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 5.3 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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Indian in the Cupboard
    A faithful, clever adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks's award-winning children's book. A sort of blockbuster in reverse, with its action and adventures played on a very small scale, it combines the touching themes of classic stories like The Velveteen Rabbit with the high-tech micro-special effects of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
  2. Trick or Treat
    A surprisingly effective satire on heavy metal, on horror films and on those forces who see both of those as immoral and destructive to American society. [29 Oct 1986, p.D15]
    • Washington Post
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bel Canto
    Where the novel’s omniscient narrator provides ample insight into its protagonists’ interior thoughts and backstories, much of that is missing here: Some characters, particularly Gen, come across as flat, their motivations not deeply explored or explained.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Places in the Heart
    Places in the Heart grapples with great and important themes -- sexism, racism, grief, despair -- and in aiming high it achieves much. Not quite as much, perhaps, as its primary creator, Robert Benton, might have hoped for, but enough to make it a distinguished film that is both moving and provocative. [21 Sep 1984, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  5. Crime + Punishment
    For the most part, the film balances its outrage with objectivity.
  6. Kusama - Infinity
    Directed by Heather Lenz, the film offers insight and eye candy, despite the fact that it is far more traditional — in style and format — than its subject.
  7. Being There
    The fragile satric fable seemed to defy adaptation. But despite its shortcomings, director Hal Ashby managed to transplant the undernourished narrative with remarkable success. [08 Feb 1980, p.D1]
    • Washington Post
  8. The Front Runner
    Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.
  9. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    A balanced and deeply satisfying documentary assessment of his work, which is lavishly on display in hundreds of the artist’s images.
  10. Gloria Bell
    The comedy is far more subtle and elusive than laugh-out-loud. It’s a reflective, even occasionally tedious slice of daily life that relies on Moore to sell its dullest interludes — sequences that aren’t made any livelier by Lelio’s parched, washed-out visual design.
  11. Maria by Callas
    In this immersive, often deliciously sensuous documentary portrait of the late opera star Maria Callas, viewers are treated to another rise-and-fall story of a great but tortured artist, this one punctuated by the occasional real-life bed of roses and pleasure cruise.
  12. The Biggest Little Farm
    This is a must-see film, not just for the primer it offers in how foodways, farming practices and larger environmental forces are crucially connected but for its dazzling imagery of nature in action, both by way of breathtaking close-ups and sensational aerial shots of the farm and its environs.
  13. Teen Spirit
    Don’t expect more of Teen Spirit than the movie can deliver: It’s an unapologetically slight story about a girl with ambitions that many would call shallow. But even as it obeys the rules of the Cinderella story in many ways, it defies them in some others.
  14. The Return of the Living Dead
    A zombie comedy that gradually builds from a teasing take-off to a genuine, gross-out thriller. It's definitely not for all audiences, but its visceral effects and old-fashioned scare tactics make it a real scream for chiller fans. [16 Aug 1985, p.19]
    • Washington Post
  15. Becoming Astrid
    This familiar-sounding melodrama works because of the extraordinary performance, in the title role, by Alba August, a young actress whose every emotion is made manifest, like passing clouds or a burst of sunshine, on her uncannily expressive face.
  16. Psycho III
    A playful, artfully made horror movie that shows there's life in Norman Bates yet, and death, too. [04 July 1986, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  17. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
    Genre fans will appreciate the blood flow and the gore, and director Anthony Hickox keeps things moving so that there's never a dull moment -- or dull blade. Consider Hell raised.
  18. Antlers
    Antlers obeys the rules of horror — many of which are familiar, even at times cliche — while also bending them. It’s a creature feature at heart, yes, but its footing is grounded in the tragedies we hear about in the news every day.
  19. The Great Mouse Detective
    A delightful and frequently funny cartoon feature based on the characters of the Sherlock Holmes series. [07 July 1986, p.B8]
    • Washington Post
  20. Oliver & Company
    Take the kids. Have fun.
  21. Isn't It Romantic
    A visually and verbally ingenious sendup of romantic comedies that wears its candy heart on its sleeve.
  22. True Stories
    True Stories is an Our Town for our time, a slightly surreal portrait of the fictional frontier village of Virgil, Texas, sprung from a pancake landscape and hogtied with freeways.
  23. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    Aside from the bell-ringer's new look, the studio's ambitious adaptation of Victor Hugo's sprawling classic remains surprisingly faithful to the book's grim mood, if not its plot.
  24. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    Ultimately, Divide and Conquer offers useful lessons — and maybe even a little hope — for people on both sides of the national divide, about just how we came to this terrible, but not irreversible, place.
  25. Semi-Tough
    Well supplied with both raunchy humor and star appeal, particularly in the person of Burt Reynolds, the film seems certain to become a crowd-pleaser.
