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. The Hunting Ground
    Heartbreaking, infuriating, and unmissable.
  2. While We're Young
    After a while, the director of the more perceptive "Frances Ha" and "The Squid and the Whale" tips his hand, painting the aging Xers as guardians of integrity and the millennials as opportunists. It’s a cheap shot, and it feels like he’s telling the kids to get off his lawn. It’s not Stiller’s character who’s the curmudgeon, it’s Baumbach.
  3. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    12:08 East of Bucharest is a shrewdly built comedy, but the characters are broad-verging-on-cheap unholy hick fools.
  4. Shut Up & Sing
    Through it all, Natalie Maines' decision to shirk humility, to stick by her guns, to the point that the group returns to that London concert venue in 2006 and she utters the same joke again, becomes a feisty and inspiring act of something there is only one word for: patriotism.
  5. The Verdict
    If you were presenting a case for Newman’s legacy of acting brilliance, this film would be exhibit A.
  6. Dallas Buyers Club
    It's been 20 years since Tom Hanks put a movie star's face on the AIDS crisis in "Philadelphia." Since then, Hollywood has largely ignored one of the most tragic chapters of the 20th century. Considering that track record, even a movie as imperfect as Dallas Buyers Club is something worth celebrating.
  7. Better Man
    Better Man is beautifully emotional and engaging, and it’s an admirably big swing. But it would have a greater shot at making audiences go ape if the primate concept were used more judiciously.
  8. Notre musique
    Notre Musique is Godard's post-9/11 statement, a meditation on how war emerges from the eternal, and hypocritical, duality of human perception -- the sense that it's always ''the other'' who dies.
  9. The Cockettes
    The Cockettes weren't talented, exactly, yet the bedazzled flakiness of their passion takes you closer than just about any movie has to what was once really meant by the term ''free-spirited.''
  10. The Imposter
    The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.
  11. A Single Man
    Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    For those who saw it back in 1972, The Harder They Come was a revelation, evocative of a poor but vibrant Jamaican culture few Americans knew about, with a bombshell reggae soundtrack that for all intents introduced the musical genre here.
  13. The Messenger
    There's nothing drab about the tormented place these men take each other to. You'll want to go along.
  14. Under the Sea 3D
    Offers up dazzling ocean creatures in calmly shifting scenes that could double as the world's most expensive screensaver.
  15. Private Fears in Public Places
    The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes.
  16. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    A fascinating and lovingly crafted musical documentary that nevertheless misunderstands its own subject.
  17. Sin Nombre
    Whenever Sin Nombre turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill, but the film's images vastly outstrip its imagination.
  18. 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.”
  19. 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.
  20. The Nightingale
    At nearly 140 minutes, the narrative takes its time wending toward a final, inevitable confrontation, and the incidents that punctuate it can sometimes feel like singularly ugly stations of the cross to be marked off; a series of random man- and nature-made cruelties meted out without pity.
  21. Grandma
    Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer supply sharp cameos, but this is Tomlin’s movie, and she obliges with a spiky, refreshingly unvarnished performance.
  22. Presence
    As haunted house stories go, Presence is more interested in lurking dread than bloody jump scares, slowly ratcheting up the tension with long, uninterrupted takes.
  23. I, Tonya
    The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.
  24. Fat Girl
    With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.
  25. Ulee's Gold
    Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.
  26. Humanité
    It ought to be seen, because it's a work of moral and spiritual mystery.
  27. Grindhouse
    Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.
  28. The Pool
    Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India's western Goa region -- and works in Hindi, primarily with novice actors. The result is a story both authentically specific and profoundly global.
  29. Benda Bilili!
    This unsentimental, smartly assembled film is equally attentive to the cacophony of African poverty and the balm of harmony provided by these pied pipers of hope.
  30. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.
  31. The War Tapes
    The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''
  32. Maestro
    This is not a movie made for second-screen viewing; anyone glimpsing at their phone for even a moment may miss a key character moment or plot detail that is conveyed visually. It will be best to see in a theater during whatever release window Netflix provides — but even when viewed at home, Maestro deserves the same level of respect from viewers as one of Bernstein's public performances of the music of Mahler.
