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. Just a Sigh
    Without much to go on, Just a Sigh lives up to its name. It disappears without a trace.
  2. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    The film serves an effective marketing tool after all, with some lively footage and funny interviews. It’s just too bad viewers can’t see the actual play.
  3. Fading Gigolo
    There’s a far more interesting movie taking place alongside this more than slightly silly one.
  4. For No Good Reason
    For No Good Reason rambles too much for its own good, compared to more traditional documentaries. The most rewarding parts of the film feature Steadman simply talking about his influences (Picasso, among others) and his youthful goal of changing the world through art.
  5. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Despite all the swooping and spinning and swinging in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield looks less like a kid having fun than like an actor entangled in a corporate web that, at least for now, he can’t escape.
  6. Brick Mansions
    Visually, Brick Mansions is a duller and more conventional film than “District B13,“ which was, if nothing else, a sourball-flavored form of eye candy.
  7. Finding Vivian Maier
    One of the great strengths of Finding Vivian Maier is the filmmakers’ willingness to gently thread ethical inquiry in and out of the film.
  8. Dancing in Jaffa
    While the movie can feel disjointed at times, bouncing around to cover so much territory, the climax of the kids’s ballroom competition makes up for any quibbles. If nothing else, it’s heartening to see the kids so transformed.
  9. Hateship Loveship
    Hateship Loveship sneaks up on the viewer, not only in the way the story takes its unlikely turns, but in Wiig’s own portrayal of a woman discovering desire and, in the most subtle way possible, acting on it.
  10. Walking with the Enemy
    A simple retelling of these stories would have been more dramatic, more effective and more powerful.
  11. The Other Woman
    Although The Other Woman nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted cliches about zip-less marriages, upper class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes.
  12. A Haunted House 2
    Definitely exceeds expectations, but in the worst way possible.
  13. The Railway Man
    The film is less deeply affecting than merely admirable. It’s a good, slick and well-intentioned film that wants so hard to be an important one that the slight feeling of letdown it leaves is magnified.
  14. That Demon Within
    Its cinematic flair nearly overcomes the awkward story.
  15. Make Your Move
    Some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high.
  16. Bears
    The spectacular cinematography (which took a year to capture), the sometimes silly and sentimental narration, and the alternately cutesy and menacing score are all used to showcase the dramatic lengths the wildlife kingdom’s most famously protective mother will go to provide for her cubs.
  17. Alan Partridge
    Partridge is such a fatuous, superficial figure that the trick is to make him palatable enough to sustain interest for more than an hour. The filmmakers meet with uneven success.
  18. Transcendence
    The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.
  19. Heaven Is for Real
    Thanks to a sensitive performance from Kinnear, as well as from a terrific cast of supporting actors, what could have been merely a feel-good exercise in Eschatology Lite instead becomes a wholesome but also surprisingly tough-minded portrait of a man wrestling with his faith.
  20. Dom Hemingway
    Though writer-director Richard Shepard (“The Matador”) knows how to spin a yarn about the vicissitudes of fate, Dom’s adventures make for a pretty thin garment in which to cloth such an outsize antihero.
  21. Watermark
    It’s as if the movie’s many pieces are supposed to be like impressionistic brush strokes. When seen together, the result is pretty to look at. But it’s not as meaningful as it should be.
  22. Mistaken for Strangers
    What might have been just another anodyne promo piece or solipsistic valentine instead becomes a funny, eccentric and finally deeply poignant depiction of art, family, ­self-sabotage and the prickly intricacies of brotherly love.
  23. Joe
    Nicolas Cage delivers what may his best, most nuanced performance yet in the gritty, hypnotic and deeply moving Joe.
  24. Under the Skin
    With long, quiet takes in which he simply observes Johansson wordlessly taking in the world around her, Glazer infuses the everyday modern world with a surpassing sense of strangeness and doom.
  25. Rio 2
    The movie feels at once too busy and too derivative. That’s no easy feat, but it’s also one sequel-makers probably shouldn’t aspire to.
  26. Oculus
    Oculus director Mike Flanagan has crafted a satisfyingly old-fashioned ghost story that, in its evocation of shivery dread, is the most unnerving poltergeist picture since “The Conjuring.”
  27. Draft Day
    This isn’t a sports movie so much as a procedural about backroom dealings, double-crosses and high-stakes trades.
  28. Jinn
    Intriguingly, Jinn makes a plea for understanding and cooperation between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Disappointingly, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad does all too good a job burying that message within a blustering supernatural thriller.
  29. The Missing Picture
    As haunting as it is haunted, The Missing Picture leaves viewers’ heads rattling with ghosts.
  30. Frankie & Alice
    Berry’s performance, although less campy and histrionic than the trailer makes it look, is still outsize in proportion to the material, which feels slight and insubstantial despite its basis in a true story.
  31. The Raid 2
    The brawling itself is every bit as inventive and exhilarating this time around... The script and acting, however, prove less successful.
