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. Bobby Deerfield
    An uncoordinated tear jerker certain to double up cynics and touch only those fans who prefer their favorites lost in a narcissistic fog. [26 Oct 1977, p.B1]
    • Washington Post
  2. Satisfaction
    If the movie had any pace or energy, or even if the music were something other than tepid covers of songs, most of which were written before anybody in the cast was in rompers, then it might have been fun just to watch the actors strut around sexily onstage, living the rock life. But the thing just lies there. [15 Feb 1988, p.D4]
    • Washington Post
  3. Nightbreed
    Barker the filmmaker resorts to most of the horror cliches he chillingly sidesteps in his writing.
  4. Outland
    The conventions that worked for High Noon break down in the high-tech atmosphere of Outland and the story seems trite and dinky. [23 May 1981, p.C6]
    • Washington Post
  5. Strange Days
    One imagines that Bigelow's story conferences with ex-husband Cameron (maker of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "True Lies") and Cocks were free of such apparently anti-entertainment concepts as "character development," "predictability" and "believability." [13 Oct 1995, p.N44]
    • Washington Post
  6. Out for Justice
    Though it boasts a big budget and is indeed busier and more densely populated than Seagal's previous efforts, Out for Justice feels cheap, not only in its production but in its content. It's "Scarface" without a point of view; it's shallow plot cluttered with extreme violence, both verbal and physical.
  7. SpaceCamp
    A kind of landmark of exquisite bad timing. And that's the most intriguing thing about it. [6 June 1986, p.D3]
    • Washington Post
  8. The Glimmer Man
    The plot of The Glimmer Man involves not only the Family Man but Our Evil Secret Government, the Russian Mafia and Rich Powerful Politicians -- the three stooges of action cinema in the '90s.
  9. Endless Love
    And the person who seems least convinced of the validity of the passion is Brooke Shields, who looks ravishing but is most charming when she's childishly affectionate or aloof -- thus blithely making her partner, with his burning eyes, look demented. One begins to feel that making her forgive arson and worse in the name of true love is forcing the naivete of adults on a sensible child. [17 July 1981, p.17]
    • Washington Post
  10. Eye of the Needle
    The tussle between David and The Needle seems to release a Pandora's Box of outrageous scenes. [24 July 1981, p.D8]
    • Washington Post
  11. Happy Birthday to Me
    This film will be a treat for those to whom the highlight of the dramatic season so far was "Friday the 13th, Part 2." [15 May 1981, p.19]
    • Washington Post
  12. Shock Treatment
    All the redeeming qualities of "Rocky Horror"--naive wit, enthusiastic invention and absurb plotline--have been approximated in Shock Treatment without ever approaching the original. Unlike its inspiration, which fans have returned to time and again, Shock Treatment is hard to sit through once. [28 May 1982, p.C4]
    • Washington Post
  13. The Burning
    The repeated fake-outs even lead one to entertain the fond delusion that The Burning might be absent-minded enough to diverge into harmless farce and end up as a rehash of "Meatballs." Regrettably, once Cropsy strikes again, he can't seem to stop, and the movie keeps him company by going methodically beserk. [28 May 1981, p.D11]
    • Washington Post
  14. Ice Castles
    Ice Castles has been shamelessly, and none too slickly, engineered to empty the tear ducts of customers primed to blubber at the sight of a Pavlovian cliche. [03 Feb 1979, p.D7]
    • Washington Post
  15. The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia
    After getting off to a wretched start, the film settles down in mid-passage and grows unexpectedly appealing. Down the stretch it reverts to faltering form. The best policy might be to go about 30 minutes late and leave about 15 minutes early. [7 Aug 1981, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  16. Cutter's Way
    The intelligence and artistry with which Cutter's Way dresses up the top few cliches of the 1980s is amazing. This is a film with brittle dialogue, complicated acting and visual subtlety in the service of a trite and unworkable story. [20 Nov 1981, p.21]
