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 Mist
    More political allegory than horror movie.
  2. Awake
    Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.
  3. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Clever enough to keep adults entertained, even if the story is something of an antique.
  4. The Grand
    Wildly uneven but often quite funny, The Grand allows its actors to act out, get the "E!" out of their systems and give the Christopher Guest treatment to professional gambling without Christopher Guest, with whom it would have been funnier and a lot more acerbic.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Longshots
    The characters have an equally realistic appearance that's rarely seen in Hollywood productions these days
  6. The Duchess
    It's too bad there's not more substance to The Duchess, because there's lots of acting and, as is required of a Brit-styled period piece, lushness galore.
  7. Bolt
    As sprightly and determined as its fuzzy, yappy lead, the new Disney animated film Bolt works hard to be all things to all people, with mixed results.
  8. Wendy and Lucy
    For all its virtues, Wendy and Lucy seems like the most overrated of art movies. Yes, it's obscure and distancing and makes you pay attention. Williams's performance is nuanced, moving and well worth any awards she gets. But Wendy is also anonymous.
  9. Seven Pounds
    The movie is pretty unabashed about the all-but-corny sentiment: Each of us has something to give.
  10. Hotel for Dogs
    On the upside, the movie could do something really positive for the cause of homeless pets: If audiences respond the way they should, dog shelters could be emptied in a week.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Uninvited
    Experienced horror fans will probably stay one step ahead of the game, but it's still a nice ride.
  12. Madea Goes to Jail
    Both slapstick and social drama, and it is certainly the most confident mix of the two that Perry has managed to achieve with this particular part of his vast media franchise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Race to Witch Mountain
    Race to Witch Mountain has Johnson, who lifts the script above its conventional cat-and-mouse stratagems with his buoyant wiseacre timing.
  14. Is Anybody There?
    Caine is magnificent, and the film is worth a look for his contribution alone. But Milner is a promising actor, too, and the pairing of young and old is believable and occasionally very moving.
  15. Chéri
    Cheri looks terrific, if a bit gauzy at times, and Frears, who directed Pfeiffer in that other Frenchified frolic, "Dangerous Liaisons," is never at rest. Still, the movie bogs down by going nowhere other than inside its characters, who are intensely passionate but of an era more curious than emotionally relevant.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    X Games 3D: The Movie
    For a quick ticket into the world of extreme sports, the sky-high, adrenaline-gorged stunts captured in X Games will make any spectator gasp, wince and brace with fear.
  17. Disgrace
    Is it a great movie? John Malkovich's portrayal of an aging and sexually aggressive professor of poetry is enough to make the film worth anyone's while.
  18. Die Another Day
    Surely it will not be giving things away to tell you there's absolutely nothing new about the latest episode.
  19. Skins
    Its strength is the documentary-textured depiction of Native Americans in their social environment. Its weakness is a story that's a patchy combination of soap opera, low-tech magic realism and, at times, ploddingly sociological commentary.
  20. K-19: The Widowmaker
    It's a pretty good sub movie, with some pretty good performances, that, alas, somewhat disintegrates in the last half-hour.
  21. Fidel
    Castro remains the star of the show. You can't stop watching him.
  22. Tortilla Soup
    Overwhelmingly predictable despite its cute surprise ending, Tortilla Soup is a filling but unoriginal dish.
  23. Big Momma's House
    If you're not rolling in the aisles, you're definitely in the wrong theater.
  24. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Charming but slight.
  25. Evelyn
    As vivid as many scenes are, there are just as many that seem taken directly out of the Cute Irish Movie notebook.
  26. Murder by Numbers
    Isn't a great movie, but it's a perfectly acceptable widget.
  27. Julien Donkey-Boy
    The stranger and more unusual the characters, and the less they're explained, the better.
  28. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Its greatest asset...Flora Montgomery, a flash of blond, Irish fire who makes Trudy well worth Brendan's trouble.
  29. Sugar Town
    May not rock the joint. But then, it isn't trying to.
  30. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    The film-which at 112 minutes, ends up ramblin' like its subject-does provide compelling rehab for an underrated artist.
