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. Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    Those who are only mildly curious, I fear, will be put to sleep or bewildered by the artsy and often pointless visuals.
  2. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    This mid-level, pretty-but-not-hugely-funny Allen film slips into the top spot by regretful default. I enjoyed every single second of it, a little bit.
  3. 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.
  4. Lucía, Lucía
    I love a good story, too, but I prefer one that actually goes somewhere (although, as joy rides to nowhere are concerned, this one is a beaut).
  5. Secret Window
    This Window ultimately feels like one most of us have climbed through before.
  6. The Big Kahuna
    The movie isn't about anything except acting, and although the acting it shows is brilliant, it makes exactly the point that is the opposite of the point it thought it was making: Acting isn't enough.
  7. Showgirls
    To take Showgirls that seriously (as either trash-art or appalling pornography) wouldn't be worth the exertion.
  8. View from the Top
    It's meant to be harmless fluff. It is.
  9. Evil Dead II
    The acting is straight out of '50s B movies. The exposition is clumsy, the sound track corny, the denouement silly. Then again, who said bad taste was easy? [13 Apr 1987, Style, p.b4]
  10. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    Buffed and waxed to within an inch of its life, Stella registers as more of a sequence of slick commercials than an actual drama.
  11. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Paints an often grave but sometimes hilarious picture of a hugely powerful network.
  12. 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.
  13. Gattaca
    Gattaca may be all done up in new-fangled notions, but underneath all the guff about designer babies, it rests on a notion that was a staple of the original "Star Trek" series.
  14. Tuck Everlasting
    Rather than sparkle and dance, it plods.
  15. Private Parts
    Private Parts, lifted from Stern's best-selling autobiography, is a choppy amalgam of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Father Knows Best" and "Network."
  16. Very Bad Things
    When it is good, the film by "Chicago Hope" actor Peter Berg is very, very good, but when it is bad it is horrid.
  17. Vanity Fair
    Unfortunately, Nair's film doesn't so much end as fall off a cliff, the ultimate victim of viewers' heightened expectations that this briskly paced story will take them someplace -- other than around the block in a horse-drawn carriage.
  18. Anna and the King
    Fails as the big-screen romance it wants to be. The main problem: There's only one heart between the principals, and it beats solely in Chow's chest.
  19. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    The tart, often jauntily profane dialogue and sharp interactions of the present-day relationships give Divine Secrets its occasional zip; when Khouri takes us back in time, especially to the Ya-Yas' early childhood, the movie flags.
  20. The Time Machine
    Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.
  21. 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.
  22. Dirty Dancing
    Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.
  23. In the Cut
    At once belabored and muddled movie, whose dreamy visual style and daring sexual material can't elide glaring inconsistencies in tone, plot and logic.
  24. Paycheck
    A fun if dumb movie.
  25. Runaway Bride
    Fans of Gere and Roberts may not care about the movie's many implausibilities and other shortcomings because the stars do indeed sparkle like the bubbles in wedding champagne. But the rest of us will find the vintage too sweet.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Happy Accidents
    The actors make a good team in this film, and they're playing well-defined characters, but the script is so repetitive that we get mighty impatient for the mystery to be resolved.
  27. Pay It Forward
    It's too bad about the ending because, until then, Pay It Forward... is Hollywood feel-goodism at its best.
  28. A Slipping-Down Life
    As it plays, it simply feels like a kind of cop-out. Nobody changes that much.
  29. The Thirteenth Floor
    Rusnak, who was the second-unit director of "Godzilla," brings plenty of style to this ambitious yet utterly anticlimactic thumb-sucker.
  30. Pretty in Pink
    Hughes seems to be plugged into teens' view of their own teenness, and moment by moment the movie can be touchingly real. But movies are more than moments, and in the end Pretty in Pink is as fraudulent as the junk it's supposed to transcend.
  31. Clerks
    Amateurishly acted, clumsily edited and slapped together out of what looks like surveillance camera footage, the thing bumps along not so much on talent as on audacity.
  32. Daredevil
    Like Affleck himself, the film is perfectly satisfactory without being deeply satisfying.
  33. Dudley Do-Right
    Performances feel too manufactured to be charming.
  34. In the Bedroom
    Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.
  35. Mallrats
    I'm guessing even die-hard "Clerks" fans will find this only-in-America stuff only partially satisfying, like something they gorged on at the Eatery, then wished they hadn't.
  36. The Recruit
    It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.
  37. Seven Years in Tibet
    An overextended, episodic disappointment.
  38. Wag the Dog
    So insidey it's almost parochial.
  39. The Ladykillers
    Will appeal most strongly to viewers who think Tom Hanks, who plays a thief and a potential murderer, can do no wrong.
  40. The Brown Bunny
    This bizarre little diversion will soon scamper into the wild grass, never to be seen again.
  41. Proof of Life
    In Proof of Life it's the same old story, a fight for love and glory, except that time goes by . . . slowwwwly.
  42. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    This is a sophisticated movie, but one whose sophistication is surprisingly simple-minded.
