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. Ninja Assassin
    Ten minutes after you leave the movie, all the battles will have blended in your memory into a ceaseless muddle of sliced-off appendages, jets of blood splashing artfully on walls, gurgling screams and flashing swords.
  2. Me and Orson Welles
    In addition to McKay, Danes makes a sassy, sexy Sonja. And Efron more than gets by in his role as the sweet, plucky, starstruck newbie. It's a part that doesn't require much heavy lifting, though.
  3. The Blind Side
    Grounded in the direct, disarming truth of their experience, the movie has a straightforward lack of cheap sentiment that saves it from being either too maudlin or saccharine-sweet.
  4. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, Bad Lieutenant scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Broken Embraces
    Amid all this dazzling artifice, the film's most authentic source of power comes from its star.
  6. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Despite melodrama that, at times, is enough to induce diabetes, there's enough wolf whistle in this sexy, scary romp to please anyone.
  7. Planet 51
    Planet 51 is cute, but it's no "Shrek."
  8. Red Cliff
    Red Cliff is a dichotomous beast: The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of it possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art portions, but the results occasionally border on the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist's treatment.
  9. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    Fantastic Mr. Fox imparts lessons as profound as "The Road's" about love and gratitude and awareness of others. It just has more fun doing it.
  10. 2012
    2012 takes the disaster movie -- once content simply to threaten the Earth with a comet, or blow up the White House -- to its natural conclusion, the literal end of the world.
  11. The Messenger
    Together, under the assured direction of first-time feature filmmaker Oren Moverman, these three actors tell a story that is at once hard-hitting and bizarrely gentle.
  12. Pirate Radio
    A tale so raucous, raunchy and punch-drunk with love for the rebellious spirit of rawk -- and so disdainful of those who have tried to squelch it -- that it pretty much negates any claims to objectivity, let alone factuality. In other words, it's not a documentary.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    Less weird than "Spellbound" and less fun than your average episode of "America's Top Model," Ten9Eight shoots for the moon, but scans like the background noise at a philanthropic retreat.
  14. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Qualifies as the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year.
  15. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    Content to be sparkly when it should be sharp-edged and shrewd; it has the potential to roar like a lion, but instead it lays lambs at our feet.
  16. The Fourth Kind
    But seriously, folks, if you're going to make a scary movie, shouldn't you be able to do it without resorting to both "Blair Witch"-style found footage and movie stars? (Will Patton and Elias Koteas also show up as, respectively, an angry sheriff and a psychologist friend of Abbey's.)
  17. A Christmas Carol
    A fable that is by turns antic, scary, sweet and, in the end, slightly soulless. In other words, it's a heartwarmer that doesn't have much of a heart itself.
  18. Collapse
    Think of Collapse as the anti-"2012." Not because this dour doc is any more optimistic about the future than that recent apocalyptic spectacular but because its vision of disaster is delivered not through expensive special effects but by a talking head.
  19. Gentlemen Broncos
    What Michael Bay did for the Hollywood blockbuster with his second "Transformers" movie, Jared Hess has now done for the low-budget indie with Gentlemen Broncos -- namely, stain an entire genre with a sense of soulless calculation.
  20. Skin
    If you didn't know that it was based on a true story, Skin would be a little hard to believe.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    This Is It
    For a man who so desperately wanted to show us perfection -- or at least project the illusion of it -- Jackson would never, ever want us to see this film.
  22. Antichrist
    Antichrist finally embodies the contradiction of von Trier: He's a gifted, even visionary, artist mired in his own pulp pretentiousness.
  23. Amelia
    There's so much pluck and gumption on the screen you can smell it. Flesh and blood? Not so much.
  24. Astro Boy
    It will put some viewers in mind of yet another story with the same theme: "Pinocchio."
  25. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ong Bak 2
    The hatchet-happy editor, ever-attentive to the transient attention span of the film's target audience, barely allows the hero time out from one virtuosic battle before he is flung in the face of a new enemy.
  27. Where the Wild Things Are
    In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he's created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes.
  28. Law Abiding Citizen
    A movie devoted to baroque revenge would be, on its own terms, acceptable; what makes Law Abiding Citizen so risible is its humorless conviction that it's got Big Ideas at its core.
  29. New York, I Love You
    A light but enjoyable souffle of erotic vignettes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Maid
    As played by the captivating Mariana Loyola, Lucy is a life force, cut from similar cloth as the perky schoolteacher of Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky": unsinkable, unswervable and more than a little irreverent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    An Education
    A beguiling little film that, with deceptive restraint and forthrightness, opens up worlds of roiling, contradictory emotions.
