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. New York Minute
    The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.
  2. The Clay Bird
    Strikes several beautiful and lingering chords about the human condition, but the notes of the music ultimately never come together to form a coherent song.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Laws of Attraction
    The plot, the dialogue and the main characters' love connection are basically mind-numbing.
  4. Since Otar Left
    A small film of surpassing beauty and sadness. Yet its bittersweet flavor isn't artificial, but rather the product of the slow ripening of character.
  5. Godsend
    Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Envy
    With all the dog dung in Envy, it's almost too easy to generalize that it stinks. But it does, unfortunately, despite the big-name actors in its cast.
  7. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Even the staunchest of golfheads must know they're watching a cut-and-trite accounting.
  8. The Saddest Music in the World
    You're left, as with certain vivid dreams, filled with memorable images but not completely able to account for what you just experienced.
  9. Mean Girls
    Smart, funny, well-acted and visually lively.
  10. The Agronomist
    Has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.
  11. Close Your Eyes
    The plot, loosely derived from Madison Smartt Bell's "Doctor Sleep," is utterly stale. On their way to confront ancient evil, Strother and Losey keep tripping over timeworn cliches.
  12. Faster
    A loud, choppily edited and surprisingly unengaging portrait of speed demons.
  13. Man on Fire
    This movie is a predictable, gruesome piece of business.
  14. The Twilight Samurai
    Combines novelistic detail with cinematic sweep.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    13 Going on 30
    A film whose far-fetched foundation is overshadowed by the endearing story.
  16. Lana's Rain
    Clumsily under-written and feverishly overacted, it's as embarrassing to watch as it is perplexing.
  17. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Watching Thurman's character "triumph" in a context as joyless and self-referential as Tarantino's is a soul-deadening experience, one that over two hours takes on the same dreary monotone as the cheapest pornography.
  18. The Punisher
    Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Connie and Carla
    The humor is rigorously unoriginal and it all feels a bit like minstrelsy, a freakish, ritualistic nod to things your grandfather might have found funny.
  20. Young Adam
    A compelling if singularly sour tale.
  21. A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    It's as pretentious and wispy as its title.
  22. Twentynine Palms
    It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir. What it all means, of course, I have no idea.
  23. The Girl Next Door
    Nothing in this film makes any sense, and Stuart Blumberg, David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg's script merely gets more preposterous as it elaborates on its implausible premise.
  24. The Whole Ten Yards
    Leaden, laugh-free, lacking anything resembling a heart, mind or soul.
  25. I'm Not Scared
    Good but it SEEMS even better because of its evocative setting.
  26. The Alamo
    These storied 13 days feel like the Hundred Years War.
  27. Ella Enchanted
    Good and entertaining fun.
  28. Johnson Family Vacation
    Cedric the Entertainer is the best (and probably only) reason to take this "Vacation."
  29. Walking Tall
    One mediocre, ploddingly predictable film, loaded down with cheesy Hollywood tactics.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Though lacking in any particular narrative surprise, the film nevertheless takes the viewer completely by surprise several times.
  31. The Prince and Me
    Silly? Contrived? Vapid? You bet. Put more simply, "The Prince & Me" is . . . cute.
  32. Hellboy
    Surprisingly smart, graphically faithful live-action adaptation of the Mike Mignola series
  33. Home on the Range
    Comes across less as a fully realized work of storytelling than as a commercial for a corporation whose goal of entertainment has been replaced by that of making money.
  34. The United States of Leland
    There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.
  35. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    An elegy for an aging rock pixie.
  36. Never Die Alone
    Possibly the worst thug-life flick to be released in the past 72 hours, this movie sags under the weight of the bling-bling cliches strung around its headless neck.
  37. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    As little as there is to recommend in Scooby-Doo 2, it must be noted that the human cast has done an uncanny job of inhabiting their two-dimensional characters.
  38. The Ladykillers
    Will appeal most strongly to viewers who think Tom Hanks, who plays a thief and a potential murderer, can do no wrong.
  39. Jersey Girl
    The film oozes sentimentality, soap-opera bathos and clumsy cribbings from the Frank Capra book of small-town values. Those are its good points.
  40. Dogville
    It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.
  41. Bon voyage
    Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.
  42. Taking Lives
    Taking Lives would have to work nights to reach mediocrity.
  43. Intermission
    Very, very funny, thanks to a lively first script by Mark O'Rowe, who has a good ear for earthy dialogue and a sense of life's absurd little synchronicities.
  44. Dawn of the Dead
    The movie has many of the elements that made the first "Dawn" so darkly entertaining.
  45. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.
  46. Divan
    A charming and astute first-person documentary.
