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. The Fluffy Movie
    The Fluffy Movie’s principal weakness is that it’s not much of a movie. There’s no particular reason to watch this in a theater rather than on television.
  2. Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago
    Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago may not be entirely brilliant, but it’s at the very least inspiring.
  3. Starman
    Despite Allen's sincere face; Bridges' quirky, effective portrayal; some exquisite effects; and many funny moments, the film falters at the finish, if not a little before. Mostly it never delivers what it promises -- an alien with all the right answers. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]
    • Washington Post
  4. The BFG
    Roald Dahl’s beloved ad­ven­ture tale about a brave little girl who befriends the titular Big Friendly Giant, finds Steven Spielberg in his natural element of childlike enchantment, yet also strangely out of step, his trusted sense of narrative propulsion and pacing occasionally failing him in a saggy, draggy second act.
  5. A Master Builder
    For a movie that lasts longer than two hours and is made up solely of talking, it’s impressive that the story never seems to drag. But with all of the possibilities of movie magic, it’s a shame that the characters keep us at arm’s length.
  6. The Green Prince
    Sometimes a great story is enough to overcome mediocre storytelling, and that’s the case with the documentary The Green Prince.
  7. A Five Star Life
    The final destination of A Five Star Life is well worth the wait, but the service is so slow that some viewers may check out early.
  8. The Tribe
    What makes The Tribe unforgettable is the filmmaker’s attention to composition and staging, with camera work by cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych that goes from implacable stasis to poetic fluidity with seamless, expressive ease.
  9. Silence
    The morale of [Scorsese's] story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.
  10. Pump
    Even if at times its structure feels overly complicated and the B-roll seems silly, the movie makes compelling points. More important, the film suggests both long-term and short-term solutions.
  11. Uncharted
    What transpires is part heist flick, part Mission: Impossible-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s existential darkness.
  12. May in the Summer
    It’s diverting to watch and has moments of brilliance, but even with all its refreshing female characters, May in the Summer doesn’t leave a lasting impression.
  13. Two Night Stand
    With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.
  14. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    "Out of the Shadows” isn’t going to win any awards, good or bad. Neither an embarrassment nor a triumph, it is nevertheless an improvement over the last film.
  15. Awake: The Life of Yogananda
    [A] dreamy, entrancing and occasionally overstuffed documentary.
  16. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    The bar isn’t terribly high here, but Puss and company clear it comfortably, landing — but of course — on their feet.
  17. Wetlands
    Wetlands has only a sketchy plot, based largely on Helen’s dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. It isn’t terribly clear where the movie — or its hedonistic heroine — is going, but getting there is one wild ride.
  18. Pay 2 Play: Democracy’s High Stakes
    Pay 2 Play makes no new revelations... The difference with this movie is that it actually means to inspire hope.
  19. Lilting
    It is, as the title suggests, sweet — but also slight.
  20. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    In its second half, “Kundo” becomes robust and exhilarating. The filmmakers stage cast-of-dozens battle scenes and one-on-one showdowns with equal brio.
  21. The Nice Guys
    The characters in The Nice Guys often ask each other if they’re good or bad, a choice the movie doesn’t want to force the audience to make. Instead it settles for making good on the title, occupying the nice, mushy middle — perhaps unfocused and off-balance at times, but conveying a sense of buoyancy that’s as cheerfully contagious as it is freewheeling.
  22. Good Kill
    Admittedly, Niccol succumbs to the temptation to make mini-billboards out of his dialogue, in which arguments follow neat “on the one hand” trajectories. But for the most part, Good Kill asks pertinent, enduring questions, not by way of polemic, but through the study of a character.
  23. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River includes just enough history of the civil rights era to lend it gravitas. The color-blind recording practices of studios like Stax were an anomaly at the time and are well worth noting. But it’s the music people will want to hearken to.
  24. John Wick
    Like so many action movies, John Wick goes way beyond a reasonable carnage threshold. Brawls that are exciting in the beginning become dull as each sequence attempts to outdo the last. But John Wick has a more interesting story and better fights than most.
  25. Now You See Me 2
    The film is, at times, almost sinfully fun, assuming you have a taste for self-indulgently logic-free hedonism.
  26. The Duke of Burgundy
    As a meticulously composed piece of contemporary gothic, The Duke of Burgundy is exquisite to look at, but it succeeds best as a human drama, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want — and maybe even getting it in the end.
  27. Still Alice
    The filmmakers invite the audience to get close enough to feel the pain without having to relive the depths of the real-life horror.
  28. Diplomacy
    The movie is an intellectual puzzle, the outcome of which is never in doubt. Its minor thrills come not from not knowing what will happen, but from watching the cagey choreography of two acrobatic minds.
  29. The Night Before
    The Night Before is hardly a Christmas miracle, but it’s good for a laugh or two. And that’s not a bad way to get into the holiday spirit.
  30. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    I’ll Be Me is an elevating experience, inviting the audience to bear witness to Campbell’s courage, humor and spiritual strength. His story may make for a tough movie, but it’s an important and triumphant one, as well.
