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. Black Bear
    It’s brainy, sure, but the emotional experience is what’s most vivid. The plot beats may confound you, but the feelings behind them are crystal-clear.
  2. Boys State
    Mostly though, State tells a story both heartbreaking and hopeful: part C-Span, part Lord of the Flies, and wholly unforgettable.
  3. Welcome to Chechnya
    It's shocking, and it should be. But Welcome finds tender, funny moments too — and even, in the end, some kind of hope.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    The vintage footage is seamlessly integrated into the action, and the end result is both very funny and very true to the conventions of the detective movie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Da 5 Bloods
    Lee’s latest is a crackerjack drama, directed by a filmmaker who remains in total control of his once-in-a-generation gifts and utilizes them to synthesize story and history into something new.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    Chow-Yun Fat’s sleek underworld charisma and intense emotion still come through. As for the action scenes, the dubbing affects them not a whit: They’re as dizzying as any Woo has concocted, and the climactic gun battle has to be one of the most ridiculously exhilarating — or exhilaratingly ridiculous — sequences of its kind.
  7. Elvis
    It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine, the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.
  8. Athlete A
    A measured if still-maddening look into the 2016 USA Gymnastics scandal.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Anchored by Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall’s romance and full of Altman’s typical aural flourishes (old-time radio shows serve as the soundtrack), Thieves Like Us proves that it takes both joy and melancholy to equal nostalgia.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Strawberries
    A film that goes where many others have gone (yes, this is Scrooge for Ph.D.s) but with a subtlety few have dreamed of?
  11. The War Room
    By the end of the movie, you realize that these two have devised nothing less than a media-age alternative to the Nixon era’s dirty tricks. The War Room is a giddy celebration of clean tricks.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Brief Encounter
    Director David Lean’s magnificent rendering of the short, passionate, and unconsummated affair between two middle-class, middle-aged Brits remains the most memorable treatment of extramarital romance in movie history.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Point Blank
    The lead character has been aptly renamed Walker, and, as played by Marvin in what may be the actor’s most emblematic performance, he strides through Los Angeles like a gangland golem: watchful, unstoppable, frighteningly silent.
  14. Without Limits
    A richly intimate sports fable.
  15. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya — alternately raw, tender, and incendiary — duly electrifies every scene he's in. Righteous as the road may be, his Fred hasn't been flattened to fit the broad Wikipedia-worn contours of a martyr or a hero; he lives and breathes, down to the last indelible frame.
  16. Time
    It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    The scenes between Taylor and Spencer Tracy are sweet and utterly lacking in artifice, and although the movie asks little more than her presence, she provides it with simple, natural grace.
  18. Ammonite
    There's an austerity to the film — long shots of stone and candlelight, clipped dialogue — that can feel rigorous, almost grim. But Lee (God's Own Country) is only building a richer kind of mood, and priming the canvas for his actresses, who reward that faith with remarkable performances.
  19. Totally Under Control
    The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.
  20. One Night in Miami
    A quintessentially American tale; profane, profound, and beautiful.
  21. 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    8½
    Fellini weaves the director’s memories and fantasies into a brilliant blend as Guido comes to realize that lives, like movies, need direction.
  23. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    If the movie's entire axis spins on the kind of extreme discomfort comedy you almost need a pillow to chew on and a pile of Xanax to get through, that's also the particular genius of Baron Cohen, an artist who instinctively knows how to hold up a mirror — and that a cracked one can show us, maybe better than anything, exactly what we need to see.
  24. The Russia House
    It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.
  25. Let Them All Talk
    There’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light.
    • 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.
  27. Much Ado About Nothing
    It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.
  28. On the Count of Three
    The movie settles into the blackest kind of buddy comedy — a lacerating slice of nihilism rooted in real despair, and real I-love-you-man tenderness too.
