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. I, Daniel Blake
    Loach’s film isn’t as stridently political as it probably sounds. These are just proud people who want to be treated with respect. There’s one slightly melodramatic turn near the end that felt off, but by then I was already three tissues deep.
  2. The Counterfeiters
    Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.
  3. After the Wedding
    Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.
  4. The Dark Knight Rises
    Chaos reigns for much of The Dark Knight Rises, often in big, beautiful, IMAX-size scenes that only Nolan could have conceived. Yet when the apocalyptic dust literally settles on this concluding chapter, the character who lingers longest in memory is an average Gotham City cop named John Blake, wonderfully played with human-scale clarity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
  5. 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.
  6. Avengers: Endgame
    The movie largely delivers, splashing its ambitious three-hour narrative across a sprawling canvas of characters, eras, and not-quite-insurmountable challenges.
  7. A Time for Drunken Horses
    The nonprofessional cast of Bahman Ghobadi's remarkable, slow, rough edged feature reveals a simple, piercing grimness and determination framed by the gray, icy landscape of Iranian Kurdistan.
  8. Southern Comfort
    The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.
  9. The Guard
    In this offbeat buddy-cop comedy, Don Cheadle, as an FBI agent trying to stop a drug ring, makes the perfect foil.
  10. Blue Ruin
    With the same brand of realist irony the Coens used to cool down "Blood Simple," writer-director Jeremy Saulnier slows the genre’s heartbeat to gripping effect.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lassie Come Home
    The slightly older set will be hard-pressed to watch Lassie Come Home without a great big lump in the throat.
  12. Ex Machina
    Ex Machina is beautiful and ominous and features another delicately nuanced performance from Isaac, who’s quickly making a habit of them. But in the end, for all of Garland’s ambition, his reach winds up exceeding his grasp. The film is as synthetic as Ava.
  13. 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.
  14. Morvern Callar
    A movie's refusal to judge bad behavior can be a subtle way of trumping the audience -- a passive-aggressive form of one-upmanship.
  15. The Sisters Brothers
    Sisters gets sadder and more eccentric as it goes along, and the ending actually tugs sweetly on a few heart strings, though it’s also hard not to wonder why exactly, with all the Westerns already in the cannon, this movie got made — other than to give its crew of excellent actors a chance to put on their boots and ride off, cock-eyed and whimsical, into some kind of sunset.
  16. 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.
  17. Jungle Fever
    What’s missing from Jungle Fever, I think, is a vision of the positive. By that, I don’t mean some shallow ”optimistic” message but, rather, an organic and casual sense of pleasure as one of the sustaining currents of everyday life — even in a country as mired in racism as this one.
  18. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation.
  19. Zootopia
    Zootopia delivers the genre’s requisite barrage of quick-hit puns and pop culture riffs.
  20. Hard Eight
    Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable.
  21. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness.
  22. Best in Show
    You giggle every so often, but you never give yourself over to the characters.
  23. Speed
    The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned.
  24. Non-Fiction
    In the end, Non-Fiction is a warm, humane story that ends on a hopeful note reminiscent of "Hannah and Her Sisters." Life can be a messy business, but every so often it reveals moments of unexpected joy with perfect clarity.
  25. Eve's Bayou
    But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.
  26. Mississippi Masala
    As long as Nair follows the two characters’ romantic moves or details the lives of their families (whose contrasting status on the ethnic-minority ladder marks them as both rivals and uneasy comrades), the movie is funny, observant, and deeply humane.
  27. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film isn't as fast and funny as it could be, although Nathan Fillion's easily offended constable injects some sorely needed comic relief.
  28. Up and Down
    Up and Down captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole.
  29. Beach Rats
    Between "Moonlight" and the upcoming "Call Me By Your Name," some are calling this the golden age of gay coming-of-age cinema; Beach Rats’ slow pacing and dreamy verité style doesn’t feel made for quite that level of mainstream appeal. But still it gets under the skin, and stays there.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Enchanted April
    By the end of Enchanted April, there isn’t a single character—not even the spiky flapper—who retains much of an edge. That’s what’s appealing about the movie (everyone walks away happy) and also forgettable (everyone walks away mush).
  31. The Last Mistress
    Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power.
