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. Last Orders
    The movie's pace is unhurried by Hollywood standards, but it's all the richer in character detail.
  2. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Searing dramatization of a story of remarkable courage, stamina and spirit.
  3. Shine
    The movie does what any great musician should: It lifts an idea to the heights of ecstasy; it sells its song.
  4. Hoosiers
    Yet much of the movie's validity stems from time and place recreated with such authenticity that you can sense the wet chill in the morning air and the new wax pungent on the old gym floor. [27 Feb 1987, Weekend, p.n29]
  5. The Deep End
    The real story lies beneath the surface of this superbly acted, strangely moving film.
  6. The Heart of Me
    Old-fashioned moviemaking at its best.
  7. The Crying Game
    An intriguing yarn.
  8. Apollo 13
    Apollo 13 is humanized by Hanks's reassuring portrait in courage, by Harris's nicotine-stained fingers and Quinlan's lacquered French twist.
  9. The Last Days of Disco
    The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.
  10. Out of Sight
    Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.
  11. Shanghai Noon
    Childishly simple, but extremely funny.
  12. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Small, quiet movie that imperceptibly takes its viewers by their throats and doesn't let go
  13. When Harry Met Sally...
    It's a movie that walks on air.
  14. Menace II Society
    Though brilliant, Menace II Society is definitely a film to guard yourself against. There's not a trace of softness or sentimentality. At times, the picture takes on the scary you-are-there verisimilitude of a tabloid-TV show.
    • Washington Post
  15. The Fugitive
    Pure energy, a perfect orchestration of heroism, villainy, suspense and comic relief.
  16. Smoke Signals
    And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.
  17. The Man Without a Past
    Everything has a Chaplinesque feeling, from the largely silent scenes to the highly visual, tragicomic situations...But The Man Without a Past is entirely free of the tramp's cloying sentimentality.
  18. The Joy Luck Club
    Never has political correctness looked so sumptuously handsome as it does here, and in its perfect-pitch instinct for the cultural vibe, this sweeping movie is so immaculately dead-on that it nearly transcends criticism.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Panic
    Anyone interested in serious film should absolutely not miss it.
  20. Swimming Pool
    The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.
  21. Heist
    Mamet doesn't just give us an enthralling heist flick, he makes the language something to savor. You're biting your nails with your ears peeled.
  22. Daughter from Danang
    Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again
  23. The Man Who Wasn't There
    When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.
  24. About a Boy
    Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.
  25. The Emperor's New Groove
    A hip, hilarious new animated feature.
    • 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.
  27. One Hour Photo
    It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.
  28. The Rookie
    So unassuming and pure of heart, you can't help but warmly extend your arms and yell "Safe!"
  29. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    The movie's big action scenes, at times, make you forget you're even watching animation. There's an in-your-face sequence involving a runaway, crashing train that will make you squirm in your seat trying to get out of the way.
  30. The Emperor's Club
    This isn't a stand up and cheer flick; it's a sit down and ponder affair. And thanks to Kline's superbly nuanced performance, that pondering is highly pleasurable.
  31. Traffic
    Sinfully watchable ensemble movie.
  32. L'Auberge Espagnole
    It's an exhilarating, funny, very sweet movie.
  33. The Missing
    Has Blanchett and Jones to its credit. To watch them is to take in two of the screen's greatest natural wonders.
  34. Grosse Pointe Blank
    A hilarious new addition to the wonderfully warped Generation X-Files.
  35. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.
  36. Bull Durham
    It eases up on you, lazy as a cloud, and carries you off in a mood of exquisite delight. To borrow W.P. Kinsella's phrase, it has the thrill of the grass.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Hard Day's Night
    Still a marvel of verve and bone-dry wit, the movie has been treated kindly by time.
    • Washington Post
  38. Tarzan
    This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.
  39. In the Company of Men
    This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.
  40. The Weather Underground
    One of the most thought-provoking documentaries of recent times.
  41. Jerry Maguire
    Joyous redemptive romantic comedy.
  42. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    More juvenile than a Mel Brooks movie, wittier than "Get Smart," almost as low as "Animal House" and close to the laugh count of "Airplane!", "Gun" is a loving parody of every cop show that ever syndicated its way to your living room. [2 Dec 1988]
    • Washington Post
  43. Our Lady of the Assassins
    It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.
  44. Enigma
    With a cast of actors playing some of England's smartest people and with a crackling script by Stoppard -- no slouch in the brains department -- it pays to stay awake.
  45. The Professional
    Oldman is the least inhibited actor of his generation, and as this deranged detective, he keeps absolutely nothing in reserve.
  46. Get Shorty
    Barry Sonnenfeld's irresistibly charming lampoon of Hollywood.
  47. Kandahar
    Though it might lack in Hollywood production values, it overflows with moral impact.
  48. Beetlejuice
    Not since "Ghostbusters" have the spirits been so uplifting. [30 Mar 1988]
  49. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.
  50. Groundhog Day
    For once, the audience isn't forced to surrender its intelligence (or its healthy cynicism) to embrace the film's sunny resolution.
