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. Black Mass
    Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven’t managed to solve one of cinema’s most enduring challenges — making criminals interesting without exalting them.
  2. Everest
    Everest gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.
  3. The Golden Dream
    The movie has an unhurried pace, lulling the teens — and by extension the audience — into occasional complacency with the regular rhythms of each chugging train.
  4. Wolf Totem
    Annaud and his crew, including wolf trainer Andrew Simpson, nicely illustrate the animals’ cunning and coordination.... The human drama is more perfunctory.
  5. The Visit
    The cast of mostly unfamiliar actors also serves The Visit well. Shyamalan has a gift for eliciting strong performances, even when his material is lacking.
  6. The Transporter Refueled
    The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.
  7. Learning to Drive
    Learning to Drive would be an entirely inert expedition were it not for Clarkson, who plays against Kingsley’s sentinel of propriety with her signature radiance and birdlike gracefulness.
  8. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    The picture that emerges is fractured, making for a portrait that’s as fascinating as it is baffling.
  9. A Walk in the Woods
    For a moment, the movie tries to be about something deeper — some existential epiphany, perhaps. The book didn’t deal in platitudes. It was content to be lightly educational, but mostly just entertaining. The movie aspires to be more than that, only to reveal how much less than that it really is.
  10. Unsullied
    Unsullied is wholly underwhelming, with atrocious performances and plot twists so implausible that they would be funny in a film less tedious than this.
  11. Rosenwald
    Rosenwald isn’t just a portrait of a great, selfless American and his powerful company, but an excavation of an ugly strain of our own history, and a reminder of what one person can do to uproot it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Steak (R)evolution
    The meat is supposed to be the most beautiful thing in the documentary, but I found myself more drawn to the lingering shots of shaggy cows, silhouetted on European mountainsides, with their tousled bangs blowing in the wind.
  13. Digging for Fire
    Digging for Fire is a pleasant escape — an attractively shot, gracefully edited and, finally, emotionally satisfying mystery about the nature of marriage itself.
  14. Grandma
    Like all of her greatest creations, Tomlin brings Elle to life with compassion and candid, sometimes withering knowingness.
  15. Z for Zachariah
    The acting is strong, with Robbie and Ejiofor turning in performances that feel powerfully authentic, even in moments of ethical confusion. Maybe especially in moments of ethical confusion.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    We Are Your Friends
    By the end, though, the original bits fade as easily as one song bleeds into another.
  17. No Escape
    Every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage. A lot of locals have to die, the film suggests, in order for one white family to survive.
  18. Ten Thousand Saints
    The movie captures the city vibrantly, in moments of beauty and brilliance.... But Jude, our narrator, is paper thin.
  19. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    For audiences interested in an earnest, inspirational story, full of timeless messages and beautiful animation, this is a lovely reminder of how to live life with purpose and joy.
  20. Mistress America
    Even at its most daft and infectiously ditzy, Mistress America is a sharp, aware and surpassingly kind portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.
  21. American Ultra
    American Ultra has a clever premise. But it misses several opportunities to at least comment on, if not skewer, the spy movies that it only halfheartedly pokes fun at. As it is, it’s content to generate a low-grade buzz, rather than deliver a true high.
  22. Hitman: Agent 47
    The movie — which looks and sounds like a more brutal Bond knockoff — is at least consistently stylish, though its tone is less assured.
  23. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    One needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.
  24. Straight Outta Compton
    Straight Outta Compton reminds viewers not only who N.W.A. were and what they meant, but also why they mattered — and still do.
  25. Listen to Me Marlon
    Riley doesn’t merely make a fine nonfiction film about the life and legacy of the late conflicted artist. He virtually resurrects him.
  26. Cop Car
    The film is full of quiet little truths.
  27. Sneakerheadz
    Perhaps Sneakerheadz needs a sequel, one that more directly interrogates the shoe manufacturers themselves about the hazards of pumping up so much hype about their product.
  28. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    The threat that this mess of a movie might be followed by a sequel is enough to make anyone cry uncle.
  29. Tom at the Farm
    It’s a claustrophobic drama that unfolds like a thriller, although its characters are so bizarre that sympathizing with them is difficult.
  30. Call Me Lucky
    Ironically, Call Me Lucky, a worshipful new documentary profile of Crimmins by comic-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, has a little too much reverence for its irreverent subject.
  31. Best of Enemies
    Best of Enemies exists mainly as an occasion to replay the footage of Vidal’s smug taunt and Buckley’s seething response. It’s great television, but it has been available on YouTube for some time now.
  32. Phoenix
    Hoss’s breathtaking portrayal, especially in the film’s final minutes, makes it clear why director Christian Petzold has made a habit of working with her.
  33. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Hippocrates loses its nerve with a facile climax that betrays the depth of what precedes it, yet there are few things more fascinating than when competent professionals disagree, especially if we appreciate the source of their impasse.
  34. Dark Places
    Paquet-Brenner has assembled a talented cast.... Yet he elicits mostly unmemorable performances from just about everyone involved.
