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. Hail, Caesar!
    It's Coen lite, basically, but still filled with their best signatures: cracked humor, indelible characters, and cinematography so rich and saturated you want to dunk a cookie in it.
  2. The Mad Women's Ball
    Laurent, an actress known Stateside for movies like Inglorious Basterds and Beginners, has adapted Ball from the bestselling novel by Victoria Mas, whose facts are rooted in actual history. She shares Mas' justifiable outrage at the casual inhumanity of it all — the brutal experiments and biased theories, the rampant physical and emotional abuse — and also her sense for melodrama.
  3. The Color Purple
    With stellar performances and the foundation of a beloved novel, The Color Purple should be as lush and beautiful as its titular hue. Instead, it’s just… here.
  4. Mistaken for Strangers
    The finest rock doc since "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, is a 40ish indie-rock star who carries himself like a hip lawyer.
  5. Igby Goes Down
    Gets weirder and meaner and darker and sadder as it progresses, which is amazing since it simultaneously remains funny and horrifying right up to the end.
  6. Safety Not Guaranteed
    Safety Not Guaranteed is a fable of ''redemption,'' and it's too tidy by half, but it is also very sweetly told.
  7. Christine
    Shot in the goldenrod-and-avocado palette of the ’70s and dabbed with incongruous soft-rock lullabies, the movie itself is both painfully intimate and strangely opaque on the subject of mental illness, taking us deep inside Christine’s disintegration even as it never quite figures out what it wants to say about it.
  8. Clear and Present Danger
    As a thriller, this 21 2-hour production takes a slow route between short bursts of excitement.
  9. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Into Darkness is a sleek, thrilling epic that's also a triumphantly witty popcorn morality play. It's everything you could want in a Star Trek movie.
  10. Queer
    Queer is an exercise in cinematic smugness. It’s a shame because it does contain some truly fine performances and compelling imagery. But much like its central character, it can’t get over itself.
  11. The Great Invisible
    Most of all, it's a sobering look at a part of coastal America that will never be the same again.
  12. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Even when the film fails to ask so many of the questions its narrative begs, Author is still a tricky, fascinating look at the strange nexus of art, artifice, and the intoxicating cult of celebrity.
  13. Bellflower
    Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.
  14. 50/50
    The result is a duet of outstanding loveliness between Kendrick and Gordon-Levitt, also an actor of nuanced control.
  15. Waiting for Guffman
    A madcap gem.
  16. Super 8
    Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year - of many years.
  17. War Horse
    This is a beautifully built, classically framed movie, shot with the unshowy natural expressiveness of a John Ford Western by Spielberg's great cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski.
  18. The Aristocrats
    The Aristocrats has a lot of laughs, but as it giggles and blasphemes its way into areas not so far removed from the scandalous landscape of the Marquis de Sade, the movie, funny as it is, becomes exhausting and a bit depressing.
  19. Easy A
    Easy A has some agreeable fast banter, but it's so self-consciously stylized that it wears you out.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Eagle Huntress
    The movie’s restrained second half stuns, ranking as one of the most magical stretches of nonfiction filmmaking in recent years.
  21. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    What’s lacking in this entertaining pulp quest, I think, is some essential surprise.
  22. The Mother
    Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    In their first big-screen pairing, fourth-billed Ginger and fifth-billed Fred play second banana to a bandleader and his Latina love in Flying Down to Rio, a nutty entry that springs alive for ”The Carioca,” possibly the duo’s sexiest dance.
  24. Transsiberian
    Who doesn't have a sweet tooth for intrigue on a train?
  25. Candyman
    Who can take a reboot, sprinkle it with something new, cover it with blood and bumblebees and a pointed social commentary or two? Candyman can, at least for a little while, even if the movie doesn't really find its more-than-body-horror groove in the end.
  26. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    What's especially welcome about the humor in Honor Among Thieves is that it doesn't wink or mock its material; the characters just say funny things and bounce off each other as organically as a real-life friend group. The fantasy elements are played straight, and the central story is a relatable romp about how people who fail as individuals can still succeed together.
  27. The Life of Reilly
    Reilly, in his 70s, takes us through his hilariously awful childhood: Eugene O'Neill as toxic high camp.
  28. I Served the King of England
    This is a dark story as well as a frothy one. But the bubble of absurdist self-absorption in which Menzel places this specimen of man-child is exquisite.
  29. The Meaning of Life
    It’s tough to find the meaning in much of the craziness on display here, let alone the meaning of all human existence as the title promises, but you will find a whole lot of exquisite nonsense.
  30. Gangs of New York
    Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.
  31. Felicia's Journey
    Like a dowser who can divine hidden sources of water, Atom Egoyan has a talent for locating the dream-state perversity that runs just under the surface of everyday life;
  32. The Rookie
    Something particularly clean shines in this American fairy tale, a quality of simplicity that's almost as hard to achieve in such movies as a middle-aged man's boyhood dreams.
  33. Nowhere in Africa
    Audience empathy for the displaced Redlichs, coupled with the filmmaker's proffered charms of wise natives and their mysterious rituals, goes a long way toward making this lyrical travelogue a crowd pleaser.
  34. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    Underneath the ravishing imagery however, hearts are in flux.
  35. A Beautiful Mind
    Crowe sometimes summons up one of the most powerful depictions of mental illness I have ever seen with barely an eyelid flicker separating manifestations of sickness from utterly sane displays of creative concentration.
  36. Slow West
    Imagine Terrence Malick directing the climax of "The Wild Bunch," and you’re on the right track.
