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. Fantasia 2000
    Then as now, visually pleasant and (of course) musically wonderful but, all-in-all, a mixed bag.
  2. Love in the Time of Money
    Guaranteed-to-bum-you-out conclusion.
  3. Nicholas Nickleby
    Whether the entire production comes off as classy or cloying depends entirely on the viewer's mood.
  4. Hart's War
    Follows all these rules, which is why you'll get the enjoyable basic minimum. But not a whit more.
  5. Blast from the Past
    A mediocre comic romance.
  6. The Closer You Get
    Derivative dumpling of a romantic comedy about Irish sexuality.
  7. Domestic Disturbance
    Does a masterful job of building menace until about halfway through.
  8. The Tailor of Panama
    The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.
  9. Charlotte Gray
    Those who do go with the fantasy are probably hopeless romantics.
  10. Only the Strong Survive
    The film could use a little less of the gee-whiz commentary of co-producer/narrator Roger Friedman and more storytelling from the survivors themselves.
  11. Baby Boy
    You may or may not like what you see, but there it is, indisputably, right in your face.
  12. Dead Again
    Directing with an eye to "Rebecca," Branagh brings more mood than suspense to this apparent hommage to Hitchcock. Still, he raises no goose bumps.
  13. ABC Africa
    This slight but insinuating documentary by Abbas Kiarostami...will do nothing to advance or detract from the reputation of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker.
  14. Just an American Boy
    Decidedly low-tech and not always particularly coherent or cohesive.
  15. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    The story, which feels more like a sprawl of television episodes than a film, is a little tedious to sit through.
  16. Apt Pupil
    Scares, to be sure, which is certainly one promise on which it delivers. But the film offers little insight into what it seems to be saying is essentially a mundane fact of life: When one devil leaves the world, there is always another one waiting just outside the door.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hackers
    Separates the tech-savvy boys from the lost-in-cyberspace men. Really--the movie may be too fast and confusingly jargon-choked for everyone but Netsurfers and Webheads.
  18. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Defiantly sophomoric, often hilarious and crude as all get-out.
  19. Blue in the Face
    An unpredictable, occasionally amusing, wildly uneven portrait of a neighborhood struggling to hold on to its identity.
  20. Dark Blue World
    The movie's ambitions (to pay tribute to the Czech pilots who fought for their country only to be interned later) are not matched by the actual story.
  21. Men of Honor
    Storytelling like this weighs heavier than a standard diving suit, and it's really up to you, if you're ready to take the plunge.
  22. Human Nature
    After some promising leaps, bounds and swings through a fascinating jungle of possibility, Charlie Kaufman's movie misses an all-important creeper.
  23. My Life Without Me
    The film should at least be wise and three-dimensional enough to see Ann's motivations as a source of mystery as much as heroic self-empowerment. This one-dimensional ennoblement doesn't sit quite right.
  24. The Singing Detective
    At once daring and hackneyed, absorbing and off-putting, a triumph of one sort and, more lastingly, a failure of another.
  25. Lucky Numbers
    At times, it's downright nasty; and that's when I like it best.
  26. The End of the Affair
    Fails to capture the spiritual hallelujah of the novel.
  27. Bones
    Too much of Bones feels transplanted from genre staples like "Hellraiser," "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Evil Dead."
  28. The Man from Elysian Fields
    May not be perfect but must be given credit for all that it does right.
  29. Home Fries
    You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."
  30. Center Stage
    Awkwardly acted.
  31. The Flower of Evil
    This movie is a mixed repast: good food and wine laced with enough misanthropic poison to turn any stomach.
  32. Field of Dreams
    The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.
  33. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    The movie, directed by Steve Miner, a "Friday the 13th" vet, never quite gins up the giddy, sick, politically incorrect power of the more high-powered "Screams" of late.
  34. 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.
  35. 54
    The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.
  36. Bringing Down the House
    The racial angle becomes the tiresome basis of almost every joke.
  37. The Man in the Iron Mask
    There is nothing worth getting steamed over or particularly excited about.
  38. Along Came a Spider
    A corkscrew of a thriller, has more twists than a tarantula with a permanent.
  39. The Object of My Affection
    Wendy Wasserstein brings a dull pen to this literary adaptation, which shows none of the bite or savvy of Stephen McCauley's novel.
  40. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    A movie carefully engineered for an audience of exactly nobody.
  41. Life
    Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."
  42. The Jungle Book 2
    The franchise is cheapened by Disney's crass commercialism in releasing material that, by rights, should have gone straight to video.
  43. Spy Kids
    Energetic and slickly done, but also somewhat soulless.
  44. The Grey Zone
    Nelson certainly passes muster for sincerity but, unfortunately, his movie doesn't have the same clear-cut quality.
  45. L.A. Story
    Taxes the threshold of acceptable cuteness.
  46. Great Expectations
    There's nothing wrong, nor particularly right about the experience. It just sits there, like a Nike ad.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Club Dread
    Of course, the film still may be too bloody and crass for some, and it's by no means hilarious, but all things considered, Club Dread lives up to expectations, which were never really that high to begin with.
  48. Windtalkers
    For all this potential, and the appealing presence of Nicolas Cage and newcomer Adam Beach, Windtalkers remains almost obstinately flat.