  47. Noi the Albino
    Kari may eventually go far, but for now he's one of the less interesting inhabitants of international art cinema's disaffected-youth ghetto.
  48. Maestro
    Maestro is for people already aware of this history. For everyone else, this is pretty much invitation-only.
  49. 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.
  50. Knafayim Shvurot
    Well-made, if rather predictable, new-age melodrama.
  51. Secret Window
    You can boost mediocrity a little, but you cannot raise it from the dead.
  52. Distant
    Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Kids should be reasonably diverted for a couple of hours, but odds are they'll have forgotten the whole thing by the next morning.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    True to IMAX form, the high-tech graphics and sounds are great.
  55. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Provides some wry chuckles, but much of it is as dark as a Glasgow winter.
  56. Games People Play: New York
    It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.
  57. Hidalgo
    If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie.
  58. Starsky & Hutch
    What modest pleasure the film affords is largely thanks to the charisma of its genial stars.
  59. The Reckoning
    Although the acting is committed and sometimes stirring, most of the characters are about as one-note as the biblical archetypes Martin wants to get away from in the first place. "The Name of the Rose" this ain't.
  60. Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen
    For a quicker and more startling survey of Hong Kong stunts gone wrong, just check out the blooper clips that conclude any '80s Chan flick.
  61. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    It's hard to say exactly what the point is to this sour tale.
  62. Club Dread
    About as funny as malaria.
  63. Greendale
    To watch Greendale is to understand everything about Neil Young. Like him, it's grungy, honest, disarming and unapologetically original.
  64. Twisted
    A nasty, formulaic and unforgivably obvious procedural.
  65. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    The movie is still a routine Hollywood high school morality play.
  66. Goodbye Lenin!
    It's a sweet family dramedy whose political undertones don't flatter either capitalism or "democratic socialism."
  67. The Passion of the Christ
    Controversial, yet undeniably powerful.
  68. Against the Ropes
    A boilerplate melodrama whose good guys and bad guys are so baldly drawn they could have been conceived by Friz Freleng.
  69. Clifford's Really Big Movie
    The movie's sweet, gentle nature may lack the subtle irony of the "Toy Storys" and "Shreks" of the world, but parents won't be bored.
  70. EuroTrip
    If you're going to make a gross-out comedy you can't just be gross. You've got to be to be funny as well, or the movie will be DOA. Which is why Eurotrip should be toe-tagged and shoved into the deepest and coldest of video vaults.
  71. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.
  72. Kitchen Stories
    May, at times, be deadpan to the point of stiffness, but it's far from dead.
  73. Welcome to Mooseport
    A movie marred by a flaccid script, listless pacing, a plethora of cutesy-poo gags and Ray Romano.
  74. Lost Boys of Sudan
    A touching documentary on the immigrant experience -- or at least one very tough slice of it.
  75. After the Life
    The most assured of the three films.
  76. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.
  77. Love Object
    The sort of clumsy undertaking that trips up everyone and everything in it.
  78. 50 First Dates
    Possesses an undeniable heart. The bad news is that it will still be buried underneath layers of stale Sandlerisms tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.
  79. Robot Stories
    Most of the performances are excellent. The scripts, however, are slight and unsurprising.
  80. An Amazing Couple
    In this comedy, Cecile misinterprets husband Alain's furtive attempt to have himself medically tested as suspicious extramarital behavior.
  81. Osama
    In its small, achingly beautiful way, this is the lesson that Osama teaches us: When one human being suffers, it is all of us who share her pain.
  82. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.
  83. 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.
  84. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    What separates Calvin and Eddie from the typical comic hero -- and each "Barbershop" movie from the standard yuk-fest -- is that these folks know how to back up all the hot air with meaningful action.
  85. Catch That Kid
    The movie isn't only boring; it's troubling:
  86. The Return
    It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.
  87. The Dreamers
    It may give many viewers a licentious flutter, but the highbrow ingredient -- although it desperately wants to be there -- is missing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Thoughtful documentary.
  89. Blind Shaft
    Slow going, but it provides an absorbing glimpse of a rarely seen side of Chinese life.
  90. On the Run
    The most cinematic of the three films. It tells its story in stark, often wordless scenes.
  91. The Perfect Score
    Luckily, life (just like the SAT) has its multiple-choice options. You don't actually have to watch this.
  92. Latter Days
    Although the rest of the story plays out with melodramatic predictability, it's timely, not to mention refreshing, to see an affirmation of true love over hot sex, along with a reminder that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
  93. The Big Bounce
    An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.
  94. You Got Served
    A thinly written, hoarily cliched story that serves mostly as connective tissue between the movie's chief draw, its dazzling dance sequences.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eat This New York
    The oddest thing about this sweet but not entirely satisfying documentary is how little food is involved.
