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. Lights Out
    For a movie that relies so heavily on a single, not especially groundbreaking visual effect — now you see the bogeyman, now you don’t — Lights Out is crazy scary.
  2. You've Been Trumped
    It’s pretty obvious, with the controversy surrounding Trump’s political ascendancy, that there is a built-in market for a film that makes him and his business surrogates out to be both callous bullies and buffoons.
  3. Captain Fantastic
    Captain Fantastic leaves viewers with the cheering, deeply affecting image of a dad whose superpowers lie in simply doing the best that he can.
  4. Microbe and Gasoline
    Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Our Little Sister
    To his credit, Kore-eda avoids oversentimentality in a narrative that could easily have indulged in it. Yet the unhurried pacing and minimal dramatic tension — even when an important character makes an appearance midway through the story — feels unsatisfying.
  6. Cold War 2
    Although it boasts three crackerjack action sequences, Cold War 2 won’t wow Hong Kong cinema buffs who crave nonstop mayhem. This clever drama features more bureaucratic wrangling than criminal scuffles.
  7. Ghostbusters
    Sunny, slimy and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash and bluster that’s preceded it.
  8. The Infiltrator
    If the movie isn’t always gripping, it’s nevertheless a worthwhile examination of the intricacies of undercover life.
  9. The Innocents
    Through the example of friendship and cooperation, The Innocents shines a glimmer of hope on a period of great doubt.
  10. Life, Animated
    Life, Animated makes fascinating points, about the power of cinema, about meeting our loved ones where they are and, as Ron says, about who gets to decide what constitutes a meaningful life.
  11. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    The vérité style of filmmaking is slow and sometimes monotonous, making it all the more surprising that you will probably find yourself bawling your eyes out — without ever knowing how you got to that state — at the film’s profoundly, heartbreakingly somber conclusion.
  12. Seoul Searching
    It’s too bad, then, that the comedy spends so much more time mimicking the familiar than trusting in its own fresh perspective.
  13. Zero Days
    Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.
  14. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is uproarious and flamboyantly raunchy, utterly stupid yet also occasionally winning
  15. The Secret Life of Pets
    The humor is generic. And the film’s most obvious comparison — it’s been called “Toy Story” with animals — only points up the one thing “Pets” lacks, and that any animal lover will tell you their furred and feathered friends have, in spades: personality.
  16. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    Amusing and even edifying, although it is also unlikely to make converts out of those who just don’t get Zappa’s pastiche of juvenile parody and sophisticated songwriting, derived from rock, jazz and 20th-century experimental music.
  17. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Les Cowboys
    Bidegain and cinematographer Arnaud Potier speak multitudes with wide-angle, slow-panning shots that immerse us in a post-9/11 quagmire that’s never less than utterly personal.
  19. Nuts!
    Nuts!”is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.
  20. Swiss Army Man
    [The film] isn’t for everyone. But the story is astoundingly original. During the summer months, when theaters are occupied by superheroes and sequels, that’s something worth celebrating.
  21. Tickled
    The story is so nasty, so depraved and troubling, that viewers may well wonder at its value beyond prurient interest.
  22. The Witness
    The Witness makes an encouraging case for the argument that society is not as apathetic as we fear. But it also reveals a troubling phenomenon: our willingness to accept all that we are told as truth.
  23. Wiener-Dog
    You wouldn’t exactly call the movie a thrill, but it’s curiously engrossing all the same.
  24. The BFG
    Roald Dahl’s beloved ad­ven­ture tale about a brave little girl who befriends the titular Big Friendly Giant, finds Steven Spielberg in his natural element of childlike enchantment, yet also strangely out of step, his trusted sense of narrative propulsion and pacing occasionally failing him in a saggy, draggy second act.
  25. Our Kind of Traitor
    There’s little of the poetry that Perry teaches in the script, but the story’s mechanics are solid.
