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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    For Ahkeem
    The vicious-cycle narrative is familiar, but For Ahkeem comes uncomfortably close at times to crossing the line between shining a light on a problem and exploiting one, despite the filmmakers’ good intentions.
  2. I Am Not a Witch
    It is a remarkable, strange and politically potent first film.
  3. Chappaquiddick
    The Kennedy dynasty has its share of admirers and critics alike, and — to the film’s credit — director John Curran and his screenwriters do not appease either camp. The result is a challenging character study, punctuated by moments of uneasy suspense and dark humor.
  4. Beirut
    Beirut is an engaging, well-crafted thriller, offering a showcase not just for Hamm but for Rosamund Pike (playing his levelheaded handler) and an ensemble of terrific character actors, including Dean Norris, Shea Whigham and Larry Pine.
  5. Mystery Train
    The great thing about Mystery Train is its open-endedness. It's a generously scripted ride that gives equal berth to all its characters, then cuts them loose with unfinished business, which also leaves them alive and drifting in your thoughts for a long time. That doesn't seem like a bad achievement at all.
  6. Smallfoot
    This entertaining fantasy has intellectual ballast, but it’s cleverly disguised.
  7. Light Sleeper
    Little in this movie makes real sense; and characters (particularly Dafoe and Delany) seem to bump regularly into each other. But there's something transcendentally appealing between the lines. This is a film to be savored for its nuances rather than its story.
  8. 7 Days in Entebbe
    The dance itself makes a much more powerful, and ultimately poetic, point. On the most superficial level, it serves as a blunt metaphor for the elaborate choreography of the rescue operation, which entailed its own intense rehearsals, undertaken in a scale mock-up of the Entebbe airport that had been re-created back in Israel.
  9. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    Reynolds, known for the “Deadpool” movies, jettisons that character’s foul mouth in this PG-rated outing, yet he brings a similar, blunt-spoken charm to this sweet-at-the-center role.
  10. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks like big money. It has the stars, it's based on a classic (and foolproof) story and it's an exhilarating couple of hours. It fills the entertainment megabill utterly.
  11. Permanent Midnight
    Despite some small narrative flaws, though, Stiller alone is reason to keep watching. It's a brave, scary and antic tour de force from a performer who, over the past few years, has been slowly banging his head against the glass wall of typecasting. In Permanent Midnight, the clown finally shatters the barrier and comes out the other side an actor.
  12. Oh Lucy!
    “Eat Pray Love” this isn’t. Although Lucy is on a journey of self-discovery, she often hurts others in her quest for herself. That makes Hirayanagi’s take on the later-in-life coming-of-age story more honest than most.
  13. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.
  14. Hotel Mumbai
    The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. Hotel Mumbai is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.
  15. Crazy Rich Asians
    Like the finest forebears of the rom-com genre — including its urtext, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” — Crazy Rich Asians indulges in the escapist pleasures of aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism and invidious judge-iness.
  16. Vazante
    Thomas keeps things at a simmer for the longest time, forestalling the story’s ultimate boil-over until the final minute or so of the tale.
  17. Revenge of the Pink Panther
    Edwards and his collaborators have wisely chosen to give an audience just what it wants and expects from a Pink Panther film - riotous slapstick, spectacular stunts and Sellers in a variety of accents and disguises that give him free reign and lead to inevitable uproariousness. [19 July 1978, p.E1]
    • Washington Post
  18. Bumblebee
    In the end, Bumblebee is less a movie about giant robot aliens punching each other than it is a story about friendship.
  19. Transit
    All this can make Transit a bit confusing at times, in addition to lending it the patina of metafiction. It’s almost as if the tale is being acted out by people who know they are players in a drama, and not real human beings.
  20. Damsel
    In Damsel, sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have created the perfect western for the #MeToo era, delightfully twisting and torquing the traditional woman-in-jeopardy narrative to create a clever, comical and uncannily relevant allegory.
  21. Swimming with Sharks
    Only a fool -- or someone who's never had a boss -- could completely dislike George Huang's Swimming With Sharks. A revenge comedy in which a much-wronged employee ties up his insensitive, abusive boss and gets a little payback -- puny offense by puny offense -- the film is like Death and the Maiden for disgruntled employees. [12 May 1990, p.B07]
    • Washington Post
  22. American Animals
    American Animals, while an entertaining version of a heist film at times, is no “Ocean’s 8.” Its signature moment occurs not during the reenactment of the inept crime, or its planning and antic aftermath. Rather, it comes in the middle of one of Lipka’s interview scenes.
  23. Skate Kitchen
    The result is a movie that feels both hard-edged and dreamy; punk-rock and lyrical; wised-up and unbearably tender.
  24. Generation Wealth
    Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.
  25. Hereditary
    Creepy, creepy, creepy. Writer-director Ari Aster makes an impressively unnerving debut with Hereditary, a meticulously crafted horror thriller.
  26. Juliet, Naked
    Described as a “98-minute diversion” by producers at a recent screening, the romantic comedy is just that: a sweet-tart confection that, like lemon sorbet, cleanses a palate gone sour from too many cinematic servings of the heavy stuff.
  27. Predator 2
    Beautifully outfitted and moodily photographed, the movie is directed by Stephen Hopkins, the Jamaican-born Australian responsible for Nightmare on Elm Street V. He keeps the pedal to the metal but never allows the explosive action to minimize his actors.
  28. RBG
    Despite her biting legal writing, she comes across, on camera, as unfailingly mild-mannered, decorous and polite, especially when the film explores her rather unlikely friendship, based on a shared love of opera, with her late conservative colleague Antonin Scalia.
  29. Itzhak
    Director Alison Chernick profiles the violin virtuoso, through his performance, of course, but she also reveals a personality as expressive as his musicianship.
  30. Hearts Beat Loud
    Its smallness is its strength — as is its silence. That’s the odd and evocative resonance of Hearts Beat Loud. For a movie that is so rock-and-roll, it turns out to be less about making noise than about listening to the message that can only be heard in the stillness that comes after the song.
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