  35. The Gift
    A surprisingly intelligent and effective (if slightly pulpy) psychological thriller.
  36. The End of the Tour
    Improbably, The End of the Tour doesn’t just sustain the audience’s interest in Wallace and Lipsky’s exchanges, arguments and moments of bonding, but invites us to care deeply about the men.
  37. Ricki and the Flash
    Although sweet and likable, Ricki and the Flash pulls too many punches to qualify as cathartic or even memorable. Instead, it’s a crowd-pleaser every bit as calculated and earnestly defanged as a Golden Oldies bus-and-truck tour.
  38. Fantastic Four
    The special effects look cheap, the acting is wooden, and the shouted dialogue consists largely of throwaway action-movie cliches (“Let’s do this”) and B-movie sci-fi jargon (“His bioenergy is off the charts!”).
  39. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    As with other Aardman productions, the greatest delights derive from relishing the details of the clay figures and intricate sets, crafted by the studio’s master model builders.
  40. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Overall the movie is a fun peek at the birth of Lego bricks and their ever-evolving place in the world.
  41. The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence is as beautiful as it is bleak.
  42. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The film can be appreciated, if only as a showcase for its assured, emotional attuned performances, as a convincing time capsule and period piece, and as a chance to reconsider one of the more well-known and still-influential studies of its era.
  43. Samba
    Like “The Intouchables,” Samba is loosely plotted and is at least 20 minutes too long. It seems ready to end half a dozen times before it finally does, with ironic payoffs for Samba and Alice that are too glib to be satisfying.
  44. That Sugar Film
    Although Gameau’s film includes a fair amount of science, he and his helpers sweeten the film’s statistics, delivering them in clever, accessible ways.
  45. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.
  46. Vacation
    For the most part, Vacation is a sad, cynical rip-off of writer John Hughes’s source material. No one expects originality, but the new movie may end up making history: It’s already looking like the worst movie of the year.
  47. A Borrowed Identity
    Under Riklis’s direction, the film’s first act lulls the audience into a sense of familiarity, before plunging into a darker reality. The effect is shattering.
  48. Do I Sound Gay?
    Thorpe doesn’t flinch from whatever awkward or controversial findings his subjects offer up, especially when they concern himself. The filmmaker’s curiosity as a reporter is tempered by an unapologetically subjective perspective.
  49. Paper Towns
    If it’s a bit dull, and too dependent on a what-I-learned voice-over to make its points, it can still be applauded for resisting the temptation to overreach.
  50. 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.
  51. Unexpected
    Unexpected would have been enriched by a more generous balance between the two characters’ worlds. But Swanberg shows a sure, sensitive hand in limning the upshots and downsides of life’s most blessed events.
  52. Irrational Man
    Irrational Man isn’t a comedy. There are, however, moments that invite rueful chuckles of recognition, especially when Posey’s character is giving Abe the business. She strikes a welcome madcap note in what is otherwise a series of bland medium shots of people talking.
  53. Pixels
    Lazy humor and familiar plotting aside, Pixels at least gets a little mileage out of its affection for the 1980s.
  54. Southpaw
    Southpaw may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he’s in.
  55. Tangerine
    As one character observes in Tangerine, Los Angeles is “a beautifully wrapped lie.” Baker has created a fitting homage to artifice and the often tawdry, tender realities that lie beneath.
  56. Trainwreck
    Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.
  57. Boulevard
    If the movie is cheesy at times, it more often presents an understanding of life’s contradictions and compromises.
  58. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    One wonders what someone who has never heard of the guy...would make of the film, which is defiantly, even, at times, obnoxiously, obtuse. Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of like the Russell we see in the film.
  59. Mr. Holmes
    Like any good Sherlockian case, the stories interweave into a satisfying conclusion. And the cinematic elements fit together as neatly as the plot lines.
  60. Lila & Eve
    In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.
  61. Ant-Man
    The second half of this nearly two-hour film is a pure delight — fast-paced and funny and filled with special effects and humor as great as any recent Marvel movie, with the possible exception of “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
  62. The Tribe
    What makes The Tribe unforgettable is the filmmaker’s attention to composition and staging, with camera work by cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych that goes from implacable stasis to poetic fluidity with seamless, expressive ease.
  63. Batkid Begins
    Batkid would be easier to swallow if it focused less on self-congratulation than on the epidemic of unselfishness that inspired the magic in the first place.
  64. Strangerland
    It’s hard to get over the movie’s haunting atmosphere. It may be just another story of kids in peril, but this one’s particularly hard to shake.
  65. Tap World
    The movie is at its best when Hargrove shows rather than tells. Anyone can appreciate these artists in motion, all of whom prove the infectious appeal of a dance that doesn’t just respond to rhythm but creates its own.
  66. Cartel Land
    Cartel Land reveals a culture that spans the border, full of death and dismaying behavior on both sides, but thriving all the same.
  67. Jimmy's Hall
    In many ways, Jimmy’s Hall shows what the pursuit of happiness can look like, and why it’s worth a revolution to protect it.