  31. The Triumph of Love
    Playful as it is, Clare Peploe's adaptation of Pierre Marivaux's romantic comedy coughs and sputters on its own postmodern conceit.
  32. Agnes Browne
    A generally well-made tale of humor and hard luck.
  33. My Wife Is an Actress
    A blackhearted little film. What's being marketed as a frothy French confection about jealousy (specifically the jealousy of a regular guy married to a famous movie star) also just so happens to be a portrait of a marriage going down the toilet.
  34. Brown Sugar
    Isn't much more than another conveyer-belt romantic comedy.
  35. The Four Feathers
    It's a pretty compelling yarn, not to mention full of pretty pictures, and yet it could be so much more than that.
  36. The Banger Sisters
    The sexual frankness is refreshing. As Suzette and Lavinia banter, their dialogue often suggests how "Sex and the City" might sound 20 years hence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eureka
    The film's loveliness does much to modulate its often maddening pace.
  38. Monkeybone
    Although Monkeybone will undoubtedly make you laugh at its slapstick highjinks, the irony is that for a movie that's ultimately about soul, that's the one commodity that's in precious short supply up on the screen.
  39. Everybody's Famous!
    The more you lower your expectations, the more you'll learn to laugh.
  40. The Visit
    In its quiet way, The Visit is a testament to the tenacity of the family, particularly the African American family.
  41. Sade
    Although the movie adheres more closely to history than "Quills," it lacks dramatic punch and depth.
  42. CQ
    A certain sexiness underlines even the dullest tangents, bouncing along to the all-too-essential groovy soundtrack.
  43. Elling
    Charming but slight comedy.
  44. Bad Company
    Anthony Hopkins, with a toothpick and a slouch. Fabulous!
  45. XX/XY
    Each moment feels real, but the movie wears you out in some way. High naturalism is just as much a stylization as High Stylization. The groping nature of the conversations comes to feel as artificial as iambic pentameter.
  46. Les Destinées
    How great can an epic be, when it takes 30 years, including a whole sequence devoted to World War I, for Jean to realize he could be a little nicer to his wife? This is for diehard Francophiles and literate-movie fans only.
  47. City of Ghosts
    A triumph of place over sense.
  48. Edtv
    Howard's film, like McConaughey's performance, is unassuming, ingratiating and a little rough around the edges.
  49. Laurel Canyon
    McDormand is the best thing about Laurel Canyon. She's also the most unfortunate victim of a film that seems unable or unwilling to give even its most intriguing and compulsively watchable character her due.
  50. Outside Providence
    Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable
  51. Lumumba
    The movie is visually stirring. And the locations, in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, imbue the story with eerie authenticity.
  52. Cookie's Fortune
    Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.
  53. The Contender
    I can recommend the first two-thirds of this movie with great enthusiasm.
  54. Maid in Manhattan
    It's a warm, if pallid, romantic comedy that may not do much more to burnish Lopez's reputation, but will certainly not bruise it.
  55. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    For the first time in 30 years, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars appear on the movie screen as Pennebaker intended. It's almost worth the wait.
  56. Billy Elliot
    There's actually a lot going on in this little movie, and first-time feature director Stephen Daldry, turning his talents from the theater, handles all of it deftly.
  57. Margarita Happy Hour
    Feels like a hazy high that takes too long to shake.
  58. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    Lawrence's material runs between mediocre and offensive, and then he rescues it with his physical humor. He's at his best when he lets his face or inflection do the talking.
  59. The Pledge
    Cares not a whit for such arbitrary concepts as justice, crime or punishment. It understands the relativism of right and wrong and takes a kind of perverse pleasure in reminding us that there are some things we'll never know.
  60. Tape
    The smart but slight film implodes under the weight of its own "excessive linguistic pressure."
  61. Blast from the Past
    Like last winter's "Pleasantville," this movie juxtaposes classic virtues against modern mores. The former did so with far more invention.
  62. City by the Sea
    The cast and the direction are too good, in the end, for the rather desultory place the movie ends up.
  63. Collateral Damage
    I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.
