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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  1. 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.
  2. One Day
    One Day often seems too tame for its own good, as if its spirited protagonists were censoring themselves in deference to a PG-13 rating.
  3. Contraband
    Watching it leaves you feeling less buzzed than jittery and slightly nauseated. If the "Ocean's" movies were martinis, Contraband is a thermos full of coffee.
  4. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Both terribly silly and a lot of fun.
  5. Brave
    The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.
  6. The Croods
    Just good, goofy fun, for a generation too young to have met Bamm-Bamm.
  7. Bride Flight
    Lovely scenery and historical context elevate the sentimental story lines above the soap opera domain.
  8. Chimpanzee
    But nature is messy, and Chimpanzee doesn't shrink from that, to its credit. Fothergill and Linfield at least exercise discretion when their cameras capture disturbing turns of event.
  9. The Guard
    Hip, lurid and improbably lovable, The Guard is easily the best guy-love comedy of the summer, with Cheadle and Gleeson's riffs and repartee tumbling back and forth as if they've been trading lies over Guinness forever.
  10. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    The cast is talented - the chemistry between characters is solid, comedic timing is impeccable and the actors seem to be having fun, which may prove contagious for audience members.
  11. Janie Jones
    Nivola and Breslin make a terrific mismatched pair in a film that often resembles a mash-up of "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere," which may account for why it too often feels derivative and contrived.
  12. The Five-Year Engagement
    I liked The Five-Year Engagement, and then I didn't, and then I did.
  13. Free Birds
    Free Birds has the colorful palette, zippy action and silly story to keep kids giggling, but it also delivers a few worthwhile winks to parents.
  14. Think Like a Man
    An all-star revue of some of the most physically stunning actors working in Hollywood, Think Like a Man is a pleasure if only on a purely sensory level.
  15. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    If viewers are left feeling just as impotent as many of the characters, that may be precisely what Jolie intended for a film that asks nothing more of its audience than to bear witness.
  16. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    Like many Aardman films, The Pirates! is awash with silliness. There are far more fleeting visual jokes than one can possibly digest in a single viewing. It makes for an experience that, while geared toward younger, more fidgety audiences, has enough humor to keep Mom and Dad from falling asleep.
  17. Elysium
    A high-low tension runs through Elysium, not only in the narrative itself, but in Blomkamp’s own cinematic language, which can be lofty one moment and gleefully pulpy the next.
  18. Django Unchained
    Breathes its own refreshing, occasionally demented, life into that time period, albeit in a pulpy, stylized cinematic language more akin to vampire-hunter cartoonishness than "Lincoln's" more classical reserve.
  19. Savages
    Savages is a B-movie striving for an A-plus, a decadently energetic summer escape with bloody action, bold visuals and bodacious attitude to burn.
  20. Oblivion
    It’s an engrossing, if complicated and twisty, story, with plentiful sci-fi action and a provocative subtext about the nature of the human soul. At times, however, the balance between those two things feels off.
  21. Bully
    This intimate, straightforward, often wrenching portrait of five families dealing with bullying and its aftermath doesn't hold many surprises at a time when such campaigns as "It Gets Better" and special programming on kids' cable networks are bringing the issue to the fore.
  22. Fast & Furious 6
    Like its predecessors, doesn’t need CGI, 3-D glasses or even praise from film critics. It just needs to please its audience with amped-up, old-school thrills that make its target demo whoop and holler with every zoom, smash and ka-BOOM. Consider this review a declaration that it does just that.
  23. Pacific Rim
    A big, lumbering, rock ’em, sock ’em mash-up of metallic heft and hyperbole, a noisy, overproduced disaster flick that sucks its characters and the audience down a vortex of garish visual effects and risibly cartoonish action. And you know what? It’s not bad!
  24. Turbo
    A derivative but nevertheless good-hearted movie that’s peppered with enough clever touches to engage adults as well as moviegoers of the smaller, squirmier variety.