  43. Equilibrium
    Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's easy to do well. Screenwriter-turned-director Kurt Wimmer has a hard time keeping his actors from, well, acting a lot of the time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Training Day
    A taut, high-velocity film that departs from the action flick template by having actual ideas.
  45. Tea with Mussolini
    Watching Tea with Mussolini is probably a lot like having tea with Mussolini would be: never dull but neither, I imagine, an entirely pleasant experience.
  46. Rush Hour 2
    It's about half as much fun as the original.
  47. Contact
    The best moments occur when -- as in reality -- we're still in the dark. As soon as the movie gets to its version of a punch line, it turns into another Hollywood vehicle spinning aimlessly in space.
  48. A Bug's Life
    It's an infusion of zip that's sorely needed, because the chief deficiency of A Bug's Life so far is its blandness….The film's other weakness is the low-octane vocal performances of its leading cast.
  49. The Haunted Mansion
    Eddie Murphy is less offensive than Dr. Seuss.
  50. Spun
    It's like the longest just-say-no commercial in history, only you'd say no not because drugs are evil but because you don't want to get a serious foot fungus.
  51. The Usual Suspects
    Nothing more than an over-designed lobster pot. After following the beckoning twists and turns, you're left trapped and more than a little disappointed for getting in so deep.
  52. Rain Man
    Hoffman blows costar Cruise right off the screen...Instead of playing off or with Hoffman (a greenhorn's smartest strategy), Cruise tends to play at him, flailing and swearing like a spoiled, grounded pilot in "Top Gun II."
  53. Envy
    One of those cinematic curiosities that almost always fade quickly, but that will usually find a devoted cult audience once it hits that peculiar Elysian Field known as the aftermarket.
  54. 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.
    • 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.
  56. Brother to Brother
    Works far better as an idea than its execution; this has to do with the difficulties of making profound statements with limited budgets and technology, and also grappling with the still-growing sensibilities of an emerging writer.
  57. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Preaches most effectively to the converted.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Independence Day
    Cruises to an upbeat ending but furnishes no more of the wicked thrills of the initial hour. Particularly disappointing is the human contrivance employed in the defeat of the vastly superior enemy.
  59. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    At its best, Woman Thou Art Loosed conveys the unfathomable meaning behind those words.
  60. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    It has great mood and a sense of the toughness of the London underworld, but it never really gets into gear.
  61. Masked and Anonymous
    A fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerizing pop culture curio.
  62. Gozu
    Miike's fans, those used to his strange ways, will certainly find Gozu an amusing addition to the oeuvre. All others will be bewildered beyond expression.
  63. White Chicks
    But it's not what the Wayans brothers do, it's how they do it. They do it funny.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sleepover
    Not overwhelmingly original or funny.
  65. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    It isn't that Bobby Jones is especially bad. It's just not especially good, either.
  66. Instinct
    A sloppily structured, snoozily paced psychodrama about living in harmony with nature and all the rest of that tree-hugging hooey.
  67. Save the Last Dance
    Takes its cues from the musical dramas of the '70s, but this otherwise engaging young-adult romance never quite catches Saturday night fever.
  68. The Ring
    Has its creepy moments, but also its cliches.
  69. Bubba Ho-tep
    A leisurely paced, subtly funny, though verbally crude chamber piece.
  70. A Man Apart
    While you're enduring the usual formulaic yada yada -- at least there are yuks to enjoy.
  71. Princess Mononoke
    As spectacular as it is dense and as dense as it is colorful and as colorful as it is meaningless and as meaningless as it is long.
  72. Basic
    Entertainment more suitable for the living room than the movie theater.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Human Traffic
    Wildly uneven--inventive and clever moments are interspersed with dull and predictable ones.
  74. Enemy at the Gates
    Still, if the movie is mediocre, the history it represents is not. For that correction to our collective Western amnesia, then, Annaud deserves some special award.
  75. The Salton Sea
    Adheres to the whacked notion that Hollywood does drugs so the rest of us don't have to.
  76. Dreamcatcher
    All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.
  77. September 11
    Of the pieces, two are first-rate, a few more are amusing or provocative, and the rest are actively annoying.
  78. Fierce Creatures
    You leave Creatures with the unsettling sensation of being highly tickled yet greatly dissatisfied.
  79. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Intriguing, inspired, flawed, misbegotten and fascinating -- all of these qualities apply to the movie, at one point or another.
  80. Connie and Carla
    Broad and cheesy, yet it is not utterly without a kind of junk-food appeal.
  81. Van Helsing
    The effect for viewers is that of having inserted one's head in a kettledrum that is being pounded on by drunken monkeys.
  82. Beijing Bicycle
    Too simple for its own good.
  83. The Clearing
    Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.
  84. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    Potter-philes are sure to get what they want -- if what they want is, in fact, an exacting version of J.K. Rowling's charming children's fantasy. If it's enchantment they are after, that's quite another matter.
  85. The Lion King
    Shakespearean in tone, epic in scope, it seems more appropriate for grown-ups than for kids. If truth be told, even for adults it is downright strange.
  86. Never Been Kissed
    Predictable, slightly painful and as embarrassing as all get-out.
  87. Rush Hour
    A misbegotten marriage of sweet and sour.
  88. Signs
    Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.
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