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. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.
  2. Distant
    Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.
  3. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    In keeping with the Smith rules, the movie is irreverent, self-referential, twisted, cheap and tasteless. And, of course, I mean that as the highest compliment.
  4. Memento
    Unforgettable, especially in Pearce's startling performance.
  5. Songs from the Second Floor
    Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.
  6. Mulan
    Gorgeously animated and stirringly told, Disney's Mulan is a timeless story that will delight kids and divert adults with its sweeping scope, emotional intimacy and screwball humor.
  7. The Corporation
    Cogent, scary and, at times, sickening.
  8. Fade to Black
    A spectacular concert documentary that also gives some fascinating insights into the making of "The Black Album."
  9. Rain
    All about undertones, obliqueness and expectancy, about the scent, if you will, of something no one can stop
  10. Open Range
    There's a lot in this movie, simple, big, small and exciting. It's the year's first serious contender for big prizes. What's not to like about this picture?
  11. My Own Private Idaho
    Van Sant's sensibility is wholly original, wholly fresh. "My Own Private Idaho" adds a new ingredient: a kind of boho sweetness. I loved it.
  12. Sling Blade
    Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.
  13. Monster's Ball
    The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.
  14. Toy Story
    Though computer-animated rather than hand-drawn, this wry, rippingly paced buddy movie is as delightful in its own way as any of Walt Disney's traditional fairy tales.
  15. Three Kings
    Enormously entertaining.
  16. The Straight Story
    Cuts a path directly to the heart.
  17. Liberty Heights
    Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.
  18. Elephant
    A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.
  19. The Sixth Sense
    The 11-year-old Osment evokes the boy's terror and awful predicament so memorably, you'll never forget him.
  20. Thelma & Louise
    It spins its wheels in a giddy sort of way, then puts the pedal to the mettle, lays rubber and fairly takes wing.
  21. 21 Grams
    The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.
  22. Lilya 4-Ever
    Lilya's struggle to make a life for herself is both heartbreaking and heart-stirring.
  23. Red Lights
    It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid.
  24. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Truly a movie for world audiences with a message that's devastatingly subtle.
  25. The Thin Red Line
    The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate.
  26. Gods and Monsters
    In a performance of enormous complexity and nuance, emotions seem to race across McKellen's face like hurrying clouds.
  27. Dances with Wolves
    Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.
  28. Elizabeth
    Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.
  29. Full Metal Jacket
    We've seen it all before, most recently in "Gardens of Stone," most romantically in "An Officer and a Gentleman," but never more elegantly than here as Kubrick sustains the athletic ballet of obstacle courses and white-glove inspections for a breathtaking 40 minutes.
  30. This Is Spinal Tap
    Its cleverness is exceptionally congenial and sustained. [13 Apr 1984, p.B1]
    • Washington Post
  31. The Count of Monte Cristo
    That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.
  32. Good Will Hunting
    Director Van Sant, who made the lyrical "Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," returns to his favorite hunting ground -- the subworlds of grimy, poetic lost boys -- and pulls us right in
  33. My Flesh and Blood
    For an agonizing and ultimately transcendent cinematic portrait of sacrifice, love and saving grace, audiences need look no further than this unpretentious and deeply moving film.
  34. Talk to Her
    A movie of technical skill and rare depth of intellect and feeling.
  35. A Room with a View
    Room With a View, with its genteel cliches and its mouth-puckering social commentary, will absolutely please. It is a gorgeous, glimmering film adaptation of E.M. Forster's sweetest novel, an affectionate study of a party of English gone globetrotting, their Baedekers held close like talismans. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]
    • Washington Post
  36. The Ring
    The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.
  37. Intermission
    So full of pep you can't help surrendering to its creative energy.
  38. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Steers refreshingly clear of the usual cliches. Character takes the wheel and dictates the action, not the other way around.
  39. Pieces of April
    This film explores what low-budget films do best: the quirkiness of character, and slightly off-kilter comedy.
  40. Tokyo Godfathers
    Part of the spell cast by this magical film is its ability to make an unvarnished political statement about economic reality and social alienation while, at the same time, seducing its audience into believing in the transformative power of love and the almost supernatural beauty of the everyday.
  41. The Matrix Reloaded
    The Matrix Reloaded is about sensation, not logic. As such, it delivers, in spades, exactly what you should expect from a popcorn flick -- thrills, chills and spills -- plus a little more for good measure, just to keep anyone from whining who might want a beginning, a middle and an end.
  42. The Triplets of Belleville
    Chomet's vision is singularly strange and somber, and one of enormous originality and promise.
  43. In Praise of Love
    I don't pretend to understand a darned thing about Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love...But it's undeniably powerful and, if you're up for the experience, exhilarating.
  44. Amélie
    Amelie is joie de vivre in a nougat.
  45. Working Girl
    A delectable reworking of the ultimate girl's myth, a corporate Cinderella story with shades of a self-made Pygmalion.
  46. Primary Colors
    Guilty, deftly orchestrated fun.
  47. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    It's one heck of a basis for a funny movie.
  48. Tarnation
    You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.
  49. The Road Home
    A beautifully textured, disarmingly simple movie about romantic devotion.