  33. Jerry Maguire
    Brashly engaging.
  34. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    Jim & Andy is fascinating, but it lands on a weird message: Thank goodness Andy Kaufman existed so Jim Carrey could play him in a movie.
  35. Relic
    If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.
    • 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.
  37. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.
  38. Chi-Raq
    Erupting like a scalding geyser from the ground right beneath our feet, Spike Lee’s daring, dizzying, sympathetic, symphonic, vital, vehement Chi-Raq is the most urgently 2015 movie of 2015.
  39. Thelma
    Not every gag lands, but Thelma is the rare spoof that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and disarmingly sweet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Young and Innocent
    One of Hitchcock's lighter thrillers, Young and Innocent is a straightforward wrong-man film elevated by the chemistry of its leads, Derrick De Marney as fugitive and Nova Pilbeam as a young woman roped into his antics. Despite being relatively underwritten, their romantic dynamic crackles as the two easily find the comedy in every scenario without undermining the dramatic tension.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Saturday Night Fever
    Travolta molds what could have been an equally obvious character into a substantial, tragic figure.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    One of the five essential Paramount comedies.
  43. Love Lies Bleeding
    It’s a brutal, bloody, and discombobulating ride, but boy, is it a blast.
  44. The House I Live In
    David Simon, creator of "The Wire," who argues that the targeting of minorities, fused with mandatory sentencing, has turned the war on drugs into ''a holocaust in slow motion.''
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tom Jones
    Screenwriter John Osborne and Richardson (both received Oscars as well) came up with a smart solution to the problem of adapting an 18th-century literary classic: Turn it into bawdy slapstick with generous helpings of then- daring sex and violence.
  46. Little Fish
    The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making.
  47. A Touch of Sin
    Sin, more stylized than the director’s previous work, is also more detached.
  48. The Beguiled
    For all that lavish calibration, its beauty is a little remote, too — so beguiled by style that it forgets, or simply declines, to make us feel too much.
  49. The Mustang
    First-time feature filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre brings a gorgeous, wide-open sparseness to her visual storytelling (it makes sense that Robert Redford, the original Sundance Kid, is listed as an executive producer), but it’s largely Schoenaerts’ movie to carry.
  50. Shanghai Noon
    Lacks confidence in its own much bigger, potentially fascinating story -- an American tale of pageantry and history.
  51. The Holy Girl
    The blessings of salvation have rarely felt so mixed, the parameters of Lolita-hood so elusive - which is exactly Martel's specialty.
  52. Philomena
    Dench and Coogan's chemistry is undeniably great. In the end, he manages to give her the answers she seeks and she manages to give him a heart.
  53. Get Low
    Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.
  54. 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.
  55. The Best Intentions
    The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.
  56. Detroit
    A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own.
  57. The Edge of Seventeen
    Thankfully, Fremon Craig’s script is smart and sensitive enough not to gloss over the real pain lurking beneath Nadine’s bravado as she deals with the aftermath of her dad’s death, her best friend’s betrayal, and the fact that the right guy (Hayden Szeto) might not be the one with the best bangs.
  58. Brooklyn Castle
    A great subject goes a long way in this standard but effective entry in the amazing-kids documentary category.
  59. Logan
    The loner has to learn to put someone else first. It’s both as manipulative and hokey as that sounds, but occasionally it works well enough that you might find yourself getting choked up against your better judgment.
  60. 28 Years Later
    Prepare for more gruesome kills, more gross-outs, more insight into how a society might actually look a generation after an unfathomable event. These movies are clearly infectious.
  61. Stephanie Daley
    The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance.
  62. Water
    The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
  65. Bukowski: Born into This
    It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.
  66. Monsoon Wedding
    The old-world-meets-new mesh is incarnated in the movie's soundtrack, a joyful effusion of disco Bollywood that, by the end of Monsoon Wedding, sent my spirit soaring out of the theater.
  67. The Wife
    Welsh actor Pryce (Game of Thrones) is fantastic — a fussy, adulterous egoist in the Great Man mold of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth, with his own touchingly real frailties. But the movie belongs to Close, whose face, as she is courted and patronized, sexually betrayed and damned with faint praise, is a marvel of emotional intelligence and control.
