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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Soldier's Story
    Almost as powerful as the stage version, craftily recreating the small Louisiana town and the nearby military barracks housing companies of black soldiers in 1944 -- and incidentally providing a splendid showcase for a squadron of black performers who should rarely be out of work from now on. [28 Sep 1984, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  2. Miami Vice
    Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.
  3. Breaking
    In the end, “Breaking” feels like a foregone conclusion: a dismal portrait of a system — and a someone — already irreparably broken.
  4. Paris, je t'aime
    Paris, je t'aime builds into something quite wonderful.
  5. Master
    Master might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.
  6. La Vie en Rose
    Cotillard leaves you loving her Piaf, wishing you could reach through the screen and steer her life a bit differently.
  7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    The second part of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy goes a long way — and at 2 1/2 hours, I do mean long — toward righting the wrongs of the first movie, which was even longer.
  8. Another Earth
    As large as Earth Two looms - literally - in the frames of Mike Cahill's film, so do its implications. It's one big, honking metaphor, as much as a special effect. As a symbol of second chances, it's as intriguing as it is frustratingly obvious.
  9. E-Team
    Exciting, absorbing and stubbornly optimistic in the face of overwhelming devastation, E-Team will, with any luck, shed deserved light on the routine sacrifices these activists and professionals make for the sake of human values.
  10. Mid90s
    Mid90s” is often painful to watch as Stevie puts himself through the punishing rituals of proving his street bona fides. But Hill takes even the most treacherous dangers in stride, suffusing his story with as much tenderness as stark terror.
  11. Swimming with Sharks
    Only a fool -- or someone who's never had a boss -- could completely dislike George Huang's Swimming With Sharks. A revenge comedy in which a much-wronged employee ties up his insensitive, abusive boss and gets a little payback -- puny offense by puny offense -- the film is like Death and the Maiden for disgruntled employees. [12 May 1990, p.B07]
    • Washington Post
  12. 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.
  13. Nixon
    Nixon is an audacious biography rich in imagination and originality, with a provocative, often subversive sense of character and history. Dense and challenging, it is also undermined in places by Stone's obsessions just as dramatically as Richard Nixon was undermined by his.
  14. Premium Rush
    The summertime diversion will give audiences a little jolt of nervous energy along with a few laughs. A rush is about making the most of the present, not creating lasting memories.
  15. Marshall
    Director Reginald Hudlin handles the story with just enough finesse to make its details more thrilling than uneasy.
  16. Splice
    The yuck factor spins off the charts in Splice, a thoroughly repulsive science fiction-horror flick that slicks up its B-movie tawdriness with high-gloss production values and two otherwise classy stars.
  17. Thirteen Lives
    Thirteen Lives is a solid achievement, technically and dramatically, using a ticktock timeline and periodically superimposing on-screen maps of the miles-long cave system to build tension. Like its protagonists, it isn’t flashy but is all business. It gets the job done with a minimum of histrionics, yet a mountain of suspense.
  18. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    One overly busy (not to mention shopworn) story, which regurgitates everything from H.G. Wells's "The Island of Dr. Moreau" to the herky-jerky monsters of Ray Harryhausen to James Bond to "The Mummy."
  19. Heist
    Mamet doesn't just give us an enthralling heist flick, he makes the language something to savor. You're biting your nails with your ears peeled.
  20. Barbershop
    Doesn't always cut it -- and, somewhat embarrassingly, boom mikes hover on screen so frequently they deserve co-billing -- but it's a likable venture that just misses being a lovable one.
  21. Bridget Jones's Diary
    How can you celebrate a movie in which Zellweger doesn't soar but simply avoids disaster?
  22. Mothering Sunday
    Based on a spare, exquisitely crafted novel by Graham Swift, this thoughtful but ultimately inert dramatization respects its source material and tries valiantly to give arresting visual expression to its finely layered themes.
  23. Elf
    The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.
  24. The Way Back
    The Way Back diligently catalogs the outrages through which extreme cold, hunger and thirst put the body, and Weir's camera finds the terrible beauty in his actors' chapped lips, windburned cheeks and tenderized feet.
  25. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    The girls in 'Traveling Pants' are only mannequins wearing someone else's clothes. They don't get inside your head, let alone your heart.
  26. The One I Love
    Duplass and Moss are so good, and their reactions to the frankly nutty circumstances of the film are so plausible, that the preposterous premise of the story hits home both conceptually and emotionally.
  27. 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form.
  29. Cobb
    Shelton's movie never quite transcends its cheap, baseball-card poignancy. You never get the feeling these pulp-fiction archetypes -- the young hack-writer and the aging bull -- are real people. [06 Jan 1995, p.N37]
    • Washington Post
  30. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The plot thickens, along with the emotional tension, which was always the best part of the Potter universe, and not the dazzling special effects.
  31. Nénette
    The animal's striking resemblance to a human is part of what makes Nicolas Philibert's documentary Nenette so evocative.
  32. Beloved Sisters
    Without at least the tawdry pleasure of a little bodice ripping, the film moves along sluggishly, even though it is well acted and handsomely shot.
  33. Becoming
    The film (streaming Wednesday, directed by Nadia Hallgren) is a thoughtful scrapbook, briskly perused — an inside look that never gets too inside.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elio
    The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.
    • 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.
  36. Earth Girls Are Easy
    Earth Girls Are Easy, a frisky extraterrestrial romance starring Geena Davis, is the movie equivalent of cheap champagne -- even though it's lousy, it still gives you tickles up the nose. Even at its most rambunctious, the picture just never seems to get going, and if the performers weren't so consistently charming you'd be tempted to pack it in early.
  37. Occupation: Dreamland
    It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mountainhead
    It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.
  39. Mission: Impossible III
    Abrams keeps the action clicking along in 5/8 time, and Cruise is at his scowling/smiling best as he jumps, shoots and leaves. (See Tom run! Run, Tom, run!) Best is Philip Seymour Hoffman as the baddie; the film's best sequence features him playing Cruise playing him at a swank party in Vatican City.
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