  32. The Saddest Music in the World
    Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.
  33. Tracks
    What's on screen will leave you in a state of wonder. The sweeping cinematography surveys the cracked earth and Davidson's chapped skin with equal intensity, as if to remind us how vulnerable we puny mortals are.
  34. Magnolia
    Anderson's big, showy flower of a movie unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint whiff of rot.
  35. Sorry to Bother You
    Exploding with infectious originality, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You may be the most wonderfully bizarre film of 2018.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All That Heaven Allows
    Boiling over with heated acting and schmaltzy scores, Douglas Sirk’s ’50s melodramas tap neatly into our collective trash psyche.
  37. 1917
    The film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Gaslight
    It’s canny, gothic fun, helped along by Lansbury (in her film debut) as a tarty maid who delights in overstepping boundaries.
  39. The Substance
    While it is so over-the-top as to verge on camp, it is also a chillingly pointed expression of the madness that ensues in pursuit of impossible standards — and the self-loathing and hatred that emerges when women are pitted against each other and themselves.
  40. 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.
  41. Last Orders
    The storytelling may be ordinary, but the cast is one of those all-star reunions.
  42. Son frère
    Son Frère is hushed, clinical, grimly paced, and moving.
  43. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
    It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.
  44. The Aura
    Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.
  45. Logan Lucky
    A fizzy, twisty Southern-fried heist flick that’s more enjoyable the less you try to dissect it.
  46. James and the Giant Peach
    If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.
  47. High Life
    High Life is, at turns, gorgeous, ridiculous, and confounding. Yet, the more you wrestle with it, the more it haunts you. As for Pattinson, who commits as fully as ever, he can rest easy knowing that he’s left his audience another riddle to chew on.
  48. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.
  49. 2046
    There are many places a visitor may go astray in 2046 -- places where the filmmaker appears to be a bit at loose ends too. Still, Wong's invitation -- ''Let's get lost'' -- is irresistible.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Nothing Sacred
    Ben Hecht supplied the cynically amusing script, but the brilliant Lombard makes it fly — wringing laughs from an arsenal of loopy gestures and cacophonous outbursts.
  51. Kung Fu Hustle
    All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.
  52. Apollo 13
    Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.
  53. Meru
    Meru the film, then, might be the anti-Everest. There are no expensive special effects, but there is a lot of authentic climbing footage.
  54. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    The film lacks the atmosphere of David Lean's "Great Expectations" or the weighty iconography of any one of a number of "Christmas Carols," but a sincere affection for and understanding of the source material shines through in its wit and good nature.
  55. Clemency
    Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.
  56. Command and Control
    The pace of the drama is riveting, as it jumps back through the decades to place the accident in the context of the nuclear arms race.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Own Private Idaho
    But Van Sant, whose vision is otherwise sharp, pushes the connection to Shakespeare's Henry IV too far, having Reeves at one point declaim in rhyming couplets, which severely tests even the most forgiving viewer.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  58. The Aviator
    Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.
  59. Till
    Till-Mobley's choice to let the world see what Mississippi had done to her son — she demanded an open casket at his funeral — helped ignite a movement, and made history. Till bears stirring witness to that, even if it leaves the full measure of her life a mystery.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. Abuse of Weakness
    Huppert is a wonder, inhabiting every iota of rage and froideur and helplessness; if only the movie's motives were as lucid as her performance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zero Days
    A sense of duty and morals doesn’t render Gibney infallible as a storyteller, however, as even passion for justice sometimes breeds overindulgence when you’re drunk with power and a camera.
  64. Nope
    Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan).
  65. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    More narratively straightforward (but also masterfully edited in F for Fake style), the documentary takes its title from a Welles quote about the fickle hypocrisy of the movie business and about his other favorite subject: himself. And that quote couldn’t have been more spot-on for a man who was most appreciated most only when it was too late.
  66. Finding Dory
    It’s not Toy Story or Inside Out or even Nemo. What it is is a perfectly enjoyable family film that’s comforting, familiar, and a bit slight, like one of those serviceable Lion King spin-offs that Disney used to ship straight to DVD back in the ‘90s.
  67. Rescue Dawn
    Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty.
  68. Happy Feet
    A moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy.
  69. The Weather Underground
    Powerful and searching documentary.
