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 5.4 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. Sorry, Baby
    Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Twinless
    James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.
  3. All That's Left of You
    At minimum, “All That’s Left of You” is a thoughtful exploration of how trauma can both fracture and bond a family. But for those who need it, the film serves as an urgent reminder of how ignorance and passivity undermine what it means to be human.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
    The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Oh, Hi!
    A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.
  6. Come See Me in the Good Light
    The movie is more than an admonition for the living; it’s also an achingly bittersweet love story about caregiving.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prime Minister
    As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bring Her Back
    Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.
  10. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    If you like your movies with smooth skin, this might not be your cup of Neutrogena. But if you appreciate satire that reaches out and squeezes you where it hurts, you're going to enjoy yourself thoroughly.
  11. Jean de Florette
    Beneath the sylvan trappings is a whodunit as riveting as any.
  12. Secret Mall Apartment
    Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.
  13. Materialists
    Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thank You Very Much
    Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.
  15. Roofman
    This internal struggle transforms “Roofman” from what could have been a run-of-the-mill heist movie into an intriguing character study, even if it falls just short of success.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Words of War
    There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Highest 2 Lowest
    Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.
  18. Little Buddha
    What is surprising is the beguiling, unpretentious result: "Little Buddha," a modern fable about a Seattle boy believed to be a reincarnated Buddhist teacher, endears the audience to the Tibetan doctrine with a glowing, almost Disneyesque panache.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jay Kelly
    There’s a lot to like about “Jay Kelly,” the unexpectedly sweet new film from director Noah Baumbach. It’s beautifully shot, bustles with strong performances by a roundly endearing cast and indulges in an old-Hollywood elegance well-suited to its story: the late-life crisis of its titular megastar, played — embodied, really — by George Clooney.
  20. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    The story, held at well-mannered arm’s length by Piani, never gets too messy; even Agathe’s deepest psychological issues — a phobia that makes travel difficult and, later, the explanation of its traumatic roots — are handled with efficient, unfailingly discrete politesse.
  21. Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round
    In an era beset with dizzying setbacks in the ideals it celebrates, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round feels particularly necessary right now.
  22. The Last Rodeo
    The Last Rodeo may not be bodacious, but it’s a satisfying ride.
    • 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.
  24. Ghosts of Mississippi
    As an amalgam of drama and history, Reiner and scriptwriter Lewis Colick strike a surprisingly satisfying compromise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Steve
    The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.
  26. Is This Thing On?
    In some ways, this dramedy, directed by Bradley Cooper, is a familiar story about midlife crises and marital dissatisfaction, but it quickly swerves in a fresh direction, resulting in a movie that’s both resonant and hilarious.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hedda
    There is a ritualistic, even tribal, quality to DaCosta’s telling that suggests a truth to the story untethered to time or place: Any woman confined like Hedda is will strive to escape, one way or another.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nuremberg
    This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series. Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.
  29. Dead Man's Wire
    Riveting and darkly comedic, the film nimbly conveys the tragedies of buying into the American Dream.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    John Candy: I Like Me
    You’re astonished to see how fully actualized Candy was as a performer in his short time, but you’re also left with the heartbreak of all that was left unrealized by his untimely passing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Voice of Hind Rajab
    The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.
  32. Ju Dou
    Directed by Zhang Yimou, a maverick of China's "new wave," this disturbing tragedy is as unexpectedly lurid in its way as "Blue Velvet."
  33. Send Help
    McAdams again proves she has real comedic chops that this island, and Raimi’s direction, have only sharpened.
  34. A Cry in the Dark
    Meryl Streep teams with director Fred Schepisi for "A Cry in the Dark," a compelling account of the media witch hunt and subsequent trial of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian mother accused of murdering her 9-week-old daughter Azaria.
  35. Whip It
    Arriving on the nastier heels of the horror comedy "Jennifer's Body," Whip It plays like that movie's more wholesome twin, delivering the same jolt of anarchic guerrilla-girl empowerment, only with a far less threatening disposition.
  36. (500) Days of Summer
    And what makes this autopsy of a love affair funny is Tom's ironic, morose commentary as he revisits what happened.
  37. The Invention of Lying
    Like Gervais, the audience wants to see a struggle, which here comes down to whether unvarnished honesty or random acts of compassionate deceit will win the day. That alone makes for entertainingly high stakes.
