Entertainment Weekly's Scores

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For 7,797 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 68% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 13th
Lowest review score: 0 Wide Awake
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,958 out of 7797
  2. Mixed: 2,079 out of 7797
  3. Negative: 760 out of 7797
7797 movie reviews
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  1. Control
    Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    It’s hard to believe that these two people, so dissimilar in every way, would be attracted to each other in the first place. It’s even harder to listen to the drone of the numbingly unsympathetic Michael (Noonan, also the movie’s writer and director). When there are only two characters on screen, you’d better rouse concern for both so your viewer is not fatally tempted by the stop button.
  3. Bad Santa
    Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.
  4. Tears of the Black Tiger
    A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.
  5. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    While it won't win any Oscars, Matthew Cooke's new documentary How To Make Money Selling Drugs may take the prize for being the shallowest and most glib film of the year.
  6. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?
    • 68 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Maps to the Stars
    The goal here is cynical satire. The result, sadly, is just a yawn.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Avalon
    The movie is the visual equivalent of a stranger picking out highlights from his family album and providing brief descriptions of them. Everything that happens in Avalon, be it happiness or trauma, is infused with the same tone. The result is test-pattern emotion; everything’s on the same level. There’s no discrimination and, hence, no drama.
  9. Synecdoche, New York
    I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.
  10. Brothers of the Head
    A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.
  11. Fight Club
    If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.
  12. Wiener-Dog
    In Wiener-Dog, Solondz just keeps telling the same dark joke over and over again—and it just keeps getting less and less funny. It’s a dog.
  13. Another Earth
    It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.
  14. Cobb
    In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.
  15. Pecker
    Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.
  16. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    A brutally monotonous thriller.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mortal Thoughts
    Directed by Alan Rudolph (Choose Me), this tedious film, rife with flashbacks and slow-motion sequences that underscore the already overbearing plot and exaggerated characters, fails both as a mystery and as a statement on marital violence.
  18. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''
  19. Clockwatchers
    There’s a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls.
  20. Northfork
    It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.
  21. You Kill Me
    Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.
  22. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    It's both exhausting and laughable in its eagerness to shock. That's the bad news. The worse news is that Volume II comes out next month.
  23. Dear Frankie
    A Scottish weepie of such bathos and balderdash that it deserves a drinking game in its rotten honor.
  24. Lord of War
    The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.
  25. Dolores Claiborne
    Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.
  26. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.
  27. Trucker
    Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker
  28. Mr. Jealousy
    Have there ever been two less energetic stars than Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra? Casting this diffident duo in an allegedly romantic comedy proves disastrous; they suck the air out of virtually every scene.
  29. Trance
    I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.
  30. Morlang
    A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    As bad as Ebert’s screenplay is, Meyer’s direction is just as choppy. The film also looks ugly.
  32. Femme Fatale
    If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.
  33. Trumbo
    How could a movie about a great screenwriter have such a terrible screenplay?
  34. Battle in Heaven
    A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.
  35. Never Been Kissed
    Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.
  36. Copying Beethoven
    Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.
  37. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.
  38. What If
    An unctuous rom-com that runs its characters through every plastic cliché of a pre-Oscar McConaughey vehicle, ultimately causing us to root against the vacuous couple and their predetermined happy ending.
  39. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.
  40. An American Pickle
    There are actors who can pull off dual roles, and now we know Seth Rogen isn’t one of them.
  41. Ask the Dust
    The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.
  42. Ocean's Twelve
    What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.
  43. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.
  44. Body of Lies
    Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.
  45. Space Jam
    This mediocrity disguised as entertainment, this greed promoted as synergy — this, to paraphrase that seminal media study, Broadcast News, is what the devil looks like.
  46. Flesh and Bone
    In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.
  47. The Forbidden Kingdom
    This kingdom really should be forbidden.
  48. Assisted Living
    Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).
  49. The People Under the Stairs
    If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.
  50. Not Without My Daughter
    It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.
  51. The Equalizer
    It's the sign of an empty, depressing experience when the only tension is over Bob's choice to use a power drill or a weed whacker for his next kill.
  52. An Everlasting Piece
    In every way dreadful.
  53. Mermaids
    In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.