  49. What Women Want
    Gibson and the overexposed Hunt don't exactly burn up the screen, not that it much matters. The charm isn't in the relationship, it's in Gibson's puckish appeal.
  50. Ronin
    Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.
  51. The Siege
    Most of the fault rests with the script, which gets to this issue late and feels only perfunctory, more interested in the jolt of the image than the jolt of the idea.
  52. Cherish
    This is a downbeat, indulgent and self-consciously quirky little movie.
  53. The Isle
    "Spring, Summer" fans should only have their appreciation of that film expanded by seeing this rougher take on similar themes.
  54. The Newton Boys
    It trickles and moseys about on its old good time, punctuated by guffaws and thigh-slapping and the occasional eyeball-blasting jolt from the white lightning, but never really manages to achieve the formal status of "story."
  55. Bride of the Wind
    It has moments of humor, some of them intentional, and it occasionally tugs at the heartstrings. Yet it ultimately makes real history feel ridiculously improbable.
  56. Life as a House
    Built with fine materials and boasts a gorgeous ocean view. Unfortunately the family dramedy's design is overblown and the construction is pretty flimsy.
  57. At First Sight
    A love boat afloat on the vast cinematic ocean that sloshes back and forth between the stinko and the fabulous.
  58. Femme Fatale
    A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.
  59. The Transporter
    Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Addicted to Love
    Like a cute version of Jekyll and Hyde.
  61. Ghosts of Mars
    For those so inclined, it's nice to see the girl and the gangsta -- not the gunslinger -- save the day.
  62. Psycho
    This Psycho seems a little nuts.
  63. Suicide Kings
    The mixture of tension, yuks and horrific violence at times reminds one of nothing more than a poor man's "Pulp Fiction."
  64. Heartbreakers
    A sporadically amusing romp modeled on "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."
  65. Dead Man on Campus
    The bad news is that the opening credits, which make sick and darkly comic allusions to suicide, are the best thing about the film.
  66. The Parent Trap
    There is still a self-consciousness and a forced quality to much of the humor that this TPT redux just can't shake.
  67. Mighty Aphrodite
    In this loser-and-the-whore story line, Allen's sensibilities have taken a turn for the nasty.
  68. The Truth About Charlie
    Newton may not be a great actor, either, but she's full of life and charm. She's the only thing holding this movie together at all.
  69. Summer of Sam
    If there's any moral to this sorry story, perhaps Lee's stealth-message is it: Even when it's not about race, it is.
  70. He Got Game
    The problem, sadly, is that the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
  71. Ghost
    It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.
  72. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    Both lead players are appealing and attractive enough to make an otherwise tepid movie at least un-excruciating.
  73. 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.
  74. 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.
  75. Zoolander
    A sometimes inspired but sputtering parody of the fashion industry. It's desperate to please, yet never unzips the fancy pants of haute couture.
  76. The Claim
    Nicely acted, wonderfully scenic but emotionally vapid.
  77. In This World
    It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.
  78. Anything Else
    Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.
  79. Forces of Nature
    Unhappily, the attractive twosome never give into the pull, just as this coquettish variant of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" never arrives at its promised destination.
  80. The Anniversary Party
    A celebration of the actor's art – but not the dramatist's.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Guru
    A spirited rally in the final reel can't quite overcome the damage.
  82. Bulletproof Monk
    One of those motley movies that borrows from just about everywhere.
  83. In & Out
    The movie gradually peters out.
  84. A Beautiful Mind
    Instead of an originally conceived movie that reflects Nash's troubled but brilliant mind, we have one of those formulaically rendered Important Subject movies -- the kind that seem exclusively designed for Best Picture nominations.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Practical Magic
    It's not that the movie isn't fun in spots; it's just a TV-ready mix of camp and curdle.
  86. Trainspotting
    The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.
  87. Meet Joe Black
    Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt, is a near-death experience: Time seems to stop as we stiffen in our seats and the actors all whisper as if they're at a wake.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snow Dogs
    A throwaway movie, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, if you have a soft spot for man's best friend, it's a pretty good throwaway movie.
  89. Holy Man
    There just aren't many laughs in this slack dramedy, and what yuks there are are fairly low-wattage.
  90. Simon Birch
    The film does not jerk tears as much as it knocks you down and runs away with them.
  91. Ready to Rumble
    Bizarre yet popular.
  92. The Dancer Upstairs
    The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.
  93. The Perfect Score
    The comedy about a coterie of high school seniors plotting to steal the answers to the dreaded standardized test talks a pretty good game, but in the end the numbers just don't add up to much.
  94. Bad Boys II
    Might be considered three action sequences and four comedy routines in search of a story.
  95. Soul Plane
    Only fitfully funny, and it makes up for what it lacks in genuine humor by overdosing viewers with outrageous sexuality and outsize stereotypes.
  96. Solaris
    Even by the art film standards it apes, Solaris lacks conviction. And although it's meant to be restrained and free of emotional hysteria, the result is a movie that pretty much lies dead on the screen for an hour and a half.
  97. The Princess Diaries
    The movie updates Disney's blueprint without altering it in any meaningful way.
  98. The Myth of Fingerprints
    The film has a kind of echo-filled emptiness to it that some will take as profundity and others as mere emptiness.
  99. Swiri
    The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.
    • Washington Post
  100. Storytelling
    The lower your expectations, the more you'll enjoy it.
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