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. Love & Mercy
    It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness.
  2. Results
    Results is a smooth transition for Bujalski from the fringes to more commercial work. It’s heartening that he didn’t give up his calling-card observational humor to do it.
  3. Salad Days
    While the movie is best viewed as an examination of a specific place and time, it also can be seen as a celebration of a larger, more generic cultural phenomenon that one might call creative foment.
  4. Spy
    As cinema, Spy is content to cater to its own conventions, hit the required marks and earn a few laughs along the way. As a cultural bellwether, it does something bigger and more important, without ever italicizing that fact.
  5. Entourage
    Piven is so in the pocket as the smarmy, aggressive, inappropriate Ari that, when the movie he’s in does little more than double down on the bro-ing out, the whiffed opportunities become all the more obvious.
  6. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    Although he comes across as a sort of elfin crypt-keeper in this intriguing portrait by documentarian Belinda Sallin, Giger was also, quite literally, close to death.
  7. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    What happened to almost an entire generation of musicians in Cambodia isn’t a scandal. As “Forgotten” makes powerfully, passionately clear, it’s a tragedy.
  8. Survivor
    Director James McTeigue frequently collaborates with the visionary Wachowski siblings, and he directed V for Vendetta. How the man who blew up Parliament in such memorably spectacular fashion can’t add some originality to Philip Shelby’s script is the movie’s only real mystery.
  9. Sunshine Superman
    Sunshine Superman might seem like a niche story, with its focus on stunts that most people wouldn’t dream of actually doing, but the documentary feels universal. It’s simply an examination of how one man fully embraced life while charting his own path.
  10. San Andreas
    The dialogue in San Andreas is lame, its plot both predictable and implausible, and the character development beside the point. Even Dwayne Johnson, that force of cinematic nature and rock-ribbed charisma, doesn’t have enough charm to dig this mess of a movie out of the rubble of cliche it’s buried in.
  11. Aloha
    Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched.
  12. Poltergeist
    To call Poltergeist laughable is not the same thing as saying it’s bad (although it is that, too.) It’s just that it seems less interested in scaring you than in making you chuckle. At least on that score it succeeds.
  13. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    Whimsical, fantastical and self-consciously charming, it slinks around viewers’ ankles like an affectionate cat, purring ever more loudly until the audience can’t help but succumb.
  14. Félix And Meira
    That we almost don’t question the plausibility of this oddest of odd couples is a tribute to the sensitive direction of French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux, who wrote the relatable yet keenly observant script with Alexandre Laferrière.
  15. Marie's Story
    The movie by Jean-Pierre Améris milks the tears in the home stretch, making little effort to hold the melodrama at bay. The result is a story that everyone can feel great about feeling terrible about.
  16. In the Name of My Daughter
    In the Name of My Daughter has good intentions of taking a sensationalistic riddle and turning it into a human story. But the pendulum ultimately swings too far, leaving an explosive tale behind in favor of one that fizzles out.
  17. Good Kill
    Admittedly, Niccol succumbs to the temptation to make mini-billboards out of his dialogue, in which arguments follow neat “on the one hand” trajectories. But for the most part, Good Kill asks pertinent, enduring questions, not by way of polemic, but through the study of a character.
  18. Slow West
    [A] meandering, deliberate and tearless — yet oddly moving — western vehicle.
  19. I'll See You in My Dreams
    There’s something refreshingly realistic about the director’s approach. The movie has an unhurried pace, letting the camera linger over long conversations.
  20. Tomorrowland
    Maybe the ultimate goal of Tomorrowland remains obscure because once you know where the story is headed, you realize it’s a familiar tale. The movie can conjure up futuristic images, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen before.
  21. Mad Max: Fury Road
    To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.
  22. Saint Laurent
    A film that manages to avoid the dreary, Wikipediaesque literalism that plagues so many biopics while obliquely evoking the man and his era with textures, atmosphere, mood and tone.
  23. Where Hope Grows
    The Christian-themed Where Hope Grows wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who’s in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment. It’s a soft sell, to be sure, but it’s salesmanship all the same.
  24. Iris
    Iris serves as a spirited, often dazzling primer in how to fight the dying of the light and feel fabulous while doing it.
  25. Pitch Perfect 2
    A comedy that, if not always better than the first, is certainly more uproarious.
  26. Welcome to Me
    As she demonstrated in “The Skeleton Twins,” the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian has grown so adept at rendering troubled characters without offering sideline commentary that you can’t help but fall in love with her, even as laughter gives way to uncomfortable silence.
  27. Noble
    Writer-director Stephen Bradley may make some missteps, but he capitalizes on this underdog story’s inherent thrills.
  28. About Elly (2009)
    The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged.