  32. The Damned United
    It's more than a detailed account of one man's petty vindictiveness in a bygone era. It's about how our hatred can consume us so deeply that we lose sight of everything.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Couples Retreat
    Coasts on comic fumes, relying on colloquialisms, foreign accents, racial stereotypes, lemon sharks, Speedos and inopportune erections to supply the funny. Any one of these things might work in a comedy that was less contrived.
  34. Good Hair
    Thanks to Rock's running monologue, combining scathing humor with trenchant observations, the film manages to be side-splitting even while making its most poignant points.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Yes Men Fix the World
    For those who enjoy the shift-in-your-seat kick of seeing emperors caught with their knickers down, however, the squirm factor achieved by the Yes Men out-Borats Sacha Baron Cohen at his most confrontational.
  36. A Serious Man
    May not be "Fargo," but it nestles comfortably somewhere beneath that masterpiece and "Miller's Crossing," yet far above such forgettables as "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty."
  37. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zombieland
    Zombieland is sometimes funny. But those of us who have teeny coronaries every time something goes bump in Zombieland might have a hard time relaxing for long enough to really enjoy ourselves.
  39. 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.
  40. The Horse Boy
    A lovely, amazing, wonderfully provocative film.
  41. Surrogates
    Surrogates takes an interesting idea -- the triumph of technological convenience over grimy, workaday life -- and buries it under clumsy exposition, unconvincing action sequences and a by-the-numbers conspiracy plot.
  42. Coco Before Chanel
    This refreshing alternative to the usual potted biopic provides an absorbing look at a singular, steely determination as it was forged and annealed, long before it made itself known to the world.
  43. The Boys Are Back
    What power the movie has comes from its stars, especially the two boys, who give very different but very convincing performances.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fame
    This new Fame, whitewashed for the kids, leaps into a catchy rhythm at the start.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Providence Effect
    Though it drags on a bit, the film is certainly good-hearted, informative and relevant. We look through the doors of the St. Mel's classrooms and we see the whirrings of a school that can help a smart West Side kid land a spot at MIT. That, at least, is something to celebrate.
  46. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Exhibits the weaknesses and the strengths of what has become a nearly foolproof formula for keeping viewers engaged.
  47. The Informant!
    With composure so out of fashion these days in the public square, Steven Soderbergh's adamantly restrained The Informant! arrives like a cleansing tonic.
  48. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    Any moviegoers possessed of funny bones will laugh their fool heads off at Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
  49. Love Happens
    More thoughtful than its cookie-cutter marketing campaign implies, and better than its awful title promises, "Love Happens" is the rare Hollywood romance concerned with emotions other than love at first sight.
  50. Jennifer's Body
    Admittedly, this is the stuff of lurid adolescent distraction, not great cinema. Jennifer's Body is strictly a niche item but provides a goofy, campy bookend to "Drag Me to Hell" on the B-movie shelf. Watch it, forget it, move on.
  51. Paris
    Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.
  52. Disgrace
    Is it a great movie? John Malkovich's portrayal of an aging and sexually aggressive professor of poetry is enough to make the film worth anyone's while.
  53. Fuel
    It is stylistically breezy but deeply sincere, as Tickell offers a thoughtful, well-researched argument for alternative energy.
  54. Bright Star
    That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.
  55. 35 Shots of Rum
    The French actor Alex Descas is mesmerizing in 35 Shots of Rum, where he plays a metro conductor.
  56. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Manages to be both engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.
  57. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    You know what they say: Behind every successful, self-flagellating environmental activist is a woman. And that's what saves both Beavan and the movie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    9
    Does 9 rival last year's "Wall E" as the best post-apocalyptic "cartoon"? The short answer is Nein. 9 is, however, a visual stunner.
  59. Crude
    If the movie is any indication, Chevron would have the public believe there was no Amazon at all -- something people might be willing to believe, were Berlinger not sticking Crude in their faces.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Walt & El Grupo
    The most damning assessment comes from animator-historian John Canemaker, who concludes that Disney's ethnically neutered South American output "gagged it up so that the American influence overwhelmed the cultural" influence of South America.
  61. All About Steve
    Much of what's offensive and insufferable about All About Steve can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Kim Barker, best known for inflicting "License to Wed" on the world. Why do these people still earn obscene amounts of money churning out dreck? And why do stars like Bullock keep paying them?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Extract
    May be the most disappointing American comedy of the decade, partly because it's jokeless and joyless but mostly because it squanders an all-star cast of superb comic talent.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amreeka
    Abetted by an observant cast, she (Dabis) navigates across politically and emotionally fraught terrain with a warming inflection of humor and a mother-hen's attention to the needs of all of her characters.
