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. Stick It
    Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.
  2. RV
    Why did director Barry Sonnenfeld take on this project? Just to sully a fine comedic resume that includes "The Addams Family" and "Get Shorty"? And one last one: Which one of these levers do you push to send the RV careering off the mountain for good?
  3. One Last Thing...
    The mawkishness is ultimately too formidable.
  4. The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
    This adaptation of the underground comic strip is mostly unfabulous.
  5. You, Me and Dupree
    Artistically, You, Me and Dupree is a mess. Technically, it's an abomination. Spiritually, it's a void. Commercially, it'll probably be a big hit.
  6. Shadowboxer
    If only Shadowboxer had gone for more than an unwavering commitment to imitate better movies, it might have been one for the cult shelves at the video store. Right now, you'll be lucky if you find it in the giveaway bin.
  7. Monster House
    A grisly, often cynical piece of work whose joyless, aggressive spirit is made even less appealing by its soulless visual style.
  8. Scoop
    This gives nobody, least of all me, any pleasure, but a truth must be faced: Scoop is the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    13 Tzameti
    These actors move with the labored blocking of a high school play.
  10. The Quiet
    Creepy, creepy, creepy -- and not in a good way.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Feast
    What's the difference between Feast and, say, "Alien" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," all of which share the same plot? Patience. Feast lacks it.
  12. Employee of the Month
    Rarely has an actress exuded such blank nothingness as Simpson, a one-woman vapid delivery system who sucks the energy and joy out of every scene she's in, like some freakishly well-endowed black hole.
  13. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
    Sadly, this movie is a far cry from the atmospheric, even thoughtfully crafted original, which made you truly scared for the unkempt, everyman victims. But this latest version, though just as grisly, is literally hackwork, and stars a forgettable, airbrushed cast of slaughterees.
  14. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.
  15. Color of the Cross
    This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.
  16. Flannel Pajamas
    The two main characters are so shallow and self-involved -- not to mention the friends, family members and sundry apparatchiks they lug around with them -- that the two hours of Flannel Pajamas begin to feel like real time.
  17. Deck the Halls
    I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.
  18. Deja Vu
    After 9/11, few of us look at terrorist acts casually. It's insulting to watch this grandiloquent pornography, using shock value and Hollywood cliche to evoke poignancy.
  19. 10 Items or Less
    A good-natured but failed experiment in meeting cute -- indie-movie style.
  20. Happily N'Ever After
    Winds up answering the question of what "Shrek" hath wrought, and between its plastic-looking visuals and cynical attitude, the news isn't good. Lacking the genuine wit and humanism of that film and any number of forebears, this one deserves its dumpin'.
  21. Because I Said So
    What the filmmakers try to play for laughs -- a mom and her daughters chatting about orgasms while shoe shopping -- isn't funny, it's creepy.
  22. Puccini for Beginners
    But when mechanical plots are a drama's main engine, we look for something else to divert us, preferably good comedy. That's in short supply, unfortunately. And it's no fun to sit through the movie's retread Woody Allenisms.
  23. Norbit
    Much of the movie -- which Murphy wrote with a small posse of collaborators -- is taken up with the torturously dull, not to mention unbelievable, romance between Norbit and Kate (a disappointingly lackluster Newton) and the tedious agenda of Cuba Gooding Jr. as a schemer-manipulator.
  24. My Brother
    What it possesses in heart and goodwill, it sorely lacks in narrative skill and artistic depth.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Boy Culture
    Opportunities for dramatic tension, comedic effect, erotic energy, even just flat-out weirdness -- all are squandered by Brocka and the actors in a haze of blandness that gives the film all the edge of a particularly gay Gap commercial.
  26. Are We Done Yet?
    John C. McGinley from "Scrubs" gets to strut some of his comic stuff as the deranged builder, but he's the only passable feature in a property that should be condemned.
  27. Black Book
    The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.
  28. The Reaping
    If only The Reaping had the decency to be coherent.
  29. Perfect Stranger
    Just another thriller, utterly disposable.
  30. The Condemned
    It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.
  31. Angel-A
    Angel-A is counterfeit art-house chic writ large -- a French film that fails to produce the ineffable charms of the yesteryear movies it brazenly imitates.
