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. Fade to Black
    The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head?
  2. 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.
  3. Contact
    If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.
  4. Bright Future
    The most spellbinding aspect of Bright Future is that the surrealism sustains its own squiddish logic, concluding with one of the most breathtaking film finales of the year.
  5. The Boxer
    Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?''
  6. Brother to Brother
    First-time writer-director Rodney Evans makes a ballsy leap into historical fantasia, with heartfelt fervor outrunning stray moments of artistic gawkiness.
  7. Total Recall
    Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.
  8. The Sixth Sense
    It's a psychological thriller that actually thrills.
  9. 21 Grams
    Paradoxically, a movie that loses power the more you perceive what's actually going on in it. Laid end to end, the story is, to put it mildly, overwrought, fusing several cataclysms too many.
  10. Holes
    Honoring the literary ground beneath it, spotted yellow lizards and all, the movie Holes is easy to dig.
  11. Independence Day
    It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.
  12. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.
  13. Red Lights
    It evokes the spirit of Hitchcock and Highsmith.
  14. Alias Betty
    A nifty, entwined, ultimately gripping adaptation of British crime writer Ruth Rendell's novel ''The Tree of Hands'' by French director Claude Miller.
  15. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around.
  16. Elizabeth
    This is a sensual, psychologically modern costume drama influenced by both "The Godfather" and gals' guides to empowerment.
  17. Something's Gotta Give
    Every moment spent in the company of Keaton... is such a joy that the whole is more delightful than the sum of the formulaic ingredients. Keaton makes Nicholson bounce the way Shirley MacLaine once did in ''Terms of Endearment.''
  18. Springtime in a Small Town
    There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable.
  19. In the Mood for Love
    Although In the Mood for Love isn't in the mood for action, it dazzles with everything but.
  20. American History X
    This is the sort of incendiary role a lot of actors would kill for, yet the shock of Norton's performance isn't its showboat flamboyance. It's that he makes this sadistic junior sociopath rueful and intelligent.
  21. Alien: Resurrection
    By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  22. The Road Home
    This is a gentle, engaging narrative of constancy and devotion against all odds, both natural and bureaucratic, in which the past represents enduring family values and customs.
  23. Blue Crush
    The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.
  24. Shadow of the Vampire
    Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.
  25. Touching the Void
    The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion.
  26. The Game
    An intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity.
  27. The Fighting Temptations
    Makes shameless use of tried-and-true elements -- but it's hardly the same old song.
  28. Scary Movie 3
    Like its two predecessors, Scary Movie 3 is a hit-or-miss affair, but the gags that connect really connect.
  29. True Romance
    You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.
  30. Dinosaur
    Doesn't offer anything to adult viewers as thrilling, as shivery, as satisfyingly primal as Steven Spielberg's intricate predator choreography in the original ''Jurassic Park.''
  31. Friday Night Lights
    Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    The title refers to cheap fireworks that fizz before they flame out quietly, and that's what three Southwestern slackers do in this amiable heist movie-cum-road flick.
  33. Ararat
    As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.
  34. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.
  35. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    A lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you.
  36. Pitch Black
    So jaunty, so limber, and so visually self-assured that art peeks through where crap has traditionally made its home.
  37. The Age of Innocence
    Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.
  38. 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.
  39. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.
  40. Dolls
    As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing.
  41. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.
  42. American Pimp
    Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.
  43. 28 Days Later...
    A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.
  44. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude.
  45. The Merchant of Venice
    Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.
  46. Meet the Parents
    It's a bouncy, loose limbed, ''families do the darnedest things'' sitcom that elicits ungrudging laughs.
  47. Hero
    I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king.
  48. Ella Enchanted
    The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.''
  49. The Door in the Floor
    Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.
  50. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    Let's face it: Lizzie McGuire (Hilary Duff) is just too darn polished to be a junior-high underdog, even by the standards of her 'luxe suburban environs.
  51. City of God
    Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.
