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. Smoke Signals
    A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    September 5
    September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.
  3. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    You have the right to remain silent. But if you do, call 911 -- your funny bone is busted. [2 Dec 1988]
    • Washington Post
  4. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    What’s most fascinating about Afternoon of a Faun — and what the movie could spend more time delving into — is ballet’s grueling and fleeting nature.
  5. At Eternity's Gate
    Much like the painter, who died without the recognition he deserved, the movie approaches greatness without quite achieving it.
  6. The Dance of Reality
    For all the spectacular weirdness, Jodorowsky manages to generate real emotion.
  7. Pavements
    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.
  8. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    All in all, this is a celebration of Australian exuberance, a national ethic of adventurousness and enormous charisma.
  9. 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.
  10. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film is a testament to art, life and survival like the similar but superior "Buena Vista Social Club."
  11. Iris
    Not just a fitting document of a life brilliantly lived but a vibrant, almost palpitating piece of cinema.
  12. Tim's Vermeer
    Tim’s Vermeer makes a convincing case that Vermeer could have painted the way Jenison says he did. It also makes a pretty powerful ancillary point: that some people are both geniuses and geeks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Animation Show 2005
    All of the dozen works featured are strong, with even the least engaging of the stories ... being visually compelling.
  14. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    A balanced and deeply satisfying documentary assessment of his work, which is lavishly on display in hundreds of the artist’s images.
  15. The Secret of NIMH
    Sadly, The Secret of NIMH is beautiful but unbalanced: The animators gambled when they should have gamboled. [09 July 1982, p.13]
    • Washington Post
  16. King Richard
    Will Smith delivers a ferocious, all-consuming performance in King Richard, a thoroughly entertaining portrait of Richard Williams — better known as Venus and Serena’s father.
  17. Shirley
    Shirley sometimes feels as unfocused as the stymied protagonist at its core, but its point of view remains crystalline throughout: As Shirley tells Rose early in their friendship, best to be born a boy. “The world is too cruel for girls.”
  18. Nanking
    In clothes reminiscent of the '30s (but not, strictly speaking, costumes) the performers read dramatically from the letters, journals and diaries of the Western missionaries and diplomats; they "perform" but in the limited sense, using only face and voice to communicate with the camera. And you have to say: Wow.
  19. mother!
    Even Lawrence’s magnetic powers can’t keep Mother! from going off the rails, which at first occurs cumulatively, then in a mad rush during the film’s outlandish climax.
  20. Black Souls
    Black Souls has a deep and startling soulfulness that, despite its shocking conclusion, is profoundly moving.
  21. Trees Lounge
    The movie is bracing, bleak and funny, assuming you can appreciate the comedy in a story full of lowlifes, lushes and losers.
  22. What We Do in the Shadows
    The film’s writers, directors and stars lovingly impale bloodsucker mythology with the sharpened wooden stick of comedy. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” their satire is a crude but effective tool.
  23. The Usual Suspects
    Nothing more than an over-designed lobster pot. After following the beckoning twists and turns, you're left trapped and more than a little disappointed for getting in so deep.
  24. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.
  25. A Dangerous Method
    Mortensen has called A Dangerous Method Cronenberg's "Merchant-Ivory picture," but it just as often resembles a Woody Allen movie - literate, sophisticated and deeply concerned with sex and manners. (It's even mordantly funny, as an early scene at the Freud family dinner table attests.)
  26. Mother
    Though Mother has already collected two prizes for its screenplay, it's really rather thin. If it weren't so slow and repetitious, there'd only be enough whining and grousing for a Seinfeld episode. [10 Jan 1997, p.D01]
    • Washington Post
  27. 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).
  28. Rabbit Hole
    What on the surface seems to possess all the melodrama and photogenic suffering of a banal prime-time weepie instead becomes a lucid, tough, deeply sensitive examination of emotional fortitude.
  29. The Last Days of Disco
    Eavesdropping on the glib conversations of witty urbanites can be a pleasant diversion, but after so much volubility, you might find yourself wishing that they would all just shut up and dance.
  30. The Last of the Mohicans
    Mann, who's best known for such urban crime dramas as "Vice" and "Manhunter," is equally at home whether the chase concerns a cigarette boat or a birch-bark canoe. He brings the same flair pairing action and style to The Last of the Mohicans, an attempt to resurrect and redefine the American hero.
  31. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    López elicits solid performances from the young actors, and her vision is clear and uncompromising. It isn’t always obvious, however, what the moral of this story is. There’s an air of wishful thinking to the way things work out, even if a traditional happy ending is elusive.
  32. American Gangster
    It has the aspirations of an epic of crime and punishment, a superb feel for time and milieu, and an almost subliminal feel for myth.
  33. The Royal Tenenbaums
    This is not a movie that wraps up its story in a tidy bow, but it's a lot more fun than most of the ones that do.
  34. 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.
  35. Nightcrawler
    The film has a sulfuric, Dostoyevskian quality — and sick sense of humor — that captures the muted aquarium that Los Angeles becomes at night, a spell that’s broken once plot overtakes mood.
  36. The Woman King
    The Woman King may be a fable, but its power is real: Her name is Viola Davis, and she’s nothing less than magnificent.
  37. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.
  38. Asteroid City
    Maybe the whole endeavor is some kind of self-portrait of an artist who doesn’t know what he wants to say anymore, or how to even say, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say anymore.”
  39. The Last Emperor
    Pu Yi's personal tragedy has become Bertolucci's three-hour epic of obsolescence, opulently visualized. It's docudrama that dazzles, but basically Pu Yi was a bore.
  40. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.
  41. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Everyone hits their marks with gusto and believability in Catching Fire... But the engine of the entire operation is Jennifer Lawrence.
  42. Submarine
    For much of the film, this is very funny and fairly original stuff, though Submarine starts to run aground about the time that Jordana and Oliver's relationship does.
  43. Marguerite
    In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nouvelle Vague
    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.
  45. Superbad
    Christopher Mintz-Plasse steals the movie in his screen debut as a nerd di tutti nerds, a kid whose fake I.D. reads "McLovin."
  46. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pearl
    As a prequel, it never finds its footing, bogging down a potentially fascinating character study with unnecessary details — traveling old paths instead of seeking new ones. “Pearl,” like the version of the character we see in “X,” is stuck in the past.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Hau Chu
    Paris, 13th District
    Audiard’s direction is engaging, especially his choice to portray one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world as a place defined by stark, concrete slabs of apartments and high-rises. But the film never quite lands on anything profound about how this generation lives.
  49. Suzhou River
    A Chinese film whose simple surface belies greater mysteries.
  50. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Enter the world of the sociopathic killer and enjoy.
  51. The Manchurian Candidate
    It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.
  52. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.
  53. A Hard Day
    You’ll be glad that A Hard Day isn’t happening to you, but you won’t regret observing it all from a safe distance.
  54. The Lovers
    Flustered, flirty and filled to the brim with compassion, The Lovers is charming, even when it’s proving how hollow charm can be.
  55. Final Account
    Final Account aims to provide insight into the psychological mechanism that would allow otherwise good people to stand idly by (or actively participate in) the perpetration of mass murder. As such, it’s only partly effective, and frustrating.
  56. Greenberg
    A delicate, if slightly smoggy, feeling of regret hangs over Greenberg, a quietly funny portrait of grown-ups growing up.
  57. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    It's the rare 2 1/2 -hour film that doesn't make you look at your watch once. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a film.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Fire Inside
    Ryan Destiny’s performance as Shields is persuasive and commanding.
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