  68. Manglehorn
    Sure, there’s an undeniable pleasure from watching Pacino and Hunter work the screen, but the syrupy, symbol-heavy script by first-time feature writer Paul Logan is weighed down further by cliches and false notes.
  69. Rebels of the Neon God
    Rebels of the Neon God rarely cracks a smile, but it’s as droll as it is disaffected.
  70. Self/less
    Self/less bears not a trace of Singh’s signature visual richness, quickly devolving into a tiresome game of cat and mouse, padded with cliched fight scenes, car chases and shootouts.
  71. Amy
    [A] sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary.
  72. Minions
    I, too, once enjoyed the Minions, in the small doses that they came in. But the extra-strength Minions is, for better or for worse, too much of a good thing.
  73. The New Rijksmuseum
    Artful yet agonizingly unhurried at times.
  74. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    A deep core of emotion gives 3  1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets its ballast, but Silver, who also serves as cinematographer, infuses the production with simple, elegant sophistication.
  75. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL tries mightily — if unsuccessfully — to match its predecessor’s stature as a camp classic, the epitome of trashy summer fun for the whole pansexual, polymorphously perverse, omni-libidinous family.
  76. Terminator Genisys
    Genisys goes back to what made the franchise work in the first place: not the machine inside the man, but vice versa.
  77. Fresh Dressed
    The film doesn’t always dig deeply, glossing over why certain trends have emerged. And some of the interviews don’t add much to the movie beyond star power. Fresh Dressed nevertheless offers an original and worthwhile look at the history of hip-hop style. And the soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.
  78. Infinitely Polar Bear
    What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.
  79. A Little Chaos
    Though it purports to be about the delights of disorder, “A Little Chaos” feels like yet another by-the-book period romance, only without the genre’s requisite spark between the main characters.
  80. Ted 2
    As he proved with his misbegotten A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane is essentially a guy who’s gotten appallingly lucky on television. He exhibits zero proficiency in cinematic staging and no sense of pace.
  81. The Overnight
    In a way, The Overnight ends just as it’s beginning. But for a brief time, even in the midst of preposterous digressions and full (and not so full) Montys, it offers a compassionate glimpse of people at their most naked, honest and undefended.
  82. Max
    Despite the overplaying, Max gets its job done, which is to celebrate the sacrifices of military dogs, while warming the cockles of your heart.
  83. Every Last Child
    What’s true in Pakistan turns out to be universal: Misconceptions can prove as dangerous as any disease and are even harder to eradicate.
  84. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    Servin and Vamos clearly have a healthy sense of the absurd, which they use, like good satirists, to highlight hypocrisy, greed and corruption.
  85. Dope
    Famuyiwa reminds viewers not to believe — or worse, internalize — the hype, and he provides a great deal of cheeky, infectious fun in the process. Put another way, Dope is the bomb.
  86. The Wolfpack
    More than a testament to the power of cinematic storytelling as food for the human spirit, The Wolfpack also is a portrait of a family that has had to rely on each other to survive.
  87. Inside Out
    This is that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions.
  88. The Farewell Party
    Despite its missteps, The Farewell Party feels special in the way it covers the Big Stuff — love, death, friendship, family — without losing its playful streak.
  89. Live From New York!
    Live From New York! is a fun, not academic walk down memory lane.
  90. Heaven Knows What
    What elevates Heaven Knows What above other run-of-the-mill wallows in aimlessness and self-destructive compulsion is Arielle Holmes.
  91. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    Me and Earl and the Dying Girl succumbs to the same cloying too-cuteness and solipsism that often plague its glib and sentimental genre. But those limitations are leavened by the film’s lively, ultimately affecting flourishes and sprightly voice.
  92. Gemma Bovery
    The movie winks and nudges its way through a lighter, modernized variation of the classic, proud of its own cleverness every time Gemma’s life mirrors Madame B’s. But imitation for the sake of itself isn’t brilliant, especially when the elements most worthy of copying — Flaubert’s precise narration and telling details — don’t make the cut.
  93. When Marnie Was There
    There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.
  94. Love at First Fight
    The actors make the movie’s memorable characters all the more indelible, even when Love at First Fight loses its sense of originality.
  95. 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.
  96. Jurassic World
    The most enjoyable moments of an otherwise oddly joyless film actually belong to Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus, who steal the show in an especially amusing scene during a panicked evacuation.
  97. Insidious: Chapter 3
    The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.
  98. Aloft
    The characters in Aloft seem to float over their strong passions, like birds riding on columns of air, without ever alighting. I kept waiting for the sharp sting of a talon to take hold of my heart, but it never came.
  99. The Connection
    Director Cédric Jimenez, who wrote the movie with Audrey Diwan, has created a slow burn of a movie. The action is intermittent, but a steady tension keeps things interesting.
  100. Freedom
    In the world of Freedom, slaves and the people who help them are Christians, and the bad guys don’t believe in God.
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