Washington Post's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    Jack Black and Kyle Gass bring characters they created for the HBO program "Mr. Show With Bob and David" to the big screen with mixed success, depending on the age, gender and degree of inebriation of the filmgoer.
  2. The Nativity Story
    This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.
  3. Turistas
    Horror fans will twitch impatiently at those long stretches between killings. And audiences anticipating a feature-length "Girls Gone Wild" video will suffer withdrawal from the lack of loosened bra straps.
  4. Dreamgirls
    Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.
  5. The Good German
    Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.
  6. Off the Black
    Writer-director James Ponsoldt's film treats big subjects -- loneliness, coming-of-age and father-son relationships -- with such half-baked conviction, it's a wonder the screen doesn't redden with embarrassment. Which makes it all the more gratifying to watch Nolte pulverize the dramatic banality around him.
  7. The Painted Veil
    The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.
  8. Home of the Brave
    The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.
  9. Miss Potter
    Zellweger is certainly likable as Beatrix, but as an upper-class English lady of a century ago, she enunciates her words as if sucking a lemon -- you almost start to wonder if you've stumbled into a satire of "Masterpiece Theatre."
  10. The Last Sin Eater
    Clearly targeted at Christians looking to reaffirm their faith. Its chances of crossover success with the secular crowd seem remote, given the dramatic shortcomings.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reno 911!: Miami
    Moviedom is littered with the wreckage of ill-conceived small-to-big-screen adaptations, but Reno 911!: Miami is not the disaster it could have been. Fans of the TV show need not shudder. You will not see sacrilege.
  12. Amazing Grace
    If Amazing Grace serves its most superficial purpose -- to educate the viewer -- it's hardly compelling viewing.
  13. The Last Mimzy
    The best element of the movie is a subplot involving Noah's spiritually obsessed teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his wacky girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn), whose bumbling eccentricities give the movie an emotional liveliness it otherwise lacks.
  14. TMNT
    The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.
  15. First Snow
    A movie that clearly aims to be a cool, picturesque modern film noir becomes another moody banality.
  16. Firehouse Dog
    Firehouse Dog goes into the marginally watchable category, aimed as it is toward the middlebrow family trade, preferably dog owners with their own Sparky slopping up the station wagon windows.
  17. The Hoax
    Even though we're caught up in his derring-do as he beguiles entire meeting rooms of jaded publishers and editors, we're kept at a dissatisfying distance from Irving and the movie.
  18. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    A work of either a profoundly transgressive genius or a goofball high on Pez and patio sealant. It could come from no normal collection of brain cells.
  19. Disturbia
    LaBeouf is appealing as the frustrated shut-in, and comic-relief cred goes to Aaron Yoo, who plays his neurotic buddy Ronnie. The ending, though, drags, and the film quickly shifts from a clever homage to "Rear Window" to a bad parody of "The Silence of the Lambs."
  20. Fracture
    The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.
  21. In the Land of Women
    The movie refuses to descend into the cute smarminess of a mutual recovery drama, thanks to originally conceived characters. We're always wondering -- and wonderfully surprised -- by their choices.
  22. Jindabyne
    Sometimes, the sincerest form of tribute is inferiority. Watching the Australian film Jindabyne, one soon embraces the conclusion: Robert Altman did this work better. And with fewer brush strokes.
  23. Snow Cake
    Never gets as emotionally involving, or persuasive, as the moviemakers intend it to.
  24. Civic Duty
    The film is all cliched atmospherics and no real insight.
  25. Shrek the Third
    The end result of Shrek the Third is that you laugh a lot and you go home grumpy.
  26. The Hip Hop Project
    Ultimately, The Hip Hop Project is all raggedy rhythm and long-winded discourse, a tuneless song in search of a hook.
  27. Ocean's Thirteen
    Ocean's Thirteen is too complicated for its own mediocrity.
  28. Crazy Love
    Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.
  29. Evan Almighty
    In Evan Almighty, Mr. God goes to Washington. Frank Capra, stop rolling in your grave. At least they cared enough to steal from the very best.
  30. Broken English
    If Broken English occasionally falls prey to a bit too much self-conscious lethargy, it's still a welcome chance to see Posey at her flighty, edgy best.
  31. Sicko
    Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.
  32. Evening
    High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.
  33. License to Wed
    Uneven but occasionally funny.