    • Washington Post
  17. S.O.B.
    The problem with S.O.B. is that it reveals another sort of failure on Edwards' part: his fondness for dwelling on this low point in his career. He neglects to update the scenario or liberate it from the self-pity he overindulged in at the time. In fact, it's residual self-pity that undermines S.O.B. as a promising satire of Hollywood mores and hypocrisies. Edwards' tendency to feel sorry for himself keeps intruding on the potential wackiness. [2 July 1981, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
  18. Opening Night
    It could be the basis of a genuinely interesting drama, for stage or screen, about conjugal relations in the theater. Obviously. John Cassavetes is the last person in the world likely to perceive or write that drama. [15 Apr 1978, p.C9]
    • Washington Post
  19. Project X
    There isn't enough magic in the bag this time. Although Parkes and Lasker produce a set of primates guaranteed to charm the upholstery off the theater seats, there is little else.
  20. She's Having a Baby
    In general, if it weren't for the good will we feel toward the actors, the movie would be intolerably feeble. It's nearly intolerable as it is. The only other plus is Stewart Copeland's jaunty, percussive score. It's this sort of thing that's giving maternity a bad name.
  21. Quicksilver
    According to the press kit, "Producer Daniel Melnick's personal stamp on films has always been to avoid the obvious, the cliche'." Uh, Dan . . . you lost your stamp.
  22. Corvette Summer
    The premise breaks down just at the point when it needs to be cleverly elaborated into a story. [05 Aug 1978, p.H1]
    • Washington Post
  23. Eyes of Laura Mars
    You find yourself chewing over Laura Mars after the lights come up. Unfortunately, it's the kind of chew that leaves your jaw feeling tired and your mouth tasting sour. [03 Aug 1978, p.B6]
    • Washington Post
  24. Lady Beware
    There is a televisiony smallness in its focus -- and while director Karen Arthur treats her story seriously, she has only a rudimentary feel for the medium and fails to bring the suspense elements to a boil.
  25. Funny Farm
    The problem is that the director, George Roy Hill, tries to construct a real universe around Chase and his costar. And for a time he's able to give the comedy some snap. But after the couple settle in their new home and nightmare piles on nightmare, the picture deteriorates into a shtickfest and the sense of reality drags on the proceedings.
  26. For Keeps?
    It's all as cliche'd as "A Summer Place," a better movie even if it was soap opera. For Keeps is a soapbox opera, and the slats are about to fall through. Writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue are as wishy-washy about their issues as they are their heroes. And they serve up the usual "you can have it all" scenario. After the teen-agers suffer with didies and postpartum depression, it's off to college to prepare for future careers. [16 Jan 1988, p.B5]
    • Washington Post
  27. Bright Lights, Big City
    The movie is like a Porsche outfitted with a lawn mower engine; there's not even enough juice to get the machine out of the driveway.
  28. Punchline
    It's not surprising that Punchline is mostly banal; it's constructed on a banality -- namely, that clowns suffer.
  29. Loverboy
    The film's premise is hopelessly ludicrous. Plus, though Patrick Dempsey is an agile light comedian, he's hardly plausible as a lady-killer. Patrick Swayze he's not. Alfalfa, maybe.
  30. Casualties of War
    But don't let a little gore, misogyny, factbusting, counterfeit hipness and screenwriter David ("Streamers") Rabe's public disassociation from the project get in your way. Enjoy Penn's actor imitations. Or Fox's raspy earnestness. Or scorer Ennio Morricone's sentimental mortars. Or a bafflingly anticlimactic final sequence in which veteran Fox appears to come to terms with himself with the help of an Asian woman and a dropped scarf. Is that what you call a wrap?
  31. The Freshman
    No actor has ever been more contemptuous of his profession -- or the movie business as a whole -- than Brando; to him, acting is nothing, and his performance here shows his self-loathing, his desire to trash himself and his accomplishments. This isn't self-parody, it's self-desecration.