  68. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    While the original movie benefited from narrative simplicity and an admirable lack of villains, this one paints the screen with too many characters and frequent diversions from the main story, but nevertheless serves up a bountiful and sugary feast for the 3-D-bespectacled eyes.
  69. Career Girls
    It isn't easy to get close to these two women. But the effort yields a rewarding take on the resiliency and therapeutic importance of friendship.
  70. The Disaster Artist
    It feels only appropriate that James Franco, an actor and director for whom weirdness is next to godliness, would be the one to tell his story.
  71. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Some of the effects remain nicely repulsive; Freddy himself comes across as a genuinely nasty piece of work, far removed from his later incarnation.
  72. Dig!
    The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.
  73. Broken Embraces
    Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.
  74. Rosetta
    Rosetta is a character of raw pride in a film of lingering power.
  75. Kandahar
    With its lyrical vision of oppression, looks, if anything, milder now than it might have before the war.
  76. Maggie's Plan
    Sometimes that tips too far into silliness (the final scene, especially, works strenuously towards an end-cute); still, its mildly subversive rom-com sensibilities are just sour-sweet enough to pull it off.
  77. Heavy
    Mangold, who also wrote the script, has made a modern-day "Marty", a kitchen-sink drama that doesn't condescend to its characters.
  78. The Sure Thing
    Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap follow-up is surprisingly deep for a flick that rests on the same shelf as Hardbodies and My Tutor. But as Gib would say, ”What the hell’s wrong with being stupid once in a while?
  79. Adventureland
    For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.
  80. Every Little Step
    A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.
  81. Like Someone in Love
    The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.
  82. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.
  83. 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.
  84. Inside Man
    The jazzish score, by Lee's music man, Terence Blanchard, is typically intrusive. But the mood is right, the twists are new. And with one casting inspiration, Inside Man furthers the rising stardom of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity).
  85. Dolemite Is My Name
    Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.
  86. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The film's a giddily subversive space opera that runs on self-aware smart-assery.
  87. Lore
    This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape.
  88. I Carry You with Me
    In Ewing’s hands and as anchored by two superb performances, Iván and Gerardo’s romance gets scaled up to an epic, a searing saga of the undocumented experience in which love is the binding force.
  89. Jesus' Son
    Another grotty drama about junkie love? Well, yes...I make an exception for Jesus' Son.
  90. In America
    Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.
  91. Morning Sun
    Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.
  92. Grosse Pointe Blank
    High school reunions should only be this satisfying.
  93. Red Rocket
    Rocket is leisurely episodic and at over two hours, almost certainly longer than it needs to be, but the director's singular gift for street casting — beyond Rex, hardly anyone here has acted professionally before — and deeply embedded sense of mood works its own kind of unhurried alchemy.
  94. 3:10 to Yuma
    This is how a Western today tries to give us more bang for the buck. By working this hard to be a crowd-pleaser, though, it may please fewer crowds.
  95. Jane Eyre
    The film never conveys that something larger is at work - like, say, the hand of fate. And without that, there's more busyness than beauty to Brontë.
  96. Children of the Revolution
    Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm.
  97. A Monster Calls
    Bayona packs his tale with spellbinding visuals and honest emotion, and if the ending doesn’t reduce you to tears, you may be the real monster.
  98. Buck
    The result is a portrait that expertly mirrors its subject: Buck is shaped with the same economy, restraint, and unfussiness as the man, to unexpectedly inspiring effect.
  99. Shaun of the Dead
    The daffy, innately British joke that propels the cheeky U.K. comedy hit Shaun of the Dead is that although real zombies have risen up -- slacker wankers Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his best pal and roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), are too slack, wankerish, and blitheringly British to notice.
  100. The White Tiger
    Gourav is frankly devastating, his face a cracked mask of pain and disbelief. In others he's ruthless, calculating, even cruel. It's the kind of performance that can either make or break a movie like this, and the broad sweep of Tiger, with its cavalcade of outsize themes and incidents, sometimes threatens to overtake him. But through his eyes, Balram's singular story — in all its wild, exuberant improbability — roars to life
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