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. Shrink
    Shrink is no worse than the average Hollywood comedy. But it shows, more obviously than most, the bankruptcy of standard-issue American pop narrative, circa 2009.
  2. (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.
  3. A Woman in Berlin
    Joins such wonderful recent films as "The Lives of Others" and "The Baader Meinhof Complex" as a clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.
  4. 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.
  5. Bruno
    Seems fatally out of tune, with every staged encounter falling as flat as the protagonist's hot-ironed bob.
    • 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Perhaps the best thing that can be said about I Love You, Beth Cooper is that the title is correctly punctuated. Beyond that, the movie is a disappointingly flabby teen flick.
  8. Soul Power
    Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    As is, this generally excellent portrait does much to fill the void, restoring an unfortunately forgotten figure to her rightful place among broadcasting's trailblazers.
  10. The Girl from Monaco
    Zem and Bourgoin are great, but the movie is too frivolous to win anything but a dismissal in the court of moviegoer opinion.
  11. The Beaches of Agnès
    For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnes arrives like an exhilarating call to arms.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Public Enemies
    It's also a double-barreled bummer. There's no excitement in the bank-robbing, no thrill of the chase, no emotion over justice served or thwarted. Depp's Dillinger is neither charming nor despicable, nor does he occupy that delicious gray area between the two. His spree unspools dispassionately, cold as a Colt .380.
  13. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    Scrat's annoying ubiquity -- is just one piece of evidence that Dawn of the Dinosaurs has been focus-grouped and is now trying to please its presumed young audience a little more than is healthy.
  14. The Hurt Locker
    When viewers are ultimately released from The Hurt Locker's exhilarating vice grip, they'll find themselves shaken, energized and, more than likely, eager to see it again.
  15. My Sister's Keeper
    Within this structurally baggy weepie, at least two perfectly good movies fight to break free, one a provocative legal thriller, the other a melodrama.
  16. Afghan Star
    Afghan Star goes much deeper, eloquently conveying the tensions, small victories and shattering setbacks of a fragile democracy struggling to regain a once-flourishing culture.
  17. Chéri
    Cheri looks terrific, if a bit gauzy at times, and Frears, who directed Pfeiffer in that other Frenchified frolic, "Dangerous Liaisons," is never at rest. Still, the movie bogs down by going nowhere other than inside its characters, who are intensely passionate but of an era more curious than emotionally relevant.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Iranian American director Cyrus Nowrasteh, co-writing with wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, has amplified the basic elements of Suraya's story into the worst kind of exploitive Hollywood melodrama, presented under the virtuous guise of moral outrage.
  19. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    Much of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is simply despicable.
  20. Whatever Works
    This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note.
  21. 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.
  22. Year One
    A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.
  23. $9.99
    A charming, poetic and at times surreal stop-motion animation co-written with Etgar Keret and based on the Israeli writer's short stories.
  24. The End of the Line
    The movie does present solutions, including its urging of consumer demand for more accountability from restaurants and the building of marine reserves.
  25. Under Our Skin
    Under Our Skin has a major ax to grind, but if even half of what it alleges is true, it's more deeply terrifying than any slasher film you'll ever see.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Moon
    Storywise, Moon fails to live up to the promise of its premise. There's plenty of atmosphere, but little gravity.
  27. Food, Inc.
    See Food, Inc. after dinner, but see it.
  28. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    If a few decent actors play their roles and defend their turf, it doesn't matter how preposterous the whole proposition is.
  29. Imagine That
    It's refreshing that in effects-happy Hollywood, Evan and Olivia only imagine their travels, rather than run a gantlet of computerized hallucinations. This may turn out to be one of the more endearing aspects of Imagine That to its younger audiences.
  30. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    But by far the most powerful element is N'Dour's lone voice, a thing of high, pure beauty that feels at once ancient and new. When he sings, an otherwise earnestly conventional film becomes a vehicle of incantatory power.
  31. Tetro
    Tetro has no internal tension and should have been a comedy.
  32. The Hangover
    Sitting through The Hangover is like watching "Memento" featuring the Three Stooges.
  33. Séraphine
    The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.
  34. Away We Go
    It's in these vignettes that Away We Go begins to feel less like an authentic exploration of identity than a condemnation of the very community the couple pretends to crave. No one, it turns out, is good enough for Burt and Verona.
  35. Land of the Lost
    It's cheap-looking (dinosaurs and other beasts here look like CGI loaners from Spielberg), deeply mediocre and predictable.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    My Life in Ruins
    Fittingly, My Life in Ruins goes downhill after its title.