  32. On My Way
    Bercot’s sense of atmospherics is more successful than her editing and camera work. Some pieces of the plot seem like they would make a bigger impact with a bit more backstory... But these series of vignettes still leave an impression, thanks in no small part to Deneuve.
  33. In the Blood
    As is typical of the genre, the plot gets sillier as it unfolds, while the violence gets gnarlier.
  34. Anita
    Mock’s biases are clear here, and her documentary does at times feel a bit too worshipful of its subject... Still, the documentary remains a powerful time capsule. It’s a reminder of what we were and, thanks to Hill, how far we’ve come.
  35. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    Even at its most depraved, Joe’s journey, and her confession to Seligman, are still compelling enough to propel Volume II until the story becomes hopelessly over-plotted.
  36. The Unknown Known
    Seemingly unable to engage in self-reflection, let alone self-criticism, Rumsfeld is given virtually full rein to control the narrative by Morris, who is far more interested in letting the audience dwell inside his subject’s strangely attenuated moral imagination, rather than challenge it.
  37. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    A baggy, at times brutal conglomeration of surprisingly deep character development and aggressively percussive action, The Winter Soldier is a comic-book movie only in its provenance.
  38. Ernest & Célestine
    Its charms, and they are both subtle and many, emanate like perfume.
  39. Cesar Chavez
    It seems like a waste of talent, but worse still, Cesar Chavez squanders an opportunity to revisit a story worth retelling.
  40. Big Men
    Boynton’s most impressive feat in Big Men is how she takes an impossibly convoluted scenario, makes sense of it and tells a story that’s riveting on its own but also serves as a parable about greed and human nature.
  41. The Face of Love
    Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.
  42. Honey
    Trinca delivers a marvelously unfussy performance, rendering her complex character gradually, along with the effects of the opposing forces that tear at her.
  43. Le Week-End
    In the capable hands of these fine filmmakers and actors, even its most bitter observations about life and aging are nearly always reliably balanced by moments of warmth, understanding and out-and-out screwball humor.
  44. Sabotage
    Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.
  45. Noah
    Viewers may not agree about what they’ve seen when they come out of Noah. But there’s no doubt that Aronofsky has made an ambitious, serious, even visionary motion picture, whose super-sized popcorn-movie vernacular may occasionally submerge the story’s more reflective implications, but never drowns them entirely.
  46. 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.
  47. Shirin in Love
    Although Boniadi makes Shirin nearly as likable as she’s supposed to be, writer-director Ramin Niami’s movie is crudely contrived and sloppily edited.
  48. Dark House
    Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.
  49. Particle Fever
    It plays out with all the suspense of a thriller. Assisted by acclaimed editor Walter Murch, Levinson wisely shapes the story not around the hardware, which was plagued by malfunctions and other delays, but around the people tasked with making the LHC run.
  50. Enemy
    There’s no doubt that Villeneuve can make a movie; he’s developed a strong cinematic voice. It’s tantalizing to imagine what he could do with a really fine story.
  51. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    It’s impossible to dismiss von Trier as merely a hype-monger. He’s too damnably good a filmmaker for that. Watching Nymphomaniac is to be reminded of his superb skills in creating vivid worlds and characters on screen.
  52. Bad Words
    Although his character might be a one-trick pony, Bateman’s directing proves he’s got skills to spare.
  53. Muppets Most Wanted
    The wittiest jokes and cameo appearances are designed to soar far over the heads of young filmgoers and into the atavistic pop consciousness of their adult companions.
  54. Divergent
    Director Neil Burger (“Limitless”) has crafted a popcorn flick that’s leaner, more propulsive and more satisfying than the bestseller that inspired it.
  55. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    As directed by Perry, The Single Moms Club goes for a mix of escapism and reality-based drama and winds up with a movie that can only be enjoyed via the running, snarky commentary that will inevitably scroll through most audience members’ heads as they watch.
  56. Child's Pose
    A compelling, complex, confounding film.
  57. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Elaine Stritch’s strength, along with the film’s, comes from her honesty. She is herself, even when — maybe especially when — she knows she’s being watched.
  58. Generation War
    The films are highly entertaining and highly disturbing, in the latter case for both the right and the wrong reasons. While admirably delineating moral decay, which eats away at one character like a virus, the movies never really get at the seed of evil.
  59. Veronica Mars
    The movie lacks some of the verve and chemistry that made the series a must-see. I guess that makes the movie more of a good-to-see.
  60. Need For Speed
    Need for Speed is a piece of auto-collision pornography that weighs down its car-flip-and-massive-fireball money shots with a preposterous plot involving vehicular manslaughter vengeance.
  61. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.
  62. Bethlehem
    Adler nicely harnesses the mounting volatility of this situation, which builds to an intense if tragic conclusion.
  63. Kids for Cash
    Kids for Cash proves that the abuse was both more nuanced and more tragic than the public understood.
  64. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers is hampered by a static structure that relies too heavily on a single voice.
  65. Stranger by the Lake
    Writer-director Alain Guiraudie takes an all-natural approach to his material, and not just because most of the men spend the movie in the buff. He takes long, lingering shots, never rushes a scene and uses no score, just organic sounds.