  34. Introducing the Dwights
    Amusing only for its performances, including those of Chittenden and Wilson. The cast cannot hide the movie's derivative shortcomings, which only remind us that we've seen better and funnier elsewhere.
  35. Interview
    Unfortunately, Buscemi's film conveys the spirit of its source material but doesn't make a satisfying transmogrification out of its homage.
  36. Cashback
    Springs from that childhood fantasy of being able to stop time and wander freely among the temporarily frozen. If only writer-director Sean Ellis had done more than use the conceit for a functional romance.
  37. Goya's Ghosts
    Handsome but stilted.
  38. I Know Who Killed Me
    Lohan brilliantly brings off her double turn and clearly believes in the picture, as do all who worked on it. These things used to be called B movies in the old days.
  39. No Reservations
    There's already a crazy behind-the-scenes restaurant movie out this summer, and it's got a better story, and it's a cartoon, and it stars a rat.
  40. Becoming Jane
    So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?
  41. Falling for Grace
    Even though these characters are hogtied by the story's unimaginative conventions, at least their lively interactions feel genuine.
  42. Them
    Them knows something the makers of the "Hostel" and "Saw" movies apparently don't: Subtlety and suggestion are every bit as terrifying as slashing and sawing.
  43. The Signal
    In a movie about perception, misperception and the ramifications of misunderstanding, it's a bit ironic that the directors can't get out of one another's way.
  44. Illegal Tender
    A throwback to 1970s blaxploitation flicks, with a Latin accent, Illegal Tender would be a brassy, sassy guilty pleasure if it were more, well, pleasurable.
  45. The Nanny Diaries
    Linney -- this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in a movie that at most achieves a certain mediocrity.
  46. Resurrecting the Champ
    Hardly anything feels real, but what feels even more unreal is Hartnett with a cloying, sentimental, self-pitying performance. The liveliest thing in the film is the great Jackson, slumming again in a role miles beneath him.
  47. Right at Your Door
    First-time director Chris Gorak is no Rod Serling, and in his hands the enterprise tends toward the lurid, especially after his nifty third-act twist.
  48. Death Sentence
    Death Sentence, directed by "Saw" co-creator James Wan, swings the pendulum too far. One day Nick is a mild-mannered nerd who spends his days making (and loving) risk assessments for his company; the next, he's Travis Bickle from 1976's "Taxi Driver."
  49. 3:10 to Yuma
    The remake adds 24 minutes and subtracts most of the suspense.
  50. Fierce People
    When the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.
  51. The Hunting Party
    Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.
  52. December Boys
    Radcliffe is good at showing vulnerability but without the skills to give it gradation. The magic doesn't work for him this time.
  53. Ira & Abby
    It's all too zany and madcap and Woody Allen-redux to be remotely credible, but Ira & Abby turns out to be witty and winning, in large part because of its cast.
  54. Mr. Woodcock
    Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.
  55. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    The entire film carries a whiff of "vanity project," with several of Garlin's comedic buddies reporting for duty.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    Follows familiar formulas and characters, both brightened by a bit of wit and good performances from the two leads.
  57. The Kingdom
    One electrifying performance becomes the only saving grace of The Kingdom, a goofy action movie that tries to marry the blitzkrieg entertainment of "Rambo" to the cultural consciousness of "Syriana."
  58. Rendition
    Reese Witherspoon paces and cries through Rendition in a performance that does as much a disservice to her talent as the movie does to the issues it raises.
  59. Reservation Road
    Ruffalo is so squirrelly in the role that he seems like a dead giveaway from the start. You know exactly where the story is going, and, dang, that's exactly where it goes.
  60. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.
  61. Dan in Real Life
    Filmgoers haven't seen a family this neurotically enmeshed since the last Diane Keaton movie.
  62. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    The movie doesn't offer much new to anyone familiar with Carter.
  63. Music Within
    If it does nothing else, Music Within shows us how deeply Ron Livingston's amiable face can take us into a movie. But even likable mugs like his -- remember him in "Office Space"? -- need help from the movies around them.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Final Season
    Nathan Wang's score borrows blatantly from "The Natural" and is slathered on thick in all the big emotional scenes. They establish the right nostalgic mood, but it's broken with that loud "ping" of a metal bat every time a kid gets a hit.
  65. Sleuth
    Little more than a sleek, stylish stunt.
  66. Martian Child
    In drama, and just about everything else, almost is never enough. Which is why Martian Child, about the growing bond between an adult and child, never reaches us.
