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. Green Zone
    The jittery, scattershot camerawork of Greengrass's longtime cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, was used far more coherently in Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker," and the constant blurry close-ups of computer screens and street-level scrums lose their power with each successive cut.
  2. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?
  3. King of California
    There's so little authenticity between them, it destroys the story's most crucial element: the love between father and daughter. And finding the gold becomes our only reason to watch.
  4. Damsel
    In Damsel, sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have created the perfect western for the #MeToo era, delightfully twisting and torquing the traditional woman-in-jeopardy narrative to create a clever, comical and uncannily relevant allegory.
  5. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.
  6. Master Gardener
    I wanted to buy this story. I really did. But its protagonist floats through the action — filled with jealousy, lust and violence — as though he were anesthetized.
  7. Hardcore
    Schrader's second feature, Hardcore, is more confidently made than his first, Blue Collar, but it slips into a similar category: absorbing but unsatisfying. [10 Feb 1979, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  8. Inside Moves
    Inside Moves is sneaky-funny and sneaky-affecting. It's an artfully old-fashioned morale booster celebrating comeback kids: apparent losers, outcasts and hard-luck cases who manage to pull themselves together, buck the odds and reaffirm their pride, dignity and masculinity. [18 Dec 1980, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  9. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Sometimes a movie comes along that, devoid of a noisy publicity push or festival buzz, quietly ambushes the unsuspecting viewer with an absorbing, skillfully executed, meaningful and thoroughly entertaining experience. Ladies and gentlemen, Borg vs. McEnroe is just that kind of film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The 11th Hour
    The picture almost beats its theme to death -- the first hour is enough -- but the imaginative designers dreaming up a cleaner future end this Cassandra cry on an upbeat note.
  11. The River Wild
    The film would be utterly banal without the novelty of the high-toned Streep in an action role.
  12. Octopussy
    One of the snazziest, wittiest productions in the history of the serial.
  13. Falling
    Viggo Mortensen makes a sensitive and assured directing debut with Falling, a meditation on aging, mortality and slow-drip loss that will resonate deeply with anyone going through the agonies it depicts.
  14. Unsane
    A straightforward, B-movie horror flick — “The Snake Pit” without the prestige — complete with intentional overdosing, electroshock torture and patients threatening each other with a sharpened spoons, when they’re not either screaming or catatonic. It also is very, very bad.
  15. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    The film's flaws are nothing compared with the pleasures it offers, chiefly in its unapologetic pursuit of old-fashioned sweetness and romance.
  16. Undertow
    It's just sort of trying.
  17. The Jungle Book
    The narrative shifts from romance to adventure the way Cheetah used to hop from foot to foot, but Sommers nevertheless delivers a bully family picture.
  18. Single White Female
    Schroeder's refusal to choose moral sides gives the psychological confrontation between the women the kind of weird, mutually accepted form of diseased codependency that Claus and Sunny von Bulow shared in his previous film, Reversal of Fortune. In Single White Female, Schroeder leaves the subtext unresolved, but manages to strike a very raw nerve.
  19. Spring Breakers
    How on earth is it possible for one film to be so tiresome? Spring Breakers isn’t deadly dull despite all the nudity and violence, but because of it.
  20. Fingernails
    It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.
  21. Villains
    If you’re a fan of broad black comedy — the kind in which someone blasts a hole in someone else’s head, and then the next camera shot is framed by that gaping aperture — Villains may be your cup of strong tea. The dialogue by writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen is less than witty, and peppered with a heavy sprinkling of dully numbing f-bombs.
  22. The Cat's Meow
    An elegant drama about power and its frightening uses, The Cat's Meow is the bee's knees.
  23. Happy Times
    The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.
  24. Open Water
    These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.
  25. 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.
  26. Rio
    This is a movie that imbues even the hoariest quest-peril-life lesson tropes of family animated films and imbues them with new life and rhythm.
    • 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.
  28. Triangle of Sadness
    As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.
  29. Let Him Go
    Surprisingly gripping and moving modern western.
  30. Batkid Begins
    Batkid would be easier to swallow if it focused less on self-congratulation than on the epidemic of unselfishness that inspired the magic in the first place.
  31. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.
  32. City of Men
    So much emotional traffic streams through this City of Men that it's easy to miss a narrative turnoff. You won't get lost, but your sense of direction might be profoundly changed.
  33. Cry-Baby
    Basically the filmmaker reminds us of his affection for social misfits, but without much conviction. He's simply too hip to commit himself to his beliefs, and a relentless frivolity prevails. Still Cry-Baby is not without its spit-curled charms, its amusing lines and its funky famous-name cameos.
  34. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maria
    Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.
  36. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time
  37. Love, Cecil
    Vreeland’s film, for the most part, is structured around spoken passages from Beaton’s voluminous diaries, which are read, expressively, by Rupert Everett. The actor ably channels the persona of the self-described “rabid aesthete.”
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Foot Fist Way
    Fails to generate a real plot, and the awkward moments work better in a context of adolescence. Quirk isn't funny when accompanied by adultery and brutality -- though a couple of lines zing.
  39. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    In the end, A Tout de Suite leads to not much more of a point than one woman's loss of innocence.
  40. Split
    For all the outrageousness of Kevin’s alters, the movie falls oddly flat: less tantalizingly enigmatic “et cetera” than “blah blah blah.”
  41. Until the End of the World
    Wenders weaves all his thematic and narrative threads together into a coherent, philosophical whole. Even with the apocalypse, though, his view isn't despairing. A new direction, a new beginning emerges out of the ashes of the old, image-overloaded world, and with it, a sort of muted optimism.
  42. The Adventures of Felix
    This French film has a breezy, documentary air that belies the important issues is raises.
  43. I Capture the Castle
    Could have been a sensation if a director with a smidgen of moviemaking instinct had taken the helm.
  44. Alpha
    Sweet, strange and at times slightly scary.
  45. Life
    Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."
  46. The Upside of Anger
    It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.
  47. The Dreamers
    It may give many viewers a licentious flutter, but the highbrow ingredient -- although it desperately wants to be there -- is missing.
  48. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.
  49. This Christmas
    The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.
  50. 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.
  51. Laggies
    Laggies possesses irrepressible cheer, optimism and an innate sense of ease that often go missing in angstier productions loosely organized under “Aging, fear of.” Unlike its sometimes annoyingly wishy-washy heroine, this is a movie that knows just where it’s going, and finds joy in the journey.
  52. The Rip
    If you go for this kind of fare, you’ll have a good time. If you don’t, you’ll probably find it off-putting.
  53. True Lies
    Deceptively labeled a domestic epic by writer-director James Cameron, the $100 million movie is, in fact, a weird hybrid of action juggernaut, buddy cop caper and reactionary soft-core pornography.
  54. SubUrbia
    Linklater, who introduced the blithe, but bemused slacker subculture to America in 1991, gets bogged down not only in Bogosian's for-stage structure, but especially his middle-aged perspective.
  55. Free Fire
    With his cultivated air of nonchalance, the trivialized, consequence-free violence and reverse-engineering of a plot threaded with convenient twists and unexpected arrivals, Wheatley seems intent upon lowering the stakes at every opportunity.
  56. In the Earth
    You’ve got to give Wheatley credit: In the Earth is like nothing else you’ve seen — although some might wish it were a little less, er, original.
  57. Beau Is Afraid
    The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.
  58. A Haunting in Venice
    A Haunting in Venice isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But that’s no doubt as intended by Branagh, who seems intent on rescuing Poirot from the reassuring, too-cute world of “cozy” mysteries and grounding him in the real-life loss and emotional dislocation of the postwar eras from which he sprang.
  59. Megamind
    Megamind has presentation in spades. But it also has something even rarer than that. It's got heart.
  60. The Signal
    In a movie about perception, misperception and the ramifications of misunderstanding, it's a bit ironic that the directors can't get out of one another's way.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Burn After Reading
    Oh, the high-octane cast works hard. But there's nothing to suggest anybody off camera tried that hard, which is fatal to a Coen outing.
  62. Invincible
    There's too much slow-mo and too many music cues, but there's a low-key buzz to Wahlberg's scenes with Greg Kinnear.
  63. The Matrix Resurrections
    Wachowski seems to be at war with her audience, rewarding them with deep-cut callbacks one moment only to roll her eyes at the entire enterprise the next.
  64. Peter von Kant
    There are pleasures to be had here, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call “Peter” fun, by any stretch of the imagination. At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.
  65. Shutter Island
    If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."
  66. Boiler Room
    As a piece of journalism then, Boiler Room is first class.
  67. Amigo
    The argument in Amigo is so heavy-handed - and its execution so crude - that by the time the movie winds its way to a predictable but uninvolving conclusion, nobody will be listening anymore.
  68. Love at First Fight
    The actors make the movie’s memorable characters all the more indelible, even when Love at First Fight loses its sense of originality.
  69. Night Shift
    Michael Keaton's the live wire and Henry Winkler's the deadbeat in director Ron Howard's new hit, Night Shift, a whorifying undertaking that solicits its laughs by pairing the quick and the dead.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Strongest Man in the World
    These delightful movies provide just the right blend of humor and adventure and lack of big-bang special effects to make viewing an enjoyable experience. They rank among the best of Disney's live-action comedies. [06 Aug 2000, p.Y05]
    • Washington Post
  71. The Man from Snowy River
    A rousing and scenically breathtaking romance about ranch life in the 1880s, the film should recommend itself strongly to families. [24 Dec 1982, p.14]
    • Washington Post
  72. Dreamscape
    The possibilities are intriguing, but more might have been realized. [17 Aug 1984, p.23]
    • Washington Post
  73. Bubble
    Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough aren't interested in creating a coy whodunit so much as evoking the deeper, less romantic mysteries of people -- and it's riveting.