  29. 5 Flights Up
    5 Flights Up is far from perfect, but it’s also undeniably touching.
  30. Bravetown
    I would call the movie a trainwreck, except it’s really four or five separate trainwrecks.
  31. Maggie
    The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.
  32. The D Train
    A modestly funny, little bit dark, occasionally knowing, not entirely cynical comedy that, to the extent that it succeeds at all, does so thanks to James Marsden.
  33. Hot Pursuit
    There isn’t one joke, sight gag or piece of slapstick tomfoolery that lands with any success or originality in Hot Pursuit.
  34. 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.
  35. Lambert & Stamp
    Through some astonishing archival footage and perceptive commentary from Who guitarist Pete ­Townshend, the filmmaker puts the band in its complicated context as both reflector and creator of the postwar British teenage gestalt.
  36. Far from the Madding Crowd
    The latest film adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd will delight fans of period dramas. It checks off the required boxes with solid acting, gorgeous cinematography and all the frustrating, glorious emotional restraint that you expect from a romance set in Victorian England.
  37. Dior and I
    The movie, not to mention the company, deserves praise for showing the challenges as well as the triumphs; Dior and I doesn’t shy away from conflicts when they arise. This isn’t marketing material. It’s a real look at a fascinating line of work.
  38. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    As he did in the first “Avengers,” writer-director Joss Whedon avoids the fatal trap of comic-book ­self-seriousness, leavening a baggy, busy, overpopulated story with zippy one-liners, quippy asides and an overarching tone of jaunty good fun.
  39. 5 to 7
    This calculatingly adorable coming-of-age tale has its delights — chiefly in a modest, endearing lead performance from Anton Yelchin and an amusing two-handed turn by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as his parents — but feels more constructed than lived.
  40. Adult Beginners
    There’s never any question where this is all headed: a huge blowup argument and a tidy resolution. That being said, the cast is excellent.
  41. Blackbird
    The heart of the movie is in the right place. And although some of the acting from the younger stars comes across as amateurish, a few performances truly shine.
  42. See You in Valhalla
    See You in Valhalla, which is being released simultaneously in select theaters and on demand, is as deadly as its funereal subject matter.
  43. Little Boy
    Little Boy is a as phony as a game of three-card monte.
  44. The Age of Adaline
    The Age of Adaline works best as a simple story of boy meets girl; girl falls in love; girl mulls whether or not to reveal that she’ll stay young forever. Everything else is just a lot of unnecessary noise.
  45. The Water Diviner
    Crowe clearly seeks to return to classic storytelling values with this sweeping-yet-intimate, serious-yet-swashbuckling, hither-yet-thither picaresque; that he succeeds only part of the time shouldn’t detract from the worthiness of his mission.
  46. Clouds of Sils Maria
    Olivier Assayas’s drama is intriguingly ambiguous and strangely constructed, and there seems to be symbolism lurking in every shot. Yet, despite acting that dazzles and no shortage of artistry, the movie is more fun to ponder than to sit through.
  47. Unfriended
    At times, Unfriended really clicks — but ultimately, it’s a drag.
  48. Black Souls
    Black Souls has a deep and startling soulfulness that, despite its shocking conclusion, is profoundly moving.
  49. Man from Reno
    If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it’s worth the ride.
  50. The Human Experiment
    The movie was nicely shot with flashy graphics to explain the data that does exist. But in the end, this film will persuade only those who already believe.
  51. 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.
  52. Beyond the Reach
    There are goofy, primal pleasures to be had in the first two-thirds of the film. But Beyond the Reach exceeds even its humble grasp in the final act, collapsing in a clatter of blockheaded manhunter-movie cliches. Crazy is one thing, but dumb is unforgivable.
  53. True Story
    Writer-director Rupert Goold, here making his feature debut, fails to capture the chemistry and tonal complexity necessary to make this grim, often grisly tale anything more than a tragically lurid anecdote.
  54. The Longest Ride
    People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.
  55. 3 Hearts
    The gently perfumed air of impending doom suffuses 3 Hearts, a tasteful, mildly intriguing romantic drama from writer-director Benoît Jacquot.
  56. The Forecaster
    The bigger mystery is whether the models actually work. Though the Armstrong partisans in the film strongly suggest that they do, director Marcus Vetter struggles to convince the lay viewer.
  57. Kill Me Three Times
    Although Kill Me Three Times includes a few murders, it does nothing to justify its title. Mostly, it just shoots itself in the foot, over and over.
  58. White God
    Even those who don’t buy in completely to Mundruczo’s parable will be impressed by his canine crowd scenes, staged with ambition, skill and genuinely original vision.
  59. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    The movie marches so quickly past the many milestones of Welles’s career and life that it doesn’t have to time to linger — lovingly or otherwise — on any of them.