  29. What's Love Got to Do with It
    The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Freaked
    The first half hour of this deliriously rude comedy, codirected by Winter and Tom Stern, is so overflowing with anarchic invention that it holds up against such certified classics as Duck Soup and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The last 48 minutes aren’t bad, but they rely so heavily on gross-out makeup and special effects that the movie’s initial rush wears off.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Love Potion #9
    It’s the height of silliness: An elixir makes two wallflowers (Tate Donovan and Sandra Bullock) irresistible. But the blithe comedy Love Potion #9 is both playful and sweet — and its modest intentions fit the small screen snugly.
  32. Singles
    But here they’re all still young and flannel-y and full of hope—and nobody needs an app for that.
  33. Petite Maman
    Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.
  34. Microcosmos
    The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.
  35. Damage
    Whether you respond to this movie may come down to the question of how far you think people are willing to go to realize their desires. Damage says that they’ll go all the way — past honor, past rationality, past sin. The movie may not always convince, but when it does it’s a cataclysmic peek into the erotic abyss.
  36. Riders of Justice
    A kind of popcorn movie that doesn't just let wit and storytelling serve as the garnish for big-bang action, but makes that its actual priority.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    My Favorite Year
    My Favorite Year, a slight but sweet backstage comedy, now provides three levels of nostalgia: for the era of swashbuckling stars like Errol Flynn; for the golden age of TV that supplanted it; and for the presence of Peter O’Toole.
  38. Q & A
    Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.
  39. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice (the title, never once mentioned or explained, remains a happy non sequitur) is a love letter to an era, and more than that a feeling: a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, one wild poly-blend rumpus at a time.
  40. A Hero
    Even as the story's inevitable reckoning descends, Farhadi allows his modest morality tale to take on a note of battered, ambiguous hope: a cautionary fable whose purest notes ring poignantly, painfully true.
  41. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    Roadrunner, steeped in the jittery punk-rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document­, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived
  42. Tenebrae
    Directed by Dario Argento, a.k.a. the Italian Hitchcock, the remastered giallo Tenebre is crammed with artsy camera work, intricate Rube Goldbergian death scenes, and a gruesome final reel where blood flows like the Tiber.
  43. The Power of the Dog
    Unless you're one of the few who's read Thomas Savage's 1967 book of the same name, on which the script is based, there's rarely a moment that doesn't feel racked with the queasy, thrilling promise of sudden violence or epiphany.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    tick, tick...Boom!
    Tick, Tick… Boom! is a totem for the thrills and trials of making art, with all the sacrifices and empathy it requires.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Boys in the Band
    This heavy-handed relic of a self-loathing time proves surprisingly relevant — not to mention funny, disturbing, and deeply moving.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Brain Damage
    Writer-director Frank Henenlotter’s disturbing antidrug parable has more gross-out scenes than it probably needs, but it also has the funniest and most literate dialogue ever to grace a no-budget monster movie.
  47. The Eel
    In the creature’s mating habits and its wriggling life, Imamura creates a parallel to the upstream battle of these fragile outsiders, and he makes his points with abundant, tender humor.
  48. Spencer
    For all of Larraín's artistry, Spencer would crumble in the hands of the wrong actress, and Stewart gives one of the best performances of her career so far as this highly subjective version of Diana.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    An Unmarried Woman
    In An Unmarried Woman, Paul Mazursky’s realist look at the dissolution of a marriage, Jill Clayburgh brought its effects to near-harrowing life.
  50. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    At just under 90 minutes, the movie is as short and sweet as its stamp-size muse, but an uncommon loveliness lingers; Marcel might just be the most purely joyful, stealthily profound movie experience of the year.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment, Part II
    The original song-and-dance formula is diluted, however, by a dozen or more comedy scenes (with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Hepburn and Tracy, Abbott and Costello, and others). But they are so wisely chosen, sharply edited, and outright funny that the overall entertainment level remains high.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Quiet Man
    Sentimental and sexist, John Ford’s gorgeous slice of the auld sod nevertheless moves like music.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment! III
    The biggest innovation is in making TE! III much more than a compilation of familiar scenes. This time producers Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan have ferreted out previously unseen sequences and outtakes featuring the likes of Astaire, Horne, Frank Sinatra, Charisse, Reynolds, and Judy Garland.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    If you’re looking for cool, here’s Elvis Presley at his absolutely arctic.
