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 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. In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon finds new resonance in the moment when America redefined progress -- but also when it heeded the siren song of a world so desolate it reminded you what a paradise ours truly is.
  2. In the Valley of Elah
    It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.
  3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke.
  4. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers.
  5. Michael Clayton
    It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.
  6. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    Mesmerizing.
  7. I'm Not There.
    I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever.
  8. Oswald's Ghost
    In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.
  9. Elegy
    There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.
  10. Snow Angels
    David Gordon Green's captivating winter-chill tragedy, is a tale that encompasses murder, divorce, adultery, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, and the disappearance of a small child. In other words, it's downbeat enough to make the recent Oscar-nominated films look like party games.
  11. Up the Yangtze
    Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study.
  12. Battle for Haditha
    Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.
  13. Encounters at the End of the World
    The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.
  14. My Winnipeg
    Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche.
  15. Tropic Thunder
    It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions.
  16. Trouble the Water
    Essential, unique viewing.
  17. I.O.U.S.A.
    If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it.
  18. A Christmas Tale
    The movie is enchanting.
  19. Of Time and the City
    ''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.
  20. Every Little Step
    A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.
  21. Pontypool
    Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky.
  22. Earth Days
    A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.
  23. It Might Get Loud
    A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.
  24. The September Issue
    Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.
  25. A Christmas Carol
    A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.
  26. A Prophet
    There's also no romanticizing on the part of the director, who proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness (even in the midst of scenes of violence), creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor for whom prison turns out to be a twisted opportunity for self-definition.
  27. Mother
    Another must-see marvel of horror, comedy, and impeccable filmmaking by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.
  28. IMAX: Hubble 3D
    Awesome documentary.
  29. The Dish
    It's a lovely, original, Australian take on a climactic moment usually thought of as all American.
  30. Dick
    A gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire.
  31. Big Night
    The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive.
  32. Before Night Falls
    Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.
  33. Swingers
    The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  34. Lies
    Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.
  35. Sound and Fury
    A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.
  36. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    A candy store for film buffs.
  37. Autumn Tale
    Rohmer treasures the undervalued glories of discourse and the intimacy of conversation over the obviousness of action or sexual display.
  38. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.
  39. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.
  40. Our Song
    The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.
  41. The Color of Paradise
    While never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer.
  42. Rififi (re-release)
    It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.
  43. Rosetta
    Rosetta is a character of raw pride in a film of lingering power.
  44. The House of Mirth
    This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating.
  45. Amores Perros
    Fierce, loving, and electric, this movie's got bite as well as bark.
  46. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.
  47. Affliction
    Affliction -- a beautiful bummer, a magnificent feel-bad movie -- is American filmmaking of a most rewarding order.
  48. The Circle
    Circles the heart of noisy, modern Tehran with an informal, documentary-like freedom that is thrilling in its naturalism.
  49. Ulee's Gold
    Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.
  50. Gimme Shelter
    Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.
  51. A Decade Under the Influence
    This documentary about the triumph of the New Hollywood employs a treasure trove of interviews and clips to create a rich understanding of the many forces -- cultural undertows, really -- that flowed together to fill the void left by the dying studio system.
  52. That Obscure Object of Desire
    The lightness with which Buñuel was able to insert the little jokes and knife stabs of surrealism he loved so much is, in fact, divine.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dead Ringers
    A masterpiece.
  54. The Crying Game
    By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.
  55. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.
  56. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Reversal of Fortune
    Funny and scary, Reversal is a tour de force for Schroeder, who examines the idle rich, the intricacies of the legal system, and the imperatives of morality concisely but with unmatched brio.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  58. Menace II Society
    Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.
  59. The Man Without a Past
    The message, if there must be one, of this marvelous, stubbornly personal movie is that there is a spark in every soul.
  60. Quiz Show
    Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.
  61. The Player
    The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.
  62. Nurse Betty
    The superb screenplay won an award at Cannes this year for good reason.
  63. Go Tigers!
    Beautifully edited, Go Tigers! is an enthralling look at the drama that can transpire in the autumn of one small town on any given Friday.
  64. The Apostle
    Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  65. Chuck & Buck
    The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.
  66. Traffic
    The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.
  67. Hamlet
    Almereyda excises big chunks of plot to shape his vision, but retains Shakespeare's language and pays such rigorous attention to meaning and subtext that what's missing isn't missed.
  68. A Hard Day's Night
    They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.
  69. Together
    This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like.
  70. In the Company of Men
    Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.
  71. Timecode
    A voyeur's delight.
  72. Startup.com
    For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.
  73. L.A. Confidential
    Voluptuously engrossing.
  74. The Grey Zone
    No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.
  75. A Simple Plan
    Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.
  76. Chinatown
    It’s one of those rare puzzle-box mysteries where, even if you can’t work it all out, you trust that it all makes sense. And when you do finally solve it — for me, around the fifth viewing — it fills you with the giddy sense of accomplishment you get from polishing off a stubborn New York Times Sunday crossword.
  77. Babe
    A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture.
  78. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Errol Morris may have been put on earth to make The Fog of War, a stunning portrait of Robert S. McNamara that closes a year of outstanding nonfiction movies on a high note.
  79. Bukowski: Born into This
    It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.
  80. From Hell
    Sensational and accomplished.
  81. The Filth and the Fury
    A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy.
  82. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    E.T. is ultimately a tale of love, and the film becomes a cathartic leap into pure feeling. [2002 re-release]
  83. The Grifters
    The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Edward Scissorhands
    Simple, funny, gorgeous, sad, and sweet, perfect for playing over and over.
  85. Igby Goes Down
    Gets weirder and meaner and darker and sadder as it progresses, which is amazing since it simultaneously remains funny and horrifying right up to the end.
  86. Osama
    The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity.
  87. A Mighty Wind
    A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.
  88. Happiness
    Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody.
  89. Air Force One
    Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  90. Joe Gould's Secret
    A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.
  91. Shattered Glass
    Presents Glass as a masterfully corrupt fabulist who convinced himself of the ultimate seductive lie, which is that there can't be anything wrong with telling people what they want to hear.
  92. Alien
    Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly.
  93. Blood Simple
    All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.
  94. Bloody Sunday
    It's a mad cycle of arrogance and despair, and Bloody Sunday etches it onto your nervous system.
  95. Time Out
    There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.
  96. Trainspotting
    It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.
  97. Glengarry Glen Ross
    The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.
  98. Bowfinger
    Disciplined script -- bitingly funny.
  99. Y Tu Mamá También
    Sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Buffalo '66
    It's all somehow both familiar and dazzling, just as Ricci's kidnapped tap student, forced to pose as the protagonist's wife for his horrifically indifferent parents, is somehow both nondescript and heartbreaking.
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