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. Syriana
    Indeed, the point of Syriana appears to be that the whole lousy, corrupt, oil-producing and -consuming world is a ball of wax, ready to melt.
  2. Stand by Me
    Rob Reiner’s film is all about the journey, not the destination. And all of his young actors are great — Wheaton as the sensitive narrator, Feldman as the slightly crazy wild card, and especially Phoenix as the tough-yet-tender doomed soul.
  3. 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.
  4. Intimate Stories
    But while this piquant, tapas-like movie (a 2003 film- festival favorite only now being released) asserts that landscape is a kind of destiny from which one cannot escape, Sorin takes delighted, serious interest in how far a person can advance psychologically, even if all roads lead back to a home at the end of the world.
  5. Dreamgirls
    Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.
  6. Outside In
    Shelton may not be as prolific as the Duplasses (I’m not sure anyone could be – they seem to churn out movies in their sleep), but her work has steadily gotten more assured and quietly powerful. Her continued partnership with the brothers is a tonic for anyone who cares about keeping the Sundance-of-the-‘90s spirit alive.
  7. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.
  8. 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.
  9. Flight
    Flight opens with one of the most harrowing in-flight-disaster depictions of all time.
  10. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    Chicago 7 frames the past not just as entertaining prologue but a living document; one we ignore at our own peril.
  11. The Lunchbox
    It’s neorealist corn, but it gets to you.
  12. Dave
    For all its modest charm, Dave is a true throwback to the Capra days, a political comedy just cockeyed enough to triumph over cynicism.
  13. Shine a Light
    In Shine a Light, a crackling concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones are now so old that they seem new again.
  14. La Ciudad (The City)
    In their stark, black-and-white visual style, they are redolent of Italian neorealist cinema or fine muckraking WPA photojournalism.
  15. Menace II Society
    Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.
  16. Chuck & Buck
    The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.
  17. Blue Car
    A memory of the automobile in which a father drove away from his family provides the title for Blue Car but no hint of the power of writer-director Karen Moncrieff's superb feature debut.
  18. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.
  19. A Very Long Engagement
    This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.
    • 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.
  21. Heat
    We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.
  22. Soul Power
    What's infectious in Soul Power is the almost shocking optimism of its America-meets-Africa '70s world-beat vibe.
  23. 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.
  24. Hail Satan?
    Why end a rallying cry with a question mark? The devil is in the details, or at least in the punctuation of Hail Satan?, a movie that often seems to teeter on the line between doc- and mockumentary — a sincere examination of a social and political movement delivered with just a soupçon of Christopher Guest.
  25. Zola
    If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.
  26. Cinévardaphoto
    What lights Cinèvardaphoto is Varda's ageless ability to merge her spirit with that of the images she shows us.
  27. Midnight Special
    As father and son speed toward some doomsday reckoning, Nichols keeps us guessing in a way that evokes "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Midnight Special is a more modest, more enigmatic film than that one was, but it’s no less gripping.
  28. The Unforeseen
    Add The Unforeseen to the catalog of artfully produced nonfiction films that show how humans are screwing up the planet.
  29. Tickled
    David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary Tickled is so crazy that it feels like a hoax. Only it’s not. At least, I don’t think it is.
  30. Brothers
    We do live in a fraught world of interconnections, Bier makes clear, and what happens far away matters, in unexpected ways, close to home.
  31. The Last Station
    A grandly entertaining historical drama.
  32. The Guest
    The coat of irony helps when the film takes a major pivot in tone, and Stevens is unnervingly placid as the corn-fed terminator.
  33. Margin Call
    You could describe Margin Call as a thriller (it's wired with suspense), yet the tension all comes from words.
  34. The Hand of God
    There are more cohesive coming-of-age movies to be sure, and subtler ones. But God doesn't really try too hard to make it all make sense; it's just one boy's dolce vita, drenched in Mediterranean sun, hormones, and salt air.
  35. Listen Up Philip
    I can't think of anyone under 40 who plays arrogant, self-absorbed jerks more convincingly than Jason Schwartzman. I have no clue what the actor's like in real life, but if he's not a complete prick, he deserves an Oscar.
  36. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman is smart, slick, and satisfying in all of the ways superhero films ought to be. How deliciously ironic that in a genre where the boys seem to have all the fun, a female hero and a female director are the ones to show the fellas how it’s done.