  25. Young Adult
    Though marketed as a comedy, this film is too creepy and acerbic to be consistently comic.
  26. Epic
    Enormously visually appealing, even if the story itself is almost unrecognizably bloated.
  27. Mozart's Sister
    Mozart's Sister feels like a rococo reverie. The film was shot inside Versailles, which borders on the best sensory overload when you factor in the gorgeous classical soundtrack.
  28. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Everyone hits their marks with gusto and believability in Catching Fire... But the engine of the entire operation is Jennifer Lawrence.
  29. World War Z
    The result is a movie that, while no classic, can be credited with giving the audience something a bit more substantive than the usual disposable summer fare.
  30. Hysteria
    It's cute. So is the movie. If it never rises to greatness, it may be because it's also a fairly formulaic romcom.
  31. Benda Bilili!
    The band's success is never diminished. The fickle music industry can seem so arbitrary: A talented singer with connections might not make the cut, while a middling performer in the right place at the right time rockets to fame. Staff Benda Bilili's unlikely triumph is an epic feat, with or without anyone's help.
  32. Les Miserables
    For better or worse, though, this adaptation of the mega-hit Broadway musical fits neither description, largely because it lives in that kinda-sorta, okay-not-great, this-worked-that-didn't in-between for which words like "better" and "worse" fall woefully short.
  33. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    A surprisingly lush, endearing little film, in which a swelling sense of romanticism thoroughly banishes even the most far-fetched improbabilities.
  34. Now You See Me
    The problem is that, in focusing on what makes a good caper, director Louis Leterrier forgot about what makes a good movie: character development, carefully constructed tension and believable plot points.
  35. Broken City
    Overall, this is an entertaining diversion.
  36. Sparkle
    While Sparkle doesn't give the audience a lasting memory of Houston's voice at its most soaring, it does manage to provide a lingering sense of loss, mixed with celebration and grim irony.
  37. Norwegian Wood
    At times, the story seems to exist in the instant between wakefulness and sleep, a dreamy state that's also startlingly realistic.
  38. Hyde Park on Hudson
    The problem with Hyde Park on Hudson isn't its suggestion of FDR's dark side. That complexity, and Murray's spot-on portrayal of a man juggling myriad pressures and demands, from petty to momentous, marks one of the film's greatest strengths. It's that Daisy rarely comes into her own as more than the pliant emotional helpmeet to the Great Man.
  39. Silent House
    It will make you jump, to be sure, and your heart to beat a little bit faster. But what's truly scariest about it takes place not in the body, but in the mind.
  40. The Hunter
    At the core of the movie is the message that the real lonely hunter is the heart.
  41. Blue Like Jazz
    Without being parodistic, it manages to poke fun at the air of privilege and strenuous political correctness common to lefty, liberal arts schools, while retaining a certain affection for their heartfelt quirks.
  42. End of Watch
    It's powerful stuff, but I almost felt like I needed an intermission.
  43. Delicacy
    It is Markus's sensitivity to nuance and to the feelings of others that characterizes every step that he - and this sure-footed if off-kilter film - takes.
  44. People Like Us
    It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.
  45. Ruby Sparks
    For a movie so bent on skewering illusions, Ruby Sparks ultimately can't entirely let go of its own.
  46. The Master
    By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been.
  47. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Fan or not, it's hard not to give in to Perry's endearing charms.
  48. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    This was a man who needed no help standing out from the crowd.
  49. Maleficent
    For all its limitations, Maleficent manages to be improbably entertaining to watch, due solely to its title character. As befits a star of her regal standing and superb self-awareness, Angelina Jolie has managed to bend even the Brothers Grimm to her indomitable will.
  50. The Good Dinosaur
    The Good Dinosaur is hardly catastrophic. But the movie is a lot like Arlo. On its own, it seems fine; just don’t compare it to its capable siblings.
  51. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The empathy-generating performances by the charismatic young actors -- particularly the uber-confident Miller and a simultaneously punk-rock cynical and girlishly fragile Mae Whitman -- compensate for any missteps.