  31. The Irish Pub
    A lovingly laid-back documentary about the charms, liquid and otherwise, of the traditional Irish watering hole.
  32. Justice League
    Most of the brights spots in Justice League involve Miller’s Flash — literally.
  33. The Flash
    The disconnect between Barry’s mature and adolescent selves, a running gag, can be amusing. But coming on the heels of the parade of similar content that we’ve been subjected to for the past several years in the world of superhero films and shows, the device cloys.
  34. The Finest Hours
    Somewhere in here, there’s a pretty decent movie. The Finest Hours is probably the best of a bad bunch of recent releases. But it’s a shame that this terrific story’s engines keep flooding in the face of wave after wave of narrative inertia.
  35. Predestination
    The movie may not have quite the mind-bending wallop of “Inception,” but Predestination is about something deeper than fantasy.
  36. Danny Collins
    Danny Collins, like its central character, has a good heart, and sometimes that’s enough.
  37. Ballet 422
    For fans of dance, Ballet 422 will produce plenty of pleasures. But as with great ballet, great movies always benefit from a little drama.
  38. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    With its awkward reenactments and other stylistic clunkers, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry doesn’t break much formal ground. But it serves as a moving reminder of how crucial citizen action is in fomenting social change.
  39. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    The movie marches so quickly past the many milestones of Welles’s career and life that it doesn’t have to time to linger — lovingly or otherwise — on any of them.
  40. Women Who Flirt
    It’s just a question of what route Angie and Marco will take to happiness. Yet their unsurprising journey is lively and entertaining, thanks in equal measure to the movie’s star and its director.
  41. Unfinished Business
    While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.
  42. Human Capital
    Human Capital is a well made but ultimately rather facile tragedy for the globalized age of vertiginous wealth disparities. It’s suffused with beauty, guilt, regret and impunity that only the most obscenely overprivileged and dimly self-aware can hope to attain.
  43. Woman in Gold
    Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.
  44. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Overall the movie is a fun peek at the birth of Lego bricks and their ever-evolving place in the world.
  45. The Visit
    The cast of mostly unfamiliar actors also serves The Visit well. Shyamalan has a gift for eliciting strong performances, even when his material is lacking.
  46. Kidnap
    Kidnap is a solid and economical piece of filmmaking. It just goes to show: A big budget isn’t necessary to make a big impression.
  47. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth remains worshipful when it should be more probing, especially around questions of ethics, privacy and consent.
  48. The Greatest Showman
    Don’t overthink it, in other words. All “Showman” asks of you is that you give yourself over to the holiday-cheer machine, if you can. Like the circus, it’s an experience that’s been engineered for this precise moment in time, and not one minute longer.
  49. The Mountain Between Us
    Helped by director Hany Abu-Assad and spectacular cinematography by Mandy Walker, who makes the most of the film’s British Columbia locations, Elba and Winslet generate chemistry that is convincing in direct proportion to the story’s outlandishness.
  50. Effie Gray
    Laxton knows how to get the audience down but hasn’t quite mastered the art of lifting them back up.
  51. Concussion
    As Omalu, Smith gives an emotional performance, bolstered by capable supporting players. Albert Brooks is especially good as Omalu’s wry boss and chief advocate, Cyril Wecht, lightening the film’s otherwise gloomy mood.
  52. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    Me and Earl and the Dying Girl succumbs to the same cloying too-cuteness and solipsism that often plague its glib and sentimental genre. But those limitations are leavened by the film’s lively, ultimately affecting flourishes and sprightly voice.
  53. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind winds up being an improbably satisfying, even heartwarming character study.
  54. The Overnight
    In a way, The Overnight ends just as it’s beginning. But for a brief time, even in the midst of preposterous digressions and full (and not so full) Montys, it offers a compassionate glimpse of people at their most naked, honest and undefended.
  55. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The film can be appreciated, if only as a showcase for its assured, emotional attuned performances, as a convincing time capsule and period piece, and as a chance to reconsider one of the more well-known and still-influential studies of its era.
  56. Digging for Fire
    Digging for Fire is a pleasant escape — an attractively shot, gracefully edited and, finally, emotionally satisfying mystery about the nature of marriage itself.
  57. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Douglas Tirola’s documentary is brisk and entertaining, if not especially thoughtful.
  58. Take Me to the River
    The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.
  59. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    In the end, the plot is the least interesting part of the movie. One-upmanship gets old fast, but evolved, of-the-moment comedy helps make a stale story fresh.
  60. Man from Reno
    If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it’s worth the ride.
  61. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is uproarious and flamboyantly raunchy, utterly stupid yet also occasionally winning
  62. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    By no stretch is this a disaster on a par with Lucas’s misbegotten prequel trilogy. Still, at least until its final section, Rogue One lacks the zip, zing and exhilarating sense of return to form that “The Force Awakens” conveyed so lightly.
  63. Trumbo
    After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.
  64. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence won’t win any points for originality, but that doesn’t make it any less funny.
  65. Adult Beginners
    There’s never any question where this is all headed: a huge blowup argument and a tidy resolution. That being said, the cast is excellent.