  37. Something in the Dirt
    Doubling down on COVID-era listlessness and QAnon paranoia, the impressively fidgety, crammed-to-bursting Something in the Dirt ends up with something like: Please let my life make sense. It's an understandable wish in an uncertain moment.
  38. Tito and the Birds
    The strength of Tito and the Birds lies in its imaginative touches like this and overall visual aesthetic, which mixes various painting and animating styles into a beautiful fusion, but the actual storytelling leaves a little depth to be desired.
  39. The Hidden Blade
    The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real.
  40. (500) Days of Summer
    It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between.
  41. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage.
  42. 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.
  43. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking.
  44. The Revenant
    Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu’s savage endurance test of a film almost works better as a series of stunning images and surreal sequences than as an emotionally satisfying story.
  45. House Party
    The movie is slick and cartoonish but also extremely clever, and its unabashed conventionality is exactly what’s fun about it.
  46. Safe
    Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon.
  47. Stronger
    There’s a raw, tangible humanity to nearly every scene that sets the film gratifyingly apart.
  48. Smoke Signals
    The film excels in small scenes of cannily chosen Indian everydayness.
  49. Horses of God
    Director Nabil Ayouch hammers his points rather bluntly, but his filmmaking is hypnotic.
  50. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    A spooky, heartbreaking documentary.
  51. Pass Over
    The dialogue mixes Sunday school and the streets, and it’s funny, profane, and occasionally poignant when it’s not a bit too on the nose.
  52. At Eternity's Gate
    If Eternity is hardly a completist portrait — or even a narratively satisfying one, really — it’s still gratifying to watch in other ways. Not just for the pureness of Dafoe’s performance but for the way it lets art be both celebrated and unexplained, still as much a mystery as the man who made it.
  53. Obvious Child
    Despite a few too-cute moments (and many fantastically graphic vagina jokes), the movie is both smarter and more sympathetic than that glib shorthand.
  54. 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.
  55. Iris
    The movie's most artful feature is the fluidity with which the past slides into the present, echoing Murdoch's own unmoored sentience, so that the younger self, played with dash and vigor by Kate Winslet, turns into the old woman lost in her own home.
  56. Tim's Vermeer
    An exquisitely fun documentary.
  57. The Loneliest Planet
    One of the year's most original and emotionally profound movies masquerades as the tiny story of a young couple who take a backpacking trip in the Caucasus Mountains the summer before their wedding.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Secret of NIMH
    Bluth and his animators, bless them, chose to revive an endangered art form — classically detailed animation. They drew their characters exquisitely and gave them individual personalities. The entire ensemble — artists, actors, animals, and musicians — created something unique: the world’s first enjoyable rat race.
  59. King Richard
    Green (who made the small, affecting 2018 indie Monsters and Men and this year's little-seen Joe Bell) hasn't reinvented the underdog wheel, but he has made something fresh out of the familiar — a smart reminder that when a story is told well it can hit all the beats we know, and still somehow surprise us.
  60. Shirley
    The plot, admittedly, is scattered; this is par for the course for Decker, but in a movie with more conventional bones, the shagginess sticks out. Shirley gorgeously invokes its subject’s style, however, via a disarmingly off-kilter score; handheld camerawork that gets intimate with characters’ psyches; and, most strikingly, a series of unforgettable images that intensify this study of female awakening and decay.
  61. Nanking
    Nanking, a carefully nonpunitive documentary of remembrance, is emotionally draining, as it should be, but it's also overstructured, as it needn't be; the actors are intrusive in a story that isn't theirs.
  62. 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.
  63. Trees Lounge
    Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made.
  64. What We Do in the Shadows
    What ends up carrying the movie is the sweetness of the characters, especially the lovelorn Viago and Stu (Stu Rutherford), the one human the group won’t eat because he’s genuinely just a good dude.
  65. The Usual Suspects
    Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.
  66. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    For a rookie director, Trachtenberg appears to be a real craftsman, even if what he’s crafting doesn’t add up to as much as you hope it will.
  67. A Dangerous Method
    Intelligent conversation about the interplay of erotic and destructive urges takes place over cups of tea in fine bone china. Yet the movie is a radically modern story about sex.
  68. Mother
    The best reason to see Mother is the deliciously off-kilter performance of Debbie Reynolds, who speaks in pure honey-sweet tones yet keeps planting tiny seeds of disapproval, using her maternal ”concern” as an invisible form of warfare. You never quite catch her doing it; the character doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She just is who she is, and by the end you realize that that’s her glory.