  26. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    What She Said pays fitting homage, not just to a great writer but to a vanished age.
  27. Bob Roberts
    Filmed in the mock-documentary style pioneered by acknowledged mentor Robert Altman, it does for baby-kissing phonies what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal poseurs.
  28. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    The fact that Guy-Blaché isn’t a household name — even after making nearly 1,000 films — is due pure and simply to sexism, and literally being written out of history, either through animus or laziness. Thank goodness “Be Natural” is here to set a brilliant, distinguished, invaluable record straight.
  29. The Mustang
    Luckily, The Mustang overcomes its most predictable story beats thanks to de Clermont-Tonnerre’s intimate, unfussy style and a quietly captivating performance by Schoenaerts.
  30. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Through the lens of the eminence sleaze at its center, Where’s My Roy Cohn? offers as cogent a primer as any on how we got here. Meanwhile, somewhere down there, Roy Cohn is having the last, bitter laugh.
  31. 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.
  32. Pretty Baby
    Malle's most forcefull dramatic element is the feeling of rivalry and resentment that exists between mother and child without the characters being conscious of it. The script is eloquently supplied with scenes illustration this fundamental conflict and bond. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]
    • Washington Post
  33. All Is True
    An intriguing speculative drama.
  34. The Wedding Guest
    It’s a while before we learn anything, even a name, about the title character in The Wedding Guest. Played by Dev Patel, who delivers an unexpectedly stoic — yet predictably appealing — lead performance, he is a man of deep professionalism and equally deep mystery.
  35. The Last Unicorn
    There is enough action and general movement to satisfy younger moviegoers and enough gentility and creative thought to please everyone else. [26 Nov 1982, p.D1]
    • Washington Post
  36. Hail Satan?
    As a history lesson every bit as clarifying as it is cockeyed, Hail Satan? possesses unarguable value. But it also serves as a reminder of why we embrace nonconformity, pluralism and tolerance.
  37. The Doom Generation
    Doom Generation is an 85-minute, darkly comic assault on the audience, laden with satirically over-the-top (and below-the-belt) violence, unending profanity and enough references to the posterior to fill a proctologic encyclopedia. Araki wants to serve up the sleaziest, crudest fare he can dream up. His efforts can only be described as successful.
  38. Brian Banks
    On one level, Brian’s story is meant to be inspirational; the real Banks would ultimately go on to play in the NFL. But it is also a painful reminder of how young black people still face overwhelming disadvantages. The film leaves you wondering: What might have happened if Brian hadn’t been a talented linebacker?
  39. Ask Dr. Ruth
    Fortunately, the [animated] reenactments are rendered with sensitivity, respectfully capturing the wide-eyed curiosity of a young woman, and conveying her story in a way that archival footage and family photos cannot.
  40. The Secret Garden
    The Secret Garden unearths a few inventions of its own, it bears its own, quiet charms.
  41. Knives Out
    The fun here — and there is a lot of it — is to be had simply in allowing an ensemble of game, generous-spirited actors to give their all in service to the fine art of misdirection and mayhem.
  42. Apollo 11
    It’s a more visceral trip than any moviegoer — even the armchair experts — has ever taken before.
  43. After the Wedding
    This sets up a mesmerizing double master class in acting — by Moore, to be sure, but also by Williams.
  44. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    An engaging, modestly amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious comedy of manners in which the usual millennial excesses are skewered, from the invidious hellhole of social media to the mendacities of online dating.
  45. Clemency
    Clemency, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, isn’t really a death row drama in the same way that “Just Mercy” is. Rather, it’s a character study of a witness who, vicariously, is a stand-in for each of us.
  46. 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.
  47. Monos
    The violent, beautiful and powerfully watchable movie Monos — Spanish for monkeys — takes its title from the code name used by a group of teenage guerrillas.
  48. Official Secrets
    Although Knightley’s Gun often seems to be a passive figure, buffeted by the machinations of those around her, the film’s honesty about the enormous personal costs of whistleblowing is a welcome relief from more romanticized heroics.
  49. The Brink
    Thank goodness, then, for The Brink, which is just the kind of lucid, observant, chillingly contradictory portrait Bannon deserves.
  50. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    Famously prickly, Crosby never gets really angry in “Remember My Name,” although at one point he yells at Eaton about the filmmaker not being able to set up a good shot (Crosby comes by the expertise honestly: His father, Floyd Crosby, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer).
  51. The King of Staten Island
    Perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Davidson, Apatow and their collaborators is that The King of Staten Island is probably the first movie in cinematic history to earn every single one of the audience’s tears at the sight of a disastrous back tattoo. May it be the last.
  52. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.
