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. Easy Money
    The story and cinematography are gritty, but the portraits of these characters are impressively human.
  2. The Imposter
    What's most fascinating are the movie's larger questions about why some people tell impossible lies -- and why others believe them.
  3. The Bourne Legacy
    With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.
  4. The Campaign
    Tends toward the broadest possible takes on slapstick, sophomoric sexuality and post-"Hangover" raunch.
  5. Hope Springs
    Hope Springs is a minor miracle of a movie. Within a Hollywood tradition accustomed to treating sex as something titillating, taboo, gauzily idealized or downright pornographic, finally someone has made a movie that treats it in the riskiest way possible: as the physical expression of intimacy between two flawed but recognizable adults.
  6. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.
  7. Searching for Sugar Man
    The movie is neatly structured, and Rodriguez turns out to be an interesting guy. He's worth getting to know, even if his music isn't.
  8. Killer Joe
    The action and dialogue find the same squalid level in time for the climactic scene, the cruel humiliation of a central character. That's when sensitive viewers should do what the bloody-minded Joe could never imagine: Walk away from the mess he has made.
  9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    It really captures what it feels like to be a kid.
  10. Total Recall (2012)
    So what makes this 2012 Total Recall superior to the Arnie model? For starters, there's an actual actor in the starring role.
  11. Farewell, My Queen
    The foreboding and chaos contrast neatly with the lavish costumes and sets. Versailles takes on the feel of a gilded fortress, behind which the serving class hopes to hide. But money can't buy everything, including, in this case, security.
  12. Step Up Revolution
    Considering the clichd storyline and lackluster acting, maybe it's South Beach that deserves top billing on the "Revolution" poster.
  13. The Queen of Versailles
    The Queen of Versailles turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.
  14. Trishna
    That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.
  15. China Heavyweight
    Its brutality is unacceptable to Buddhism and Confucianism yet is increasingly appealing to young men (and women). And in a country that still professes socialism, it's fiercely individualistic. There are no collective work groups in the boxing ring.
  16. Ruby Sparks
    For a movie so bent on skewering illusions, Ruby Sparks ultimately can't entirely let go of its own.
  17. The Watch
    The Watch takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin. The tires may be in need of changing pretty soon, but for now the jalopy still runs.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    It's a story with serious human drama that will make you think a little differently the next time you watch your favorite team take the field.
  19. The Dark Knight Rises
    Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
  20. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.
  21. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    The fourth Ice Age freshens up the 10-year-old franchise by shunning easy ­pop-culture jokes and embracing its weird side.
  22. Take This Waltz
    Known for comedy, Rogen and Silverman are the film's most delightful surprises, and their performances shine.
  23. Savages
    Savages is a B-movie striving for an A-plus, a decadently energetic summer escape with bloody action, bold visuals and bodacious attitude to burn.
  24. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Fan or not, it's hard not to give in to Perry's endearing charms.
  25. The Amazing Spider-Man
    The good news is that Garfield and Stone whip up a warm, convincing froth as two teenagers caught up in a beguiling case of puppy love. The not-so-great news is that by "reboot," the studio means taking audiences once again through every step of Peter's transformation into Spider-Man.
  26. People Like Us
    It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.
  27. Magic Mike
    It's a nicely balanced blend of comedy, drama and athletic dancing that plies its trade with winking, unforced self-assurance.
  28. Ted
    Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.
  29. The Invisible War
    Dick, whose films include a revealing expose about the movie industry's film ratings board, has created yet another galvanizing call to action with The Invisible War.
  30. To Rome with Love
    A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.
  31. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.
  32. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Both terribly silly and a lot of fun.
  33. Brave
    The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.
  34. Safety Not Guaranteed
    As happens with many time-travel films, this one ultimately paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.
  35. The Woman in the Fifth
    It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.
  36. Lola Versus
    Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.