  70. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''
  71. Longlegs
    What’s most impressive is how Perkins collects his simple component parts and somehow transforms this into such an unnerving film. Longlegs is definitely a step above the others.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Dark Horse
    How The Dark Horse differs from similar based-on-a-true-story dramas like "Remember the Titans" and "Freedom Writers" is the deeply personal focus on the mentor’s own family struggles and mental illness.
  73. Burden of Dreams
    Herzog’s death-defying endeavor (executed with the help of an indigenous Indian tribe, not special effects) is the basis for Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s lyric chronicle of the film’s four-year evolution.
  74. The Gift
    The real joy of The Gift is getting to that twisted goodness, because more than anything, Edgerton’s script and direction demonstrate a keen understanding of tension and what puts an audience on edge.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Donnie Brasco
    It's the electric interplay between Pacino and Depp that will make it a Mob movie classic.
  76. Dear Mr. Brody
    The heir himself turned out to be a naïve and troubled young man, though Strickland leaves his particular fate a mystery until the final moments of the film. What's in between is unevenly executed but still compelling: a far-out cautionary tale of money, media, and gonzo idealism gone wrong.
  77. Courage Under Fire
    A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.
  78. Queen of Earth
    The result is chilling and beautifully composed, a stylish study of disintegration that is easier to admire than enjoy.
  79. Paddington
    Paddington is fast-paced yet unhurried, serving up surprisingly subtle ideas on melting-pot urban diversity—Paddington is a stranger in a strange land, after all—and rich visual tableaux, including a gorgeous recurring shot of the Brown home as a living dollhouse.
  80. Women Talking
    There's a deep vein of humor and humanity that Polley and her actors mine from the text, and something quietly mesmerizing in their meticulous world-building.
  81. The Virgin Suicides
    Glum and preposterous -- an operatically stilted adolescent martyr fantasy -- and yet, as staged by Coppola, it's well worth seeing.
  82. Fly Away Home
    Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.
  83. Pollock
    For all the praise that has been heaped upon it, is a quasisatisfying, half realized vision.
  84. 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.
  85. 51 Birch Street
    A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.
  86. And Then I Go
    In quiet, often dream-like interludes that frequently burst open into scenes of brutal verbal or physical violence, director Vincent Grashaw explores what it’s like to be Edwin, so battered by anxiety and anger and a crushing sense of unfairness that he hardly sleeps at night.
  87. Wild Tales
    Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales almost feels too audacious, too crazy, and, in some ways, too slight for the Oscars.
  88. Best of Enemies
    This deliciously feisty doc contextualizes their verbal brawls and the odd love-hate (mostly hate) rivalry between two men who seemed able to regard their own sense of heroism only through the other’s villainy.
  89. Shanghai Triad
    Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.
  90. Red Riding Trilogy
    Each episode (originally made for British TV) works by itself, but there's a real payoff in following all three. (Nothing matches The "Wire," but this holds its own.)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Three Musketeers
    The movie Musketeers most faithful to Dumas’ spirit didn’t arrive until director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) delivered The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.
  92. Personal Shopper
    Stewart, who appears in nearly every scene, is intensely watchable, a coiled spring. But the movie is too fragmented and tonally strange to register as more than one of Maureen’s wispy, haunted apparitions.
  93. Open Hearts
    Well-made film. Indeed, discovering such a small pleasure is the kind of experience that rewards film lovers who browse with open eyes as well as hearts.
  94. 8 Mile
    Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.
  95. Once Were Warriors
    You can feel director Lee Tamahori doing his best to get a rise out of you. Yet his work has fire and substance, too.
  96. The Ghost Writer
    Satisfying, melancholy political suspense story.
  97. Babyteeth
    Davis and "Bloodline" Emmy winner Mendelsohn, both Australian screen veterans, do the less glamorous work of being sad, angry adults, though it's often their ordinary grief that grounds the movie, even as their stories lean into the clichés of certain coping mechanisms (Pills! Infidelity! Bargaining with God!).
  98. The Jungle Book
    The Jungle Book is a tender and rollicking fable that manages to touch on some grown-up themes about man’s destructive power and the loss of youthful innocence without losing sight that it’s first and foremost a gee-whiz kids adventure.
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