  96. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Forget Tad Hamilton -- this is really a 90-minute date with Kate Bosworth.
  97. Touching the Void
    Tells a tale of fortitude that comes not from muscle but from the ineffable, bungee-like sinew that is the human spirit.
  98. The Butterfly Effect
    With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.
  99. Teacher's Pet
    The writing (by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner) has a non-sentimental appeal for that young preteen (and early teen) crowd that fancies itself too cool for kiddie stuff.
  100. Torque
    The loudest, trashiest, stupidest, cheesiest celebration of ritualized male aggression of 2004.
  101. 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.
  102. 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.
  103. Tokyo Godfathers
    Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.
  104. 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.
  105. 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.
  106. The Battle of Algiers
    The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.
  107. 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.
  108. Secret Things
    Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.
  109. 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.
  110. The Company
    It is sheer brilliance and testament to the vitality of an old master.
  111. Paycheck
    Represents such a professional nadir for each of its principals that you wish better for them in the new year.
  112. 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.
  113. 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.
  114. Peter Pan
    Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.
  115. Monster
    An okay movie made nearly great by one great thing: the bravura, mercilessly watchable performance of Charlize Theron.
  116. 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.
  117. Mona Lisa Smile
    Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
  118. House of Sand and Fog
    The movie's intense watchability can be traced directly to superb performances by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley.
  119. The Hebrew Hammer
    Desperation is the project's principal quality, characterizing everything from the misfiring jokes to the surprisingly distinguished cast.
  120. 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.
  121. Power Trip
    An instructive account of the perils of attempting to privatize decrepit public utilities in countries with stagnant economies.
  122. The Statement
    Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.
  123. 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.
  124. Stuck on You
    Viewers anticipating side-splitting guffaws will be disappointed: Stuck on You is a strangely lackluster, flaccid string of fitfully humorous episodes.
  125. Something's Gotta Give
    It is a well written, nicely acted and smoothly directed battle of the sexes.
  126. 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.
  127. Big Fish
    A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.
  128. Monsieur Ibrahim
    A movie suffused with a warm glow of nostalgia for times and music and movies gone by.
  129. Honey
    It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.
  130. The Last Samurai
    There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.
  131. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.
  132. My Flesh and Blood
    Poignant, heartbreaking proof that, sometimes, love is just not enough.
  133. Timeline
    Time travels, but it sure doesn't fly by in this debacle.
  134. 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.
  135. The Haunted Mansion
    Eddie Murphy is less offensive than Dr. Seuss.
  136. 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.
  137. 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.
  138. 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.
  139. 21 Grams
    It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.
  140. Gothika
    An unsurprising, undistinguished piece of post-summer, pre-holiday detritus.
  141. The Barbarian Invasions
    A movie that, in the story of one man dying, shows us all how to live.
  142. 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.
  143. The Missing
    Ron Howard somehow makes a great movie and an awful movie, all at the same time.
  144. 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.
  145. Tupac: Resurrection
    The result isn't a fragmentary experience so much as an evocative collage.
  146. 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.
  147. 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.
  148. 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.
  150. Just an American Boy
    Decidedly low-tech and not always particularly coherent or cohesive.
  151. In My Skin
    It's a silly, if simultaneously deadpan and stomach-churning, psychological portrait of one crazy lady.
  152. 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.
  153. 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.
  154. Love Actually
    If listing the cast of Love Actually is exhausting, it's even more tiring to watch it.
  155. 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.
  156. 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.
  157. 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.
  158. Shattered Glass
    In a sense, Shattered Glass is a parenthetical horror movie in which someone discovers (or worse, denies) the monster within themselves.
  159. The Human Stain
    All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.
  160. Girlhood
    Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.
  161. The Singing Detective
    Unfortunately, apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.
  162. Radio
    A train wreck of a film lying inert where the tracks of the Feel Good Line cross the Path of Good Intentions.
  163. Elephant
    A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.
  164. 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.
  166. In the Cut
    Although Ryan is cannily cast against type, she doesn't bring much more than muttery incoherence and nudity to the role.
  167. 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.
  168. Veronica Guerin
    In a movie whose texture is supposed to be hard-edged realism, the characterization seems a little too pat and jaunty.
  169. Runaway Jury
    Efficient, precise, carefully calibrated and terrifically entertaining.
  170. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Weakens, dilutes, disinfects and otherwise undermines the legacy of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original.
  171. 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.
  172. 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.
  173. The Flower of Evil
    This movie is a mixed repast: good food and wine laced with enough misanthropic poison to turn any stomach.
  174. 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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