  55. You Won't Be Alone
    The movie also gets deeper and more emotional as it goes, becoming a metaphor for restless empathy and non-binary points of view. You Won't Be Alone is a fitting title, bearing the ominous warning of a juicy thriller, but also a subtle sense of compassion. It's a big world and you won't be alone, if you let the witches in.
  56. X
    For its whole running time, X has ideas on its mind. Like the doubled-edged title itself, both an evocation of the grungy rating this movie might have received in 1979 and something more suggestive ("You've got that X factor," Wayne says of Maxine's allure), it indicates a film that feels unpinned, ominous, and potentially unforgettable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Forbidden Planet
    It’s quintessential ’50s male chauvinism, and Nielsen plays it with a man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do stiffness.
  58. Fire of Love
    The romance of the documentary emerges out of its deep, unfaked appreciation for nature: long, uninterrupted stretches where these self-described "weirdos" go off on their own to explore alien worlds like astronauts in their protective gear.
  59. Master
    Diallo, an inspired stylist with bold things to say, strikes the balance between thrills and ills in a way that's wholly her own.
  60. Flux Gourmet
    Give yourself over to the movie's absorbing sense of process and rehearsal, complete with notes of humor that never quite puncture into mockery, and you'll have a better time with it.
  61. Hustle
    Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.
  62. Moonage Daydream
    Pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display, which extends to some atmospheric animation (as it did with Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), and instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs. The music itself, gorgeously remixed by Bowie's longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti, has never sounded better or stranger, with isolations of instrumental passages that stick in mind.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic.
  64. Armageddon Time
    A nuanced exploration of situational ethics tinged with guilt, it's a small, near-perfect New York story.
  65. The Banshees of Inisherin
    To be corny, which the film is decidedly not, it's about life: the brevity of it, the risks we do or don't take, who in the end we choose to share it with. And for all the pettiness, absurdity, and outright threats of violence, it's pretty feckin' wonderful.
  66. Close
    Shot in alternating French and Flemish, it's also quintessentially European, but the language of his storytelling is the most universal kind: a moving and often sublime piece of small-scale filmmaking, told with uncommon empathy.
  67. Eat Drink Man Woman
    The personalities in this well-drawn family combine to produce subtle new flavors — and in the end, no one is spiced as you’d imagined they’d be.
  68. This Is Elvis
    Its ambition is so great that the production’s occasional melodramatic touches can not only be forgiven, but viewed as having been executed in the spirit of the man himself.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Plan 9 from Outer Space
    Shockingly nonlinear, boasting a cast of the once great (Lugosi), the never-even-good (Lyle Talbot, Tor Johnson), and the unbelievably motley (”psychic” Criswell, cinch-waisted Vampira), its 79 minutes are jam-packed with insanity, and those tin plates on strings that Wood tries to pass off as flying saucers are the least of its delights.
  70. Pearl
    Co-scripting with her director, Goth is the standout, displaying a verbal vigor and earthiness she's been unable to tap so far (not even in movies like Nymphomaniac and A Cure for Wellness).
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is simply the closest any TV or movie incarnation has ever come to the spirit of the original Batman comic books.
  72. All Quiet on the Western Front
    This sprawling German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic WWI novel is a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that transcends the bombast of propaganda mostly just because it's so artfully and indelibly made.
  73. Return to Seoul
    In its colorful, Godardian way, Return to Seoul becomes a quest movie, but not the one you're expecting — it's the opposite of sentimental or overly therapized.
  74. The Little Mermaid
    The human world, it's a mess, but with Halle Bailey, life under the sea is better than anything Disney live-action has done in nearly a decade.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Intervista
    Sublime moments encounter clunkiness and bad overdubbing until it’s hard to know what’s on purpose, but you certainly envy the Fellini family/crew their experiences in service of a man who so appreciated his life’s pursuit (or what he called ”this alibi”).
