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. Run All Night
    Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad “Out of the Furnace” Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food. It satisfies the craving for the sensation of nihilism, without its substance.
  2. Cinderella
    For all its gossamer, gauze, filigree and refinement, Cinderella drags when it should skip as lightly as its title character when she’s late getting home from the ball.
  3. Still Alice
    The filmmakers invite the audience to get close enough to feel the pain without having to relive the depths of the real-life horror.
  4. Ballet 422
    For fans of dance, Ballet 422 will produce plenty of pleasures. But as with great ballet, great movies always benefit from a little drama.
  5. Unfinished Business
    While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.
  6. Road Hard
    You can make a movie that’s both sweet and crass; just look at Judd Apatow’s comedies. But the mix doesn’t work here, maybe because both the vulgarity and the cheesiness are so amped up.
  7. Everly
    Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
  8. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Thanks to its funny, attractive, emotionally on-point cast, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel puts the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement about life having no second acts. In fact, it goes one step further to question why on Earth anyone would stop at just two.
  9. Chappie
    Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.
  10. Girlhood
    Girlhood is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.
  11. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.
  12. Maps to the Stars
    The movie can be over-the-top and the characters are rarely anything more than vile. And yet, the whole thing is mesmerizing.
  13. Human Capital
    Human Capital is a well made but ultimately rather facile tragedy for the globalized age of vertiginous wealth disparities. It’s suffused with beauty, guilt, regret and impunity that only the most obscenely overprivileged and dimly self-aware can hope to attain.
  14. Wild Tales
    Szifrón handles the tone and presentation masterfully.
  15. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.
  16. Focus
    Will Smith and Margot Robbie bring low-key erotic chemistry to an easy simmer in Focus, a smooth, sophisticated, often amusing little caper flick.
  17. What We Do in the Shadows
    The film’s writers, directors and stars lovingly impale bloodsucker mythology with the sharpened wooden stick of comedy. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” their satire is a crude but effective tool.
  18. The Last Five Years
    It’s more than great dancing and tragic strings that elevate The Last Five Years to a very funny, deeply affecting portrait of love lost and found. Kendrick and Jordan are both Broadway performers with powerful voices.
  19. McFarland USA
    A new sport doesn’t equate to new ground, but there is pleasure to be had in a formula that works.
  20. The DUFF
    Between its grating heroine, strident speechifying, derivative plot and draggy tone and tempo, it’s like the redheaded stepchild of “Mean Girls” and “Freaky Friday.”
  21. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    The film isn’t bad, although it is somewhat repetitive. If it has plot holes, conceptual laziness and an overreliance on dumb-insult humor, the film at least seems to know it. There are lots of self-referential jokes that acknowledge its own stupidity.
  22. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.
  23. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    With its awkward reenactments and other stylistic clunkers, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry doesn’t break much formal ground. But it serves as a moving reminder of how crucial citizen action is in fomenting social change.
  24. Boy Meets Girl
    Often, it feels conspicuously educational. The movie is far better when it focuses on its intimate story of love between family and friends in a small town.
  25. Timbuktu
    In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance and human dignity, Sissako has created a film that’s a privilege to watch.
  26. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.
  27. Fifty Shades of Grey
    In the end, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. But there’s also nothing as agonizingly awkward as James’s prose.
  28. Red Army
    In this swift, smart, often very funny film, Polsky takes an unprecedented look at the legendary Soviet-era hockey program and its life after glasnost, exposing an athletic system that became a crucial symbol of Communist history and politics, but also discipline, grace and brooding, melancholy soul.
  29. The Duke of Burgundy
    As a meticulously composed piece of contemporary gothic, The Duke of Burgundy is exquisite to look at, but it succeeds best as a human drama, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want — and maybe even getting it in the end.
  30. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is like the family movie equivalent of a Krabby Patty: It tastes fine and will satisfy some cravings. But it’s ultimately a product cranked out to make money and keep our consumer-driven society, much like Bikini Bottom’s, chugging along without significant disruption.
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