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. You Will Be My Son
    You Will Be My Son is not a subtle movie. Some of the characterizations and music feel heavy-handed, and one major plot point late in the film feels inauthentic.
  2. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    For those seeking further insight into this sliver of Ali’s remarkable career, “Trials” is as comprehensive as it gets.
  3. Mademoiselle C
    It’s an air-kiss of a movie, one that places a non-contact peck on either side of its subject’s mouth, then breezes off before a serious conversation can begin.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Inequality for All
    The job is not to convince us of something many Americans don’t want to believe, but to address something we all know is happening and nail down just how bad it really is. Judging from the pit left in a viewer’s stomach, it does the job pretty well.
  5. Haute Cuisine
    Haute Cuisine provides no huge revelations or profound messages, but it is sweetly and consistently engaging — a tasty treat that’s not entirely filling but perfectly enjoyable all the same.
  6. Blue Caprice
    As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.
  7. Enough Said
    Feisty, funny, fizzy and deeply wise, Enough Said sparkles within and without, just like the rare gem that it is.
  8. Baggage Claim
    Glossy, flossy and blithely secure in its own cheerfully fake worldview, Baggage Claim bypasses the intellect entirely, happy to satisfy on a silly, screwball, wish-fulfillment level. It could have been so much better, but for racking up undemanding escapist flyer miles, it’ll do.
  9. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    Kids will chuckle, for sure. But parents who were pleasantly surprised by the original film’s intelligence will miss Lord and Miller’s guiding hands, as what once felt so funny now leaves a stale taste.
  10. Don Jon
    Don Jon is a disarming film that proves Gordon-Levitt’s deftness both behind the camera and in front of a computer screen, writing.
  11. Metallica: Through the Never
    The music is central, so viewers without a preexisting taste for thump and thrash will probably not be converted by the Imax 3-D spectacle.
  12. Rush
    Howard directs Rush with speed and jangly, jarring verve, bringing the races themselves to white-knuckled life and allowing the men’s stories to play out with only slightly predictable reversals, upsets and, inevitably, those hard lessons learned.
  13. Battle of the Year
    What saves “Battle” from complete irrelevancy is the undisputable fact that a scrappy underdog formula tends to work no matter what time period or sport.
  14. Good Ol' Freda
    The documentary transmits plenty of positive vibes, but it offers nothing fresh about the Fab Four.
  15. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    As a character study, Ip Man: The Final Fight would be more convincing if it didn’t look so distractingly like a Hollywood musical.
  16. My Lucky Star
    While Zhang is one of China’s greatest international stars, My Lucky Star is utterly provincial. It’s for Chinese viewers, plus those few westerners who revel in Asian hyper-cuteness.
  17. Prisoners
    Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, Prisoners works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.
  18. Thanks for Sharing
    It’s surprisingly wise, funny and affecting, thanks in part to a sensitive script, and in part to a strong ensemble cast.
  19. Generation Iron
    “Iron” opens a window to an exclusive club and gives valuable insight into a small, dedicated and proudly unique community.
  20. The Henchman's War
    “War” reminds us that “economic” doesn’t have to mean “cheap.” “Indie” doesn’t have to mean “amateur” and “gangster” doesn’t have to rely on tired cliches.
  21. Salinger
    While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.
  22. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    The film is less a look into the Fed’s head than a presentation of its history, going back even farther than its creation in 1913, in response to a series of early 20th-century banking panics.
  23. The Patience Stone
    Farahani’s performance is outstanding. She comes across as both delicate and fierce, and her sad-eyed anguish is palpable.
  24. Populaire
    Populaire is a mostly delightful and entirely unironic throwback to the kind of film they stopped making about 50 years ago.
  25. Sample This
    The movie provides a vivid sense of the period, as well as an intriguing backstage look at the making of improbable pop classics.
  26. Things Never Said
    When it comes to writing the poetry that Kalindra recites, Murray knows how to do more with less; he needs to apply that lesson to his filmmaking, too.
  27. The Family
    After the movie limps along for an hour and a half, Besson suddenly switches gears and does what he does best.
  28. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A bustling, overly busy mess.
  29. Follow the Leader
    The movie is about so much more than politics. Growing up, growing disillusioned, gaining wisdom — these are the themes of Levitt’s slight but eminently watchable film.
  30. Adore
    Adore at its core is a bore, nothing more.
  31. The Ultimate Life
    The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.
  32. Terraferma
    The story starts to feel crowded, especially when each character seems instantaneously at odds with another. One set of opposing forces would probably suffice.
  33. Afternoon Delight
    The movie’s a mixed bag, but Hahn makes the most of her opportunities. Casting directors would be wise to take note.
  34. Winnie Mandela
    Despite the marquee names and their obvious talent, the film feels like a made-for-TV movie. It’s slight and episodic, with a weirdly scrupulous ambivalence about its subject, whom it seems torn between loving and loathing.