  32. Nightmares
    Nightmares, an anthology of suspense shorts, is about as scary as getting up to face another day. It's teddy-bear terrifying, definitely not for those who're into blood and guts. [09 Sep 1983, p.23]
    • Washington Post
  33. King of New York
    [Abel Ferrara's] specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.
  34. Fade to Black
    Fade to Black washes out by relying too heavily on assocations from older films. The excerpts from old movies are far more vivid and evocative than the host attraction. [12 Nov 1980, p.B7]
    • Washington Post
  35. Color of Night
    An increasingly ridiculous hybrid of sexy romance, murder mystery and psychological mumbo jumbo, it's another bad spin on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," with plummetings from high-up places, repressed guilt and love for a mysterious woman. But its watchability is more attributable to comic relief from Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren and others than the ballyhooed steam between Willis and March.
  36. Exotica
    At its worst, which ends up being most of the time, the movie traps us in art-house pretentiousness, as we're obliged to follow the yearnings and abstract corruptions of the urban zestless.
  37. The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
    It's a like a film made by people who don't really care, for an audience of people who don't really care. It stars Tim Conway and Don Knotts, who are not exercising their legitimate comic talents beyond one expression each: Conway crosses his eyes, and Knotts makes his eyeballs disappear upwards. [13 July 1979, p.25]
    • Washington Post
  38. Return from Witch Mountain
    It's a frequent theme of bad children's pictures that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is the opposite of unspoiled childhood goodness,and here it is again, only weakly contradicted by the one pleasant actor in the film, Jack Soo, as an idealistic truant officer. It's as if kiddies' mindless escape films, unlike adults', needed to carry their own internal justification. [31 March 1978, p.15]
    • Washington Post
  39. The Sandlot
    Has enough dog slobber, curdled hurl and toe-jam jokes to keep its target audience amused. Older kids and overgrown ones too probably will notice that nothing much ever happens in this belabored suburban variation on "The Little Rascals."
  40. Innocent Blood
    Like one of the victims, Innocent Blood feels about five quarts low.
  41. Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
    As one-joke movies go, it's fairly inoffensive but also never better than mildly diverting.
  42. A Kid in King Arthur's Court
    Because of the square, lackluster way that director Michael Gottleib has staged his material, the whole production seems sort of limp and perfunctory.
  43. Fright Night
    A chiller that, except for the last half hour of ghoulish effects, is undeadly dull. [02 Aug 1985, p.23]
    • Washington Post
  44. Night of the Creeps
    Unfortunately, the film's stalking hordes of zombies aren't the only lifeless things about it. [03 Nov 1986, p.B2]
    • Washington Post
  45. Witchboard
    A thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers.
  46. The Craft
    Despite all their toil and trouble, the tale leaves us more bothered than bewitched.
  47. Body of Evidence
    She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.
  48. Deadly Friend
    On the whole, Deadly Friend is a routine horror movie, poorly photographed (by old-time cinematographer Philip Lathrop) and poorly performed (with the exception of New York stage actress Anne Twomey, as Paul's mother).
  49. The Good Son
    Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.
  50. Comes a Horseman
    Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]
    • Washington Post
  51. Magic
    In short, Magic is unworthy of its name. It's frightfully feeble and obvious. [11 Nov 1978, p.F11]
    • Washington Post
  52. The Boys in Company C
    The finished film has no thematic or emotional integrity. It flip-flops withdesperate hypocrisy between clownish antics and indignant orations. [09 Feb 1978, p.B13]
    • Washington Post
  53. Judgment Night
    Perhaps the ultimate "Judgment" comes from Estevez, who observes: "Nothing about tonight makes sense."
  54. Malice
    This latest project, a murder mystery scripted by Aaron (A Few Good Men) Sorkin and Scott (Dead Again) Frank, is bilge water.
    • Washington Post
  55. White Palace
    While this sort of thing may have worked in the '30s, by today's standards it's half-baked.
