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. Rules Don't Apply
    If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well.
  2. Allied
    As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.
  3. Bad Santa 2
    Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.
  4. National Bird
    Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.
  5. The Love Witch
    As with giallo, The Love Witch features deliberately wooden acting, and can be a little boring at times. But it’s a stunningly photographed, fascinating reinterpretation of classic melodrama.
  6. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.
  7. Elle
    Elle would be too clever by half — not to mention fatally offensive — were it not for Huppert, who in her portrayal of Michèle owns the movie from its opening moments to its bizarre, but not entirely surprising, denouement.
  8. The Edge of Seventeen
    Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.
  9. Bleed for This
    The halfhearted attempt to tweak the boxing-movie formula is a diversionary tactic. No amount of feints will change one fact: Bleed for This has no new moves.
  10. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    The film’s subtly observed moments are more powerful than any of its technical wizardry.
  11. Nocturnal Animals
    It’s a tale bluntly told that arouses intense, evanescent emotion and then leaves you haunted, long afterward, by provocative but arguably answerable questions.
  12. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The plot thickens, along with the emotional tension, which was always the best part of the Potter universe, and not the dazzling special effects.
  13. We Are X
    You don’t have to understand the lyrics — or even like the music — to find We Are X entertaining, even, at times, moving.
  14. Peter and the Farm
    By looking closely, clinically and ultimately compassionately at one eccentric practitioner of a dying way of life...Peter and the Farm nevertheless manages to harvest not just understanding of one peculiar, broken little man, but a broader wisdom about the cycle of seasons that we all must endure on this planet.
  15. Being 17
    What elevates the film is not just its beautiful setting in the French Pyrenees but also how the beautiful mountain exteriors serve as a metaphor for characters’ inner lives. Téchiné keeps his distance from his subjects, allowing their emotions to reveal themselves and delivering a payoff that is ultimately a delicate one.
  16. Almost Christmas
    Is it a good movie? Not particularly. But if you’re a forgiving filmgoer in need of a smile, it’s a reasonable diversion, one that ties up its message of love — if a bit too neatly — into a holiday bow.
  17. The Eagle Huntress
    For every misgiving The Eagle Huntress invites, it offers inspiration in equal measure, taking the audience on a beautiful, thrilling journey to a part of the world that is still largely inaccessible. And it introduces them to a young woman who gives bravery a bracing, unforgettable face.
  18. Loving
    Intimate, moving and superbly underplayed, Loving is every bit as soft-spoken and subtly implacable as its protagonists. It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.
  19. Arrival
    Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.
  20. Gimme Danger
    A bittersweet, elegiac tone can’t help but suffuse a film animated by so many anarchic spirits who have since left the planet, but it leaves viewers with the exhilarating, inspiring reassurance that we still have Iggy. To adopt his own highest praise: That’s cool.
  21. The Pickle Recipe
    Despite a solid central performance by film veteran Lynn Cohen and a Detroit setting that will please expats and current residents of the Motor City, there is little here to lift this film beyond its regional appeal.
  22. The Uncondemned
    The victims are impossibly brave as they sit for interviews, revisiting the worst moments of their lives. Their stories are the strongest part of the documentary, making up for uneven pacing and some otherwise strange editing choices.
  23. Hacksaw Ridge
    Hacksaw Ridge winds up being a rousing piece of entertainment that also happens to be an affecting portrait of spiritual faith and simple human decency.
  24. Trolls
    Like the hit single on its soundtrack, “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” the movie Trolls is irresistibly charming because of a simple but catchy hook.
  25. Doctor Strange
    All in all, Doctor Strange is a fun and trippy excursion to a place where Marvel rarely seems to go: that is, to the retinal roots of the comics.
  26. Moonlight
    Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.
  27. Inferno
    Say what you will about Dan Brown’s books. They may be, as some have noted, poorly written, formulaic and pretentious. But at least they hold a reader’s attention, in ways that this excursion — as sleep-inducing and rigidly predictable as a train ride — does not.
  28. The Handmaiden
    As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.
  29. Miss Hokusai
    Miss Hokusai is more adept at delivering beautiful visuals than anything deeper. That’s perhaps not all that ironic, given that the movie’s portrayal of Hokusai is as a man who valued art above all else.
  30. Aquarius
    Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.
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