  53. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    The Final Reckoning stays true to those core tenets, even if it too often feels baggy and redundant. It’s a nesting doll of life-and-death deadlines within life-and-death deadlines, with one wildly improbable stunt leading to another, even more wildly improbable stunt.
  54. Coming 2 America
    It’s not great cinema. It’s good at what it sets out to do. Which makes it great fun.
  55. Abominable
    The animated film takes a standard story and adds so much visual beauty that it exceeds expectations.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    By the Grace of God
    Ozon has said the American drama “Spotlight” inspired his sober, methodical approach. The similarities between the two films are obvious, but there’s a crucial difference: While the 2015 Oscar-winner focused on investigative journalists, By the Grace of God is primarily concerned with the victims.
  57. Piranhas
    Piranhas is no documentary, but it plays out with a deadpan style that is deeply unsettling.
  58. Dune: Part One
    There’s a lot going on here — a quasi-biblical space opera, part Lawrence of Arabia and part mobster movie — and spreading it out over two movies has allowed [Villaneuve] to take his time with the story and tell it richly, and without rushing
  59. Queen & Slim
    At its best, Queen & Slim isn’t just a crime drama but a nuanced portrayal of family, legacy and self-preservation — how they’re distorted by trauma and history, and how they thrive despite the near-constant threat of annihilation.
  60. For Sama
    For Sama is a before-and-after portrait, both literally and figuratively. What begins as a brash, bold, giddily optimistic love story devolves into something far darker, as viewers begin to question why al-Khateab is willing to endanger her child in the name of doomed principles.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Hau Chu
    Saint Frances
    A charming, nuanced story with plenty to say about making just that sort of superficial judgment and about what people are actually going through beneath their carefully crafted appearances.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Working Woman
    This story of workplace abuse and its fallout could just as well take place in New York, Istanbul, Mumbai — or any other city. Orna is Everywoman. Like many other women in her shoes, she emerges scarred, but stronger and wiser.
  63. Honeyland
    The film by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov is a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable.
  64. Hesburgh
    This moving, illuminating slice of American life and social history serves as a stirring example that we should all do much better. And we can start right now.
  65. Blow the Man Down
    A clever slice of regional noir that carries a gale-force punch beneath its modest, soft-spoken trappings.
  66. Swallow
    Bennett claims her own form of autonomy with the movie itself, which could be read as an actress’s decision to stop hoping for good scripts to arrive over the transom and make her own luck.
  67. Always Be My Maybe
    A surprisingly sweet and sassy rom-com about childhood best friends.
  68. Meeting Gorbachev
    An engaging and touching valedictory to one of the most pivotal figures of the 20th century.
  69. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    If there’s one drawback to The Sound of My Voice, it’s that Ronstadt herself declined to sit down with the film’s directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.
  70. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    Morrison, at 88, is as clear-eyed and sharp as ever. What’s most surprising about her interviews is not her candor, but her humor, revealed, as she speaks, in a way that makes you want to lean closer. (Her gifts as a storyteller are not just on the page.)
  71. Judy
    The result is a relatively straightforward slice-of-life biopic, bogged down with flashbacks and backstage histrionics, that nonetheless offers an utterly transfixing glimpse at the art of screen performance writ gloriously, glamorously large.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Hau Chu
    The Third Wife
    Some viewers may want delicacy in a period film about women navigating a world in which they’ve been pitted against one another. But maybe, Mayfair suggests, we need the blunt reminder: The issues that women were confronting in the Vietnam of the 1800s — a world in which they’re considered property more than people — aren’t all that different from today.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frankie
    Thanks to a superb cast and a welcome strain of comedic energy, Frankie turns out to be more than a pretty travelogue with melodrama.
  74. Little Joe
    If Little Joe’s message is never less than apparent, it avoids hitting you over the head with it. It’s a movie that grows on you, planting a seed that only comes to flower long after the closing credits.
  75. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    True to its title, Portrait of a Lady on Fire generates more than its share of heat, even if it never truly becomes an engulfing flame.
  76. Sorry We Missed You
    In this unsparing but deeply compassionate film, viewers get a chance to see the fatigue, stress and bewilderment of modern life for what they are: not the regrettable side effects of market-driven progress, but the results of cynicism and greed, and the unfathomable human cost of wanting what we want, right now.
  77. The Traitor
    If The Traitor proves anything, it’s that an 80-year-old filmmaker can still pounce.
