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. On My Way
    Bercot’s sense of atmospherics is more successful than her editing and camera work. Some pieces of the plot seem like they would make a bigger impact with a bit more backstory... But these series of vignettes still leave an impression, thanks in no small part to Deneuve.
  2. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.
  3. Protocols of Zion
    The movie goes off the rails only when the filmmaker inadvertently legitimizes the Protocols' loony philosophical heirs by interviewing a New York medical examiner and a widow about the remains of one of 9/11's Jewish victims.
  4. The Last Sentence
    It’s a thoughtful and workmanlike portrait, but a less than profoundly moving one.
  5. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    It can feel, at times, both overlong and oversimplified, but the story propels itself along while awakening in viewers some profound emotions.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brothers at War
    There are much better Iraq documentaries than this one, but Brothers at War distinguishes itself by peering out over the emotional chasm between soldiers and their families.
  7. The Bear
    It's certainly harrowing to sit through. Talk about your grizzly misadventures.
  8. RED
    Unlike "Wild Hogs" or last summer's "The Expendables," this adaptation of the "Red" graphic novel series gets into a cool, sophisticated swing.
  9. Goosebumps
    It’s occasionally funny and sometimes suspenseful, but it isn’t particularly imaginative. Then again, neither are Stine’s popular novellas.
  10. Rules Don't Apply
    If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well.
  11. Interview with the Assassin
    It's just a gimmick, right down to its Washington release date.
  12. Spartan
    Is Spartan a perfect, or even a great, movie? Probably not. But in its prickly irascibility and deeply unsettling intelligence, it makes for a very, very good one.
  13. The Debut
    It is also, despite the all-too-rare focus on the Filipino American community, a creakily familiar take on an age-old family dynamic.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Happy Accidents
    The actors make a good team in this film, and they're playing well-defined characters, but the script is so repetitive that we get mighty impatient for the mystery to be resolved.
  15. Cellular
    Its adroit use of suspense makes you overlook the silliness.
  16. Never Been Kissed
    Predictable, slightly painful and as embarrassing as all get-out.
  17. Brassed Off
    An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.
  18. Happy, Happy
    First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.
  19. The Blues Brothers
    Ironically, the stars didn't get it together either. The Blues Brothers offers the melancholy spectacle of them sinking deeper and deeper into a comic grave.
  20. Between Two Worlds
    Between Two Worlds is freshest when it emphasizes its documentary-like qualities, such as the brief inserts of everyday scenes and locales shot by Philippe Lagnier without any guidance from the director. Less effective are traditional movie elements like Mathieu Lamboley’s score, which flirts too openly with Philip Glass’s style.
  21. Rolling Papers
    Despite slick production values, this look at the intersection of two potentially fascinating subcultures — journalists and stoners — yields only half-baked results.
  22. Analyze This
    A pretty woeful affair...a sitcom disguised as a movie.
  23. They Came Together
    Larky, witty and sometimes even wise, this spoof on every rom-com ever made is less a fully realized film than an extended skit, a series of set pieces that poke gentle and sometimes transgressively crude fun at the tropes of girl-meets-boy that have enchanted and addled audiences for generations.
  24. Moving On
    It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.
  25. Isn't It Romantic
    A visually and verbally ingenious sendup of romantic comedies that wears its candy heart on its sleeve.
  26. The Columnist
    Unfortunately, The Columnist doesn’t live up to its initial promise: What might have been a trenchant cultural critique couched within poisonously playful genre exercise becomes an indulgence in undifferentiated rage for its own graphic sake.
  27. The Decline of the American Empire
    From the opening shot, an endless, unmotivated dolly move up a corridor that conveys no information, establishes neither theme nor setting and serves no other purpose, you know that you are in the presence of true film ineptitude, which only deepens as The Decline of the American Empire continues.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Dragon
    Red Dragon is merely the distant echoes of what we liked about "Lambs."
  29. The Beaver
    In a triumph of cinema over celebrity gossip, The Beaver mostly makes us forget about Gibson's madman persona and simply draws us into the story that he and director Jodie Foster, who also plays Walter's wife, Meredith, want to tell.
  30. Time and Tide
    The result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.
  31. Manic
    It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.
  32. Gray's Anatomy
    When Gray brings things to a narrative conclusion, the movie feels perfectly structured. If it were any longer, it would tip the overindulgence scale, and lose its effectiveness. But at 80 minutes, the film feels compact and pithily observed. And you're quite prepared to meet Gray on his next flight of self-absorbed fancy. [30 May 1997, p.N41]
    • Washington Post
  33. Mighty Aphrodite
    In this loser-and-the-whore story line, Allen's sensibilities have taken a turn for the nasty.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    The Aeronauts
    The Aeronauts is the second film this year by Harper to get a U.S. release, after “Wild Rose.” That film was excellent, with strong music and an effervescent star turn from newcomer Jessie Buckley. This one is, at moments, exhilarating — but not much else.
  35. Little Joe
    If Little Joe’s message is never less than apparent, it avoids hitting you over the head with it. It’s a movie that grows on you, planting a seed that only comes to flower long after the closing credits.
  36. The Godfather: Part III
    The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.
  37. 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    The Fencer
    Finnish Director Klaus Haro has a sharp eye, and his shots deftly juxtapose the delicate beauty of the Estonian lowlands with the harsh reality of life under Soviet rule. But the script, written by Anna Heinamaa, gives him little more than an aesthetic landscape to work with.
  39. What About Bob?
    Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss star in this hilarious brain-teaser about a patient who suffers acute separation anxiety when his psychiatrist goes on vacation.
  40. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The film is far from prestige fare, yet more often than not, it hits that summer sweet spot between the silly and the satisfying.
  41. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.
  42. Wayne's World 2
    Carvey is such a lovable doofus and Myers such a well-intentioned naif that it's hard to get down on them, especially considering that the heirs to their niche in pop iconography are Beavis and Butt-head.
  43. Gifted
    It is redeemed by an appealing cast, tart dialogue and the preponderance of genuine emotion over the manufactured variety.
  44. Lone Survivor
    What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.
  45. Smallfoot
    This entertaining fantasy has intellectual ballast, but it’s cleverly disguised.
  46. Bandits
    As for Billy Bob, they all steal the money, but he steals the show.
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