  32. Charlie Bartlett
    The movie feels forced, cliched and derivative.
  33. Daddy Day Camp
    It's gotten to the point where Gooding's presence on a marquee practically guarantees we'll be bashing our heads against the seat in front of us. Bonk, bonk, bonk.
  34. Dedication
    Theroux and company could be said to be "Garden State"-ing, or trying to. Instead of that film's sheen of the touchingly weird, Dedication finds a whole lot of the coldly dumb.
  35. September Dawn
    It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.
  36. Romance & Cigarettes
    the movie comes on as a novelty item, meaning it's so full of disparate parts and so unable to approach coherence, it just sits there and burns out.
  37. Trade
    By introducing silly elements into a serious endeavor, the filmmakers undercut their own movie. In the end, we're watching a somewhat exploitative movie about exploitation.
  38. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.
  39. Bella
    A Mexican movie in which the outcome is never in doubt, the scenes are endless -- sorry, we meant poetic-- and the false beard on the central character's face looks as though it could use a little extra gum.
  40. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.
  41. Fred Claus
    Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.
  42. August Rush
    Intended as a fuzzy family fable, "August" plays more to the gag reflex than to the heart, especially when our little orphan starts playing the guitar like a virtuoso after what seems like a three-minute tutorial.
  43. The Perfect Holiday
    A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.
  44. Southland Tales
    May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.
  45. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    The movie, directed (and written) by Zach Helm in grotesquely bright colors, means to approach the creepy wonder of Roald Dahl but gets only the creepy part right.
  46. Redacted
    The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.
  47. The Bucket List
    The overall sense, however, is of a movie coasting on an obvious and somewhat flimsy premise, to which no one thought to bring much else besides Nicholson and Freeman.
  48. Cassandra's Dream
    Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.
  49. Honeydripper
    Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.
  50. Cloverfield
    Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.
  51. Fool's Gold
    Any more than two writers on a movie usually spells trouble. On the other hand, that two of the three scribes responsible for Fool's Gold have previously specialized in horror makes perfect sense.
  52. The Hottie & the Nottie
    Like Nate, we are mere Notties. And we are supposed to feel oh-so privileged for getting to watch Paris through the glass.
  53. Step Up 2: The Streets
    Let's wait for a movie where they do get it all right: story, acting and dancing. It'll happen, just not this time.
  54. Vantage Point
    Although it was held back by the studio for about a year, someone apparently came to the inevitable conclusion that no amount of ripening time was going to help this gimmicky and ultimately harebrained movie.
  55. 10,000 BC
    One part Joseph Campbell hero quest, one part multi-culti morality tale, one part live-action "Flintstones" cartoon, 10,000 B.C. is finally every part just plain nuts, from a hike featuring more ecosystems than an Al Gore documentary to a wacky climax set amid pyramids that -- you'll e-mail me if I'm wrong -- wouldn't have been built for another 7,000 years or so.
  56. Sleepwalking
    An inert, sloppily written melodrama as grim and featureless as its frozen Midwestern setting.
  57. My Blueberry Nights
    Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.
  58. 88 Minutes
    Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.
  59. Chaos Theory
    In Chaos Theory, Reynolds's performance is taut, crabby and tense. And his beard and glasses, which intensify those already narrow eyes, suggest a mad bomb-builder rather than a hapless soul with whom we can identify.
  60. Zombie Strippers!
    The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.
  61. Deception
    Deception is another example of when genre-fication (the forcing of otherwise intriguing stories into the straitjackets of horror, thriller or other genres) reduces our entertainment to head-shaking banality.
  62. Made of Honor
    At its worst (and this is where Made of Honor comes in), it can leave you with a bad taste, not just in your mouth but in your soul.
  63. Speed Racer
    Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go.
  64. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.
  65. War, Inc.
    A film that, in attempting to ridicule the Bush administration, finally just settles for being ridiculous itself.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Foot Fist Way
    Fails to generate a real plot, and the awkward moments work better in a context of adolescence. Quirk isn't funny when accompanied by adultery and brutality -- though a couple of lines zing.
  67. Savage Grace
    What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.
  68. The Happening
    He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.