  64. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    Never was the case for psychotropic medication more acute than in Jovovich's performance.
  65. Full Frontal
    No matter how much fun it is to watch -- and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun -- there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives.
  66. Jakob the Liar
    But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."
  67. Colors
    The movie lacks a sure sense of purpose and direction, and, watching it, you can't help but feel that Hopper, by stepping back and refusing to assert his own point of view, has on some essential level abdicated his responsibility as a director. [15 Apr 1988]
  68. Dark Blue
    The movie ends not with a bang but a wimp.
  69. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    Sad, sobering film.
  70. Thirteen Days
    Like President Kennedy, director Donaldson (who made "No Way Out," another pretty good Washington-seat-of-power thriller) has found a perfect balance of often-opposing forces: between recorded history and the demands of plain old entertainment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Experiment
    The film's hysterically pitched action overshadows its more subtle psychological points.
  72. Welcome to Collinwood
    This ensemble comedy has its inventively funny moments. But ultimately, it gets a little too cute for its own good.
  73. Smoke Signals
    A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.
  74. Mystery Men
    A live-action cartoon without dramatic focus, a solid structure or discernible theme.
  75. Bittersweet Motel
    You don't have to be a Phishead to enjoy Bittersweet Motel.
  76. Midnight Run
    Too routinely formulaic to be anything more than modestly diverting. But as modest diversions go it cruises along at a reasonably brisk pace and, in the smaller details -- the off-in-the-margins doodling -- it has its rewards. [20 July 1988]
  77. Albino Alligator
    A character study with underdeveloped characters.
  78. Human Nature
    In truth, I didn't care much for it, while respecting it a great deal. It's self-consciously childish and "innocent," and everything is overdrawn to cartoon dimension.
  79. Velvet Goldmine
    In trying to compose a poetic love letter to a time of liberation and freedom, Haynes has merely conjured up memories of druggy excess, egotism and tight trousers. The only mementos worth saving from the experience are available on the soundtrack.
  80. The Spanish Prisoner
    The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.
  81. Dr. Dolittle 2
    Brings bite as well as bark to the funnier sequel.
  82. The Apostle
    Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.
  83. Buffalo Soldiers
    The highest accomplishment of Buffalo Soldiers is its wise invocation of that weirdest of all precincts, the post, and the odd culture it spawns.
  84. Joe Somebody
    It's not great; it's also not idiotic.
  85. Maestro
    Maestro is for people already aware of this history. For everyone else, this is pretty much invitation-only.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stone Reader
    Like the novel, the film is occasionally overwrought and overwritten.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Ball
    It is only when Reeves meets up with his incredibly cute baseball team that this movie comes to life.
  88. Field of Dreams
    Everything from time travel to melodrama figures in this whimsically daft story, a romanticization that tries your patience even as your tear ducts well.
  89. Like Mike
    Sappy but sweet B-ball Cinderella story that succeeds thanks largely to the outsize charm of its 4-foot-8-inch, corn-rowed protagonist.
  90. The Missing
    Ron Howard somehow makes a great movie and an awful movie, all at the same time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nowhere in Africa
    What rescues the film is Gernot Roll's spare, almost aesthetic cinematography, and the quality of the acting.
  92. Kingdom Come
    You're hard-pressed to dislike the film.
  93. Up at the Villa
    Moderately pleasing adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novella.
  94. Timecode
    But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.
  95. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Wuornos was unambiguous about one thing: She wanted to die. In the end, that's the only assurance the movie provides. It's an odd kind of closure for her and for us.
  96. The Princess Blade
    It suffers from a dreary middle section. Great movie, mediocre script.
  97. Frida
    Ultimately, the movie's biggest crime is its inability to convey the delicate, damaged texture of Kahlo's life, but also the triumph of her will over intimidating defeat.
  98. Train of Life
    Less-than-scintillating spin on "Life Is Beautiful."
  99. Men in Black II
    The only active ingredient is the dynamic between Smith and Jones. There's just enough of that to get us through.
  100. Serving Sara
    Folks, I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say this is pretty darn fine American entertainment
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