  54. The Arrival
    The Arrival looks and feels awfully small and cheap. In that way, the movie does feel like those science-fiction classics of the ’50s. But back then, sweaty heroes didn’t utter lines of ’90s dialogue like ”I look like a can of smashed a–holes.”
  55. 2 Days in the Valley
    Writer-director John Herzfeld blends violence and top-heavy absurdism, creating a self-conscious muddle of indie-style hackery. Strip away the goofball nihilism, though, and what’s left is as formulaic as any straight-to-tape opus with a title like "Dangerous Instinct."
  56. The Merry Gentleman
    This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.
  57. The Beach Bum
    Hard on the heels of January’s god-awful "Serenity," we’re now treated to The Beach Bum — a shambling, self-indulgent inside joke about a perpetually stoned holy fool from the Florida Keys named Moondog. I’ll give you one guess who plays him.
  58. Back to the Future Part III
    Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.
  59. Resurrecting the Champ
    The gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons all but nullify Jackson's zesty performance.
  60. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    The first movie from the cult television comedy troupe doesn’t have a single good laugh.
  62. Megalopolis
    Megalopolis grants Coppola a dubious honor. In addition to his being the mastermind behind two of cinema's greatest achievements, he's also now the architect of one of its worst.
  63. The Acid House
    Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie.
  64. Great Expectations
    The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.
  65. Flatliners
    You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.
  66. Take the Lead
    Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.
  67. The Prom
    Some of the songs have charm. The cast is undeniably talented. But ultimately, the film has way too much in common with the egomaniacs at its center: It poses for an undeniably good cause, but its greater purpose is to collect the credit for having done it.
  68. All the Pretty Horses
    McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell from this confused mess (costarring Jakes as himself) what that message is.
  70. Song to Song
    In terms of content and meaningfulness, Terrence Malick’s Song to Song is the cinematic equivalent of a Trump press conference. Incoherent, disconnected, self-interrupting, obsessed with pointless minutiae and crammed full of odd, limp stabs at profundity from a closed-off man in his 70s who apparently has no ability to edit or accept constructive criticism.
  71. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.
  72. Dunston Checks In
    Director Ken Kwapis fills the movie with feeble references to Planet of the Apes and King Kong that don’t amuse adults and sail over the heads of tykes who snicker most at the raspberries Dunston blows at anyone he meets.
  73. Cashback
    Director Sean Ellis has a lovely eye, but he's set the film in his blind spot. Not only can't he distinguish between art and porn, savoring and wallowing, universal truths and exhausted clichés -- he doesn't even seem interested in these distinctions.
  74. Art School Confidential
    Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.
  75. 10 Items or Less
    I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.
  76. Night of the Living Dead
    In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.
  77. Mister Lonely
    None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.
  78. 30 Days of Night
    You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    The Wiz
    Whatever fun this funked-up Wizard of Oz had on Broadway is erased by miscasting and a hideous design (Oz as a New York slum).
  80. Imaginary Heroes
    Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.
  81. Tea with Mussolini
    The film values quips and declamations over natural conversation (or an explanation of how such intelligent women could have been so blind to world events).
  82. Focus
    Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.
  83. A Good Woman
    British director Mike Barker and magpie New York screenwriter Howard Himelstein, have taken "Lady Windermere's Fan" - Wilde's first big stage success, written in 1892 - and pulped it senseless in the name of puttin' on the charm.
  84. The Book of Eli
    A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.
  85. Malcolm & Marie
    The whole movie comes across as deeply self-conscious, more concerned with how it sounds than what it's saying, consumed with impressing people rather than expressing something.
  86. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
    Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.
  87. Redacted
    For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.
  88. Get Over It
    The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.
  89. Wild Tigers I Have Known
    Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.
  90. Goya's Ghosts
    In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.
  91. Nacho Libre
    You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.
  92. Snake Eyes
    Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.
  93. Pretty Woman
    Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.
  94. The Neon Demon
    The dialogue, most of which is stilted philosophy about femininity and beauty, sounds like something your freshman-year roommate said and you learned to ignore.
  95. The Man with the Iron Fists
    The movie wants to be deadly cool, but mostly it's just deadly.
  96. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.
  97. My Date with Drew
    Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.
  98. The Gods Must Be Crazy II
    It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.
  99. Quigley Down Under
    Vapid, cutesy, knockabout Western.
  100. The Transporter
    It's like the worst movie Jean-Claude Van Damme never made.
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