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. Young Adam
    A compelling if singularly sour tale.
  2. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Provides some wry chuckles, but much of it is as dark as a Glasgow winter.
  3. Wimbledon
    The best thing about all of this is Bettany.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Without a Paddle
    The cheesy, unconvincing moments centered on the characters' serious discussions of life and friendship really seem unnatural and ruin the flow of the physical comedy.
  5. Cheaper by the Dozen
    This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.
  6. The Manchurian Candidate
    It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Sometimes charming, sometimes a tad too silly and all the time predictable.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volcano
    You hope against hope that the lava flowing through the city will wipe out Los Angeles and everyone in it, if only to prevent them from making more movies like this.
  9. The Mask
    Mike Werb's screenplay -- just a rickety framework for Carrey's consummate clowning -- lacks a propelling plot and has zip in terms of secondary character development.
  10. Mimic
    Del Toro, expanding on a short story by Donald A. Wolheim, isn't able to invest his version of a familiar horror convention with either the supple wit or deep humanity he brought to "Cronos."
  11. The Jackal
    To enjoy it, however, you have to do the mental equivalent of squinting your eyes, so the credibility is only fuzzily ridiculous.
  12. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here.
  13. Brassed Off
    An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.
  14. Oscar and Lucinda
    Oscar and Lucinda seems like the perfect story for director Gillian Armstrong, that of a free-spirited proto-feminist chafing at the strictures of tight-laced colonial Australia. But in the end, she's created a beautiful but annoying Victorian-era melodrama. [30Jan1998 Pg.D.06]
    • Washington Post
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Substance of Fire
    The whole thing plays like some dreadful masochistic, self-pity fantasy.
  16. Basquiat
    Despite the movie's suffocating sense of chic Soho hipness, it touches on all the square cliches about the tragic life of the misunderstood artist.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bound
    Like so many other rob-the-mob movies, the plan seems pretty far-fetched, and the ending isn't much of a surprise. But if you like your films sprinkled liberally with sex, violence and humor, then you're bound to like Bound.
  18. While You Were Sleeping
    Its attitude seems to be: You met her and liked her in "Speed," now get to know her better. But while it's easy to like her, liking the movie is another matter.
  19. Home for the Holidays
    The movie faithfully records the rivalries among the various members of a fractious Baltimore family, but it never really attempts to resolve any of the internecine conflicts. In that sense, it's less ambitious than many a TV series.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dangerous Minds
    The sweet story turns stickygooey, however, as writer Ronald Bass sprinkles the script with saccharine lines that sound plain dumb coming from high schoolers.
  21. True Lies
    Deceptively labeled a domestic epic by writer-director James Cameron, the $100 million movie is, in fact, a weird hybrid of action juggernaut, buddy cop caper and reactionary soft-core pornography.
  22. In the Name of the Father
    Based on Gerry Conlon's own account of his arrest and subsequent incarceration, the film takes forever to do what "60 Minutes" does with the same meat in a single segment.
  23. Speed
    Undeniably, the picture now and again supplies that edge-of-the-seat sensation; yet, by action-adventure standards, Speed is leaden and strangely poky. It never seems to shift into overdrive and let fly.
  24. Emma
    What McGrath's Emma does have going for it is a breakthrough performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as the heroine.
  25. Superman II
    The thrust of the film is to escalate the Superman idea to the point where the charm is no longer visible. A snide and knowing viewpoint has left a cloud of smudge over the original clean satire. [19 Jun 1981, p.19]
    • Washington Post
  26. This Boy's Life
    It never attains full dimension. It pursues the De Niro-DiCaprio war so singlemindedly, everything else is left high and dry.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death and the Maiden
    Polanski touch -- apart from a little suspense here and there -- is limited. And the story, which Ariel Dorfman adapted from his radical-chic play, is too contrived and smug to really hold.
  28. The Portrait of a Lady
    This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Higher Learning
    For every persuasive insight John Singleton brings to Higher Learning, his thoughtful but flawed movie about multiculturalism and racism, he throws in something equally disappointing.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack
    It sits in a rather unspectacular niche between modern fairy tale and a disease-of-the-week TV movie.
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