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. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    The bar isn’t terribly high here, but Puss and company clear it comfortably, landing — but of course — on their feet.
  2. The Grandmaster
    The director took great efforts to be true to Chinese martial arts, but he did so without sacrificing his own distinctive vision.
  3. 40 Years a Prisoner
    So many of our problems remain, but 40 Years a Prisoner presents a valuable primer on what mistakes not to repeat.
  4. Gran Torino
    If you can survive the F-bombs and the near-constant ethnic invective, Gran Torino is not to be missed, if only as the gutsy, thoroughly unexpected valedictory of an icon fully willing to spend every bit of his considerable capital.
  5. Honey Boy
    Well, surprise: Honey Boy, Shia LaBeouf’s startlingly forthright, cathartic and beautifully acted movie based on his confusing and chaotic life as a child actor, winds up demonstrating what can go right, when the right elements are in place.
  6. The Killer
    As it is, The Killer is less a diamond than a piece of good-looking but cheap quartz: all sparkling surface and not much value.
  7. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    My Name is Pauli Murray delivers a lively, revelatory litany of all the things Murray got right first, in a career that was driven by equal parts intellectual curiosity and call to service.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Splitsville
    The grand subject of “Splitsville” is the virtues and pitfalls of unconventional relationship structures, and it’s never more inspired than when it’s finding surreal ways to convey the insecurities such arrangements may awaken.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Folktales
    The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.
  10. 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.
  11. Cars
    The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.
  12. Appropriate Behavior
    Comedy today is less about punch lines and pratfalls and more about eliciting that laugh-gasp hybrid. And those jokes come constantly in Appropriate Behavior.
  13. Erin Brockovich
    It is a rabble-rousing cheerfest, based on a true story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zombieland
    Zombieland is sometimes funny. But those of us who have teeny coronaries every time something goes bump in Zombieland might have a hard time relaxing for long enough to really enjoy ourselves.
  15. Red Satin
    Although the movie is slow-going at first, it gradually awakens, like Lilia. And then it dances.
  16. Alias Betty
    The good news might be that Huppert wasn't available for Alias Betty, but the bad news is that it didn't stop France from exporting yet one more cold, pretentious, thoroughly dislikable study in sociopathy.
  17. Julieta
    Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.
  18. Ferrari
    Enzo Ferrari was a real person, not just a narrative device. No matter how ardently he sang of speed and danger, there must have been more to his character than Ferrari manages to find.
  19. Antz
    Sorry, Antz has no show-stopping song and dance numbers, no catchy melodies and no love songs either. The score, made up of old standards, does, however, enhance one of the movie's wittier episodes.
  20. The Lookout
    The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance. Still, Gordon-Levitt is superb, and Jeff Daniels delivers a wry and wily performance as Pratt's blind roommate.
  21. News of the World
    "News” is like almost every other western. Still, it works.
  22. Big
    Big has a warmhearted sweetness that's invigorating; it makes you want to break out the Legos. It's only near the end of the film, when Hanks has to play the scenes for pathos, that the movie becomes cloying.
  23. The Hangover
    Sitting through The Hangover is like watching "Memento" featuring the Three Stooges.
  24. The Square
    The Square may be one of the most timely films of this season, but it squanders its own relevancy by shooting fish in the world’s most shallow, painfully obvious barrel.
  25. The Club
    Toward the end, the film veers a bit out of control, as the residents engage in behavior that is incomprehensible, even given their previous transgressions.
  26. The Girl Cut in Two
    For all its charisma, A Girl Cut in Two lacks a certain depth.
  27. Slam
    Director Marc Levin's shaky, hand-held camera lends "Slam" an unvarnished, documentary feel. The script – credited not only to Levin, Bonz Malone and Richard Stratton, but to acclaimed performance poets Sohn and Williams – is dense and difficult.
  28. Journey's End
    This taut, emotionally wrenching snapshot of both the mythologies and grim realities of war possesses useful reminders about self-deception and abuse of power, especially at a time when bellicose rhetoric and war cabinets seem to be the order of the day.
  29. Both Sides of the Blade
    The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.
  30. 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.
  31. Battle of the Sexes
    A warm, earnestly entertaining film.
  32. River's Edge
    At its worst, River's Edge is crackpot sociology. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. They want to blame somebody.
  33. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    There's a place in the movies for wish fulfillment, no doubt, including the wish for it all to be over.
  34. Cold in July
    The first half of Cold is tense and suspenseful, albeit in a conventional way; the second half is sickeningly compelling. It’s hard to watch and hard to look away from.
