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 5.4 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. Metroland
    The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]
    • Washington Post
  2. Cookie's Fortune
    Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.
  3. The Out-of-Towners
    There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.
  4. 10 Things I Hate About You
    It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.
  5. The Matrix
    One big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure flick.
  6. Edtv
    The movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.
  7. The Mod Squad
    Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.
  8. A Walk on the Moon
    It's just a simple, actorly drama about big, gaping emotional needs and the consequences a woman can face -- particularly during the 1960s -- for simply owning up to them.
  9. 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.
  10. Ravenous
    The film is one of those accursed self-styled "outrageous" comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847.
  11. The King and I
    An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.
  12. True Crime
    The geological equivalent of an albatross around the neck. It's another of those Warner Bros. productions that are heavy on star iconography and production values but AWOL on story.
  13. Wing Commander: Space Will Never Be the Same
    Cinematic sleeping pill.
  14. The Deep End of the Ocean
    The movie's a floating longboat that ought to be ignited and pushed out to sea, Viking style.
  15. The Rage: Carrie 2
    Only reason to watch this: the grisly reward Irving receives for being in this picture.
  16. Baby Geniuses
    The laughs are few, far between and pretty darn faint in this comedy.
  17. The Corruptor
    After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]
    • Washington Post
  18. Analyze This
    A pretty woeful affair...a sitcom disguised as a movie.
  19. Cruel Intentions
    The original was about social manipulation as blood sport. Amazing how easily it transports, themes intact, to our blighted decade, and to our children.
  20. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.
  21. 200 Cigarettes
    A twentysomething comedy with a brain-dead script, unflattering lighting and 16 performers in search of a scriptwriter...[It] feels like one-sixth of an idea stretched to the breaking point.
  22. The Other Sister
    The Other Sister is sanctimonious, sanitized fare primarily preoccupied with patting its own back and plucking our heartstrings.
  23. 8MM
    It's sickeningly violent!
  24. Office Space
    A knowing, somewhat slight, often hilarious sendup of cubicle culture.
  25. October Sky
    Paint-by-numbers feel-gooder, in which Homer and his friends decide to win a national science fair for their little town and, ultimately, for America.
  26. Jawbreaker
    Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.
  27. Blast from the Past
    A mediocre comic romance.
  28. Message in a Bottle
    There's only one thing to do with this "Bottle": Put a cork in it.
  29. My Favorite Martian
    My Favorite Martian never achieves anything that resembles farcical consistency, let alone farcical bliss, but it has enough playful nonsense scattered around a hit-and-miss scenario to rationalize a kiddie matinee excursion. [12 Feb 1999, p.C16]
    • Washington Post
  30. Simply Irresistible
    The dialogue is fast but bad, the acting is loud but awful and the morality is chaste but unromantic. As for the food, it looks vulgar.
  31. Payback
    We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.
  32. Gloria
    A classic like this deserves to be unearthed! After all, this picture is likely to command a pedestal of its own at the local video store. Just check for shelves marked either "Sharon Stone" or "Staff's Worst Picks of 1999."
  33. Playing by Heart
    An amateurish jumble of romantic and tear-jerking overtures from novice writer-director Willard Carroll. [28 Jan 1999, p.M20]
    • Washington Post
  34. Virus
    Everything in it is a cliche including the end.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Varsity Blues
    This flick has modest ambitions, but it delivers the goods in a fresh manner.
  36. At First Sight
    It's sheer piffle, a disingenuous romance with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino that's all sap and no sizzle.
  37. The Thin Red Line
    A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.
  38. Affliction
    Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.
  39. Hilary and Jackie
    The movie is exquisitely directed by Anand Tucker in an anti-documentary style that sometimes fractures the time sequence, sometimes re-creates moments impressionistically instead of objectively and is vivid in style.
  40. Stepmom
    It's not without moments of wit and powerful emotion, but somehow Stepmom never feels either real enough to move us deeply or bubbly enough to make us forget our woes.
  41. A Civil Action
    A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.
  42. Patch Adams
    There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.
  43. Down in the Delta
    Down in the Delta is as savory as a slowly stirred gumbo, a heartfelt saga of family and forgiveness directed by America's best-loved living poet, Maya Angelou. The spices are plentiful and the taste complex, but there's nothing fancy about this cultural icon's down-home cooking. [25 Dec 1998, p.C01]
    • Washington Post
  44. The Theory of Flight
    The Theory of Flight, an unlikely marriage of malady movie and romantic comedy, never quite soars, but beats its wings with the desperate tenacity of a wounded butterfly. Alas, the proportion of lift to drag isn't quite enough to defy the gravity of its subject.
    • Washington Post
  45. You've Got Mail
    Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.
    • Washington Post
  46. The Prince of Egypt
    As a rule, the drawn and computer-animated imagery is top notch and seamlessly integrated, but the central characters' tawny complexions and the often chiaroscuro lighting sometimes obscure all but the whites of their eyes and their pearl-perfect teeth.
  47. A Simple Plan
    But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.
  48. Shakespeare in Love
    The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!
  49. Rushmore
    Weird, warm, monumentally entertaining comedy.