  51. Stir of Echoes
    There's visceral horror, too, including a grisly image -- a horror-in-miniature involving a fingernail -- that located an open nerve in my jaded ability to endure screen violence.
  52. Babe
    A hilarious fantasy, about a plucky piglet that learns how to tend sheep, Babe is a barnyard charmer.
  53. The Fisher King
    A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience.
  54. 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.
  55. Bukowski: Born into This
    About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.
  56. The Piano Teacher
    A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.
  57. Dirty Pretty Things
    One of the year's best films.
  58. Teacher's Pet
    It's part sugar, part spice (cayenne, not nutmeg) and all-around brilliant.
  59. The Quiet American
    Thanks to Caine's subtly nuanced performance, there's a deeper dimension to everything. He's snappily ironic at times, sometimes amazingly delicate, always engaging.
  60. The Grifters
    If Frears and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (who scripted "The Stepfather") are light on substance, they're satisfyingly heavy on nuance. Grifters may not blow you away afterward but it keeps your attention riveted during.
  61. sex, lies, and videotape
    What "The Big Chill" was to baby boomers, the inspirational sex, lies, and videotape is to the mall crowd. It's designer soul-searching, a looking glass for a generation.
  62. Igby Goes Down
    A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.
  63. Osama
    Although it's a drama, Osama feels like urgent documentary.
  64. To Die For
    Brilliantly written by Buck Henry, "To Die For" works on several levels. As a satire on the American obsession with celebrity and fame, the movie is nuanced and haunting. And for the most part, Van Sant keeps the tone chillingly light and ironic.
  65. Kissing Jessica Stein
    It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.
    • Washington Post
  66. A Mighty Wind
    There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Using home movies, photos, a brilliant soundtrack and candid, articulate interviews, director Stacy Peralta (one of the original Z-boys) details the birth of a pop culture phenomenon.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Winged Migration
    Mysteries still surround many aspects of bird migration. This film unravels exactly none of them. Rather, in some of the most remarkable footage you'll ever see, the film lets you look over the shoulders of migrating birds.
  69. Intact
    Mesmerizing art-noirish thriller.
  70. Adorenarin doraibu
    Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.
  71. Happiness
    Part of this success is due to the exquisitely cast ensemble-composed of actors, not movie stars. To a man, woman and child, the unforced performers are spot-on.
  72. Air Force One
    Ford makes such a dynamic president in Air Force One, you may find yourself favorably weighing his odds in Iowa and New Hampshire.
  73. Dark City
    Obliged to go from lost soul to demigod, Sewell's performance is as fascinating as Proyas's mystical vision.
  74. X2: X-Men United
    The fantastic and at times deliciously nihilistic world of X2 is fully, believably three-dimensional.
  75. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Mike Myers unleashes (or seems to unleash) the entire contents of his comic mind.
  76. Joe Gould's Secret
    A brainy, superbly acted buddy movie.
  77. Shattered Glass
    The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.
  78. Blood Simple
    I love the unsettling details.
  79. Songcatcher
    It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.
  80. Sweet and Lowdown
    A quirky, tender, splendidly acted fable.
  81. Crimson Gold
    An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.
  82. Harry Is Here to Help
    A deliciously mordant French spine-tingler.
  83. Spartan
    Until its final stumble, this intelligence thriller, starring Val Kilmer, is charged with brilliance.
  84. Man on the Train
    What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.
  85. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    It's a kind of 18th-century "Dead Man Walking" but with that earlier film's foreground arguments against capital punishment pushed to the background here.
  86. 8 Women
    Really, really good -- Yes, it's over the top, giddy and parodistic (God bless it). But it also takes a thoughtful, if surreptitious, look at what eight women might act like when men aren't around.
  87. Lantana
    Perceptive, powerfully acted psychodrama.
  88. Seabiscuit
    Yes, it's that cheesy, but it's also surprisingly appealing. After all, the horse Seabiscuit really WAS that phenomenal.
  89. Concert for George
    It offers a special "something" for everyone who ever appreciated the Quiet Beatle's musical gifts and spiritual explorations.
  90. Heat
    As with his other works, [Mann] binds sound, music and pictures into one hypnotic triaxial cable and plugs it right into your brain. He makes this almost-three-hour experience practically glide by.
  91. The Insider
    A well-orchestrated nightmare that keeps you on edge until the very end.
  92. In This World
    Although fictionalized, it feels depressingly real. It's a 90-minute newsreel with a broken heart.
  93. Raising Victor Vargas
    Succeeds where 100 studio-generated teen romances -- starring the bland, the blunt or the blow-dried -- have failed.
  94. Spellbound
    Just might be the most action-packed suspense thriller of the summer.
  95. The Manchurian Candidate
    An exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite. [Re-release]
  96. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.
  97. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The movie, a lyrical blend of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques, offers a bold example of the rewards of crossing boundaries -- stylistic, cultural, temporal and even commercial.
  98. Joy Ride
    Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.
  99. The Virgin Suicides
    Bewitching.
  100. The Princess Bride
    As a good fairy tale should, The Princess Bride teaches but never preaches. It's a lively, fun-loving, but nevertheless epic look at the nature of true love.
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