  52. De-Lovely
    De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.
  53. Elf
    The disarming comedic tone -- silly and novel in its lack of cynicism -- is driven by the fearless, cheerful unself-consciousness of Will Ferrell, a big man last seen streaking (all too unself-consciously) through ''Old School.''
  54. Goodbye Lenin!
    A funny and intermittently sharp German satire that musters gentle nostalgia for East German communism while mocking the not-so-distant past.
  55. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    And among the things this ''HP'' does very well indeed is deepen the darker, more frightening atmosphere for audiences of all ages already familiar with the intricacies of the ''Potter'' landscape. (This is as it should be: Harry's story is supposed to get darker.)
  56. Ice Age
    Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.
  57. In Good Company
    The denouement of the movie is as preposterously happy as a children's fairy tale. But the moral is ageless.
  58. Mulholland Dr.
    Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.
  59. Osmosis Jones
    Oscillates between streaky black comedy and sanitary instruction.
  60. Praise
    Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity.
  61. 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.
  62. Sweet Sixteen
    In the grim and empathetic lost-youth drama Sweet Sixteen, the director focuses on a few failed souls -- rather than excoriate the system that failed them -- to produce a story of particularly streamlined, eloquent despair.
  63. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    The title Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a brain banger. But as sci-fi nomenclature goes, it's easy to read--no twistier, certainly, than "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."
  64. Code 46
    Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.
  65. Wicker Park
    It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.
  66. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.
  67. Collateral
    Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to.
  68. Ginger Snaps
    A ferocious, funny, gory, and astute Canadian horror parable.
  69. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Miller's Crossing
    If, however, you're looking for compelling characters, all the lights are blazing here but nobody's at home.
  71. Two Brothers
    That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.
  72. Citizen Ruth
    Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.
  73. Courage Under Fire
    A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.
  74. U Turn
    U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.
  75. Mimic
    A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.
  76. The Devil's Own
    In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.
  77. Rosewood
    As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.
  78. The Nutty Professor
    More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.
  79. Basquiat
    Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.
  80. Bound
    The true pleasures of Bound lie in the Wachowskis' inventive updated take on film noir traditions, sensuously realized by cinematographer Bill Pope ("Clueless").
  81. Star Trek: First Contact
    By the time Worf (Michael Dorn), knocking off a slimy attacker, growls a Schwarzeneggerish ''Assimilate this!'' we've already done so, with pleasure.
  82. Kicking and Screaming
    The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.
  83. Heavy
    Mangold, who also wrote the script, has made a modern-day "Marty", a kitchen-sink drama that doesn't condescend to its characters.
  84. Guarding Tess
    There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed).
  85. True Lies
    True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.
  86. Spanking the Monkey
    Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure.
  87. Michael Collins
    For whatever reason, Michael Collins is a troublesome movie, a film about a religious war in which religion is almost entirely absent; a flick that gives us our kicks with thrillingly shot terroristic violence while paying lip service to pious antiviolence sentiments.
  88. Return to Paradise
    Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.
  89. 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    4 Little Girls
    Surprisingly, given Lee's penchant for experimentation, there's nothing remotely innovative about this sober, often intensely moving exploration of a community's lingering grief and outrage -- just the usual talking heads, stock footage, montages of stills, and such.
  91. The Truth About Cats & Dogs
    The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.
  92. Rob Roy
    A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".
  93. Live Flesh
    Almodovar is positively mature, adapting a novel by Ruth Rendell so deftly that the plot now also describes the invigorating and sometimes disorienting effects of democracy after long years of repression under the Franco regime.
  94. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
    The generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott (and costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel) turn this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.
  95. Party Girl
    The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.
  96. Disclosure
    The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.
  97. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.
  98. Inception
    As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.
  99. The A-Team
    The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.
  100. Micmacs
    Jeunet maintains a firm control of his dreamscape creation, drawing on influences as varied as "Toy Story," "Children of Paradise," and TV's "Mission: Impossible."
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