  37. Herb & Dorothy
    You can't hate the film anymore than you can hate Herb and Dorothy. But this is lazy work.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unmistaken Child
    Unmistaken Child: adorable, moving, bewildering, sad and, ultimately, peaceful.
  39. Up
    The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form.
  40. Drag Me to Hell
    As in the best horror movies, Drag Me to Hell keeps the audience on the edge of hysteria throughout, so that every thump sets the heart racing and every joke earns a slightly out-of-control laugh.
  41. Departures
    It is as polished as it is heavy-handed, and it leaves one under a spell.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pressure Cooker
    Pressure Cooker may not get the royal, Conde Nast-magazine hype accorded that upcoming Julia Child movie (starring, who else, Meryl Streep), but it merits a place of honor at the table.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    O'Horten
    Depending on your patience for oddball mood pieces, you will either sleep through O' Horten or be oddly captivated. Either way, it'll be like dreaming.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Easy Virtue
    Blame the wafer-thin adaptation by Sheridan Jobbins and director Stephan Elliott. What might've been a scrumptious, chocolatey dessert of a movie -- a Noel Coward delite -- is instead a scoop of lemon ice, not filling, faintly sweet and mostly water.
  46. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    The museum sparkles, but the movie is awfully dull.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dance Flick
    There are two dance-offs, multiple fat jokes and one sight gag using eye boogers, a heretofore ignored bodily fluid. These are the highlights.
  48. Terminator Salvation
    The result is a movie that takes itself far more seriously than the "Hasta la vista, baby" tone of previous installments.
  49. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.
  50. Summer Hours
    Assayas's actors are so fascinating that I wished at times he had given the house less screen time and let his performers explore their characters more freely.
  51. 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.
  52. Angels & Demons
    What the movie is supposed to accomplish -- laying out a fairly complex mystery in a way that creates suspense -- is precisely what it doesn't do.
  53. Management
    Zahn is the single biggest reason why Management is a delightfully screwball romantic comedy and not a crazed-stalker film. And why it works. Like watching a puppy chase its own tail, it's a pleasure watching Mike try to win Sue over.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adoration
    The complex story structure teeters between the revelatory and the absurd, depending on how much you buy the irritating-then-intriguing performance by Arsine Khanjian (Egoyan's wife, the Armenian-Canadian actor).
  55. Little Ashes
    Beltrn, for his part, makes a solidly believable Garca Lorca. The problem is with the man with whom he's obsessed. In Pattinson's performance, we never see what Garca Lorca sees in Dal.
  56. Next Day Air
    I wished Next Day Air were funnier. In the end, it's a fitfully amusing, sloppy comedy that doesn't work very hard for your 10 bucks.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outrage
    A crisp, efficient, sometimes petty but often infuriating documentary about alleged gay politicians who actively campaign and vote against gay rights.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rudo y Cursi
    Enjoyable but forgettable.
  59. Star Trek
    This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion.
  60. Revanche
    Spielmann doesn't move his camera much, but he doesn't have to. The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.
  61. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    "Wolverine" is full of angst, and yet has had virtually all the soul wrung out of it in an effort to create a live-action cartoon. But cartoons are rarely so unwieldy, or force a director -- in this case, the largely unsung Gavin Hood -- to juggle so much impossible plotline.
  62. Battle for Terra
    It doesn't do much for the film's pacifist message that, as spacecraft zip across the screen and fire lasers into your popcorn, you may find yourself wishing that Tsirbas had replaced the movie's poorly written dialogue and implausible plot with more battle scenes. War! What is it good for? Awesome animation!
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    The relentless vulgarities in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past would be almost tolerable if they were amusing, but Mark Waters's direction is so tentative that the film's single laugh happens more than an hour in.
  64. The Merry Gentleman
    It's too bad the filmmakers didn't take a breath, look at the rushes and see what a comedic gem they had. With just a few tweaks, The Merry Gentleman could have made a wickedly funny parody of the over-earnest, lyrically hard-edged indie movie. But it's too late for do-overs.
  65. Three Monkeys
    It's a film filled with excellent acting, beautifully composed shots, and one or two legitimate storytelling surprises.
  66. The Informers
    A nihilistic, narcissistic, knuckleheaded move about nihilistic, narcissistic knuckleheads, The Informers might have been an interesting exercise in satire, if it only had a sense of humor. Which it doesn't. You'll need one, though, after forking over 10 bucks to see it.