  52. U.N. Me
    If it weren't so shocking, it would be a lot funnier.
  53. China Heavyweight
    Its brutality is unacceptable to Buddhism and Confucianism yet is increasingly appealing to young men (and women). And in a country that still professes socialism, it's fiercely individualistic. There are no collective work groups in the boxing ring.
  54. Cloud Atlas
    While Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski haven't necessarily expanded on Mitchell's book, they've done a superlative job making it legible onscreen. Cloud Atlas deserves praise if only for not being the baggy, pretentious disaster it could have been in other hands.
  55. Hello I Must Be Going
    Hello I Must Be Going isn't heavy lifting, to be sure. But it's still worthy of a little end zone dance.
  56. Searching for Sugar Man
    The movie is neatly structured, and Rodriguez turns out to be an interesting guy. He's worth getting to know, even if his music isn't.
  57. You've Been Trumped
    It’s pretty obvious, with the controversy surrounding Trump’s political ascendancy, that there is a built-in market for a film that makes him and his business surrogates out to be both callous bullies and buffoons.
  58. Starbuck
    It’s silly and a bit sappy, but it works, in a crowd-pleasing way.
  59. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    It’s a joyless, surpassingly dour enterprise, but one that fulfills its mission with Katniss’s own eagle-eyed efficiency and unsentimental somberness.
  60. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    As he did in the first “Avengers,” writer-director Joss Whedon avoids the fatal trap of comic-book ­self-seriousness, leavening a baggy, busy, overpopulated story with zippy one-liners, quippy asides and an overarching tone of jaunty good fun.
  61. Minions
    I, too, once enjoyed the Minions, in the small doses that they came in. But the extra-strength Minions is, for better or for worse, too much of a good thing.
  62. The To Do List
    The one thing The To Do List lacks is emotion. Carey is wise not to let the movie get bogged down by too much drama, but Brandy’s scientific approach to losing her virginity makes her seem almost robotic. That being said, it’s an amusing twist that the most emotional characters are Cameron and Brandy’s father.
  63. Last Vegas
    It’s the actors, plus an exuberant Mary Steenburgen as quick-witted lounge singer Diana, who make the movie more than a middling copycat.
  64. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Jackson’s storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion.
  65. Home
    Home is about the yearning for the comforts of family. But this kiddie sci-fi adaptation doesn’t quite live up to its evocative title.
  66. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    The trouble with the film is that this animal love story also saps some of the franchise’s main strength, which has always been the almost pet-like relationship between humans and dragons.
  67. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    A solid and subtly moving portrait of the people of Burma.
  68. Switch
    Refreshingly free of hot air.
  69. Snitch
    Snitch is protein-and-starch filmmaking at its utilitarian -- and belly-filling -- best. Johnson brings the steak; Bernthal the sizzle. The father-son drama is served up as sauce on the side. But as long as the beef isn’t too overcooked, who needs the A1?
  70. Oldboy
    In general, Lee directs with less visual verve than Park. Anchored by Brolin, who brings an almost simian physicality to his portrayal, this Oldboy feels simultaneously less showy, less nightmarish and less epic than the original.
  71. Ride Along
    Hart is clearly working overtime; there’s nothing effortless about his histrionic delivery, but it works.
  72. Delivery Man
    Starbuck was a funny and warm-hearted trifle. So is Delivery Man.
  73. Back to 1942
    It's a grim tale, and Back to 1942 doesn't pretend otherwise.
  74. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men often lets the schematic gears show, succumbing to threadbare formula and sentimental cliches rather than taut, sophisticated drama.
  75. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    Buried inside this grab bag of hits and misses is a pretty good point about the descent of television news into a miasma of 24/7 speculation, fluff and, most of all, hype.
  76. Emperor
    This drama is serious and well made but will appeal primarily to those with an interest in the devastated setting (1945 Tokyo) and the enigmatic title character (Emperor Hirohito).
