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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  1. Villains
    If you’re a fan of broad black comedy — the kind in which someone blasts a hole in someone else’s head, and then the next camera shot is framed by that gaping aperture — Villains may be your cup of strong tea. The dialogue by writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen is less than witty, and peppered with a heavy sprinkling of dully numbing f-bombs.
  2. The Cat's Meow
    An elegant drama about power and its frightening uses, The Cat's Meow is the bee's knees.
  3. Happy Times
    The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.
  4. Open Water
    These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.
  5. Elemental
    Elemental speaks to the importance of protecting the natural elements: water, air, earth. It’s a beautifully filmed piece, even when it’s showing us white clouds of pollutants billowing out of a smokestack.
  6. Rio
    This is a movie that imbues even the hoariest quest-peril-life lesson tropes of family animated films and imbues them with new life and rhythm.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Buck Howard
    Malkovich has a role that coulda-woulda-shoulda been a sensation if he had had a different director and different co-stars.
  8. Triangle of Sadness
    As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.
  9. Let Him Go
    Surprisingly gripping and moving modern western.
  10. Batkid Begins
    Batkid would be easier to swallow if it focused less on self-congratulation than on the epidemic of unselfishness that inspired the magic in the first place.
  11. 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.
  12. City of Men
    So much emotional traffic streams through this City of Men that it's easy to miss a narrative turnoff. You won't get lost, but your sense of direction might be profoundly changed.
  13. Cry-Baby
    Basically the filmmaker reminds us of his affection for social misfits, but without much conviction. He's simply too hip to commit himself to his beliefs, and a relentless frivolity prevails. Still Cry-Baby is not without its spit-curled charms, its amusing lines and its funky famous-name cameos.
  14. World War Z
    The result is a movie that, while no classic, can be credited with giving the audience something a bit more substantive than the usual disposable summer fare.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maria
    Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.
  16. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time
  17. Love, Cecil
    Vreeland’s film, for the most part, is structured around spoken passages from Beaton’s voluminous diaries, which are read, expressively, by Rupert Everett. The actor ably channels the persona of the self-described “rabid aesthete.”
    • 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.
  19. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    In the end, A Tout de Suite leads to not much more of a point than one woman's loss of innocence.
  20. Split
    For all the outrageousness of Kevin’s alters, the movie falls oddly flat: less tantalizingly enigmatic “et cetera” than “blah blah blah.”
  21. Until the End of the World
    Wenders weaves all his thematic and narrative threads together into a coherent, philosophical whole. Even with the apocalypse, though, his view isn't despairing. A new direction, a new beginning emerges out of the ashes of the old, image-overloaded world, and with it, a sort of muted optimism.
  22. The Adventures of Felix
    This French film has a breezy, documentary air that belies the important issues is raises.
  23. I Capture the Castle
    Could have been a sensation if a director with a smidgen of moviemaking instinct had taken the helm.
  24. Alpha
    Sweet, strange and at times slightly scary.
  25. Life
    Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."
  26. The Upside of Anger
    It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.
  27. The Dreamers
    It may give many viewers a licentious flutter, but the highbrow ingredient -- although it desperately wants to be there -- is missing.
  28. 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.
  29. This Christmas
    The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.
  30. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    If you like your movies with smooth skin, this might not be your cup of Neutrogena. But if you appreciate satire that reaches out and squeezes you where it hurts, you're going to enjoy yourself thoroughly.
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