  35. Layer Cake
    The director Vaughn has a flair not merely for action and ambiance but also for character.
  36. The Company
    It is sheer brilliance and testament to the vitality of an old master.
  37. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    A compelling French Canadian drama.
  38. Ray
    It is to the film's credit -- and Foxx's -- that we are able to see, behind the flash and fury, a man who didn't know how to love, and was so much the lonelier for it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mask
    Mask is a tear-jerker in the sense that your dentist is a tooth jerker -- it yanks on your heart with pliers. That said, the story it has to tell is so unutterably sad and inspiring that the movie works in spite of itself. [22 Mar 1985, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  40. Suburbia
    All the kids are believable and Suburbia's shortcomings are mostly in its script, not in its characterizations. [11 Feb 1984, p.G1]
    • Washington Post
  41. The Inspection
    Two things distinguish writer-director Elegance Bratton’s lyrical debut feature from its predecessors: a clanking, droning, energizing score by experimental rock band Animal Collective and a central character — based on Bratton himself — who’s Black and gay.
  42. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.
  43. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    Macabre, yes, but the movie's also inventive and funny. You get a lot of smart bang-bang for your buck.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Bridge never quite gels into anything.
  45. Crossing Delancey
    What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.
  46. Three Monkeys
    It's a film filled with excellent acting, beautifully composed shots, and one or two legitimate storytelling surprises.
  47. The Long Walk Home
    One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion. 
  48. Bowfinger
    Lacks emotional depth and intellectual sincerity.
  49. The New World
    The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.
  50. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.
  51. In This Corner of the World
    “Corner” is a deeply sympathetic tale, using the possibilities of animation not just to pique curiosity, but to devastate.
  52. A Royal Affair
    But even appreciated simply as a little-known chapter of European history, it proves consistently engrossing, edifying and affecting.
  53. Bull Durham
    You may catch yourself trying to remember where you parked a little before the end.
  54. Dark Waters
    Dark Waters is an effective outrage machine: If you like “Erin Brockovich,” you’ll probably like this too.
  55. The Puffy Chair
    A charming, if limited, romantic comedy that examines post-collegiate angst with easy, unself-conscious humor.
  56. The Original Kings of Comedy
    There's nothing stodgy about these court jesters or their humor, even though their act is a decidedly grown-up affair.
  57. Innocence
    A sweet but labored love story.
  58. Shattered Glass
    In a sense, Shattered Glass is a parenthetical horror movie in which someone discovers (or worse, denies) the monster within themselves.
  59. Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    It's a masterful little film, and, thanks to Zhang's seasoned hands, it's subtly heartfelt but never manipulative.
  60. War of the Worlds
    As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.
  61. ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    ShowBusiness is not so clever nor so entertaining as the popular musical "A Chorus Line," which plied this territory more than 30 years ago, but it does go deeper into the mechanics of the business.
  62. Love & Basketball
    This one has crossover hit written all over it.
  63. Breaker Morant
    To present a simple progression from crime to trial to death, when a moral dilemma was promised, is a dramatic crime. [01 May 1981, p.19]
    • Washington Post
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirst
    Thirst is good, insolent fun for about two-thirds of the way, before it stumbles and drowns in a pool of its own excess. Still, you can't help but admire a horror movie that prompts us to wonder how vampires with a surplus of blood got by before the advent of Tupperware.
  65. Notes on a Scandal
    I can't remember a film that sees the here and now more precisely, one that offers total believability in the tone and motive of its characters and then goes further, showing us a whole and completely recognizable world.
  66. The Dig
    Gradually, and with the methodical patience of someone unearthing buried treasure with a tiny brush, The Dig reveals itself to be a story of love and estrangement, of things lost and longed for, of life and death — of what lasts and what doesn’t.
  67. Clueless
    Ultimately, [Heckerling's] portrait is affectionate and, in places, even sweet, enabling us to laugh at them and embrace them at the same time.
  68. The Blue Room
    As a storyteller, Amalric is a master of manipulation, first leading the audience in one direction and then another. The Blue Room is a hall of mirrors, reflecting every detail but making it hard to know where you stand.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amreeka
    Abetted by an observant cast, she (Dabis) navigates across politically and emotionally fraught terrain with a warming inflection of humor and a mother-hen's attention to the needs of all of her characters.
  70. CODA
    You’ll laugh, all right. You’ll cry. You’ll do both at the same time. CODA is just that kind of movie. And thank goodness for it.