  69. Rabbit Hole
    Eckhart shows a new kind of foreboding anger. He's powerful as a man who will do anything to crack the ice.
  70. The Last Days of Disco
    The fetching cast (including Jennifer Beals as a histrionic girlfriend), while a long way from Gwyneth and Matt stature, nevertheless reflects Stillman’s enhanced status as an established indie talent.
  71. The Last of the Mohicans
    The first hour of The Last of the Mohicans plays like a convoluted history lesson. I appreciate that Mann has enough respect for the audience's intelligence to sketch in this briar patch of conflicting loyalties. But he outlines the interlocking factions without really making it clear, in dramatic terms, what each one stands for.
  72. American Gangster
    Meticulous and detailed, a drug-world epic that holds you from moment to moment, immersing you in the intricate and sleazy logistics of crime. Yet the movie isn't quite enthralling; it's more like the ghost version of a '70s classic.
  73. Mud
    There's something old-fashioned about Mud, but if you allow yourself to settle into its leisurely pace, it will reward you. If he were alive today, Mark Twain would approve.
  74. Nightcrawler
    In its wickedly twisted way, Nightcrawler keeps "Network's" battle cry alive. It's a 21st-century takedown of the media's pandering ''if it bleeds, it leads'' ethos and the ghoulish nightcrawlers who live by it.
  75. The Woman King
    The fighting, when it comes — from competing tribes, and from white colonizers steadily advancing an international slave trade — is viscerally satisfying too, even as the screenplay, by Dana Stevens (Fatherhood) and actress Maria Bello, works mostly in the broad strokes of genre storytelling.
  76. Asteroid City
    Johansson and Schwartzman give two stellar performances within a galaxy of gripping ensemble work that treads the line between pastiche and pathos with ease.
  77. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Catching Fire is smoothly exciting but a bit of a tease.
  78. Submarine
    The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.
  79. Superbad
    Superbad is cute if you like guys who aren't even remotely bad, in a coming-of-age tale so old-fashioned the girls might just as well be wearing bloomers.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Tales of Hoffmann
    A logical distillation of Powell and Pressburger’s Red Shoes, Tales‘ splendid excess sometimes tilts toward gaudiness. What’s nectar to some is syrup to others, an overcooked reduction that can be too thick to swallow.
  81. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Sophie Scholl has a certain quiet dignity that wins its audience popularity honestly.
  82. The Truth
    Because if anyone can handle The Truth, it's Deneuve. The French icon is as magnetic as ever, and she inhabits Fabienne (which is, incidentally, her own middle name) effortlessly, with a sly self-awareness that never undermines the fiction.
  83. 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).
  84. Paris, 13th District
    A love triangle, or maybe something more like a love polygon, lies at the center of the slight but alluring latest from Parisian writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) — one of those supremely French films in which impossibly chic people fight, come together, and fall apart, all filmed in saturated black and white.
  85. Down to the Bone
    Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.
  86. Suzhou River
    Has more atmosphere than it does coherence; it's a series of floating tricks and gambits in search of a resolution. Even so, Ye's ''Vertigo'' fever is contagious.
  87. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.
  88. The Manchurian Candidate
    What this Manchurian Candidate for a new generation makes up for in timing, it lacks in discipline and edge.
  89. Happy Valley
    The documentary offers a compelling overview of the case, but Bar-Lev spends too much time painting Paterno as a victim and scapegoat. That advocacy doesn't sit well.
  90. Nothing Compares
    As an intimate, often infuriating portrait of an artist and era, it's hard to argue with the raw power of the story on screen — and the timeliness of it too, no matter how long overdue.
  91. Greenberg
    Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife.
  92. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness. And Rapace and ? Nyqvist have compelling chemistry.
  93. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.
  94. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    The movie, for all its half-baked visual marvels, remains remarkably faithful to Lewis' story, and the innocence of his passion begins to shine through. It's there, most spectacularly, in Aslan, the lion-king messiah.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in America
    A brilliantly detailed Lower East Side Jewish version of The Godfather.
  96. Loveless
    The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.
  97. Kids for Cash
    [A] harrowing documentary.
  98. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight.
  99. Farewell Amor
    Its gentle, understated tone belies Msangi’s careful attention to rhythm and detail, though the simplicity of the plot, particularly in a few mild contrivances, slightly undermines the story’s authenticity.
  100. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    Cedar has created a classic cautionary tale in Norman, and Gere flawlessly turns his tragic hero into someone who’s sympathetic and human.
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