  35. Instructions Not Included
    The film’s counterintuitive success is largely due to Derbez, who demonstrates why he is beloved, both south and north of the border.
  36. Riddick
    Riddick can be cheesy and silly, not to mention excessively violent, but it’s also fun.
  37. The Artist and the Model
    The Artist and the Model isn’t about much, other than female beauty. That theme is not exactly controversial. Chalk the tameness of the subject matter up to the period in which the film is set.
  38. Getaway
    The whole movie becomes such a pileup of detritus, whether it’s cop cars or plot points, that even something as important as rationale becomes an afterthought.
  39. The Grandmaster
    The director took great efforts to be true to Chinese martial arts, but he did so without sacrificing his own distinctive vision.
  40. One Direction: This Is Us
    I’m on to you, Spurlock. There are holes in your story about five lads who don’t appear to ever drink, smoke, fight, curse or partake in romantic dalliances of any kind. At least, not on screen.
  41. Thérèse
    With the exception of one heartbreaking and well-acted scene towards the end of the movie, the atmosphere is oppressive and the characters act as if their personalities have been shot with novocaine.
  42. Short Term 12
    Short Term 12 is that rare movie gutsy enough to tell the truth about love: that it’s not a poetic longing or a magical-thinking happy ending, but a skill. And, the film suggests, we all have the capacity to learn it.
  43. Closed Circuit
    Closed Circuit is intriguing, even mildly diverting. That might have been fine for another film at another time, but in light of the here and now, this one should have been more.
  44. Austenland
    The movie has an Austen-like plot about an Austen obsessive. And while Hess laboriously checks off so many familiar scenarios...the film doesn’t have so much of what makes Austen transcendent.
  45. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    It’s a fascinating inside look, made all the more thrilling by Marking’s access to actual Pink Panthers.
  46. Cutie and the Boxer
    It’s a wonder how Cutie and the Boxer, in less than an hour and a half, manages to say so much about love, life and art. Movies twice as long are often half as eloquent.
  47. The Wall
    Pölsler’s film is quietly deliberate without ever feeling slow.
  48. The World's End
    This movie’s pleasures are less about its villains and more about the interplay between Pegg and Frost.
  49. You're Next
    The latest genre exercise from slasher-flick prodigy Adam Wingard (“A Horrible Way to Die”) is at times bloodily entertaining. And if the central plot twist isn’t all that clever, at least the movie offers some motivation for its mayhem.
  50. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    There are elements worth celebrating. The movie is thankfully less self-serious than the mopey “Twilight” films. The Mortal Instruments revels in its own camp. But there is plenty of room for improvement. The action flick is overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.
  51. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    One thing the film does do, if only inadvertently, is offer insight as to how we have gotten to this state of affairs.
  52. Museum Hours
    Museum Hours is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film’s lively cast of supporting characters.
  53. In a World...
    In a World . . . is a lot of fun, reflecting Bell’s own obvious love of piquant paradox and the music of the spoken word. But it also has a sharply observant streak that makes it as nourishing as it is endearingly nutty.
  54. I Give It a Year
    In addition to some trite set pieces, writer-director Dan Mazer serves up nothing more than conspicuous cynicism masquerading as comedy.
  55. Jobs
    The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights.
  56. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.
  57. Kick-Ass 2
    Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.
  58. Paranoia
    There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.
  59. Elysium
    A high-low tension runs through Elysium, not only in the narrative itself, but in Blomkamp’s own cinematic language, which can be lofty one moment and gleefully pulpy the next.
  60. The Spectacular Now
    The movie captures the raw excitement and heartbreak of adolescence so completely that it manages to replace a seen-it-all jaded heart with the butterflies that accompany fresh experiences.
  61. Computer Chess
    Computer Chess makes an affecting preservationist plea, in this case for a visual and material culture that, while not objectively beautiful, possessed its own form of buttoned-down passion — before it became obsolete by taking over the world.
  62. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    The odd and disturbing thing about the film is just how comfortable [Mancini] — and we — have become putting moments on camera that, once upon a time, were meant to be shared between two people.
  63. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Even likable actors can’t obscure the fact that, holy gods on Mount Olympus, this thing is a slog, a movie that dutifully hits its plot points involving prophecies and fleeces without evoking a whiff of spirit or imagination.
  64. We're the Millers
    It would be dishonest to claim it isn’t funny. The laughs may come in fits and starts, usually by way of sight gags and set pieces, but they do come. And then they go.
  65. Blue Jasmine
    Blue Jasmine may not be a comeback in any aesthetic or professional sense, but it nevertheless feels like Allen has come back: to the psychic space and collective anxieties of the country of his birth and a real world that, for a while there, he seemed to have left behind.
  66. Europa Report
    There are genuinely chilling moments in Europa Report, thanks in no small part to a talented cast that will likely look familiar to viewers, even if the actors’ names aren’t instantly recognizable.