  71. Polyester
    The new film, a fitfully amusing and perfectly harmless spoof of the morbid and masochistic cliches that sustain the typical soap opera, represents a mellow, spruced-up turn toward the mainstream. [06 Jul 1981, p.C3]
    • Washington Post
  72. Fire Island
    Actor and screenwriter Joel Kim Booster gives Jane Austen a brisk, lighthearted refresh in Fire Island, a hedonistic — but disarmingly sincere — ode to the eponymous gay vacation spot.
  73. Bros
    Like any successful comedy — or movie, for that matter — “Bros” succeeds in its specificity: in this case, gay life and culture that are brimming with foibles, contradictions, triumphs and failures just waiting to be mined for comic gold.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    Matilda...explodes with an exhilarating pleasure in filmic transformation, in harnessing the strength of one medium and regenerating it freshly in another.
  75. Stevie
    By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.
  76. A Song for Martin
    August, who also made "Pelle the Conqueror" and "House of the Spirits," steers this story to its stirring conclusion with firm lack of sentimentality.
  77. Road to Perdition
    There's something impressive and yet lacking about everything.
  78. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    If you love the theater, you've got to see the film.
  79. Ammonite
    Rather than a movie that breaks the mold, it looks like Anning has inspired one we've seen before.
  80. Climates
    We realize that this romance, like the beautiful land, is doomed almost inevitably to earthquake fissures, to irreversible change. But rather than making us despondent, Climates leaves us peacefully philosophical.
  81. Skate Kitchen
    The result is a movie that feels both hard-edged and dreamy; punk-rock and lyrical; wised-up and unbearably tender.
  82. Gone Baby Gone
    The movie is taut, fast, achingly authentic and terribly melancholy.
  83. The Insult
    The performances remain subtly powerful, especially Karam’s. Tony is a man whose unpredictable rage can be sparked by one wrong move, but Karam infuses the character with pathos through the subtlest gestures and facial expressions. El Basha, who is also moving in his role, was the first Palestinian to win best actor at the Venice Film Festival.
  84. Fremont
    Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where Is Kyra?
    At just over 1 ½ hours, the film feels painfully long, paralyzed by a numbing bleakness. That’s not only the result of the protagonist’s downward trajectory, but also of cinematographer Bradford Young’s long, plodding shots, which only call attention to the visually hollow landscape.
  86. Magic Mike
    It's a nicely balanced blend of comedy, drama and athletic dancing that plies its trade with winking, unforced self-assurance.
  87. The Adventures of Milo and Otis
    They don't come any cuter than The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a heartwarming, tail-thumping story about a curious kitten and his pug-nosed puppy pal. It's totally awwwwww-some.
  88. 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.
  89. 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Juror #2
    Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.
  91. 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.
  92. Pumping Iron
    An amusing, buoyant documentary about competitive body building, dominated by the humorous though awesomely proportioned star presence of champion of champions Arnold Schwarzenegger as he trains and disarms the competition prior to defending the title of Mr. Olympia for the fifth time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Matilda
    Matilda, the funny new children's film directed by and starring Danny DeVito, takes that alter-family and creates a real-life fairy tale. Frequent use of vibrant colors like magenta and chartreuse, combined with unflattering camera angles and bizarre characters, give the action an unreal quality, like the land of Oz. [02 Aug 1996, p.B01]
    • Washington Post
  94. All the Money in the World
    All the Money in the World may not have that many surprises up its sleeve, especially if you already know how this story ends. You will, however, get your money’s worth, one way or another: whether it’s from the crime thriller or the thought-provoking sermon on filthy lucre that it throws in, at no extra charge.
  95. 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.
  96. Nanny
    The film, despite being mostly set in a huge, expensive apartment that inexplicably seems to be illuminated only by low-wattage lightbulbs, by and large resists the easy tropes of conventional horror. Instead, Jusu focuses, with an assured storytelling that slowly builds a mood of real-world dread, on more corporeal concerns.
  97. The Cabin in the Woods
    A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.
  98. Miami Blues
    Certainly the going is grim, and there's nothing socially redeeming about "Blues" whatsoever, but writer/director George Armitage's movie is also funny, stirring and full of great moments done in the pop-arty, lightly macabre spirit of producer Jonathan Demme.
  99. Friendship
    Friendship is primarily a movie for Robinson’s hardcore fans, but, for the Tim-curious, it serves as an amusing — if haphazard and uneven — introduction to his distinctive sensibility.
  100. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.
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