messages.
  82. Deadpool
    It’s a voraciously self-aware comedy, one that dines out on the inherent inanity of its own premise as much as it does the movies it’s competing with.
  83. Red Army
    In this swift, smart, often very funny film, Polsky takes an unprecedented look at the legendary Soviet-era hockey program and its life after glasnost, exposing an athletic system that became a crucial symbol of Communist history and politics, but also discipline, grace and brooding, melancholy soul.
  84. Ghost in the Shell
    Technically, Ghost in the Shell is astonishing, not only for its smooth meld of cell animation and state-of-the-art computer animation, but also for its imaginative storytelling and mood-setting (thanks to an eerie, non-thumping score by Kenji Kawai).
  85. Watchers of the Sky
    Editing these unwieldy stories into a cohesive, meaningful way must have been a massive undertaking. Editors Jenny Golden and Karen Sim did such an impressive job that even at two hours — an eternity for a doc — the movie never feels too long.
  86. Citizenfour
    Citizenfour isn’t just a useful primer in the civil liberties and consent issues his disclosures raised. It humanizes a man who almost immediately became controversialized as a naive, self-important desk jockey or, worse, a handmaiden to terrorists everywhere.
  87. Ex Machina
    With Ex Machina, Garland makes an impressive debut as a director, spinning an unsettling futuristic thriller with the expertise and exquisite taste of a seasoned veteran.
  88. Hail, Caesar!
    Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalized industrial practice.
  89. Zootopia
    The genius of Zootopia is that it works on two levels: It’s a timely and clever examination of the prejudices endemic to society, and also an entertaining, funny adventure about furry creatures engaged in solving a mystery.
  90. The Jungle Book
    Filmed with dynamism and propulsive, energetic flair, The Jungle Book allows viewers the vicarious pleasure of sidling up to magnificent (sometimes mangy) beasts as if they were household pets.
  91. Difret
    This film is a necessary reminder of what can happen when people preserve tradition for its own sake.
  92. Testament of Youth
    Vikander never goes for the easy emotion, though, choosing instead to play against what conventional melodrama would dictate her reaction should be. This understatedness is always the right choice, and it makes for a far more effective — and affecting — film.
  93. James White
    James White gets up close and personal in often discomfiting ways, but it’s never exploitative or glib. It hits the highs, and the rock bottoms, and all the damnable stuff in between.
  94. Last Days in the Desert
    The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo Garcia’s thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.
  95. Creed
    The themes of love, loyalty, ambition, honor and legacy that lend sinew to the story are delivered with such a clean punch that they as feel as fresh as they did in 1976.
  96. Love & Friendship
    Love & Friendship is such a thoroughgoing delight that it’s tempting to riffle through Austen’s other works to find something else for Stillman to make into a film. As adaptations go, this is a match made in heaven.
  97. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.
  98. Rebels of the Neon God
    Rebels of the Neon God rarely cracks a smile, but it’s as droll as it is disaffected.
  99. Iris
    Iris serves as a spirited, often dazzling primer in how to fight the dying of the light and feel fabulous while doing it.
  100. Tangerines
    Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze avoids histrionics or moralizing, relying on a strong cast that expresses the film’s central argument about war’s absurdity largely through taciturn action, not words.
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