  38. The Hangover
    Sitting through The Hangover is like watching "Memento" featuring the Three Stooges.
  39. New York, I Love You
    A light but enjoyable souffle of erotic vignettes.
  40. The Dark Knight
    You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure. It never quite arrives
  41. A Perfect Getaway
    While A Perfect Getaway, like "The Sixth Sense," recaps itself, to indicate to the audience what they may have missed (and when), there seems to be plot holes large enough that one could paddle through them in an outrigger canoe.
  42. The Time Traveler's Wife
    What makes The Time Traveler's Wife work as drama, though, and certainly better than it might have, is an unhesitating emotional commitment on the part of the actors (and Schwentke).
  43. Twilight
    On the whole, Twilight works as both love story and vampire story, thanks mainly to the performances of its principals, Pattinson and Stewart.
  44. Taken
    A satisfying thriller as grimly professional as its efficient hero.
  45. Cold Souls
    If not always coherent, at least compelling.
  46. Terminator Salvation
    The result is a movie that takes itself far more seriously than the "Hasta la vista, baby" tone of previous installments.
  47. The Cove
    The slaughter is part of a traditional fishing culture, according to the Japanese. But if you succumb to the emotional appeal of this documentary, it emerges not just as a bloody and brutal business but almost as bad as genocide.
  48. World's Greatest Dad
    May not be for everyone, but filmgoers tuned in to its particular, perverse frequency will find much to value in its bent sense of humor and compassion.
  49. Tulpan
    To certain serious world-cinema aficionados, though, Tulpan's combination of understated comedy and documentary-level depiction of rural Kazakh life will be catnip.
  50. Life Is Beautiful
    While it celebrates the triumph of humor, invention and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful is not the transporting experience it might have been. Benigni knows how to make us laugh, but he has not yet figured out how to make us cry.
  51. The Notebook
    Audiences craving big, gooey over-the-top romance have their must-see summer movie in The Notebook.
  52. The Brothers Bloom
    The Brothers Bloom is all about exploding forms, tropes and archetypes. But it's also a charmer, a witty sandbagging of one's resistance to fairy tale and a movie afflicted with a kind of comic Tourette's syndrome.
  53. Brokeback Mountain
    Brokeback Mountain possesses handsome and sympathetic lead players, magnificent scenery, heartbreaking melodrama, righteousness and cultural import. But as a testament to the importance of following one's passion, it's devoid of one crucial thing: passion.
  54. Departures
    It is as polished as it is heavy-handed, and it leaves one under a spell.
  55. The Proposal
    It's as predictable and comforting as a Happy Meal, but it must be said that The Proposal manages to elicit some genuinely amusing moments.
  56. Superbad
    Christopher Mintz-Plasse steals the movie in his screen debut as a nerd di tutti nerds, a kid whose fake I.D. reads "McLovin."
  57. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    The three leads, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermione), give their most charming performances to date.
  58. The Wrestler
    As good as Rourke is, and as willingly as he throws himself on the figurative hand grenade, his performance constantly begs the question of whether the story would be worth telling without him. Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy the pole dancer, delivers a courageous performance, one nearly as ego-battering as Rourke's.
  59. State of Play
    Features a handsome production and terrific performances.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballast
    Ballast, though, is less than completely satisfying in a dramatic sense. Events that seem to be important are dropped and left unresolved. Conflicts from the past are mentioned but never explained, as if key scenes were missing. Given that disinterest in conventional narrative techniques, the abrupt ending may be appropriate, but it feels wrong and arbitrary.
  61. Two Lovers
    The movie's chief value is to preserve Phoenix at the height of his wary physical grace, which recalls a young Marlon Brando.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Role Models
    You can probably figure out how this is all going to end, but it still has more laughs than you might think. Nobody gets more than the wonderful Jane Lynch as the ex-drug addict and director of the mentoring program.
  63. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    The loudest, flashiest, silliest and longest blockbuster in a summer full of long, silly, flashy, loud blockbusters (long and silly "Transformers," flashy and loud "Wolverine").
