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. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    There's really nothing more here than you can find watching dreadful political advertisements and dreadful political talk shows.
  2. Sex Is Comedy
    By Breillat's usually dire standards, this is practically a laff riot, and if you want to see her funniest, most accessible movie, this is the one to watch.
  3. P.S.
    Somehow, wondrous acting holds things together.
  4. The Final Cut
    Cut-and-dried sci-fi thriller.
  5. Moolaadé
    Moolaade, in short, is a movie to rock the soul.
  6. Being Julia
    May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes
  7. Saints and Soldiers
    Despite all the life-threatening situations, warrior deaths and heroic feats, it's hard to get behind characters who feel like lazy archetypes.
  8. Shall We Dance
    Occasionally charming but ultimately forgettable bit of fox-trot fluff.
  9. Team America: World Police
    This is all terrifically nasty and shocking stuff.
  10. In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    This is for the pre-converted, certainly not the left, or even those who consider themselves detached observers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Vera Drake
    Sweet, strange and ultimately heartbreaking.
  12. Around the Bend
    So programmatic, so dogged in hitting the right steps at the right time that it completely lacks spontaneity.
  13. Vodka Lemon
    A thematically bleak yet subtly comic film.
  14. Go Further
    A warmly spirited travel diary of a movie.
  15. Stage Beauty
    In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Friday Night Lights
    Give credit to Berg for keeping Bissinger's all-too-true ending intact. It's a doozy.
  17. Primer
    As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.
  18. Raise Your Voice
    The movie is going to be fine for PG-ready audiences, assuming they don't have a problem with extremely predictable story turns.
  19. Tarnation
    You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.
  20. Taxi
    Goes nowhere fast.
  21. Tying the Knot
    Jim de Seve's cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason.
  22. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    A lucid, emotionally affecting portrait not just of one man but of his times.
  23. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    At its best, Woman Thou Art Loosed conveys the unfathomable meaning behind those words.
  24. Dig!
    Ultimately undermined by the fact that the two rock bands Timoner chose to focus on -- the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols -- simply don't matter as much as she thinks they do.
  25. Shark Tale
    This movie just doesn't match its predecessors.
  26. I Heart Huckabees
    It's uncompromisingly bad, single-mindedly off-target.
  27. Ladder 49
    The firefighting equivalent of an Army recruitment commercial.
  28. Incantato
    It's a warm bath experience, soap-sudsed with sentimentality, improbability and other storytelling misdemeanors.
  29. The Yes Men
    A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.
  30. Burn! (re-release)
    Pontecorvo's pointed 1969 drama of the politics of war feels surprisingly timely.
  31. First Daughter
    One hackneyed, inauthentic, predictable scene after another.
  32. A Dirty Shame
    John Waters may not be a great filmmaker, but he's usually onto something, and A Dirty Shame is onto something big.
  33. The Last Shot
    There are some very funny passing lines, but the movie's too uneven to enjoy.
  34. The Forgotten
    An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.
  35. Shaun of the Dead
    If the zombie genre steadfastly refuses to die, we can be grateful to Shaun of the Dead for breathing fresh, diverting life into the form, with subtle visual humor and a smart, impish sense of fun.
  36. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.
  37. The Take
    It's also genuinely moving to see disenfranchised individuals discovering self-determination from the hard ground up.
  38. Cowboys & Angels
    It's a sweet but slight film whose undeniable appeal is largely due to the performances of its flat-out adorable leads.
  39. Head in the Clouds
    A snooze, despite all the sex and other gunplay.
  40. Zelary
    For fans of old-fashioned European filmmaking, this may have its pleasing qualities.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mr 3000
    The script is much like a nine-inning sitcom that uses an obvious formula to tell a familiar story while garnering cheap laughs.
  42. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    So stupefyingly hideous that after watching it, you'll need to bathe in 10 gallons of disinfectant, get a full-body scrub and shampoo with vinegar to remove the scummy residue that remains.
  43. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.
  44. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.
  45. Wimbledon
    The best thing about all of this is Bettany.
  46. Silver City
    It tries unsuccessfully to make a wry gumshoe noir out of an overarching, cross-sectional political diagram.
  47. Reconstruction
    It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.
  48. Criminal
    The main reason to see Criminal isn't for the mental workout it might offer but simply to watch these two appealing performers act and act and act.
  49. Testosterone
    Tedious.
  50. Cellular
    Its adroit use of suspense makes you overlook the silliness.
  51. When Will I Be Loved
    It's trivial and narcissistic and ultimately rather sordid.
  52. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Plot and narrative? Minimal. Confrontations? Endless. Surprises? None.
  53. Evergreen
    There are a couple of good things about the film, chief among which is Land's naturalistic performance. But the overall sense of it, heightened by a folk-guitar score so spare it feels like part of the soundtrack is missing, is not one of poignant minimalism but emptiness.
  54. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    Presents an America that is as much about the pathological display of imperial power -- a showmanship of arrogance and violence -- as policy.
  55. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    You may find some of the story developments melodramatic -- I did -- but the film itself is quite powerful.