  66. The Founder
    In the end, The Founder is little more than a deflating reminder, as if we needed one, that the winner takes all, and integrity isn’t always the key to success.
  67. Burnt
    It’s not pretty, but it captures something that few cooking movies do: reality.
  68. Krisha
    It’s slightly fussy, in-your-face filmmaking, but it’s viscerally effective.
  69. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    The film’s most profound subject matter may simply be the passage of time.
  70. I'll See You in My Dreams
    There’s something refreshingly realistic about the director’s approach. The movie has an unhurried pace, letting the camera linger over long conversations.
  71. The Final Girls
    Simultaneously violent and droll, The Final Girls is a way to have your blood-soaked cake and eat it, too.
  72. 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.
  73. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    For audiences interested in an earnest, inspirational story, full of timeless messages and beautiful animation, this is a lovely reminder of how to live life with purpose and joy.
  74. Mia Madre
    Moretti mostly avoids weepy melodrama, choosing instead to focus on a side meditation about the slippery nature of reality.
  75. Youth
    Youth is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age.
  76. American Made
    Liman knows how to keep the convoluted, almost impossibly far-fetched story on the rails, without losing our attention, and he adds many details that will bring a smile.
  77. 5 Flights Up
    5 Flights Up is far from perfect, but it’s also undeniably touching.
  78. Noble
    Writer-director Stephen Bradley may make some missteps, but he capitalizes on this underdog story’s inherent thrills.
  79. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    Although he comes across as a sort of elfin crypt-keeper in this intriguing portrait by documentarian Belinda Sallin, Giger was also, quite literally, close to death.
  80. Strangerland
    It’s hard to get over the movie’s haunting atmosphere. It may be just another story of kids in peril, but this one’s particularly hard to shake.
  81. That Sugar Film
    Although Gameau’s film includes a fair amount of science, he and his helpers sweeten the film’s statistics, delivering them in clever, accessible ways.
  82. The 33
    The inspirational docudrama nicely evokes the havoc of the initial cave-in, but spends too much time above ground to convey the existential horror of the almost-buried men.
  83. The Fate of the Furious
    “Fate” gives fans of the franchise exactly what they want, provided they can ditch logic as easily as the movie does.
  84. The Lobster
    Unfortunately, the movie’s second act tends to drag, getting bogged down by uninspired twists, while the first flies by with witty dialogue and a steady stream of novel details.
  85. The Farewell Party
    Despite its missteps, The Farewell Party feels special in the way it covers the Big Stuff — love, death, friendship, family — without losing its playful streak.
  86. Mad Max
    Hackneyed at exposition, Miller demonstrates breakneck prowess at chase sequences and terrifying shock effects. [29 April 1980, p. B1]
    • Washington Post
  87. The Accountant
    True to the profession it sets out to glamorize, The Accountant takes advantage of its share of creative loopholes — and manages to break even in the process.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Our Little Sister
    To his credit, Kore-eda avoids oversentimentality in a narrative that could easily have indulged in it. Yet the unhurried pacing and minimal dramatic tension — even when an important character makes an appearance midway through the story — feels unsatisfying.
  89. The Club
    Toward the end, the film veers a bit out of control, as the residents engage in behavior that is incomprehensible, even given their previous transgressions.
  90. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    Servin and Vamos clearly have a healthy sense of the absurd, which they use, like good satirists, to highlight hypocrisy, greed and corruption.
  91. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Hippocrates loses its nerve with a facile climax that betrays the depth of what precedes it, yet there are few things more fascinating than when competent professionals disagree, especially if we appreciate the source of their impasse.
  92. Boulevard
    If the movie is cheesy at times, it more often presents an understanding of life’s contradictions and compromises.
  93. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    One wonders what someone who has never heard of the guy...would make of the film, which is defiantly, even, at times, obnoxiously, obtuse. Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of like the Russell we see in the film.
  94. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    As an action film, it is intense and gripping. As a drama, it is bombastic and unsubtle.
  95. Breathe
    In some ways it plays like a horror movie, in other ways it’s almost a documentary. The most interesting thing about the movie is the balance of tone that Laurent strikes between recognition and repulsion.
  96. Tap World
    The movie is at its best when Hargrove shows rather than tells. Anyone can appreciate these artists in motion, all of whom prove the infectious appeal of a dance that doesn’t just respond to rhythm but creates its own.
  97. Demolition
    The oddball grief drama Demolition proves that an actor who could easily be dismissed as just another watchable face is actually possessed of subtle, fascinatingly protean chops.
  98. Addicted to Fresno
    While director Jamie Babbit, who cut her teeth on indie comedies, is an equal- opportunity offender, some jokes land better than others. Still, strong lead performances and an energetic supporting cast elevate the uneven material.
  99. Money Monster
    Money Monster, which is at its best when it’s at its most crisply realistic and timely, suffers from the kind of only-in-Hollywood plot twists and eye-rolling exaggeration that results in smarter than average pulp, but pulp nonetheless.
  100. Ready Player One
    If Ready Player One is tedious at times, it’s also oodles of fun at others.
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