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 1.9 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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bonnie and Clyde
    Penn's film oozes an intellectual's fashionable contempt for the characters.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Turtles Can Fly
    Lacks grace, coherence, and a surface vivid enough to make it an alarm that many will hear.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Joy Luck Club
    A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.
  4. A Ghost Story
    Some, no doubt, will find Lowery’s playfully surreal experiment (a ghost story told from the POV of the ghost) haunting, lyrical, and moving. Others (ahem, guilty as charged) will just find it maddening, inscrutable, and alienating. Check it out, then take your side in the debate.
  5. Widows
    It’s entertaining enough for popcorn — and gratifying, too, to watch these smart, strong women step into roles they’re so often left to support from the sidelines, while men have all the contraband fun. If only the execution of it didn’t feel like such a crazy-quilt patchwork of other, better films, and so jaggedly stitched together.
  6. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.
  7. Under the Skin
    As a film, Under the Skin is hauntingly freaky and ultimately frustrating. But as a movie star's gamble to be seen as more than just a moneymaking member of the Marvel universe, it's a home run.
  8. Forrest Gump
    It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.
  9. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.
  10. Let the Right One In
    If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.
  11. Certain Women
    It isn’t until the wonderful Gladstone comes along with her aching tomboy heartache and sad seeking eyes that the film finally burrows below the surface and finally hits a dramatic nerve. Unfortunately, by then, it’s too little too late.
  12. The Secret of Kells
    Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.
  13. Inherent Vice
    Anderson's film is something to be experienced, like a psychedelic drug trip where the journey trumps the destination. Unfortunately, his journey just didn't do it for me.
  14. A War
    Once again, the shaky handheld camerawork in the battle scenes don’t portray chaos so much as a sense that the cinematographer was being attacked by desert bees
  15. Demon
    A so-so meditation on historical amnesia. It’s also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.
  16. Little Miss Sunshine
    If you're going to get on the wavelength of Little Miss Sunshine, you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots.
  17. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.
  18. Hotel Rwanda
    A strange history lesson that leaves us more overlectured than properly overwhelmed.
  19. I Am Love
    The film is almost deliriously stylish, which helps mask the silliness. But the bellowing music, by John Adams, is infuriatingly intrusive -- which undoes the visual good.
  20. Silent Light
    The stab at sublimity-by-proxy doesn't take.
  21. My Flesh and Blood
    You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by My Flesh and Blood, but the director, Jonathan Karsh, merges compassion with voyeurism until you can't tell the difference.
  22. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.
  23. High Flying Bird
    Written by Oscar-winning Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, the new film feels stagey, confusing, and didactically obvious. You can tell that it was written by a playwright (which McCraney was and is).
  24. The Humans
    The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance: the rambling anecdotes, latent passive aggressions, and aimless small talk of ordinary people just living their lives.
  25. Dirty Pretty Things
    Jammed with banner-ready political rhetoric, and the relentlessness of the lectures is wearying. The plot, on the other hand, is a standard contraption built on enduring urban anxieties and involving a nasty hotel-room trade.
  26. After Dark, My Sweet
    After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.
  27. Devil in a Blue Dress
    Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.
  28. Oldboy
    Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.
  29. La Ciénaga
    It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.
  30. The Big Red One
    Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.
  31. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    Voyage of Time is a beautiful diversion, but almost entirely empty, even in its inquisitive big swings for profundity.
  32. Children of Heaven
    The plot feels less like a realistic dilemma than it does a willed exercise in neorealist catharsis — a way of inviting Western audiences to bask in their materialist ”empathy.”
  33. Revenge of the Mekons
    Director Joe Angio presents the group's music with the contagious enthusiasm of a diehard, but exuberance is no substitute for storytelling, and Revenge of the Mekons is in desperate need of a narrative path.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby in Paradise
    Ultimately, though, it’s the film that’s tentative-and more than a little plodding. Instead of following through on the relationships, Nunez allows Ruby in Paradise to get bogged down in his heroine’s economic woes. The film ends up being about whether she’ll land on her feet, when what we really want to see is whether she can stand tall.