  26. The Purge: Election Year
    Even DeMonaco seems bored by the sieges, escapes and gun battles. Silly one-liners are the only saving grace, and that's because such acting veterans as Williamson know how to sell them.
  27. Three
    In the movie’s first hour, all the blood is medical. Then the director stages a big shootout, mostly in slo-mo, that’s more clunky than epic. Before that misstep, though, Three is singularly entertaining.
  28. The Shallows
    Is The Shallows a thriller for the ages? No, but it’s decent popcorn fare. It’s about as deep as the titular lagoon on which it’s set, but the breakers promise a short and heart-pounding ride, with no wipeout.
  29. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    “Strangers” offers an inspiring look at creative people from very different walks of life who nonetheless communicate beautifully with one another. They don’t need to speak a common language: Their dazzling music says it all.
  30. Free State of Jones
    As gratifying as it is to see forgotten history brought to light, it’s disappointing, too: There’s an epic story to be told within Free State of Jones, but this white-knight tale isn’t it.
  31. The Neon Demon
    If Refn is trying to skewer our cultural fixation with youth and good looks, his blade isn’t up to the task. The Neon Demon attacks, but indiscriminately. It’s sharp-looking but dull, hacking and plunging every which way, yet drawing no real blood.
  32. The Fits
    In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.
  33. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    The film’s most profound subject matter may simply be the passage of time.
  34. De Palma
    A documentary in which one of the most voyeuristic directors in American cinema delivers an engaging, if maddeningly unresolved, tutorial in film production and appreciation.
  35. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence won’t win any points for originality, but that doesn’t make it any less funny.
  36. Finding Dory
    In deciding not to stray far from the first film in plot or tone, it makes for a pleasant, familiar, cheerfully unassuming fish-in-her-water tale.
  37. Warcraft
    It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.
  38. Art Bastard
    The documentary is a compelling indictment of the way commerce drives the art market. But the movie’s methodology is hit-or-miss, jumping from one interview to another, to jarring effect.
  39. Dheepan
    There’s no doubt that Audiard has invested a story of grief, dispossession and desire with immediate, almost tactile, urgency. Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.
  40. Genius
    Genius may be a bit stodgy and safe, but it tells a story of beauty — as it plays out in an improbably fruitful friendship, and as it’s discovered within vast expanses of raw language by a craftsman who was arguably an artist in his own right.
  41. The Conjuring 2
    The Conjuring 2 satisfies more than it disappoints.
  42. Now You See Me 2
    The film is, at times, almost sinfully fun, assuming you have a taste for self-indulgently logic-free hedonism.
  43. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    Although “As I AM” sometimes gets lost in the weeds of the club scene and Goldstein’s personal entanglements, it approaches the central irony of his life with both clarity and sadness, honoring its subject with a frankness he would have appreciated.
  44. Time to Choose
    The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.
  45. The Final Master
    In the Chinese martial-arts film The Final Master, the fighting is more lucid than the plot. That may be characteristic of the genre, yet this smart, stylish movie diverges from the expected in many ways, most of them enjoyable.
  46. Hockney
    The documentary Hockney presents such an immersive portrait of its subject — artist David Hockney — that by the end of the film it feels like we are looking at the world through his eyes.
  47. The Idol
    Like its protagonist, The Idol finds a sense of identity, hope and pride within a landscape of grim dispossession and fatalism.
  48. Presenting Princess Shaw
    It’s a lovely tale, even if it’s not quite the Cinderella story you might expect. The documentary also brings up some interesting points about how the Internet — the land of vitriolic trolls — can draw two very different people together to create great art from odds and ends.
  49. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    "Out of the Shadows” isn’t going to win any awards, good or bad. Neither an embarrassment nor a triumph, it is nevertheless an improvement over the last film.
  50. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    Clever, amiable and eager to please, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the comedy equivalent of the pop-rap star it satirizes, a bit of stupid-smart silliness that offers plenty of pleasure in the moment, even if its amusements last about as long as a snow cone in the sun.