  50. Jack Frost
    Crass, dumbed down and stickily sentimental, it's a flavorless confection that clearly had too many chefs tugging at the taffy.
  51. Little Voice
    Little Voice may be more of a confection than a square meal, but it's proof of how good a dish can be when the ingredients are of the highest order.
  52. Psycho
    This Psycho seems a little nuts.
  53. Home Fries
    You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."
  54. Very Bad Things
    It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.
  55. 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.
  56. Babe: Pig in the City
    This is hardly your same old trough of slop. Babe nonetheless prevails, demonstrating once again "how a kind and steady heart can heal a sorry world."
  57. Waking Ned Devine
    Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.
  58. Celebrity
    It is this sense of real life blurring with make-believe that Allen's film is really playing with, like a kitten toying with a scared mouse. Back and forth he bats the subject, moving between reality, illusion and the imitation of reality with a deft touch that may bruise but never kills.
  59. Central Station
    A touching and unusual road movie-cum-buddy film.
  60. The Rugrats Movie
    Dizzy, delightful and just a bit deviant, "The Rugrats Movie" blends all the sarcastic sensibility of "The Simpsons" with the old-fashioned silliness of Soupy Sales.
  61. Enemy of the State
    The dazzle doesn't make up, however, for the movie's lack of depth.
  62. 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.
  63. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
    More in the dumb and dumber tradition of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" sequels.
  64. Velvet Goldmine
    In trying to compose a poetic love letter to a time of liberation and freedom, Haynes has merely conjured up memories of druggy excess, egotism and tight trousers. The only mementos worth saving from the experience are available on the soundtrack.
  65. 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.
  66. The Waterboy
    Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.
  67. Elizabeth
    Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.
  68. Gods and Monsters
    Eminently watchable thanks to strong performances from its three leads (McKellen, Redgrave, Fraser).
  69. Living Out Loud
    What little grace there is in Living Out Loud (and there isn't much) is all in LaGravenese's script, not on the screen.
  70. American History X
    A mousy little nothing of a picture.
  71. Life Is Beautiful
    While it celebrates the triumph of humor, invention and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful is not the transporting experience it might have been. Benigni knows how to make us laugh, but he has not yet figured out how to make us cry.
  72. Pleasantville
    Lacks the edge and depth of a truly inspired work.
  73. Apt Pupil
    Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Days
    But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.
  75. Happiness
    It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.
  76. Beloved
    Powerful, depressing and very, very long. At close to three hours, it virtually enslaves an audience, which may be part of the point.
  77. Practical Magic
    Director Griffin Dunne lacks a clear vision, torn between blithe spirits and brimstone, between madcap and macabre. But then what does it matter when there's so little magic on screen anyhow? That is unless you count making audiences disappear.
  78. Holy Man
    There just aren't many laughs in this slack dramedy, and what yuks there are are fairly low-wattage.
  79. Slam
    Director Marc Levin's shaky, hand-held camera lends "Slam" an unvarnished, documentary feel. The script – credited not only to Levin, Bonz Malone and Richard Stratton, but to acclaimed performance poets Sohn and Williams – is dense and difficult.
  80. What Dreams May Come
    Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.
  81. A Night at the Roxbury
    I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.
  82. Antz
    Sorry, Antz has no show-stopping song and dance numbers, no catchy melodies and no love songs either. The score, made up of old standards, does, however, enhance one of the movie's wittier episodes.
  83. Clay Pigeons
    Upon this fine mess shines Janeane Garofalo like a ray of sarcastic sunlight as FBI agent Shelby...With her gift for sweet bile, the sardonic Garofalo makes every second on screen a treasure to be cherished.
  84. Ronin
    Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.
  85. Urban Legend
    It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.
  86. Pecker
    It's also sweet, sentimental, rather funny and, as John Waters films go, surprisingly gentle.
  87. Monument Ave.
    Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]
    • Washington Post
  88. One True Thing
    Admirably restrained melodrama.
  89. Rush Hour
    A misbegotten marriage of sweet and sour.
  90. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    The events of the movie are filament-thin and insubstantial but, like fine silk threads, they weave together a fabric of surpassing warmth and texture. [25 Sep 1998, Pg.N.63]
    • Washington Post
  91. Permanent Midnight
    Screenwriter David Veloz makes his debut behind the camera with this stale and stodgily paced depiction of Stahl's highs and lows. The story, which Veloz also wrote, unfolds via a series of momentum-draining flashbacks. [18 Sep 1998, p.C07]
    • Washington Post
  92. Rounders
    And while it's intermittently engaging, the drama's flatter than a sucker's wallet.
  93. Simon Birch
    A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.
  94. 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.
  95. 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.
  96. Your Friends & Neighbors
    The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.
  97. Next Stop Wonderland
    It's the individual characters, so carefully crafted, who count, as opposed to a tidy conclusion.
  98. Blade
    A vulgar attempt to revamp the undead genre by introducing computer-generated splatter and a casketful of themes from genetic tinkering to conspiracy theories.
  99. Slums of Beverly Hills
    Like its Southern California setting, the sunny semi-autobiography is tempered with just the right touch of Jenkins's smoggy cynicism.
  100. 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.
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