  35. Shanghai Noon
    Lacks confidence in its own much bigger, potentially fascinating story -- an American tale of pageantry and history.
  36. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.
  37. Water
    The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
  38. The Rape of Europa
    Unfortunately, most of the two-hour documentary is devoted to annotating what the Nazis stole for both their state and personal collections. The movie doesn't dramatize this crime -- it catalogs it. With deadening monotony.
  39. Italian for Beginners
    To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.
  40. Lady Macbeth
    There’s a provocative idea at the center of Oldroyd’s beautifully photographed film — repression exploding into madness and violence. But as the body count rises, Lady Macbeth loses its secret weapon: sympathy.
  41. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.
  42. mother!
    The title isn’t the only thing about the film that has an exclamation point; every scene comes with one – and also seems to be in blaring, buzzing neon. The movie doesn’t know when to stop.
  43. Submarine
    The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.
  44. Mistress America
    Noah Baumbach’s latest wisp of privileged New York whimsy vaporizes on arrival.
  45. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    A historical drama as static as it is stately.
  46. Metropolitan
    Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.
  47. Bernie
    All those twangy, homespun observations interrupt and annotate the narrative until Black and MacLaine's scenes start to feel as trivial as reenactments on a true-crime TV show.
  48. Our Little Sister
    Despite fine intentions and four lovely performances from the female leads, Our Little Sister is simply too light to be felt. It floats away in the wind—and the memory — like a paper umbrella.
  49. Lilo & Stitch
    The animation in Lilo & Stitch has an engaging retro-simple vivacity, and it's nice to see a movie for tots make use of Elvis Presley, but the story is witless and oddly defanged.
  50. Casualties of War
    As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.
  51. Bulworth
    It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.
  52. Civil War
    The result is a brutal piece of speculative fiction that highlights the ugliness of war — even if it never quite lives up to its provocative premise.
  53. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Glazed over by its worship of Che Guevara.
  54. Dark Days
    More noteworthy for its intentions than its execution.
  55. Land of Mine
    Land of Mine is essentially bomb porn.
  56. 10,000 km
    It’s a decent critique of romance in the digital age—until you realize how boring it is to watch people break up on Facebook.
  57. Orlando
    As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.
  58. Daddy Longlegs
    A disconcertingly jumpy tale of breathtakingly crummy parenting, the windblown movie dares a tolerant audience not to call Child Services.
  59. What Maisie Knew
    In this bleak indie bummer that confuses hopelessness with depth, they're really nothing more than selfish, one-dimensional monsters. Maisie's better off without them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Judging by the title, though, Sprecher made the movie she wanted to make, and if you're in the right damp-wool mood, you may connect with it too.
  61. Casting JonBenét
    A clever filmmaking experiment? Without a doubt. A satisfying one? Not so much.
  62. Wonder Boys
    Sweet, flaky, and more than a little aimless.
  63. The Time That Remains
    At best, his poker-faced vignettes nail the icy comedy of war: A man chats on his cell phone, unworried about a tank targeting him a few feet away. At worst, they're totally opaque and unmoving.
  64. Kundun
    At once spectacular and inert -- a mosaic impersonating a movie; an empty-shell epic.
  65. Take My Eyes
    If Take My Eyes explored how a woman could still feel for a man who abused her, it might have gripped us with its difficult truths. But the movie presents Pilar and Antonio's marriage as a stale, neurotic dead end.
  66. East Is East
    A movie in which the easy socio-racial paradoxes have been diagrammed with more care than the relationships
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Golden Door
    A sluggish procedural on what it was like to make the journey to Ellis Island back in the day.
  68. Into the Abyss
    The film has the same moral design as "Dead Man Walking," but since it never gets inside the darkness of the killers' minds, it's really just a rambling episode of "A Current Affair."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bridge to Terabithia
    The movie -- which never decides if it's a fantasy or coming-of-age story -- spends a lot of time away from Terabithia; that also leaches out the wonder. The boy seems more excited that Zooey Deschanel is his hottie music teacher than he is to see tree men in the forest.