  51. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.
  52. Maggie's Plan
    Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.
  53. Weiner
    Hubris, narcissism, tabloid spectacle and massive self-deception collide with the mesmerizing inevitability of a slow-motion train wreck in Weiner, an engrossing, almost shamefully entertaining documentary.
  54. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    Wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull.
  55. X-Men: Apocalypse
    At times, “Apocalypse” can be great fun, even if it doesn’t know when to hand its car keys to a friend and ask to be taken home.
  56. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
    It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.
  57. Sunset Song
    Sunset Song is a gritty and gorgeous film. Perhaps a little too gorgeous, in fact, and not gritty enough.
  58. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    Pelé: Birth of a Legend is too earnest and single-minded to be hagiographic, and the final moments are moving in spite of their predictable trajectories.
  59. Older Than Ireland
    In giving equal weight to all subjects, “Older” flirts with triviality.... But Fegan punctuates some commonplace observations with more peppery ones.
  60. Manhattan Night
    Manhattan Night gets by on the strength of its visuals and a few vivid central performances, but by the time we find out whodunit, it doesn’t really matter.
  61. 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.
  62. The Lobster
    Unfortunately, the movie’s second act tends to drag, getting bogged down by uninspired twists, while the first flies by with witty dialogue and a steady stream of novel details.
  63. The Angry Birds Movie
    After paying good money to take your family to see this film, you may be dealing with some anger-management issues of your own.
    • Washington Post
      • Posted May 19, 2016
  64. The Nice Guys
    The characters in The Nice Guys often ask each other if they’re good or bad, a choice the movie doesn’t want to force the audience to make. Instead it settles for making good on the title, occupying the nice, mushy middle — perhaps unfocused and off-balance at times, but conveying a sense of buoyancy that’s as cheerfully contagious as it is freewheeling.
  65. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    In the end, the plot is the least interesting part of the movie. One-upmanship gets old fast, but evolved, of-the-moment comedy helps make a stale story fresh.
  66. Sundown
    Absent any self-awareness by its protagonists, the best thing about Sundown is that it’s too dumb to be offensive.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Jimmy Vestvood: Amerikan Hero
    Teetering precariously between satire and base humor, “Jimmy Vestvood” squanders opportunities for both.
  68. Dark Horse
    Dark Horse is earnest, sweet and told with sentimentality, featuring shots of horses frolicking in fields set against beautiful string music by Anne Nikitin. Surprisingly, the effect isn’t melodramatic or overbearing, but disarming and endearing.
  69. High-Rise
    The overly schematic nature of High-Rise does not entirely diminish its pleasures as a story, which include, in addition to Wheatley’s richly lurid visual sensibility, an effective metaphorical tool in Laing.
  70. 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.
  71. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The lead actresses, like the story, work in subtle ways. There’s plenty of potency in small gestures, anecdotes and shared glances.
  72. Being Charlie
    There’s something admirable about the fact that Being Charlie exists at all. It’s a testament to Nick Reiner’s survival. That doesn’t mean it’s a great movie.
  73. A Bigger Splash
    A Bigger Splash manages to infuse even the most straightforward questions with vicariously alluring ambiguity.
  74. Money Monster
    Money Monster, which is at its best when it’s at its most crisply realistic and timely, suffers from the kind of only-in-Hollywood plot twists and eye-rolling exaggeration that results in smarter than average pulp, but pulp nonetheless.
  75. Phantom of the Theatre
    The movie is carried by sweeping widescreen images, dynamic camera movements, impressive special effects and a color scheme that contrasts icy blues against fiery reds.
  76. Francofonia
    The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.
  77. Men & Chicken
    Jensen positions Men & Chicken as a fablelike ode to humanism and tolerance, but his obsession with brutish sexuality and mean, slapstick humor makes that claim feel unearned and glib.