  50. Blue Crush
    A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.
  51. Touching the Void
    Tells a tale of fortitude that comes not from muscle but from the ineffable, bungee-like sinew that is the human spirit.
  52. Liar Liar
    It's a magnificent comic experience.
  53. Malcolm X
    A spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change -- and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film.
  54. Almost Famous
    It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.
  55. The Big Red One
    What the movie may lack in "Saving Private Ryan"-style gloss, it more than makes up for in authenticity, or, in other words, heart.
  56. The Lion King
    This is the Mickey Mouse factory at its finest, with inventive animation, stirring music and a pride of inspired, almost-human animals.
  57. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Watch this film. You may never look at nature indifferently again.
  58. Rushmore
    Weird, warm, monumentally entertaining comedy.
  59. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    If the scope of the film feels small, Girl With a Pearl Earring fills that scope to bursting with subtle glory. It takes things as far as they can -- and should -- go.
  60. Dazed and Confused
    Richard Linklater's satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It's practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era.
  61. Lost in Translation
    It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blair Witch Project
    The Blair Witch Project is terrifying. It's also an exuberant prank of genius.
  63. Do the Right Thing
    A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Taste of Others
    There are some things the French do better than we do, and this small movie is one.
  65. Blade II
    To appreciate the movie, you have to be okay with vampire violence. I don't mean subtle little nips at the neck and, ooooh, it's directed by Werner Herzog.
  66. Ocean's Eleven
    One thoroughbred of a movie. Sleek, well-muscled and brisk, director Steven Soderbergh's newest offering delivers just about everything anyone could possibly want from filmed entertainment -- except deep thought.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moonlight Mile
    It's a combination of good story, nice moments and appealing texture.
  68. Unforgiven
    Exults in the hard-riding romanticism of classic Westerns, but it takes revisionist stock too. It dismounts at places usually left in the dust -- the oppressed lot of women, the loneliness of untended children, adult illiteracy and the horrible last moments of the dying.
  69. I'm Going Home
    Viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise.
  70. Mystic River
    If Mystic River is just a bit overplayed, a tad too highly pitched, it still resonates with grief and fury and feeling.
  71. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    The summer's most rousing action picture.
  72. The Silence of the Lambs
    A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.
  73. Cape Fear
    Martin Scorsese brings honor back to the remake. He shines up this reprise of the original with original brilliance
  74. Gangs of New York
    Scorsese creates a film so resonant that it is both a work of great art and an anthropological document.
  75. The Big Lebowski
    With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.
  76. The Machinist
    Psychological suspense at its finest.
  77. Notre musique
    Notre Musique is really a poetic essay, masterfully intermixing the director's mournful-toned, philosophical narration with documentary and staged moments.
  78. Whale Rider
    Evokes its spirituality with deft strokes and wonderful humor.
  79. Being John Malkovich
    So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive.
  80. The Others
    It's the atmospheric sideshow that earns the highest marks.
  81. Finding Nemo
    May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human.
  82. Dead Poets Society
    Sure, the heroes and villains are arranged in a convenient moral gallery. But the performances, Weir's adroit direction and John Seale's superb cinematography take care of that banality.
  83. Hero
    You can feel the movie's sensibility and its powerful emotions in every aching image, which leaves you so caught up in these ancient times, you're loath to return to present-day normalcy.
  84. Dogville
    It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.
  85. Spider-Man 2
    This movie, directed with precision and an appreciation for (relatively) rich character texture by Sam Raimi, remembers all the fine elements of the original film (and the comic book story). It reprises them perfectly, including wonderfully choreographed, skyscraper-hanging fights.
  86. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Reconfirms Tarantino's status as the master of pop cinema and puts a sense of excitement into the year. He has matched, if not eclipsed, the power and scope of 1994's "Pulp Fiction," though not its human charm.
    • Washington Post
  87. Bad Santa
    Suddenly, you're looking at life in his (Thornton's) jaundiced way and laughing with a sense of vicarious liberation, even when he says the most outrageous things -- to children, no less. And I daresay you can still recover your holiday spirit when you're through laughing.
  88. Diamond Men
    Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.
  89. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.
  90. Ghost World
    A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.
  91. Hellboy
    Surprisingly smart, graphically faithful live-action adaptation of the Mike Mignola series
  92. Ice Age
    This digitally animated movie, filled with a cast of charming, funny critters from long ago, is family entertainment at its most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Incredibles
    The movie is full of wonderful little touches: Syndrome, the bad guy, is drawn to remind viewers of "Heat Miser" from the classic Christmas cartoon "The Year Without a Santa Claus."
  94. Maria Full of Grace
    A gripping, deeply moving film
  95. The Polar Express
    A truly satisfying holiday picture, the kind everyone can enjoy.
  96. School of Rock
    A movie for almost everyone, from boomer parents (who remember their teens and twenties) to their teenage kids (who can't wait to get started with same). And if there's anyone who can bring so many into the same mosh pit, it's Black, who so occupies the role you can't believe he's acting.
  97. Sweet Sixteen
    It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.
  98. A Very Long Engagement
    In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."
  99. Thirteen
    It feels like real life unfolding before your eyes.
  100. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.
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