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. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann deserves credit, not only for choosing a wonderful and deserving subject for a film, but for doing him proud.
  2. Along Came Polly
    Firmly ensconced among the forgettables in Stiller's career, a generic romantic comedy of the one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B variety.
  3. Tokyo Godfathers
    Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.
  4. 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.
  5. Chasing Liberty
    An endless, virtually laugh-free pastiche of Aaron Sorkin by way of Aaron Spelling, Chasing Liberty features Mandy Moore trying so strenuously to be the next America's Sweetheart that she almost pops a vein.
  6. The Battle of Algiers
    The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.
  7. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    May be too much Yves Saint Laurent even for those connoisseurs who can differentiate the YSL line from Dior's or Chanel's.
  8. Secret Things
    Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.
  9. Japanese Story
    It's a grab bag of small delights -- and that includes a workmanlike performance by Toni Collette -- but it never quite amounts to a full load.
  10. The Company
    It is sheer brilliance and testament to the vitality of an old master.
  11. Paycheck
    Represents such a professional nadir for each of its principals that you wish better for them in the new year.
  12. Cold Mountain
    It's enough of a spectacle to enjoy. It's too bad the stars are little more than serviceable and give the movie title an irony it could certainly do without.
  13. Cheaper by the Dozen
    This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.
  14. Peter Pan
    Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.
  15. Monster
    An okay movie made nearly great by one great thing: the bravura, mercilessly watchable performance of Charlize Theron.
  16. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    McNamara fits perfectly into Morris's canon: He tells a story that knocks you right off your feet.
  17. Mona Lisa Smile
    Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
  18. House of Sand and Fog
    The movie's intense watchability can be traced directly to superb performances by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley.
  19. The Hebrew Hammer
    Desperation is the project's principal quality, characterizing everything from the misfiring jokes to the surprisingly distinguished cast.
  20. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.
  21. Power Trip
    An instructive account of the perils of attempting to privatize decrepit public utilities in countries with stagnant economies.
  22. The Statement
    Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.
  23. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    I can't recall the original, or even if I saw it or not. But this variation certainly makes its points effectively, in what must be a more superheated milieu.
  24. Stuck on You
    Viewers anticipating side-splitting guffaws will be disappointed: Stuck on You is a strangely lackluster, flaccid string of fitfully humorous episodes.
  25. Something's Gotta Give
    It is a well written, nicely acted and smoothly directed battle of the sexes.
  26. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.
  27. Big Fish
    A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.
  28. Monsieur Ibrahim
    A movie suffused with a warm glow of nostalgia for times and music and movies gone by.
  29. Honey
    It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.
  30. The Last Samurai
    There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.
  31. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.
  32. My Flesh and Blood
    Poignant, heartbreaking proof that, sometimes, love is just not enough.
  33. Timeline
    Time travels, but it sure doesn't fly by in this debacle.
  34. The Cooler
    Had The Cooler stuck to its dark guns and not turned into a treacly, love-conquers-all fairy tale, this movie might have gone somewhere. In the end, you're only watching this with a sort of mercenary interest in the actors.
  35. The Haunted Mansion
    Eddie Murphy is less offensive than Dr. Seuss.
  36. The Triplets of Belleville
    Overflowing with madcap visual flair and following a rambling thread of a plot that seems, at times, more the product of free association than an actual script, The Triplets of Belleville is a triumph of animated style over substance.
  37. In America
    In Sheridan's warm and glowing treatment, the moral of the story feels less like a reheated fable than like something utterly, indescribably original.
  38. Bad Santa
    Suddenly, you're looking at life in his (Thornton's) jaundiced way and laughing with a sense of vicarious liberation, even when he says the most outrageous things -- to children, no less. And I daresay you can still recover your holiday spirit when you're through laughing.
  39. 21 Grams
    It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.
  40. Gothika
    An unsurprising, undistinguished piece of post-summer, pre-holiday detritus.
  41. The Barbarian Invasions
    A movie that, in the story of one man dying, shows us all how to live.
  42. The Cat in the Hat
    Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.
  43. The Missing
    Ron Howard somehow makes a great movie and an awful movie, all at the same time.
  44. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    A dramatization of the life of Christ that takes as its script a word-for-word translation of the Gospel according to John, the adaptation is not so much tedious as pointless.
  45. Tupac: Resurrection
    The result isn't a fragmentary experience so much as an evocative collage.
  46. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    Has its funny moments, but all too often it's a corny, lackluster film in which humans pretend (not always convincingly) to interact with cartoons.
  47. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.
  48. Hukkle
    The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Architect
    This is a bittersweet story, no question. But to the son's great credit, what emerges from his patient investigation is a remarkably rich, even sympathetic, portrait of the father.
  50. Just an American Boy
    Decidedly low-tech and not always particularly coherent or cohesive.
  51. In My Skin
    It's a silly, if simultaneously deadpan and stomach-churning, psychological portrait of one crazy lady.
  52. Gloomy Sunday
    It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.
  53. Elf
    The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.
  54. Love Actually
    If listing the cast of Love Actually is exhausting, it's even more tiring to watch it.
  55. The Matrix Revolutions
    The Wachowski brothers have rendered their chronicles into banality, as if trying to imitate the qualitative tailspin of the "Star Wars" series.
  56. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.
  57. Die, Mommie, Die!
    What's strangest, though, about Die Mommie Die! is how material that was obviously so giddily irreverent in origin became so inert, so joyless and dull.
  58. Shattered Glass
    In a sense, Shattered Glass is a parenthetical horror movie in which someone discovers (or worse, denies) the monster within themselves.
  59. The Human Stain
    All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.
  60. Girlhood
    Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.
  61. The Singing Detective
    Unfortunately, apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.
  62. Radio
    A train wreck of a film lying inert where the tracks of the Feel Good Line cross the Path of Good Intentions.
  63. Elephant
    A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.
  64. Scary Movie 3
    It's outrageous. It's obnoxious. It's offensive. And yes, it's also really, really, really funny. Or, at least, it is for the first 40 minutes or so.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beyond Borders
    The premise of the movie deserves better.
  66. In the Cut
    Although Ryan is cannily cast against type, she doesn't bring much more than muttery incoherence and nudity to the role.
  67. Sylvia
    Sylvia plays it safe, and in doing so it becomes little more than just another domestic melodrama devoid of life and, of all things, poetry.
  68. Veronica Guerin
    In a movie whose texture is supposed to be hard-edged realism, the characterization seems a little too pat and jaunty.
  69. Runaway Jury
    Efficient, precise, carefully calibrated and terrifically entertaining.
  70. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Weakens, dilutes, disinfects and otherwise undermines the legacy of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original.
  71. Pieces of April
    Belongs, wholly and completely, to Clarkson, who delivers Joy's mordant asides and withering observations with a flawless balance of tartness and vulnerability.
  72. Dopamine
    Shakespeare asked, "Or in the heart, or in the head?" It's not a new question by any means, but it's one that is given a fresh and refreshing adult twist by Decena's heady yet steady-handed Dopamine.
  73. The Flower of Evil
    This movie is a mixed repast: good food and wine laced with enough misanthropic poison to turn any stomach.
  74. Good Boy!
    When it comes right down to it, the talking animal thing is sort of secondary to what is, at heart, just a simple but perfectly satisfying little story about a boy who wants to keep his dog.
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