  56. Wicker Park
    A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.
  57. Vanity Fair
    Unfortunately, Nair's film doesn't so much end as fall off a cliff, the ultimate victim of viewers' heightened expectations that this briskly paced story will take them someplace -- other than around the block in a horse-drawn carriage.
  58. Brothers in Arms
    Will this film do Kerry any good, or the Swifties any harm? My bet is: Not a bit, one way or the other.
  59. Suspect Zero
    A grisly, depraved and wholly uninvolving exercise in empty mannerism.
  60. The Brown Bunny
    It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.
  61. Bush's Brain
    They succeed in presenting a compelling series of dots, to use the current parlance, but they don't succeed in connecting them.
  62. Hero
    It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.
  63. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    Still manages to one-up its predecessor, 1997's unintentionally campy "Anaconda."
  64. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    So bad that I predict there will be drinking games set around viewing it someday.
  65. Bright Leaves
    We are hooked into a low-tech but compelling dynamic -- between relatively static images and McElwee's sensitive, connective narrative.
  66. End of the Century
    The interviews with band members, managers, friends and peer fans confirm not only how influential, but how beloved the Ramones were.
  67. Almost Peaceful
    There's something rather lovely about the mood and intentions of Michel Deville's French movie.
  68. The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (re-release)
    Is it scintillating, nutty, madly inspired or ecstatically preposterous? Ginsberg himself is all these things, but this movie is not. (Review of Original Release)
  69. Nicotina
    Nicotina skitters between dull and forced, this despite the use of split screens, jaunty music and the personable Luna.
  70. Rosenstrasse
    An extraordinary collective act of moral and physical courage is relegated to a backdrop for a mushy, synthetic family melodrama.
  71. Mean Creek
    That rare movie that manages to be not only an adroit, carefully observed study in character and suspense, but important.
  72. Bright Young Things
    The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.
  73. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Preaches most effectively to the converted.
  74. Red Lights
    The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Benji: Off the Leash!
    The overall unevenness of tone is the movie's biggest flaw, but the slo-mo scenes of doggie derring-do are quite funny.
  76. Without a Paddle
    At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.
  77. The Leopard (re-release)
    Watching this masterwork allows you to return to the filmmaking sensibility of the 1960s, when epics looked like epics.
  78. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    There's nothing inspiring about Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, unless you count the way it compels kids to continue to support the "Yu-Gi-Oh" franchise.
  80. Danny Deckchair
    It is piffle done well. A (literally) lighter-than-air story, full of goofs and creeps and fools and silliness, it manages to delight without simpering, make points without lecturing and break hearts and mend them again without turning you weepy.
  81. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.
  82. Bang Rajan
    It becomes, after a while, little more than a mind-numbing bloodbath.
  83. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Paints an often grave but sometimes hilarious picture of a hugely powerful network.
  84. Code 46
    Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.
  85. Little Black Book
    If you think it's worth it to sit there for 97 minutes for three or possibly four laughs, then you are beyond help.
  86. 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.
  87. Collateral
    If Collateral is all formula, it's polished to a fine sheen.
  88. Festival Express
    A delirious piece of pop ephemera.
  89. Gozu
    Miike's fans, those used to his strange ways, will certainly find Gozu an amusing addition to the oeuvre. All others will be bewildered beyond expression.
  90. Thunderbirds
    Abomination of a movie.
  91. The Village
    For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.
  92. Intimate Strangers
    It's at once too restrained and too perversely funny to have emanated from the play-it-big-but-play-it-safe sensibilities of Hollywood, U.S.A.
  93. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.
  94. The Manchurian Candidate
    It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.
  95. She Hate Me
    The most misguided, ill-conceived and lamentable film.
  96. Garden State
    Garden State features some wonderful performances, chief among them an engaging, even courageous turn from Natalie Portman.
  97. Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    The movie comes across as a political science course videotape rather than a movie to fully engage a general audience.
  98. Catwoman
    Dragged down by a paper-thin story, the predictable number of fight scenes executed at equally predictable intervals and stock, unmemorable characters.
  99. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.
  100. A Home at the End of the World
    The film's first half is easily the best and brightest. As the movie moves into the more saddening sections, however, it loses most of its power.
  101. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Kitano the filmmaker makes sure that everything is beautiful, from the wonderful colors and passing tableaux to the intricate fighting choreography. This blind swordsman, you realize, has vision to spare.
  102. Ju-on: The Grudge
    It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.
  103. The Bourne Supremacy
    I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.
  104. Zhou Yu de huo che
    Less a tale of mysterious, tragic love than a three-way Harlequin romance.
  105. A Cinderella Story
    It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.
  106. Maria Full of Grace
    A gripping, deeply moving film
  107. Touch of Pink
    It goes so far -- way too far -- as having a known actor play Grant.
  108. I, Robot
    Smith makes it look easy, but underneath the physical high jinks and slick veneer of I, Robot lies a performance of real discipline and intelligence.
  109. Let's Get Frank
    The outspoken congressman is just as entertaining as his liberal fans already know him to be.