  67. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Lush, extravagant, sad and touching, Love in the Time of Cholera still feels weirdly insubstantial when all the febrile passion has abated. Like a fever it breaks, passes and is forgotten.
  68. Elegy
    What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Walker
    Got it. Drug companies are evil, and gay people are discriminated against. But these Hollywood pieties can't paper over Schrader's maddening indifference to explaining exactly how the bad guys have been pulling the strings during the previous hour and a half. [14 Dec 2007, p.WE33]
    • Washington Post
  70. Alvin and the Chipmunks
    Youngsters who love the shrieky singing and don't notice the tapioca of the story will probably get their money's worth. Parents: Bring earplugs.
  71. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    The best part of Walk Hard, oddl enough, is the music. I might not care to see Walk Hard" a second time, but I can't wait to hear it again.
  72. Mad Money
    Possesses its share of modest laughs, many of them delivered by Ted Danson as Bridget's bemused husband. But director Callie Khouri (best known for writing "Thelma & Louise") doesn't bring the dash needed to make this a comic heist on a par with "Ocean's Eleven."
  73. 27 Dresses
    Katherine Heigl makes an official bid for America's Sweetheart in her sophomore effort, 27 Dresses, a romantic comedy that -- despite her undeniable, apple-cheeked appeal -- sags like a day-old bouquet.
  74. First Sunday
    Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan are the nominal stars of First Sunday, but it's Katt Williams who steals the show in this by turns trite and mildly amusing B-comedy.
  75. Rambo
    This muttering boatman seems to have lost his old-time heroism. No longer is Rambo killing for a cause, but for kicks. And his portentous blather, even by Rambo standards, becomes unintentionally hilarious.
  76. Untraceable
    From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.
  77. Over Her Dead Body
    In her imperfectly beautiful way, Bell suggests Carole Lombard. As a comedian, Bell is enough of a distraction that you can forgive all the inanities around her. And there are many.
  78. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    A talented comedian, Lawrence has leaned all too easily on formula for his successful films. Imagine if he would test his flair against original and fresh premises, instead of the tried and trite. Why, he'd discover what it's like to take pride, not just profit.
  79. Definitely, Maybe
    Definitely an overlong exercise in the concept of kismet, and maybe it's just what you want, in lieu of chocolates.
  80. Jumper
    It's difficult to know whom to root for.
  81. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    For the uninitiated? Man, it's a bummer.
  82. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    What The Year My Parents Went on Vacation seems to be about, in the end, is big-time sport as the opiate of the masses.
  83. Drillbit Taylor
    Owen Wilson phones it in with Drillbit Taylor, a by-the-numbers teen comedy.
  84. Leatherheads
    There's a flatness about the whole enterprise -- like drinking champagne, but from an old house slipper. Re: his performance, Clooney is terrific. His comparison to old movie stars is not just hype. He really does possess the combination of supreme confidence and humility that has been the hallmark of the biggest male Hollywood stars.
  85. Body of War
    There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).
  86. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.
  87. Baby Mama
    For those who crave mannerisms and shtick and like their jokes set up and knocked out with plenty of arrows and quote marks, Baby Mama may fall flat. But audiences alive to the modest charms of its take on female friendship will be rewarded with at least a few quiet chuckles.
  88. Fugitive Pieces
    Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.
  89. The Children of Huang Shi
    The best thing about "Children" is the cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding ("Hero," "House of Flying Daggers"), which is so distracting because it so out-classes the rest of the movie.
  90. A Jihad for Love
    The director raises the question that haunts the whole film: Who should feel shame: gay Muslims or the Muslims who oppress them?
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    A hodgepodge in the raj -- a predictable patchwork of forbidden romance, English arrogance, a gun given as a gift, suicide, corruption, deception, rising Indian nationalism and a short-lived chase through the jungle.
  92. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.
  93. Brick Lane
    Even as Brick Lane manages to sidestep one formula, it falls prey to another.
  94. Mamma Mia!
    This is a movie guaranteed to please crowds, if only because it insists on their affection so strenuously.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    For all the flash and dazzle, Gunnin' for That #1 Spot never comes close to the power and intimacy of 1994's "Hoop Dreams." The comparison may be unfair, but, given the subject matter, it's inevitable.
  96. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    A taut, well-acted, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery.
  97. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.
  98. Quantum of Solace
    Thank heaven for Judi Dench, whose M provides Quantum of Solace its sole quantum of peppery brio.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »