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 Grey Zone
    Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.
  2. Basic Instinct
    What isn't so fascinating is this movie's absurdity of motivation. No one does anything that makes sense. No one seems real. When the actual perpetrator is uncovered, there is no enlightenment as to why the killing occurred.
  3. Men in Black
    The movie, which is based on the Lowell Cunningham comic book series, throws out some wonderful implications, but they’re frustratingly few and far between.
  4. K-PAX
    Entertaining for so long it's a downer to sit through the dumbed-down finale.
  5. My Sister Maria
    A heartfelt but eccentric, pseudo-documentary tribute to his sister Maria.
  6. The Sea Is Watching
    It has the big themes that obsessed Kurosawa at his greatest, and that alone makes it worthwhile.
  7. Groundhog Day
    With its zany daily episodes, "Groundhog" gets stuck in a non-progressive repetition.
  8. Croupier
    Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.
  9. Pi
    In the end, it's primarily a brain teaser, obtuse and ultimately limited in its emotional impact.
  10. Ronin
    Unlike the ronin, the heroes of a Japanese legend, these guys are still searching for a story.
  11. A Walk on the Moon
    It's just a simple, actorly drama about big, gaping emotional needs and the consequences a woman can face -- particularly during the 1960s -- for simply owning up to them.
  12. Brokedown Palace
    This is not a fantastic movie. But there's more to it than just an MTV-slickified "Midnight Express" starring two young, photogenic stars.
  13. The Wood
    Despite the unforced humor and honesty in the performances of its young and talented cast, The Wood spends too much time wallowing in arrested adolescence to make you feel you've traveled anywhere.
  14. Cherish
    The movie's about its own playfulness. But that playfulness, all too often, feels labored.
  15. The Thin Blue Line
    Other documentarians before Morris have smudged the distinction between fact and fiction. But here the smudging seems almost irresponsible, and you may feel yourself wanting to fight against the conclusions that Morris comes to, not because they're incorrect, but because there's the chance they were come to unfairly. [2 Sept 1988]
  16. Amistad
    Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.
  17. The Newton Boys
    There are no dramatic peaks and valleys in this story line, just a uniform, dramatic flatness.
  18. Life as a House
    It's a pleasant movie, written with care for the characters. But as the film's title suggests, scriptwriter Mark Andrus has made too obvious and clunky a metaphor of George's house.
  19. Femme Fatale
    Mainly, Femme Fatale is really about De Palma's three favorite things: women, movies and women. And you can either share his guilty pleasures in all their living, breathing, power-edited, overextended glory, or you can get on with your life.
  20. The X Files
    The X-Files movie is really just a two-hour teaser for the series's sixth season. And little else. You will feel exactly like Mulder when he says, "How many times have we been right here before, Scully? So close to the truth?"
  21. sex, lies, and videotape
    The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.
  22. Edward Scissorhands
    Tim Burton remains the Wizard of Odd with this eye-filling if problematic confection.
  23. The Prince of Egypt
    As a rule, the drawn and computer-animated imagery is top notch and seamlessly integrated, but the central characters' tawny complexions and the often chiaroscuro lighting sometimes obscure all but the whites of their eyes and their pearl-perfect teeth.
  24. There's Something About Mary
    Fitfully amusing and ultimately kind of heartwarming in a twisted sort of way
  25. What Dreams May Come
    There are a number of surprises in the idiosyncratic film, and one of its pleasures is the oblique and unchronological way in which Ward peels away the layers of the story, flashing backward and forward in time and jumping between Earth and the Beyond, separating his scenes with blindingly blank, white-out screens.
  26. Intact
    Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.
  27. Chopper
    It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.
  28. Hannibal
    It is not bad on its own terms, and it is certainly engrossing, but it comes nowhere near the power and sordid glory of the original.
  29. Celebrity
    It is this sense of real life blurring with make-believe that Allen's film is really playing with, like a kitten toying with a scared mouse. Back and forth he bats the subject, moving between reality, illusion and the imitation of reality with a deft touch that may bruise but never kills.
  30. Summer of Sam
    Hobbled by a multiplicity of narrative lines and superfluous, often stereotypical characters, the movie suffers from a lack of both focus and passion.
  31. He Got Game
    He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.
  32. Knafayim Shvurot
    Well-made, if rather predictable, new-age melodrama.
  33. Miracle
    Miracle works best when the players are on the ice, shot in a faux-documentary style that uses the now-customary handheld cameras, fast pans and machine-gun edits.
  34. Ghost
    Three losers of late, the actors succeed quite nicely in unifying the movie's multiple personalities, its ricocheting screenplay.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cabin Boy
    Contains about enough laugh-out-loud sight gags and non sequiturs to justify what it demands of a viewer's time and money.
  36. Starship Troopers
    Nothing like the sight of thousands of scuttling, hideous, practically indestructible insects crawling up the sides of a fortress, hellbent on destroying the human race. As they keep coming and coming, they’re the only things in this movie earning your money.
  37. Heat
    Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.
  38. SLC Punk!
    Lillard, who played the squirrelly Stuart in "Scream," brings a mischievous sense of humor and an easygoing charm to his potentially unsympathetic character.
  39. American Psycho
    There's nothing beyond the bloodshed and gallows humor, just intellectually secondhand implications about materialism, conformity and misogyny.
  40. Meet Joe Black
    Meet Joe Black is Hopkins's movie and, despite the film's unnecessary length, his quiet and dignified performance almost carries the ball across the finish line.
  41. The Waterboy
    The Perrier of dumb-and-dumber movies, an effervescent idiot's delight that burbles from the wellspring of silliness inside star Adam Sandler's head.