  37. Your Sister's Sister
    Very little is simple in Your Sister's Sister -- not the emotions, the naturalistic tone or the unstudied, easygoing performances. But the film's pleasures are.
  38. Rock of Ages
    Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.
  39. That's My Boy
    That's My Boy is radical only in its extreme laziness.
  40. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.
  41. Bel Ami
    It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.
  42. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.
  43. Prometheus
    All the God-talk and philosophical musings about morality and "meeting our makers" aside, Prometheus is primarily about delivering those visceral, terrifying jolts. That it does so without generating the taut suspense and moody atmosphere of its antecedents qualifies as one of its greatest failings.
  44. The Intouchables
    The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.
  45. Hysteria
    It's cute. So is the movie. If it never rises to greatness, it may be because it's also a fairly formulaic romcom.
  46. I Wish
    The vignettes are linked as much by theme as story, yet they're carefully structured and delicately balanced.
  47. U.N. Me
    If it weren't so shocking, it would be a lot funnier.
  48. Polisse
    Polisse is hard to watch at times, but it's also hard not to.
  49. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom is already shaping up to be this summer's art house sleeper hit, and no wonder: It traffics in the very kind of escapist spectacle -- in this case of a thoughtfully composed world brimming with whimsy, enchantment and visual brio -- that the season was made for.
  50. Snow White and the Huntsman
    Overlong, overcrowded, overstimulating and with an over-the-top performance by Charlize Theron as the evil queen Ravenna, the movie is a virtual orchard of toxic excess, starting with the unnecessarily sprawling cast of characters.
  51. Crooked Arrows
    The high-school sports drama Crooked Arrows has two -- but only two -- original selling points: Its protagonists are Native Americans and the sport in question is lacrosse. That's something you don't see every day. Other than that, however, the film's moves are taken straight out of "The Bad News Bears" playbook.
  52. Chernobyl Diaries
    There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.
  53. Men in Black III
    This third outing climaxes with a dark and melodramatic twist that, while adding a layer of nuance and back story that the previous two films never had, also feels wildly out of sync with its audience's expectations.
  54. Bernie
    Interspersing "real" people with professional actors, Linklater creates a vivid, gossipy Greek chorus that serves as a kind of collective unreliable narrator -- an altogether appropriate stance given the moral gray zone the sweetly confounding Bernie inhabits.
  55. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The movie turns out to be a little of everything yet succeeds only occasionally at anything.
  56. Battleship
    An invigorating blast of cinematic adrenaline.
  57. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    This was a man who needed no help standing out from the crowd.
  58. The Dictator
    Even amid the hit-and-miss broadsides and laugh-free longueurs that comprise most of The Dictator, Cohen's acute hypocrisy-detector keeps on ticking, if barely.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hit So Hard
    Schemel's life story contains many interesting pieces - growing up as a lesbian in a conservative rural town, battling a lifetime of drug addiction, spending years in proximity to Love - but Hit So Hard often finds her as an extra in her own film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    First Position
    Forget that "reality" show about young dancers on the Lifetime channel. First Position, a debut documentary from Bess Kargman, is the real thing.
  61. Headhunters
    Headhunters has less in common with the somber, brooding tone of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" than the cheeky black comedy "In Bruges."
  62. Last Call at the Oasis
    As a lucid, emotionally involving portrait of the looming crisis surrounding water - supplies of which are dwindling as contamination rises - Jessica Yu's smartly constructed argument works less as a tutorial than as an infectiously impassioned call to arms.
  63. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.
  64. Darling Companion
    Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.
  65. We Have a Pope
    By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.
  66. Monsieur Lazhar
    Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.
  67. Safe
    There's a back story to this, and it's actually sort of witty.
  68. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    A blandly middling crowd pleaser.
  69. The Avengers
    The Avengers has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.
  70. Elles
    The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.
  71. Sound of My Voice
    Does it matter that Maggie might be a charlatan if she's truly capable of helping people? That's the film's most intriguing, and open-ended, question - not the more gimmicky one that will leave you hanging, and probably disappointed, at the end.