  74. ATL
    Notwithstanding the melodrama and the often ham-handed directing, ATL somehow works. A large part of this is thanks to Robinson's skill in evoking the hickory-smoked flavor of the ATL.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lost Boys
    The film loses courage (or imagination) and hews to the Spielberg school of climactic denouement, so that teen farce and special effects take over. By the time the thing has played out, that subtle scare/laugh mix is a thing of the past and you feel as though you just walked out of "Breaking Away" or Goonies. Ah well.
  76. Youth in Revolt
    A movie that feels written rather than lived; from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Rushmore," it's a story we've seen in better versions before.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tequila Sunrise
    But the greater credit goes to writer/director Towne. In this adult adventure with a twist, he has mixed a good one. [2 Dec 1988, p.n41]
    • Washington Post
  78. Farmageddon
    Kristin Canty's surprisingly engrossing documentary, a worthy addition to the growing annals of movies and books advocating for sustainable farming methods.
  79. Hotel Mumbai
    The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. Hotel Mumbai is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.
  80. Severance
    None of the killings has any suspense, and the capital I irony -- that these people make their living selling death in small mechanical packages and munitions to the world and are now being hunted down by the same devices -- never begins to produce any results. Put it on a level with a mid-series "Halloween."
  81. Sugar Town
    May not rock the joint. But then, it isn't trying to.
  82. Happy, Texas
    Along with a lot of 10-gallon laughs, Happy, Texas rustles up plenty of goodwill for its larcenous, sexually ambiguous leading men.
  83. V for Vendetta
    A piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.
  84. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    For the uninitiated? Man, it's a bummer.
    • 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.
  86. The Same River Twice
    If you can get past the "Big Chill" setup, there is a fine piece of moviemaking here.
  87. Simon & the Oaks
    Simon and the Oaks is not merely the story of two boys from opposite sides of the tracks. It's also a larger meditation on life's hardships and what endures: love, art and civilization.
  88. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    As portrayed by William Moseley, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley and especially Anna Popplewell as Susan, the Pevensies still make for terrific tween protagonists, and Aslan, the majestic mythical lion voiced by Liam Neeson, is still a breathtaking manifestation of the Cat Upstairs.
  89. Nothing in Common
    Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks team entertainingly in Nothing in Common, a sugar-coated variation on "Death of a Salesman." It proves an uncommonly funny drama, its painful truths brightened by Hanks' clowning glory and Gleason's glowering deadpan. [1 Aug 1986, p.25]
    • Washington Post
  90. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Solo: A Star Wars Story gets the job done with little fuss, but also with precious little finesse. It might arguably succeed in teeing up the cinematic narrative that would change movies forever. But in both substance and execution, it bears but a whisper of the revolution to come.
  91. Iron Man 3
    A frantic, occasionally funny, finally enervating bricolage of special effects, explosive set pieces, sardonic one--liners and notional human emotions, this branch of the Marvel franchise tree feels brittle and over--extended enough to snap off entirely.
  92. Alien: Resurrection
    So drippy and slippery you'll feel that you're hiding in Kevin Costner's nasal passages during the filming of "Waterworld."
  93. Hollywoodland
    And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.
  94. Executive Decision
    Writers Jim and John Thomas and first-time director Stuart Baird have come up with a surprisingly deft variation on the airplane hijack genre, one that relies on subterfuge and suspense rather than explosives and body counts even though Steven Seagal is in it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Call Jane
    The result is a film that’s engaging enough, but choppily paced and oddly inert. Beyond an audacious opening shot and some period-appropriate needle drops — Nancy Sinatra, Malvina Reynolds and Vanity Fare among them — Call Jane is also decidedly unstylish.
  96. Dogma
    For a while, the film is screamingly funny, but the further it goes, the more muddled the narrative becomes.
  97. Crocodile Dundee
    A double fish out of water structure -- first she's the fish, then he's the fish -- but the movie doesn't go anywhere with it, mostly because the characters are such nullities.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Set It Off
    The actresses work hard to give spark to some of the predictable scenes and dialogue in the screenplay by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford. Their fine work eclipses the fact that the film gives us very little information about most of them.
  99. Skin
    If you didn't know that it was based on a true story, Skin would be a little hard to believe.
  100. 42
    Harrison plays Rickey with a jutting jaw, squinting eye and hoarse bark straight out of the Irascible Old Coot playbook, his character constantly invoking God and the almighty dollar to justify what became known as Rickey’s “noble experiment.”
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