  70. The Secret Garden
    The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.
  71. Sin City
    Glued tightly from page to screen, Sin City is so seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.
  72. Bird
    Like the butterflies and pockets of natural beauty that Bailey is drawn to, there are glimmers of potential in Bird. But it never fully manages to take flight, leaving its provocative conclusion more jarring and confusing than revelatory.
  73. A Scanner Darkly
    In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.
  74. Rust and Bone
    Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.
  75. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Queen of Katwe
    Nyong’o’s gravitas is undercut by a script teeming with wooden platitudes, special lessons learned, and the overbaked dialogue of a Joan Crawford melodrama.
  77. Time
    Time, Kim Ki-Duk's pointed commentary on surfaces and consumer fads -- with particular meaning for plastic-surgery-obsessed South Korea -- is as tautly ''pretty'' and inexpressive as the results for those who compulsively seek cosmetic perfection.
  78. Les Destinées
    Pictorial but oddly muffled three-hour saga of romance and capitalism, not necessarily in that order.
  79. Blue Beard
    Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.
  80. ABC Africa
    It's not enough for the film to show us a child's corpse wrapped in cardboard; we've got to step back to see Kiarostami himself shooting the sad sight, so that it becomes a Godardian ironic statement.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    The Great Mouse Detective‘s few tunes are unmemorable and all the action (aside from the inventive chase sequences) is snooze-worthy. Only the incomparable Vincent Price (as Ratigan) is worth the price.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  82. The Matrix
    The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exiled
    One of those wearisome Hong Kong action movies where characters engage in Mexican standoffs not so much to ratchet up excitement or generate tension but rather to look cool for as long as possible.
  84. The Commitments
    As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.
  85. Rocket Science
    One of those terminally annoying, depressive-yet-coy Sundance faves in which the tale of a mopey teen misfit unfolds behind a hard candy shell of irony.
  86. American Sniper
    Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is a film that evokes complicated emotions. A month after seeing it, you might still be wrestling with whether it's powerful, profound, or propaganda.
  87. The Grandmaster
    Tony Leung plays Ip Man with his old-movie charisma and reserve, but the film, despite a few splendid fights, is a biohistorical muddle that never finds its center. Maybe that's because — big mistake! — it never gets to Bruce Lee.
  88. The Scandal
    Les Liaisons Dangereuses is such an elaborate and satisfying structure of deceit and salaciousness that every attempt I have seen to adapt it on film -- "Dangerous Liaisons," "Cruel Intentions," even the trashy 1959 Roger Vadim version -- has resulted in an entertainment of agreeable nasty elegance. Until now.
  89. The Killer
    Fincher is adept at excoriating the darkness of the human soul, but he's missed his mark with a character so blindly determined to prove he doesn't have one.
  90. Ferrari
    The film does not valorize Ferrari, but it doesn’t complicate him either. And while its racing sequences are exhilarating, it should have spent more time looking under the hood.
  91. The Lookout
    A thriller that wheezes along on bits and pieces of ''character.''
    • 73 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cavalcade
    It’s rife with fey, unintentional camp like the scene in which a newlywed couple pledge eternal love on the deck of an ocean liner — only to move away and reveal a life preserver labeled Titanic. Cavalcade really won its Oscar because of Hollywood’s raging Anglophilia — the insecure sense that if a character says, ”Let’s all have a cup of tea!” the movie must be art.
  93. Clueless
    There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Milo and Otis
    Milo and Otis is an okay babysitter for the very, very young, but for anyone who truly loves animals it seems pretty fishy.
  95. Miami Blues
    What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.
  96. Quinceañera
    Tthis isn't just any setup, is it: It's suds being sold as ethno-sensitive reality, a case of coveting thy neighbor's fiesta.
  97. Men in Black
    The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.
  98. Dances with Wolves
    The movie is so busy turning the Sioux characters into photogenic saints that it never quite allows them the complications of human beings.
  99. Sleepless in Seattle
    The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.
  100. Clear and Present Danger
    As a thriller, this 21 2-hour production takes a slow route between short bursts of excitement.
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