  66. The Bag Man
    The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.
  67. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    By visual standards alone, the characters, rendered in eye-popping 3-D, resemble nothing so much as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. They’re just as lifeless and inexpressive, too.
  68. 300: Rise of an Empire
    When the film isn’t sloppily directed, it’s a series of lazy filmmaking tics, including fetishistic slow-motion shots of blood, water and sweat, as well as sundry dismemberments, impalings and decapitations.
  69. Stalingrad
    As quickly as the technical elements pull the audience in, the plot pushes us away.
  70. Visitors
    For those willing to join Reggio in his extended meditation, Visitors offers a sublime, even spiritual experience, as well as a bracing reminder of cinema’s power to create a transformative occasion.
  71. Son of God
    Don’t expect to see a great film, or even a very good one. Whether you discover a meaningful channel with which to continue your walk with the film’s protagonist, however, is strictly between you and your god.
  72. Non-Stop
    Collet-Serra, who directed Neeson in “Unknown,” has a knack for keeping things lively and moving forward. There are moments of humor, gripping action and real terror.
  73. If You Build It
    A bracing, quietly exhilarating documentary.
  74. Omar
    Omar feels as trapped and enmeshed in hopelessness as the vicious political cycle it depicts.
  75. In Secret
    If you go in with the right attitude, there’s a fair amount of fun to be had from In Secret, considering it’s a musty French costume drama done in plummy English accents.
  76. The Pretty One
    For all its intimations about finding one’s true self and the complicated setups for a big misidentification, The Pretty One is just another romantic dramedy.
  77. The Wind Rises
    Of Miyazaki’s many gifts as a filmmaker, perhaps the most subtle is the way he honors time and silence and stillness, values that are in lamentably short supply in most modern-day productions.
  78. 3 Days to Kill
    3 Days to Kill feels like two very different movies, neither of which is particularly good.
  79. Pompeii
    Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.
  80. About Last Night
    About Last Night may be about Daniel and Debbie, but it’s Hart and Hall who make it worth watching. They take palatable but not exceptional cinematic hay and turn it into comic gold.
  81. Beijing Love Story
    The movie wavers in tone, occasionally lurching into supernatural fantasy, and withholds information in a manner that’s more annoying than tantalizing.
  82. Like Father, Like Son
    Like Father, Like Son grows on you, subtly and over time. Just as with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.
  83. 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.
  84. Endless Love
    The movie feels like Nicholas Sparks fan fiction.
  85. Winter's Tale
    Winter’s Tale is ambitious with its otherworldly ingredients and temporal leaps. It’s not always a success, but the movie has one thing going for it: spot-on casting.
  86. RoboCop
    For all its playfulness, the new RoboCop can’t help but lack the novelty of the original’s jolting mixture of dumb-smart irony and visceral pulp.
  87. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men often lets the schematic gears show, succumbing to threadbare formula and sentimental cliches rather than taut, sophisticated drama.
  88. Vampire Academy
    The only thing that distinguishes this teen-magnet wannabe from its predecessors is how lazily it appears to have been slapped together.
  89. The Attorney
    The Attorney can be melodramatic, and first-time feature director Yang Woo-seok is not yet a singular filmmaker. But the movie is carried by its rousing pro- democracy message and a lively performance from the versatile leading man.
  90. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    The documentary’s greatest strength is its ability to humanize Paulson.
  91. The LEGO Movie
    There are so many things to like about The Lego Movie: a great voice cast, clever dialogue and a handsome blend of stop-motion and CGI animation that feels lovingly retro, while still looking sharp in 21st-century 3-D. But the best thing about this movie... is its subversive nature.
  92. Gloria
    For the most part, Gloria is a day brightener of a character study about finding someone new and making the same old mistakes.
  93. Labor Day
    It’s difficult to believe a word of Labor Day, but then again you don’t have to in order to luxuriate in Winslet and Brolin’s bubbling, steaming chemistry.
  94. That Awkward Moment
    The best thing about awkward moments, after all, is that they usually pass quickly. And, blessedly, just as swiftly forgotten.
  95. I, Frankenstein
    If it touches on notions of scientific arrogance and the question of what makes us human, it ultimately does so lightly, and with a mix of eye-popping action and loopy good humor.
  96. Hours
    Compared to the “Fast and Furious” films, Hours is a chamber piece, but Walker wrings real pathos out of his instrument.
  97. Gimme Shelter
    Gimme Shelter has a lighter touch than you might think. Yet there are times when its attempts at wringing drama out of real life are more strenuous than is strictly necessary.
  98. Devil's Due
    It’s more silly than scary.
  99. Life of a King
    The film is an effective, even heartwarming, tale of one man’s commitment to teaching that playing by the rules is more important than winning.
  100. The Square
    In this vibrant, lyrical, graphic, sobering and finally soaring testament to aesthetic and political expression, Noujaim consistently provides light where once there was heat.
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