  42. Holy Man
    Tom Schulman's script is on the sloppy side and offers few surprises; still, it's not entirely bereft of laughs.
  43. Some Kind of Wonderful
    Mary Stuart Masterson, a delicate blond, steals the show as the sensitive gal under the tomboy's leather jacket, her natural magnetism offsetting the story's predictability.
  44. Daddy Day Care
    An easy-on-the-sensibilities family film, Eddie Murphy practically assumes the easygoing manner of Mister Rogers, a character he used to wickedly lampoon on "Saturday Night Live."
  45. Enemy of the State
    The dazzle doesn't make up, however, for the movie's lack of depth.
  46. The Virgin Suicides
    While not exactly a cop-out, Virgin may leave some viewers who crave traditional closure with the same hollow ache described by the narrator as follows: "What lingered after them was not life but the most trivial list of mundane facts."
  47. Deep Blue Sea
    You have a movie in which sharks with triple-digit IQs hunt humans with double-digit IQs. It’s no contest.
  48. Glengarry Glen Ross
    There is no evidence of life outside the immediate world of the movie.
  49. Bowfinger
    Lacks emotional depth and intellectual sincerity.
  50. Irreversible
    What we have here is a genuine outlaw work of art.
  51. 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.
  52. Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    Has its share of arresting images, especially a lovely pas de deux performed in the nude and a dazzling performance of "Le Spectre de la Rose."
  53. Auto Focus
    It never answers the key question: Why should we care?
  54. Bon voyage
    Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.
  55. Tomorrow Never Dies
    Tomorrow is propelled by relentless action. Chase scenes are interrupted not by witty conversation or sexy conquests but by the rattle of machine gun fire.
  56. Urban Legend
    It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    World Traveler
    Well-made, well-acted but ultimately enervating, this is a respectable effort from Freundlich.
  58. A Civil Action
    A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.
  59. The Good Thief
    In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.
  60. 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.
  61. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    It yields surprisingly unspectacular results.
  62. The Big Kahuna
    Never feels original, even though it's enjoyable to watch Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and newcomer Peter Facinelli going at it with snappy patter.
  63. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    Some viewers will miss the warmth and boisterous family dynamics of its predecessors.
  64. Paid in Full
    The direction has a fluid, no-nonsense authority, and the performances by Harris, Phifer and Cam'ron seal the deal.
  65. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan, a television veteran making his feature film debut, has fluffed up this undemanding material much as one would a pillow. But pillows have their place and so do girlfriend movies.
  66. The General's Daughter
    A prosaic, sexually perverse thriller masquerading as a critical look at military injustice.
  67. Down with Love
    It's like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch on a $60 million budget.
  68. The Other Side of Heaven
    A tad preachy and more than a little bit sanctimonious.
  69. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Left-wing filmmaker's attempt to call foul on megamedia owner Murdoch's exclamation-point news network.
  70. Gattaca
    Although the movie has its moments -- particularly when our hero finds himself surrounded by a gimlet-eyed circle of futuristic detectives -- it's never really successful.
  71. The Rainmaker
    This movie has all the same elements as other Grisham fare: raw young lawyer trying to make it in the South; helpless client treated badly; sleazy, star-chamber villains. Wake me up when the last-minute surprise witness comes out of her hidey hole to turn the case around.
  72. Tuck Everlasting
    The acting is occasionally creakily theatrical; as is the script. But some important things come through.
  73. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Forget Tad Hamilton -- this is really a 90-minute date with Kate Bosworth.
  74. No Man's Land
    A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.
  75. Superstar
    Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.
  76. Arlington Road
    Although the film starts out with well-mounted menace, Arlington Road becomes increasingly overwrought and predictable.
  77. Entrapment
    Even the most ardent fans of the natural-born Bond are more apt to be shaken than stirred by the 68-year-old's implausible feats in this inert romantic adventure.
  78. Barbershop
    Doesn't always cut it -- and, somewhat embarrassingly, boom mikes hover on screen so frequently they deserve co-billing -- but it's a likable venture that just misses being a lovable one.
  79. Love & Sex
    An endearing comic roundelay about the can't-commits.
  80. All or Nothing
    Will probably appeal only to the most committed of Leigh fans.
  81. Das Boot
    Unlike Hollywood's hygienic undersea dramas, Das Boot graphically depicts the nasty intimacy of a long mission.
  82. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    Ultimately, Jedi even backs off some of the more tantalizing possibilities suggested by the cliffhanging scenario of "Empire." This inhibition appears to grow out of consideration for the feelings of the juvenile audience, which can enjoy an abundance of thrills and close calls while resting assured that nothing catastrophic is going to be fall the heroes.
  83. Sweet Home Alabama
    At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.
    • Washington Post
  84. Anna and the King
    Old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking at its best .
  85. Hulk
    In the end, we don't know what we're watching, an art-house superhero film or a computer-generated "King Kong." By trying to please both sensibilities, the filmmakers have pleased neither.
  86. The Time Machine
    Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.
  87. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that's something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.
  88. The Hunting of the President
    Make no mistake. This is partisan filmmaking at its most gleefully unapologetic. Unless they're also masochists, Bill Clinton haters and Ken Starr fans will know better than to buy a ticket.
  89. Your Friends & Neighbors
    If these repugnant people were really your friends and neighbors, your time would be more profitably spent reading the real estate listings than the movie reviews. But for 1 1/2 hours in a darkened theater, the derailment of their unhealthy emotions makes for one compulsively watchable train wreck.
  90. Town & Country
    Where Town and Country gets really good and weird – and I do mean good – is only after about an hour into it in deepest, darkest Idaho.
  91. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    A considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other 'SNL' alums.
    • Washington Post
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