  110. The Door in the Floor
    Bridges can't be a whole movie. But he's the main reason to watch.
  111. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Documentary about rock history's biggest heavy metal band is -- variously -- serious, funny, frustrating and touching.
  112. The Inheritance
    The cast, all classically trained on the stage, is simply commanding.
  113. Sleepover
    It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?
  114. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    Wonderfully silly all the time.
  115. Riding Giants
    By land or by sea, there aren't many movies that can move you like that.
  116. King Arthur
    By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.
  117. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    Modest and winning.
  118. America's Heart and Soul
    This is Disney at its live-action best and brightest.
  119. The Clearing
    Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.
  120. Before Sunset
    All foreplay and no climax.
  121. De-Lovely
    The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.
  122. Spider-Man 2
    This movie, directed with precision and an appreciation for (relatively) rich character texture by Sam Raimi, remembers all the fine elements of the original film (and the comic book story). It reprises them perfectly, including wonderfully choreographed, skyscraper-hanging fights.
  123. The Notebook
    May be one hundred percent sap, but its spirit is anything but cloying, thanks to persuasive performances, most notably from Rachel McAdams.
  124. Time of the Wolf
    I would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with.
  125. Two Brothers
    The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.
  126. White Chicks
    Laugh? I thought I'd never start.
  127. Fahrenheit 9/11
    In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore largely stays out of the picture, and the film is the better for it. But otherwise his style hasn't changed.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Hunting of the President
    Something far more consequential looms in the wings. And that renders The Hunting of the President the feel of a sideshow
  129. Facing Windows
    There's something diverting but not wildly stirring about this Italian drama.
  130. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    Most important, the film has a terrific supporting character in St. Marie herself, portrayed by the real Canadian island of Harrington Harbour (pop. 300).
  131. Father and Son
    Here was my question for most of this movie: Wha-? I was clueless. Did not understand. Count me among the stupid.
  132. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    It has great mood and a sense of the toughness of the London underworld, but it never really gets into gear.
  133. The Terminal
    Hanks is great; the movie isn't.
  134. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.
  135. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Modestly amusing teen summer comedy.
  136. Around the World in 80 Days
    The gags are physical but rarely funny.
  137. My Sister Maria
    A heartfelt but eccentric, pseudo-documentary tribute to his sister Maria.
  138. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    If you love the theater, you've got to see the film.
  139. The Chronicles of Riddick
    The muddy, convoluted story revolves around the star's cool-guy poses and one-liners.
  140. The Stepford Wives
    None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.
  141. Garfield
    Bland, workmanlike and instantly forgettable.
  142. Napoleon Dynamite
    I laughed. And I laughed primarily over Heder's hilarious performance. You ain't seen nothing till you've seen Napoleon attack that tether ball.
  143. Imelda
    But even though Marcos, in this film, provides enough material for a few hundred giggles and head-shakings, she also shows a pathetically human side.
  144. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Strangely moving film.
  145. The Corporation
    This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.
  146. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.
  147. I'll Sing for You
    It never really feels like we've gotten to know the man himself, leaving the figure at the heart of I'll Sing for You a cipher.
  148. Bukowski: Born into This
    About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Soul Plane
    An hour and a half of real airplane turbulence is better than sitting through the bad, offensive material that makes up Soul Plane.
  150. Saved!
    If you're mocking holier-than-thou-ness, you can't very well strike a hipper-than-thou tone.
  151. The Mother
    You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.
  152. Baadasssss!
    While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.
  153. The Day After Tomorrow
    Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.
  154. Raising Helen
    You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.
  155. My Mother Likes Women
    What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.
  156. Stateside
    It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.
  157. Love Me If You Dare
    In this toxic tale of young psychopaths in love, the stylish, often stunning visuals are ultimately outmatched by the repellent protagonists at the story's center.
  158. Control Room
    Enlightening, if structurally relaxed documentary.
  159. Twist
    An intriguing idea for about two seconds.
  160. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary.
  161. Shrek 2
    One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    With All Deliberate Speed
    Misses almost every opportunity to break new ground on the issue.
  163. Carandiru
    The movie is powerful, if numbing. What movie about a massacre isn't?
  164. Breakin' All the Rules
    A movie that sags and drags under the weight of poor pacing, execrable writing and largely unlikable characters.
  165. A Slipping-Down Life
    As a whole, the film is a perplexing, dark and brooding exercise, which only makes its inappropriately cheery ending feel all the more slight.
  166. Strayed
    A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.
  167. Coffee and Cigarettes
    The skits that comprise Coffee and Cigarettes aren't fully realized short pieces as much as riffs or fragments; their appeal is mostly in their stars.
  168. Troy
    Far from great, but much farther from awful, Troy offers several popcorn buckets' worth of good old-fashioned time at the movies.
  169. Godzilla
    Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.
  170. Valentin
    The kid chews up the scenery like a baby T-Rex, egged on, no doubt, by director Agresti.
  171. Super Size Me
    This is a compelling cautionary tale hot-wired to your gag reflex.
  172. Van Helsing
    A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together.
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