  60. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth remains worshipful when it should be more probing, especially around questions of ethics, privacy and consent.
  61. Effie Gray
    Laxton knows how to get the audience down but hasn’t quite mastered the art of lifting them back up.
  62. 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.
  63. Furious 7
    Yes, the whole movie feels overstuffed and overlong, and the non-action scenes are often dragged down by stilted dialogue. But Furious 7 buzzes with a frenetic energy so contagious, there’s no sense in resisting it.
  64. Woman in Gold
    Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.
  65. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    The film’s steady accumulation of little quirks... soon grow tedious. After a while they’re less delightfully oddball touches with a promise of more to come than dead weight with no payoff.
  66. The Wrecking Crew
    Nostalgia trips are fun, but when they intersect with genius, virtuosity and genuine revelatory insight, they take viewers to a higher place.
  67. Deli Man
    Like a fat slab of pastrami, Deli Man is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food: warm, generous and made with love.
  68. Serena
    Cooper and Lawrence do their best, but the material consistently works against them, from the overwrought dialogue to the never-ending plot twists in place of character development.
  69. A Girl Like Her
    Weber’s main point — that bullies are often victims of bullying themselves — gets lost in a tsunami of sorrow and sadism.
  70. Danny Collins
    Danny Collins, like its central character, has a good heart, and sometimes that’s enough.
  71. Seymour: An Introduction
    Seymour: An Introduction gives viewers a soaring, sublime and enduringly meaningful glimpse of a man who is undoubtedly the real thing.
  72. Home
    Home is about the yearning for the comforts of family. But this kiddie sci-fi adaptation doesn’t quite live up to its evocative title.
  73. Get Hard
    Ferrell and Hart have a genial, easygoing chemistry and Get Hard manages to score more than a few good points about facile assumptions and toxic hypocrisy.
  74. Goodbye to Language 3D
    The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.
  75. 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.
  76. An Honest Liar
    In the end, An Honest Liar becomes a far more layered tale than it starts out to be.
  77. The Gunman
    The Gunman may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.
  78. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    There is, however, a certain urgency to the action that will prevent most people from noticing the film’s flaws.
  79. The Hunting Ground
    With its unflinching portrayal of cynical school officials and their corrupt symbiosis with the sports teams and Greek systems to which they’re beholden, The Hunting Ground is, at its most basic, a damning indictment of entitlement and impunity.
  80. Merchants of Doubt
    When Merchants of Doubt isn’t making you mad, it makes you very simply, and overwhelmingly, sad.
  81. Run All Night
    Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad “Out of the Furnace” Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food. It satisfies the craving for the sensation of nihilism, without its substance.
  82. Cinderella
    For all its gossamer, gauze, filigree and refinement, Cinderella drags when it should skip as lightly as its title character when she’s late getting home from the ball.
  83. Still Alice
    The filmmakers invite the audience to get close enough to feel the pain without having to relive the depths of the real-life horror.
  84. Ballet 422
    For fans of dance, Ballet 422 will produce plenty of pleasures. But as with great ballet, great movies always benefit from a little drama.
  85. Unfinished Business
    While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.
  86. Road Hard
    You can make a movie that’s both sweet and crass; just look at Judd Apatow’s comedies. But the mix doesn’t work here, maybe because both the vulgarity and the cheesiness are so amped up.
  87. Everly
    Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
  88. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Thanks to its funny, attractive, emotionally on-point cast, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel puts the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement about life having no second acts. In fact, it goes one step further to question why on Earth anyone would stop at just two.
  89. Chappie
    Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.
  90. Girlhood
    Girlhood is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.
  91. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.
  92. Maps to the Stars
    The movie can be over-the-top and the characters are rarely anything more than vile. And yet, the whole thing is mesmerizing.
  93. Human Capital
    Human Capital is a well made but ultimately rather facile tragedy for the globalized age of vertiginous wealth disparities. It’s suffused with beauty, guilt, regret and impunity that only the most obscenely overprivileged and dimly self-aware can hope to attain.
  94. Wild Tales
    Szifrón handles the tone and presentation masterfully.
  95. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.
  96. Focus
    Will Smith and Margot Robbie bring low-key erotic chemistry to an easy simmer in Focus, a smooth, sophisticated, often amusing little caper flick.
  97. 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.
  98. The Last Five Years
    It’s more than great dancing and tragic strings that elevate The Last Five Years to a very funny, deeply affecting portrait of love lost and found. Kendrick and Jordan are both Broadway performers with powerful voices.
  99. McFarland USA
    A new sport doesn’t equate to new ground, but there is pleasure to be had in a formula that works.
  100. The DUFF
    Between its grating heroine, strident speechifying, derivative plot and draggy tone and tempo, it’s like the redheaded stepchild of “Mean Girls” and “Freaky Friday.”
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