  72. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    Like many Aardman films, The Pirates! is awash with silliness. There are far more fleeting visual jokes than one can possibly digest in a single viewing. It makes for an experience that, while geared toward younger, more fidgety audiences, has enough humor to keep Mom and Dad from falling asleep.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Raven
    Director James McTeigue was much more successful capturing graphic novelist Alan Moore's mood in "V for Vendetta" than he is conjuring the bone-chilling suspense of Poe. But viewed as simply another Hollywood thriller, The Raven builds up a decent head of steam as time runs out for our hero's imperiled fiancee.
  74. Margaret
    Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece that refuses to follow the strictures of conventional cinematic structure, instead leading the audience on a circuitous journey down the myriad rabbit holes that comprise modern-day Manhattan.
  75. The Five-Year Engagement
    I liked The Five-Year Engagement, and then I didn't, and then I did.
  76. Chimpanzee
    But nature is messy, and Chimpanzee doesn't shrink from that, to its credit. Fothergill and Linfield at least exercise discretion when their cameras capture disturbing turns of event.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lady
    In the final scene, the filmmakers nearly succeed in turning Suu Kyi into an Asian Eva Peron, down to the outspread arms, tossing an orchid to her worshippers.
  78. The Lucky One
    Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Marley
    Marley, the new documentary about reggae icon Bob Marley opens on April 20 - of course. That date - often referred to as 420 - has been, since the 1970s, a time for people to gather to consume or celebrate pot. It has become an unofficial marijuana holiday, and Bob Marley has become the unofficial saint of marijuana.
  80. Think Like a Man
    An all-star revue of some of the most physically stunning actors working in Hollywood, Think Like a Man is a pleasure if only on a purely sensory level.
  81. Damsels in Distress
    A movie sure to reward the filmmaker's most die-hard fans, while doing little to quiet critics who found his work self-conscious to the point of insufferability.
  82. The Hunter
    At the core of the movie is the message that the real lonely hunter is the heart.
  83. Bully
    This intimate, straightforward, often wrenching portrait of five families dealing with bullying and its aftermath doesn't hold many surprises at a time when such campaigns as "It Gets Better" and special programming on kids' cable networks are bringing the issue to the fore.
  84. Blue Like Jazz
    Without being parodistic, it manages to poke fun at the air of privilege and strenuous political correctness common to lefty, liberal arts schools, while retaining a certain affection for their heartfelt quirks.
  85. Lockout
    Enjoy it, in moderation. It's your recommended weekly allowance of schlock.
  86. The Three Stooges
    So why bother with this earnest but imperfect impersonation when the original artists are readily available on VHS and DVD?
  87. The Cabin in the Woods
    A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.
  88. Boy
    A funny and touching coming-of-age story.
  89. The Kid with a Bike
    Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.
  90. We the Party
    With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.
  91. Thin Ice
    Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."
  92. American Reunion
    An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.
  93. The Deep Blue Sea
    The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.
  94. Wrath of the Titans
    The only reason you'll feel any wrath is because you shelled out 12 bucks for this steaming bucket of half-baked plot, cliched dialogue and disappointing 3-D special effects.
  95. Mirror Mirror
    As Snow White, actress Lily Collins is a washout.
  96. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.
  97. October Baby
    Extended scenes are dominated by heavy dialogue, while the lighter moments are relegated to montages of prancing across a beach, for example, which simply aren't that effective at buoying the drama.
  98. Footnote
    Most footnotes don't get a passing glance, but this one proves worthy of careful study.
  99. Delicacy
    It is Markus's sensitivity to nuance and to the feelings of others that characterizes every step that he - and this sure-footed if off-kilter film - takes.
  100. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    For all the trite sayings that come to mind, the story feels exceptional thanks to the subject, a self-made perfectionist still pursuing culinary transcendence.
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