  78. Invisible Life
    The progression of the story is steadily downward, and at times the style flirts with melodrama, the mood with moroseness. But in the film’s third act, masterfully staged by filmmaker Karim Aïnouz (who co-wrote the screen adaptation with Inez Bortagaray and Murilo Hauser), it takes a giant leap, both temporally and emotionally.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Hau Chu
    Beanpole
    A mostly empathetic tale of war’s cruelty as it affects both those who fight and those who merely look on. That empathy is conveyed through haunting performances, stunning direction and a sense of detail that elevates it beyond standard historical drama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Lighthouse
    What unfolds is a perverse odd-couple tale, flooded with ornate dialogue, surreal storytelling and nightmarish imagery.
  81. Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
    Dutifully covering the rise, fall and final triumph of Cohen’s career, Broomfield relegates Ihlen to the background of her own story, before bringing her back for the film’s touching final act and devastating epilogue. Achieving the kind of balance to which Cohen always aspired, Marianne & Leonard is heartbreaking and heartening in Zen-like equal measure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Weathering with You
    At 46, Shinkai still has plenty of time to convince us of his gifts. Weathering With You may not reach the heights of “Your Name,” but it still achieves something impressive: It tells a story that, without sugarcoating the environmental challenges that lie ahead, manages to end on a hopeful note.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Diary of Anne Frank
    Time has been good to the brave blend of stark realism and Hollywood production values of this drama, inspired by the writings of the young girl who continued to believe in the fundamental decency of mankind even as her family hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. [07 Nov 2004, p.N03]
    • Washington Post
  84. Onward
    Onward is ultimately a trip worth taking.
  85. Ford v Ferrari
    A fun, engaging story that’s more about obsessive drive than actual driving.
  86. The Buddy Holly Story
    Steve Rash directs the firm in a clean, observant and confidently transparent style - making an impressive debut after several years of TV pop-music specials - and demonstrates a flair for expressing Holly's appeal. [18 Aug 1978, p.B1]
    • Washington Post
  87. The Goodbye Girl
    The Goodbye Girl itself represents a satisfying step back in the right direction for the purposes of light, optimistic film romance. Its appeal isn't exactly novel, but it is ingeniously and refreshingly traditional. [21 Dec 1977, p.D1]
    • Washington Post
  88. Hustlers
    A funny, naughty, enormously entertaining kick in the pants, promising to be an East Coast “Showgirls,” only to wind up a girls-rule “Goodfellas,” leading viewers into a vicariously thrilling underworld ruled by money, drugs, seduction and a sliding moral scale dictated by ruthless realpolitik.
  89. Love, Antosha
    At once charming and bittersweet. But the film loses focus a little as it heaps accolades on the late actor.
  90. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    It remembers to have fun. It’s a kick to watch — often literally — and the kind of popcorn movie summer is made for.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tel Aviv on Fire
    Lighthearted and entertaining aren’t words often used to describe movies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the characterization fits Tel Aviv on Fire to a T.
  92. Harriet
    Peppered with tense action sequences and propelled by a characteristically gorgeous musical score by Terence Blanchard, Harriet is the kind of instructional, no-nonsense biopic that may not take many artistic risks or sophisticated stylistic departures but manages to benefit from that lack of pretension.
  93. Dolemite Is My Name
    Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” this is a movie rooted in the scruffy but golden days of the 1970s, populated by strivers and schemers and would-be stars whose breakthrough is as much a function of willpower as raw talent.
  94. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    Once Were Brothers is enormously valuable, if only as a reminder of what an extraordinary run this extraordinary convergence of talents enjoyed until their final show on Thanksgiving Day in 1976 (meticulously captured by Scorsese in the magnificent documentary “The Last Waltz”).
  95. The Last Duel
    The Last Duel is an entertaining movie, even an intriguing one. But audiences might be forgiven for thinking, upon leaving the theater, that they’ve just been very nobly and very honorably mansplained.
  96. How to Build a Girl
    The comedy that Feldstein and the filmmakers find in Johanna’s often disastrous attempts to become herself keeps the movie afloat; what keeps it tethered to reality is the universal drama of a young woman finding her voice without losing her soul.
  97. The Painted Bird
    At nearly three hours long, and told with the book’s peripatetic structure, moving from nightmare to nightmare, The Painted Bird is not for the faint of heart.
  98. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
    British director Beeban Kidron chooses screenplays that balance precariously between maudlin and quirkily comic. To Wong Foo, richer in character than story, fits right into her repertoire. Lucky for her that Swayze, Snipes and Leguizamo have plenty of fashion sense.
    • Washington Post
  99. The Perfect Candidate
    As with Wadjda, Mansour gives audiences a candid, often wryly amusing glimpse of life inside the Saudi kingdom, which is so often cloaked in opacity and menace.
  100. About Endlessness
    Dreamlike and deliberate, pedestrian and theatrical, bland and strangely beautiful, About Endlessness takes in the suffering, struggle and moments of vagrant joy in life and propels them into the cosmos.
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