  56. No Man's Land
    A low-horsepower chase movie with Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney...Peter Werner, with plenty of documentaries and "Moonlighting" episodes to his credit, directs this out-of-gas look at the young and the mobile. What this movie needs is more macho, more moxie, more attitude. Fill it up, and make it high testosterone.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Striptease
    Let's hope Bergman leaves the rest of Hiaasen's books alone.
  58. Dick Tracy
    Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.
  59. The Rookie
    In The Rookie, Eastwood's new buddy movie about a couple of cops in the auto theft division, Clint teams up with Charlie Sheen, and he couldn't be more naked in his attempts to connect with a younger generation of moviegoers if he laced up a pair of Reebok Pumps.
  60. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
    Seditious themes aside, the adventure fails mostly because Ward never achieves super- hero status. He never quite lives up to the name RE-MO. Sluggo maybe.
  61. Into the Night
    Into the Night is billed as a comedy-thriller, but the thrills are nothing but a generalized nastiness, the comedy an uneven collection of gags. Few of the jokes have anything to do with the characters (nor, for that matter, do the characters have anything to do with the characters); and few of the thrills have anything to do with the gags.
  62. Falling in Love
    Can contemporary romance be this flat?
  63. Back Roads
    Indeed, you come out of Back Roads feeling more familiar with the configuration of Sally Field's spinal column and chestbone than the character she's struggling to embody.
  64. Suspect
    Suspect doesn't provide even the most basic pleasure that we've come to expect from thrillers -- it's doesn't get our pulse racing. For most of it, we're stuck in what must be the ugliest courtroom in the history of movies, and after a while, it becomes a drag on your spirits.
  65. Back to the Beach
    It's deeply vapid, with the emotional consistency of styling mousse.
  66. Who's That Girl
    Technique counts for a lot in directing a picture like this -- more perhaps than in any other genre -- and Foley doesn't have any. His approach here is to toss things up into the air without caring much where they land. And as a result, the noise they make when they land is not a pretty one.
  67. Ironweed
    Ironweed, the new film by Hector Babenco starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, comes about as close to being an unmitigated waste of talent as any movie in recent memory.
  68. Big Top Pee-wee
    Kleiser has no feel for comedy, and there's no affinity between him and his star. He shoots the material as if he didn't quite get it, and the gags dribble out weakly, without any emphasis or piquancy, as if the camera itself were perplexed by the scene unfolding in front of it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Coca-Cola Kid
    The Coca-Cola Kid starts out as a lively satire of American business, posing a young Harvard MBA as a pin-striped cowboy attempting to claim a piece of the Australian outback for Coca-Cola. But Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, like a ham-handed juggler in a high wind, thwarts his promising idea by tossing up a jumble of plot detours and subplots that never come down. [30 Aug 1985, p.B1]
    • Washington Post
  70. The Mean Season
    Take a conventional, awkwardly arranged thriller, add one part meditation on the power of The Press, spice with crummy photography and crummier music, bake till inedible, and voila! "The Mean Season." [19 Feb 1985, p.B6]
    • Washington Post
  71. Subway
    Subway begins as the world's greatest car stereo commercial and ends as the world's worst concert film. In between is a muzzy tale of doomed love; and when doom lowers its boom here, it feels awfully like relief. Rarely has the excitement of an opening sequence been so quickly piddled away. [22 Nov 1985, p.B7]
    • Washington Post
  72. Agnes of God
    Agnes of God offers little besides its jury-rigged suspense. Oh, there are oodles of cigarette jokes -- Livingston is a chain smoker, Mother Miriam a reformed one -- till you wonder why the acknowledgment to Benson & Hedges in the closing credits didn't come above the title.