  67. 2 Guns
    2 Guns feels like it’s all been done before, whether by John Woo, Michael Bay or any number of their CGI-happy clones.
  68. The Smurfs 2
    Almost everything about Smurfs 2 signifies an improvement over the original.
  69. The Wolverine
    A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.
  70. The Act of Killing
    The Act of Killing is a must-see.
  71. Blackfish
    It’s upsetting and scary to watch the footage of orca attacks collected in Blackfish, a damning documentary about the treatment of the animals by marine parks.
  72. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    Part drug comedy, part psychological drama, the movie is slight, but only superficially so. As the closing credits role, we’re left not with a sense of a day at the beach, but of what might be swimming out there, in the dark of the abyss.
  73. The Hunt
    Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen delivers an astonishingly restrained and expressive central performance in The Hunt, an engrossing psycho-social drama by Thomas Vinterberg.
  74. The To Do List
    The one thing The To Do List lacks is emotion. Carey is wise not to let the movie get bogged down by too much drama, but Brandy’s scientific approach to losing her virginity makes her seem almost robotic. That being said, it’s an amusing twist that the most emotional characters are Cameron and Brandy’s father.
  75. The Rooftop
    Before it veers off course, The Rooftop is lively, funny and colorful... Too bad Chou decided to shoehorn the gangster genre into a movie that would have worked just fine as a mere comedy-romance-fantasy musical.
  76. R.I.P.D.
    A dud that squanders a decent cast and succeeds neither as the comedy nor the action film it purports to be.
  77. Fruitvale Station
    What makes it a must see is its timelessness.
  78. Girl Most Likely
    A picaresque romance of self-discovery that delivers a near-constant flow of small delights until veering too far into screwball preposterousness.
  79. The Conjuring
    Whatever your belief system, this much is gospel: Movies like The Conjuring are less about the battle between God and Satan than the battle between the silly and the scary.
  80. More Than Honey
    It’s an informative, if slightly unstructured, narrative, yet it plays more like a horror story.
  81. Only God Forgives
    The most objectionable thing about Only God Forgives isn’t that it’s shocking or immoral, but that it’s so finally, fatally dull.
  82. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    V/H/S/2
    The gory and grotesque V/H/S/2 marks such a drastic improvement over its predecessor, though, that I’m actually eager to see who signs up for the inevitable third endeavor. With the right people in p
  84. RED 2
    The bigger surprise is just how clunky and unsatisfying this follow-up feels.
  85. Turbo
    A derivative but nevertheless good-hearted movie that’s peppered with enough clever touches to engage adults as well as moviegoers of the smaller, squirmier variety.
  86. Byzantium
    The joke seems to be that in 2013, it’s hard to teach an old bloodsucker new tricks. Still, Byzantium has a few moves that might surprise you. They have nothing to do with blood, but everything to do with the heart.
  87. The Hot Flashes
    Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.
  88. Pacific Rim
    A big, lumbering, rock ’em, sock ’em mash-up of metallic heft and hyperbole, a noisy, overproduced disaster flick that sucks its characters and the audience down a vortex of garish visual effects and risibly cartoonish action. And you know what? It’s not bad!
  89. Sweetgrass
    It's a gorgeous and, believe it or not, riveting documentary . . . about sheep.
  90. I'm So Excited
    Despite its plentiful and playful sexuality, this dose of Spanish fly is anything but exciting.
  91. The Look of Love
    The Look of Love also is filled with acres and acres of naked flesh, but it’s the storytelling that keeps you engaged.
  92. The Way, Way Back
    Features one of the best endings in recent movie memory — and as we all know, endings are the hardest. If it takes some predictable twists and turns to get there, well then, accept it and move on.
  93. The Lone Ranger
    This mishmash of styles, genres and tonal shifts makes for a dizzying pastiche best described in terms of the many movies it references throughout its nearly 2 1/2-hour running time, from “Little Big Man,” Buster Keaton’s “The General” and the Monument Valley-set canon of John Ford to “Dead Man,” “Rango” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
  94. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    It’s all in the name of comedy, and it mostly works, with a couple of exceptions, including an especially mean-spirited and somewhat violent tirade against a fan he met in an airport.
  95. Elemental
    Elemental speaks to the importance of protecting the natural elements: water, air, earth. It’s a beautifully filmed piece, even when it’s showing us white clouds of pollutants billowing out of a smokestack.
  96. A Hijacking
    To refuse to call A Hijacking a thriller is not to say it isn’t thrilling, in a dryly cerebral way. Writer-director Tobias Lindholm has a point to make, and he makes it pungently.
  97. 20 Feet from Stardom
    It’s a story of standing out and blending in, sometimes at the same time.
  98. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    The film is complex and bold, sometimes even exhilarating. It can also be frustratingly esoteric.
  99. Unfinished Song
    It’s worth a watch, if just for Stamp’s complex performance.
  100. Copperhead
    The story offers uncommon insights on the endlessly parsed period in history, but its execution sometimes falls short. Both the production quality and the persistent, sentimental soundtrack create a made-for-TV feel.
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