  77. About Last Night
    About Last Night may be about Daniel and Debbie, but it’s Hart and Hall who make it worth watching. They take palatable but not exceptional cinematic hay and turn it into comic gold.
  78. The Way, Way Back
    Features one of the best endings in recent movie memory — and as we all know, endings are the hardest. If it takes some predictable twists and turns to get there, well then, accept it and move on.
  79. The Wolf of Wall Street
    The Wolf of Wall Street remains one-note even at is most outré, an episodic portrait of rapaciousness in which decadence escalates into debauchery escalates into depravity — but, miraculously, not death.
  80. Disconnect
    If this strikes you as vaguely familiar, you’re right: Disconnect is a computer “Crash.”
  81. August: Osage County
    The film feels claustrophobic at times, and stagy. It helps that the supporting cast is uniformly good.
  82. Unfinished Song
    It’s worth a watch, if just for Stamp’s complex performance.
  83. Haute Cuisine
    Haute Cuisine provides no huge revelations or profound messages, but it is sweetly and consistently engaging — a tasty treat that’s not entirely filling but perfectly enjoyable all the same.
  84. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    It’s all in the name of comedy, and it mostly works, with a couple of exceptions, including an especially mean-spirited and somewhat violent tirade against a fan he met in an airport.
  85. Black Nativity
    Sensory pleasures abound in Black Nativity, which is grounded by Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett’s performances as Langston’s strict, God-fearing grandparents.
  86. Byzantium
    The joke seems to be that in 2013, it’s hard to teach an old bloodsucker new tricks. Still, Byzantium has a few moves that might surprise you. They have nothing to do with blood, but everything to do with the heart.
  87. Blue Caprice
    As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.
  88. A Hijacking
    To refuse to call A Hijacking a thriller is not to say it isn’t thrilling, in a dryly cerebral way. Writer-director Tobias Lindholm has a point to make, and he makes it pungently.
  89. Riddick
    Riddick can be cheesy and silly, not to mention excessively violent, but it’s also fun.
  90. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    The film is complex and bold, sometimes even exhilarating. It can also be frustratingly esoteric.
  91. One Direction: This Is Us
    I’m on to you, Spurlock. There are holes in your story about five lads who don’t appear to ever drink, smoke, fight, curse or partake in romantic dalliances of any kind. At least, not on screen.
  92. Furious 7
    Yes, the whole movie feels overstuffed and overlong, and the non-action scenes are often dragged down by stilted dialogue. But Furious 7 buzzes with a frenetic energy so contagious, there’s no sense in resisting it.
  93. Computer Chess
    Computer Chess makes an affecting preservationist plea, in this case for a visual and material culture that, while not objectively beautiful, possessed its own form of buttoned-down passion — before it became obsolete by taking over the world.
  94. Sex Tape
    Segel and Diaz are gifted and game comedians, with a lot of audience appeal. But Lowe clearly upstages them, consummating their Sex Tape — and making you want to roll over and have a cigarette — while there’s still one reel to go.
  95. Fury
    It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating.
  96. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    It’s impossible to dismiss von Trier as merely a hype-monger. He’s too damnably good a filmmaker for that. Watching Nymphomaniac is to be reminded of his superb skills in creating vivid worlds and characters on screen.
  97. Europa Report
    There are genuinely chilling moments in Europa Report, thanks in no small part to a talented cast that will likely look familiar to viewers, even if the actors’ names aren’t instantly recognizable.
  98. You Will Be My Son
    You Will Be My Son is not a subtle movie. Some of the characterizations and music feel heavy-handed, and one major plot point late in the film feels inauthentic.
  99. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    The real problem with A Million Ways to Die in the West is one of editing. There are a million jokes in it, but only 500,000 of them are funny.
  100. Elemental
    Elemental speaks to the importance of protecting the natural elements: water, air, earth. It’s a beautifully filmed piece, even when it’s showing us white clouds of pollutants billowing out of a smokestack.
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