  76. Challengers
    Anchored by three arresting performances and playfully experimental direction, Challengers is fresh, exhilarating, and energetic.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Ref
    The performances are uniformly excellent — even Leary knows when to shut up and just listen — and this nasty romp delivers so many honest laughs, you may end up watching it twice in the same night to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.
  78. Twisters
    There's a ton of technobabble that you have to take on faith, but Jones and Powell do more than sell it; they make it compelling.
  79. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    The film version is an utter delight, a loving adaptation that's both true to the book and endearingly fresh.
  80. The Holdovers
    Life is messy, and The Holdovers never loses sight of that truth. But the film never becomes self-indulgent either.
  81. Magazine Dreams
    Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.
  82. Poor Things
    For all its hilarity, explicit sex — which, for the record, is a) extremely sexy, b) earned, and c) hysterically funny — and foul-mouthed dialogue, Poor Things is a romance about a woman learning to fall in love with herself, no matter what others think she should be.
  83. The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest is a formalized and frightening Holocaust film, largely for the ways it displays the Hoss family as merely human beings. It's a stark reminder of our complicity and the capacity for great evil in the most mundane of circumstances.
  84. May December
    Haynes’ camera often perceives these characters from around a corner, or from the other side of a mirror, or inside what they think is a safe space — always giving the viewer the simultaneously icky and exhilarating feeling of being a trespasser on private secrets.
  85. All of Us Strangers
    Grief is a funny animal; it tangles itself in our organs and sinews, permanently altering how we love, how we see ourselves, and how we make sense of our identity. That's what Haigh is unraveling here, with a bittersweet emphasis on the power of love and its ability to transcend even death itself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Letter
    In William Wyler’s richly torrid melodrama The Letter, Davis unsurprisingly mesmerizes as a duplicitous murderess pleading self-defense. What is surprising is how, with the help of a good, sympathetic director, she doesn’t play the role in all-out pit viper mode. Instead, Davis reveals something vulnerable and pitiable.
  87. The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy offers a potent blend of action and romance, as refreshing as one of its touted “spicy margaritas.” Sure, it’s got a little kick, but mostly, it exists to ensure that anyone who consumes it has a fantastic time.
  88. Conclave
    Conclave is packed with unexpected twists and its final reveal is one viewers will never see coming, an increasingly rare occurrence in modern movie-making and the mark of an impeccably crafted thriller.
  89. Maria
    This is a portrait of all that an artist must sacrifice for their work and the ways that is amplified further as a female artist. It's a fable of fame and control, but it's also an ode to a woman who could only find peace by singing her heart out.
  90. Nightbitch
    It is piercingly honest, remarkably sardonic, and breathtakingly brave in the way it lays bare some of women's deepest struggles and truths. But it is not a film that is anti-motherhood. It celebrates it as well, in all of its primal, animalistic, savage contradictions and complexities.
  91. 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.
  92. The Piano Lesson
    August Wilson is a poet of the American stage. In the hands of this remarkable cast and Washington's assured direction, Wilson's work finds its best conduit to the screen yet.
  93. Nickel Boys
    Nickel Boys is a fragmented film, so much so that it can be difficult to grasp it. But at a certain point, it turns around and grabs you instead, refusing to let go until you're left sitting in a startling and stunned silence.
  94. Freakier Friday
    What makes Freakier Friday so special is that amid the laugh-out-loud humor and welcome fan service, there's also a beautiful film here about parenting, coming-of-age, loneliness, grief, loss, and sacrifice.
  95. All of You
    Apart from the sci-fi element of the soulmate test, it's familiar fodder for romantic drama, but it's of the highest caliber thanks to its sharp script and devastating central performances.
  96. Saturday Night
    It's a wildly entertaining love letter to a night of television that marked a cultural watershed.
  97. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.
  99. Invictus
    How is Invictus as a sports movie? Let's just say that its lump-in-the-throat climax is predictable, but that doesn't mean it's less than earned.
  100. Crazy Heart
    Bridges' guileless performance makes this piquant little indie tale of country music, redemption, and the love of a pretty younger woman such a sad-song charmer.
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