  64. American Casino
    You won't soon forget the therapist at Johns Hopkins who counsels recently homeless patients who've fallen into depression or substance abuse -- and then goes home to her own bitter foreclosure fight.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The September Issue
    It's delicious and ensnaring and easy on the eyes, but it can't give you the definitive truth about notoriously frosty Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
  66. We Live in Public
    The title of Ondi Timoner's Sundance award-winning documentary about the loss of privacy in the Internet age says it all: "We Live in Public." Don't believe it? Just try Googling "Tiger Woods" or "Michaele Salahi."
  67. Big Fan
    Siegel's depiction of the film's supporting characters too often borders on caricature. By the movie's strained, overheated climax, it's clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology.
  68. Play the Game
    A sex romp starring Andy Griffith? Holy AARP! The good news is that the seemingly perennial TV fixture is still funny and sharp and folksy. The bad news is that he lost the bet, or whatever it was that got him into Marc Fienberg's smarmy, lackluster comedy.
  69. Taking Woodstock
    A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil."
  70. Inglourious Basterds
    Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.
  71. 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.
  72. Post Grad
    Boils down, in the end, to the age-old question: Career or life? That Post Grad draws a stark line between the two, and forces its heroine into an untenable decision, might be the most disappointing thing about a movie that never quite succeeds in capturing a generation adrift.
  73. Shorts
    If parents feel like they've seen much of Shorts before, its celebration of mayhem and restless, thrill-seeking vibe will absorb young viewers, especially as the boredom of late summer begins to set in.
  74. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    Seems propelled by a doomed sense of inevitability and is all the more gripping for it.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    X Games 3D: The Movie
    For a quick ticket into the world of extreme sports, the sky-high, adrenaline-gorged stunts captured in X Games will make any spectator gasp, wince and brace with fear.
  76. Still Walking
    One of the more accomplished and beautiful films released thus far this year.
  77. District 9
    A sci-fi-fueled indictment of man's inhumanity to man -- and the non-human -- District 9 is all horribly familiar, and transfixing.
  78. Ponyo
    Ponyo isn't Hayao Miyazaki's greatest film -- that would be a tall order in a 30-year feature career that includes the Oscar-winning "Spirited Away" -- but his beautiful, quirky fable has magic other children's movies can't touch.
  79. 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).
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bandslam
    the script's earnest intelligence and the actors' charm (Connell, Hudgens and Kudrow are especially fun to watch) make this film an entertaining ode to teenage joie de vivre.
  81. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    Sloppy compendium of filthy jokes and lowbrow sight gags.
  82. Earth Days
    Feels like a prolonged campfire conversation, filled with weathered, measured talk about holistic thinking and finding a new perspective.
  83. It Might Get Loud
    One needn't have a Stratocaster moldering in the closet at home to get a kick out of It Might Get Loud.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Way We Get By
    Not so much a slice of life as the whole pie, the highs and lows of twilight living, all found and filmed in a terminal at an airport in Maine. What a country.
  85. 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.
  86. Julie & Julia
    A movie that soars whenever Child is on the screen and sags when Powell shows up.
  87. Cold Souls
    If not always coherent, at least compelling.
  88. 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").
  89. Paper Heart
    Yi's self-regarding, ironic tone makes the whole thing feel like a setup, designed more as an indie-chic calling card than a sincere inquiry.
  90. Funny People
    Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.
  91. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirst
    Thirst is good, insolent fun for about two-thirds of the way, before it stumbles and drowns in a pool of its own excess. Still, you can't help but admire a horror movie that prompts us to wonder how vampires with a surplus of blood got by before the advent of Tupperware.
  93. Lorna's Silence
    While the Dardennes may be moralists, they are also makers of thrillers: The story within Lorna' Silence is built on tiny increments of tantalizing details, meted out in penurious droplets and with chest-tightening tension that suggests that what the brothers wanted to be when they grew up were boa constrictors -- Belgian boas, with degrees in Marxist theory.
  94. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    All in all, this is a celebration of Australian exuberance, a national ethic of adventurousness and enormous charisma.
  95. Flame and Citron
    Like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," Flame and Citron is the story of handsome rogues with guns. It's fast-paced, stylish and thrilling.
  96. Adam
    At its best, Adam makes the viewer understand the frustration of living in a world in which everyone is a stranger -- not least by making us work as hard to understand its hero's feelings as Adam himself must work to understand Beth's.
  97. In the Loop
    Tremendous fun at times, especially in its vicious power plays and betrayals. But it has no redeeming value beyond entertainment.
  98. Orphan
    Depraved, worthless piece of filth.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ugly Truth
    Pleasingly glossy, refreshingly snarky and startlingly sexy.
  100. G-Force
    An aggressively stupid entry in the family-adventure genre from Jerry Bruckheimer.
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