  73. Kansas
    In Kansas, Andrew McCarthy and Matt Dillon have a way of taking pages of dialogue and making it sound like ... pages of dialogue.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Compromising Positions
    It's particularly disappointing because Perry -- a talented director whose credits include "David and Lisa," "Diary of a Mad Housewife," "Rancho Deluxe" and "Mommie Dearest" -- has assembled a fine cast whose considerable talents go to waste, smothered by the plodding script and stale social commentary. It's also disappointing because the film opens with such promise: several wonderful scenes, some genuine laughs, snappy dialogue. Then the Novocain sets in. [3 Sept 1985, p.B11]
    • Washington Post
  75. Grandview, U.S.A.
    Grandview, U.S.A., shot in the picturesque small town of Pontiac, Ill., opens with some pleasantly misleading evocations of Breaking Away, then degenerates into one of those blithely cretinous entertainments that leave you despising characters you were presumably meant to like. [08 Aug 1984, p.F9]
    • Washington Post
  76. The River
    Gibson, the thinking man's Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Spacek, a rawboned Raggedy Ann, are nearly silent partners in this largely visual parable. Despite their good looks and best efforts, the film falters. [11 Jan 1985, p.19]
    • Washington Post
  77. The Name of the Rose
    It's a richly appointed production that's hard to take seriously since the monks all look vaguely like Marty Feldman.
  78. City Heat
    Inside this star vehicle there's a real movie screaming for air.
  79. Irreconcilable Differences
    The film aspires to some sort of commentary about the modern problems of career-minded spouses. Shyer and Meyers are trying to tap a modern vein but they don't know where to put the needle; all they get is water. This is a film with Perrier in its veins. [28 Sep 1984, p.C4]
    • Washington Post
  80. Wisdom
    As a thriller, Wisdom is dull; as an examination of a terrorist's psychology, it is, paradoxically, both overly detailed and unilluminating; and as a meditation on the nature of fame in America today, it is portentous in the gloomy manner of what college catalogues call an "all-night bull session." On the other hand, Moore springs to life whenever she's given a good sarcastic line to deliver. And if you stick around till the end, because your date wants to get his money's worth or whatever, there's a doozy of a car chase.
  81. No Mercy
    Count me among those who would be perfectly happy if they never saw another movie in which a big-city cop, fueled by the death of his partner, seeks revenge against a corrupt small-town sheriff, a wily and ruthless pillar of the Establishment, a psychotic killer or (as here) all three. While you're at it, count me among those who would be happy never to see another starring role for Gere, except maybe as Felix in a remake of "The Odd Couple."
  82. Firewalker
    Make a Steven Spielberg clone. Making shoes or making kitsch is The same for those so sold on Resoling others' souls.
  83. Author! Author!
    Eager to seem warmhearted and endearing, Author! Author! is frustrated by Pacino's conspicuous resistance. If anything, this uncharacteristic vehicle illustrates his inability to lighten up an emphatically gloomy, brooding screen presence. [19 Jun 1982, p.C1]
    • Washington Post
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Clan of the Cave Bear
    Mostly, though, the problem with the movie lies in the story, which is slow and episodic. Ayla learns how to use a sling (even though women aren't supposed to hunt). Ayla learns the tricks of the medicine woman. Ayla goes to a Neanderthal convention.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Seduction
    Misleadingly titled, The Seduction is nothing if not lush -- but it also doesn't add up to much. Considering Fairchild's sensual presence, this may not matter. [26 Feb 1982, p.11]
    • Washington Post
  86. Still of the Night
    Still of the Night is a red herring all its own. It's a mystery that isn't a mystery, a thriller that isn't a thriller. What's more bothersome, the corpse is the most animated member of the cast. [17 Dec 1982, p.19]
    • Washington Post
  87. Invaders from Mars
    Despite its occasional sparkle, Invaders From Mars is an overlong movie with a tiny spirit. It plays to a certain smug superiority of an audience nurtured on junky television, and while that smugness is in some ways justified -- movies like the original "Invaders From Mars" had their obvious failings -- it's also, over the course of a feature film, more than a little annoying. The original "Invaders From Mars" did something this spoof never even comes close to -- it scared the heck out of you. That's something Hooper might try accomplishing, before he sets about sending it up.
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