Empire's Scores

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For 6,819 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Oppenheimer
Lowest review score: 20 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,007 out of 6819
  2. Mixed: 3,654 out of 6819
  3. Negative: 158 out of 6819
6819 movie reviews
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  1. Poor Things
    Absolutely batshit, utterly filthy and a true original: Poor Things is as good as Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone have ever been.
  2. The Lives of Others
    Already fêted, von Donnersmarck’s debut sets a closely focused, personal story against a more expansive backdrop of politics and power games -- a moving, enlightening tale of recent times.
  3. Rear Window
    Flawless, essential viewing that would earn more than its five stars if only Empire would allow it.
  4. Network
    Network is typical of the cool intelligence of '70s American cinema.
  5. Au hasard Balthazar
    If you can see past the heavy-handed religious overtones you will encounter an inspired and deeply intelligent Bresson classic.
  6. The Goodbye Girl
    With insightful one-liners by the bucketload and a memorable duo in Dreyfuss and Mason, this serves as a joyful reminder of a genre which has long since past its best.
  7. Leviathan
    Frustrating, funny at points, heartbreaking and quite magnificently shot throughout, Leviathan is one of the films of the year.
  8. Great Expectations
    This is still the definitive version of Charles Dickens' atmospheric and occasionally creepy classic.
  9. Imitation of Life
    A consummate display of populist weepie-making.
  10. Marriage Story
    Marriage Story manages to be one of this year’s best thrillers, comedies and romcoms all at once. A tender, taut gem of a film that will make you reconsider love and loss.
  11. The Handmaiden
    The Handmaiden is at once a superlative thriller and a deeply erotic character study, but it’s the intelligence, mordant wit and depth of characterisation that are the real turn-ons.
  12. Waltz with Bashir
    A bravura documentary which balances the personal and the political as it peers into the First Lebanon War, its animated approach never feeling like a novelty. Astonishing, unforgettable: you have to see it.
  13. The Duke of Burgundy
    Of course, this is a film you have to meet half-way. If you’re willing to enter its world, it’s an immensely rewarding, amusing, wise, melancholy and involving experience.
  14. 12 Angry Men
    Sidney Lumet's dazzling debut, based on Reginald Rose's teleplay, delivers a masterclass in the pure dynamism of acting, as Henry Fonda's reasonable doubt gradually sways the 11 other jurors from their various prejudices.
  15. Inside Out
    Inside Out is audacious as it is silly, as funny as it is imaginative.
  16. Son of Saul
    It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it.
  17. It's a Wonderful Life
    Although peppered with colourful, sharply drawn characters, this is Stewart's movie, instantly loveable as a small town dreamer who sacrifices everything for others. His journey to despair and back warms the cockles like little else. Enjoy it in a cinema so you can sob among others.
  18. White Heat
    Magnificent examination of the criminal mind and Cagney's finest moment.
  19. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    A beautifully presented tale of love, honor and duty from a master film-maker.
  20. Night of the Living Dead
    Part of its strength is that it’s not a glossy, predictable Hollywood horror and so it has a grainy, semi-amateur, black and white look which gives it a dread sense of conviction.
  21. Suspiria
    Suspiria is the perfect antipasto.
  22. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    The people do the talking in this rage-fuelled doc and only the stone hearted will fail to be moved by the resilience of the affected and the inaction of their government.
  23. Once Upon a Time in America
    While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.
  24. Salesman
    An uncompromising documentary which simply lays its subject bare and dares us not be moved by the raw humanity on display.
  25. Cool Hand Luke
    Paul Newman gives one of his best performances in this prison film, where he inspires life in to his fellow inmates. Has something important to say with several memorable moments and a superb supporting cast.
  26. North by Northwest
    This is Hitchcock's longest film and also his most self-referential. Little jokes abound about art and artifice, role play and reality, duty and duplicity and each viewing reveals something new to enhance the pleasure of watching the Master of Suspense at his most mischievous and assured.
  27. La La Land
    Audacious, retro, funny and heartfelt, La La Land is the latest great musical for people who don’t like musicals – and will slap a mile-wide smile across the most miserable of faces.
  28. Fences
    A simply extraordinary film without crashes, bangs and wallops but full of towering performances delivered with intelligence, power and heart.
  29. Stand by Me
    The entire cast is superb and it so perfectly paced, that the story unfolds with wit, pathos and sensitivity and completely free of emotional shortcuts.
  30. Love and Death
    This magnificent, often anarchic pastiche of Russian literature’s portentous habits with a side order in Bergmanesque death wallowing actually finds Allen at his silliest. Which also means it is extraordinarily clever silliness, with designs deliberately stolen from Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers. It is film that explores comedy’s infinite variety via the medium of the existential philosophy of those big Russian sagas slumped in history like sulking teenagers.
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