  64. The Host
    It's the last thing anyone expected: an old-fashioned monster movie with a heart.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Girlfriend Experience
    The film manages a career-spanning panache: Soderbergh taps into the nervy impulses of his earliest endeavor, "sex, lies and videotape" as well as "Ocean's Eleven." The Girlfriend Experience has something to elevate and exasperate fans of both.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Humpday
    Delmore, Duplass and Leonard work up a loose-limbed, improvisatory energy, but Humpday radiates with the sheen of a film that has been thought out within an inch of its witty and insightful life.
  67. Death at a Funeral
    Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.
  68. Mindhunters
    Corny? Oh, yeah. But it's also reasonably good fun.
  69. Bride & Prejudice
    A big, sprawling, sweet-natured mishmash with plots upon subplots and enough characters to make the head spin.
  70. Coach Carter
    Covers every cliche in the Hollywood sports movie playbook, but it also makes the routine much more enjoyable than you'd expect.
  71. The Chorus
    Larded over with le fromage, which is to say, French cheese. But as these dairy products go, Christophe Barratier's movie is delectable sentiment. Audiences will crumble into itty-bitty pieces of Roquefort watching this.
  72. Hide and Seek
    As cliche-ridden horror films go, Hide and Seek builds a pretty darn good mousetrap.
  73. Lost Embrace
    Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman's shaky-camera, cinema-verite-style dramedy meanders in charming fashion.
  74. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    If there's such a thing as freedom for everyone, Rory's determined to give the prospect its most grueling road test.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hitch
    Hitch works best when it's a buddy comedy, with Smith and James having a blast as smooth Yoda and jiggly Jedi.
  76. Inside Deep Throat
    An often lively investigation of the social forces that produced the original movie and made it an unlikely political shibboleth in the ongoing culture wars.
  77. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    It Works.
  78. Because of Winn-Dixie
    Robb is remarkably assured; there isn't a false note in her performance.
  79. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Schorr's endearing little movie gets under your skin much like the music it celebrates.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Animation Show 2005
    All of the dozen works featured are strong, with even the least engaging of the stories ... being visually compelling.
  81. Dear Frankie
    Within this overly familiar trope, there's plenty of room for small surprises, not the least of which are delightful, understated performances all around.
  82. Gunner Palace
    Do these soldiers make it? We keep watching and waiting. There's not much more to Gunner Palace than that, but it's no different than the soldiers' lot.
  83. Walk on Water
    Fox's film seems to say that the kind of saintly purity that would enable one to walk on water -- or to kill with impunity and without repercussions -- doesn't exist.
  84. Robots
    For audiences simply looking for easy entertainment and some neat-looking robots along the way.
  85. The Upside of Anger
    What's best about "Upside" is its gonzo-sitcom craziness, a situation that lends itself to enjoyable performances.
  86. Off the Map
    A joy to watch.
  87. Ice Princess
    A somewhat formulaic if nevertheless crudely effective manipulation of the figure skating themes that all of us girls love so much.
  88. Mondovino
    A lively, engrossing documentary
  89. D.E.B.S.
    It's so spoofy it's difficult to call 'good' or even 'bad'; just say it's smooth.
  90. Dust to Glory
    It's a fascinating film, but after a while, the digital photography wears out its gritty welcome.
  91. Look at Me
    Smart, absorbing movie.
  92. The Interpreter
    As a straight-ahead thriller, the movie is enjoyable and stirring much of the time.
  93. Eating Out
    A sweet and funny take on the crossed-wire romantic couplings of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'
  94. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    It's French. It's sexy. It's got a killer soundtrack.
  95. The Amityville Horror
    I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.
  96. Palindromes
    The experience isn't for everyone. But it amounts to intellectual penicillin for our sequel-driven, franchise-heavy entertainment culture.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Like "This Is Spinal Tap," It's All Gone Pete Tong should have a long afterlife as a midnight-movie special.
  98. Torremolinos 73
    Starting out as a wacky little comedy about a mousy Spanish couple who become unwitting porn stars, Torremolinos 73 suddenly morphs, during the third act, into a far more sober and tender story about the lengths to which a man will go to give his wife what she wants.
  99. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    This is a movie about improbability, randomness and absurdity. It almost goes without saying, you can't get in a panic about having everything.
  100. 3-Iron
    It's actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.
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