  69. The Love Guru
    The results are a wheezy, tired attempt to milk more laughs out of the '60s, by doing exactly what "Austin Powers" did.
  70. Stuck
    The question is why the time, talent and treasure of such energetic and even gifted artists have been marshaled in such a disgusting and trivial genre exercise and what viewers are supposed to get out of it. Isn't life hard enough?
  71. Hancock
    The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.
  72. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.
  73. Space Chimps
    Kids sense when a movie is being noisy and frantic just to keep them distracted; these apes are overcaffeinated.
  74. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Tiresome and messy.
  75. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    Unfolds with all the entertainment value of watching somebody else play a video game.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Religulous
    One of the rules of satire is that you can't mock things you don't understand, and Religulous starts developing fault lines when it becomes clear that Maher's view of religious faith is based on a sophomoric reading of the Scriptures and that he doesn't understand that some thoughtful people actually do believe in some sort of spiritual life.
  77. Death Race
    It isn't so much a movie as a superheated, highly conductive miracle substance for the pure transmission of masculine aggression and misogyny.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Spirit
    Doesn't just play like a cheap "Batman" knockoff, it plays like a cheap "Batman" knockoff that knows it's a cheap "Batman" knockoff -- and wants to be sure everybody knows it knows.
  79. Henry Poole Is Here
    A not-quite-funny comedy that devolves into a tedious discussion of miracles and redemption.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Surfer, Dude
    You can stick around for the only funny line, which involves a breakfast burrito, but the smart surfer would head for the hills and Willie's goat ranch.
  81. The Women
    Falls flat at every turn.
  82. Battle in Seattle
    It's a movie by a true believer in anti-globalization, and it may win a few converts, but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.
  83. The Lucky Ones
    Could be filed under "wacky misfire."
  84. Miracle at St. Anna
    The movie winds up a casualty of schmaltzy, patronizing sentiment on the one hand and overweening ambition on the other.
  85. Choke
    A singularly vulgar piece of work.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Max Payne
    This highly stylized adaptation of the popular Max Payne video game is 70 percent dark, snowy atmospherics and 30 percent loud, violent action.
  87. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.
  88. Pride and Glory
    Pride and Glory would be risible if it weren't so reprehensible.
  89. Crossing Over
    As Crossing Over makes its patronizing points, by way of two-dimensional characters and billboarded plot points, it recalls other, better movies that dealt with the same subjects far more deftly.
  90. Nobel Son
    It's all wildly implausible and occasionally fun, but it could be so much better if director Randall Miller (who co-wrote the screenplay) had thrown in a little more character development and excised a half-dozen crazy plot twists.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Yes Man
    Even though Carrey is a bit mellower these days, the schtick feels dated. He's doing material from the '90s.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Notorious
    Cloyingly, Biggie narrates his tale from the grave. It's a device that feels irksome and condescending.
  93. Donkey Punch
    Donkey Punch is almost humorless, and there's no wink and nudge behind the mayhem to absolve us of taking its ugly, class-obsessed subtext seriously.
  94. New in Town
    Seriously, though, watching New in Town left me feeling as pained as Zellweger, playing Lucy Hill, looks.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th
    Michael Bay is destroying horror films by exhuming the genre's standard-bearers, stripping them of genuine terror, refusing to either re-create faithfully or reimagine boldly, and upping the irony until the original concept stands rigid like a taxidermied grizzly, its teeth bared but its presence, most of all, sad.
  96. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    "Wolverine" is full of angst, and yet has had virtually all the soul wrung out of it in an effort to create a live-action cartoon. But cartoons are rarely so unwieldy, or force a director -- in this case, the largely unsung Gavin Hood -- to juggle so much impossible plotline.
  97. The Merry Gentleman
    It's too bad the filmmakers didn't take a breath, look at the rushes and see what a comedic gem they had. With just a few tweaks, The Merry Gentleman could have made a wickedly funny parody of the over-earnest, lyrically hard-edged indie movie. But it's too late for do-overs.
  98. Year One
    A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dance Flick
    There are two dance-offs, multiple fat jokes and one sight gag using eye boogers, a heretofore ignored bodily fluid. These are the highlights.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    My Life in Ruins
    Fittingly, My Life in Ruins goes downhill after its title.
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