  67. Fighting
    Fighting isn't very good, but it will make you hope that someday, some great director will give Tatum's pecs the star vehicle they deserve.
  68. The Soloist
    Hollywood loves the heroics of good intentions, but this movie is just as interested in the road to hell.
  69. Earth
    A gorgeously photographed storybook.
  70. Treeless Mountain
    It's in this final chapter that the director states his message, which is handled so lightly, almost incidentally, you might miss it. But it's a profound one. For what the girls learn is that the way to get what they want -- no, need -- isn't by hoarding something, but by letting go.
  71. State of Play
    Features a handsome production and terrific performances.
  72. 17 Again
    Engaging but pedestrian comedy.
  73. American Violet
    What sticks in my craw -- just a bit -- is the way the film doesn't fully trust the true story's inherent power.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Every Little Step
    A thoroughly engrossing documentary.
  75. Is Anybody There?
    Caine is magnificent, and the film is worth a look for his contribution alone. But Milner is a promising actor, too, and the pairing of young and old is believable and occasionally very moving.
  76. Lemon Tree
    Riklis has made a powerful film, but can a powerful film change anything about the fatalistic culture of powerlessness that is felt throughout Palestine and Israel? The irony of Lemon Tree is that what it achieves adds, in the end, to the sense that nothing can unravel this mess.
  77. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    The singer-actress has screen presence to spare and a nice, rich voice. By the time her young fans outgrow her -- or she them -- she should have an excellent chance at a second career. Making, you know, real movies and real music.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
    Pleasant-to-watch, easily forgotten drama.
  79. Observe and Report
    Cruel, unfunny and yet somehow perversely fascinating.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lymelife
    Directed by first-timer Derick Martini and produced by Martin Scorsese, balances grimness and levity with relative success. It stops short of quirk. It only flirts with "American Beauty"-style hyperbole. It falls somewhere in between, thanks to Martini's steady hand and a bunch of reliable actors working in good form.
  81. Adventureland
    Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.
  82. Sugar
    A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alien Trespass
    Those who fondly recall "The Blob" would seem to be the target crowd for a fastidious pastiche that attempts to coax laughs by maintaining a poker face.
  84. Fast & Furious
    The reunion is fun and frantic, like the original on double nitro.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paris 36
    A handsomely made French musical that never really soars.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Song of Sparrows
    At times tedious but ultimately beguiling, Song of Sparrows morphs from a sly dramedy about running a household into a fable about two ways of life (urban and rural) that can't coexist.
  87. 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.
  88. Goodbye Solo
    Goodbye Solo is visually simple and stunning, especially the haunting nightscapes of Solo's perambulations. But more important, Goodbye Solo is driven by deep feeling and sensitivity. Don't miss it.
  89. Monsters vs Aliens
    Has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart. Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, Monsters vs. Aliens is too clever by half.
  90. Spinning Into Butter
    The movie suffers most of all from a feeling of creeping irrelevance, as if it's being delivered well after its sell-by date.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shall We Kiss?
    It is as if the director had studied the comedies of Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen from top to bottom and come away with all the wrong lessons.
  92. Knowing
    Yes, Knowing is creepy, at least for the first two-thirds or so, in a moderately satisfying, if predictable, way.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sin Nombre
    An elegant, heartbreaking fable, equal parts Shakespearean tragedy, neo-Western and mob movie but without the pretension of those genres.
  94. I Love You, Man
    After delivering scene-stealing turns in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" Rudd claims the much-deserved spotlight in I Love You, Man, which in its own endearing way tweaks the very same male-bonding pieties that those movies made a fortune celebrating.
  95. Duplicity
    It's smart, it's for grown-ups and it lets Julia Roberts laugh, if just once.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Buck Howard
    Malkovich has a role that coulda-woulda-shoulda been a sensation if he had had a different director and different co-stars.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sunshine Cleaning
    A boring, choppy dramedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    In the end, like virtually every other remake that has been released recently, it's polished and predictable.
  99. The Edge of Love
    That none of the protagonists earns the audience's sympathy is more likely a failure of the real-life characters rather than the actors, who deliver fine performances -- especially Rhys, who seems to be channeling Richard Burton channeling Dylan Thomas at his most manipulatively loutish.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Race to Witch Mountain
    Race to Witch Mountain has Johnson, who lifts the script above its conventional cat-and-mouse stratagems with his buoyant wiseacre timing.
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