  78. Viva
    The story is slightly melodramatic, but director Paddy Breathnach finds ways to make it surprisingly moving at times, in the same way that he makes the Havana slums look paradoxically beautiful.
  79. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    The Man Who Knew Infinity tells a great story. It’s just that it’s a little too by-the-book to make anything other than a so-so movie.
  80. The Family Fang
    Bateman does an effective job directing the movie, which is based on a novel by Kevin Wilson (with a script by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire), smartly opting for understatement from his performers, so that their characters’ eccentricities have something to play against.
  81. Mothers and Daughters
    Somehow channeling the tone of both a Lifetime movie and an after-school special, Mothers and Daughters shambles into theaters oozing schlock and melodrama, just in time for Mother’s Day. This is no way to honor a beloved family member.
  82. Captain America: Civil War
    Crisply photographed, thoughtfully acted and often refreshingly amusing, “Civil War” injects doses of much-needed fun into a genre of filmmaking that’s become mired in dour pretentiousness, when it’s not ridiculing its own excesses in such meta-snark exercises as “Deadpool.”
  83. The Congressman
    Mrazek, who certainly knows the workings of this city from his 10 years in office, has written a script that feels accurate in its depiction of the mudslinging, lobbying chicanery and constituent grumbling that come with the job of politician. It’s just that little of it is terribly fresh or funny, and it draws no blood.
  84. Dough
    Dough never leaves any doubt about where it’s going or what it’s trying to say, serving up a recipe that we’ve not only had many times before, but we’ve had enough of.
  85. Pali Road
    Pali Road toys with some interesting questions about the line between romantic love and fantasy. In the end, however, it’s no more than a mildly scenic ride.
  86. The Meddler
    The Meddler is a movie of modest charms.
  87. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    On paper, this is an extraordinary story. But the careless production values blunt its impact. The score is obtrusive and generic; the sound editing makes a shootout sound reminiscent of an old Western; continuity errors abound.
  88. Tale of Tales
    Garrone has created a world of both rich and ugly textures — visual, narrative and imaginative — that transports, delights and imparts disturbing lessons.
  89. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, Fireworks Wednesday gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work — before he was acknowledged as a master.
  90. Ratchet & Clank
    Even by the forgiving standard of stuff-we-sit-through-for-our-kids, Ratchet & Clank falls short.
  91. Mother's Day
    Despite an army of appealing actors in its large ensemble cast, the rom-com Mother’s Day is startlingly unappealing. Clumsily edited and culturally tone deaf, it’s more obsessed with the titular holiday than even most mothers would find reasonable.
  92. Sold
    Sold is maudlin in a way that makes its audience, paradoxically, feel good, albeit superficially. A story of human trafficking should move us on a deeper, more uncomfortable level.
  93. Sing Street
    Warm, ingratiating, with a beat you can dance to, Sing Street is a feel-good movie that never demands to be liked. Instead it asks, politely and irresistibly.
  94. Rio, I Love You
    There are more than 6 million potential love stories in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, none of the 10 that have been assembled in the anthology film Rio, I Love You is any good.
  95. Nina
    Nina filters the singer’s voice — and her life — through tinny-sounding speakers and an out-of-focus lens.
  96. Louder Than Bombs
    Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.
  97. The Invitation
    The filmmakers keep trying to make Will appear paranoid, but he’s not fooled for long — and most viewers won’t be, either.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Huntsman: Winter's War
    While the funny, action-packed sequences are the best parts, they are indicative of the film’s main problems: an inability to focus and an overly complicated plot.
  99. A Hologram for the King
    It’s that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead.
  100. Green Room
    Aficionados of gore and guts may not mind the comfortably lived-in feel of this blood-spattered Green Room. But anyone looking for the ferocious originality, and unexpected humanity, of “Blue Ruin” will be disappointed by Saulnier’s uninspired cover version of a song we all know.
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