  37. Your Sister's Sister
    Each an actor of distinctive delicacy, Duplass, DeWitt, and Blunt do some of their subtlest, most sweetly calibrated work ever, playing off one another with the kind of ease and trust that is, in itself, a demonstration of love.
  38. Midsommar
    Like the fretful violins that stagger raggedly over the soundtrack, the skin-pricking pleasures of Midsommar aren’t rational, they’re instinctive: a thrilling, seasick freefall into the light.
  39. The Crow
    Lee's performance is by far the best thing about The Crow. Unfortunately, he's just good enough to make you wish that the movie had had a whisper of storytelling invention to go along with its showy visual design.
  40. Groundhog Day
    The funniest moments in Groundhog Day come when Phil takes sneaky advantage of his predicament-by, say, pumping a sexy woman in the local coffee shop for facts about her past and then, ''the next day,'' using the information to lure her into bed. What the movie lacks is the ingenious, lapidary comic structure that could have made these moments fuse into something tricky and wild.
  41. The Woodsman
    Worth seeing for Bacon's lived-in minimalist purgatory, but the movie soft-pedals the nature of the desires he's at war with: the fact that they will never go away.
  42. Shame
    The biggest surprise in Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie.
  43. Akeelah and the Bee
    Blessed with excellent turns by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, this feel-gooder revels in its hip-to-be-square hyperliteracy, and neatly exceeds its own PSA-ness, practically amounting to a black, preteen "Good Will Hunting."
  44. Crazy Horse
    Completing his wonderful French cultural trilogy that also includes portraits of the Comédie-Fran¸aise and the Paris Opera Ballet, indefatigable documentarian Frederick Wiseman freely, unobtrusively prowls the joint to create a movie that respects the serious work involved in simulating the sensations of pleasure.
  45. Brick
    Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all.
  46. Doctor Strange
    Doctor Strange is thrilling in the way a lot of other Marvel movies are. But what makes it unique is that it’s also heady in a way most Marvel movies don’t dare to be. It’s eye candy and brain candy.
  47. Death and the Maiden
    Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.
  48. Watcher
    Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse.
  49. The Suicide Squad
    The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.
  50. Ghost Town
    Diverting enough, but it's also the kind of high-concept studio concoction Ricky Gervais might have ridiculed in his great backstage-showbiz sitcom "Extras."
  51. Tiny Furniture
    Tiny Furniture is proof, against steep odds, that there are no small stories, only small storytellers.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bringing Out the Dead
    Works more in your head than on the screen.
  53. Air Guitar Nation
    When C-Diddy (a.k.a. David Jung), in his samurai superman suit, does his note-perfect, lip-twisting, belly-jiggling manic mime of Extreme's ''Play With Me,'' it's hard not to grin and admit that, yes, this is almost an art form.
  54. The Closet
    Cagey, high gloss comedy.
  55. Mostly Martha
    Nettelbeck has a particularly lovely sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant choreography. And her warm, patient understanding of little girls' psyches guides young Maxime Foerste, as the turbulent niece, to a terrific performance.
  56. Walk the Line
    A big, juicy, enjoyable wide-canvas biography with a handful of indelible moments.
  57. Six Degrees of Separation
    By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.
  58. When Marnie Was There
    The animation is dazzling.
  59. Control
    Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.
  60. Match Point
    To call Match Point Woody Allen's comeback would be an understatement - it's the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made "The Player."
  61. Still Alice
    Going on 20 years now, Moore is someone who's been so reliably good for so long that we've probably taken her for granted. But her subtle, heartbreaking decline as Alice—from her initial diagnosis to her daily struggle to hold on to her identity and dignity to her eventual disappearance in plain sight—is among her most devastating performances.
  62. The Talent Given Us
    A film of uncommon originality.
  63. Manifesto
    The goal of any manifesto is making its aims as clear as possible. But it’s never clear what this Manifesto is aiming for besides a cheeky roll call of intellectual camps. Ph.D.s in art theory will chuckle knowingly as everyone else eyes the exit.
  64. Strictly Ballroom
    The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.
  65. Surfwise
    Doug Pray's cool documentary about 85-year-old Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, his wife, and their eight sons and one daughter is about surfing insofar as surfing is the family's shared passion.
  66. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    A love poem to the New York City of the '50s and '60s, when Smith, the visionary of camp (Andy Warhol stole from him), more or less invented performance art.
  67. Step Into Liquid
    Even from the safety of a movie seat, you can just about feel the stinging hardness of the surf. Blue crush? This is more like white smash.
  68. Mulan
    It took long enough, but Disney has finally come up with an animated heroine who's a good role model and a funky, arresting personality at the same time.
  69. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    For 20 years, Megumi's family doesn't know where she is; when they find out, the frustrations and uncertainties only mount. But as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.
  70. Despicable Me
    Another 3-D animated kid movie demonstrates that cartoon storytelling pitched to young people is the last, best refuge of sprightly filmmaking this hard, hot summer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kiss of Death
    The movie’s streetwise screenwriter, Richard Price, knows characters like this do exist — but only an actor like Cage can bring them off.
  72. Great World of Sound
    A terrific, small, funny, sad movie.
  73. The Double Hour
    Nothing in this enjoyably twisty, cool/ hot, genre-grafting Italian psychological thriller by Giuseppe Capotondi is what it seems. And the more you try to solve the narrative puzzle, the more you may want to watch it again - or at least argue about what's real.
  74. The Rainmaker
    Any random episode of Law & Order would be more sophisticated than this heavy-handed, moralistic Southern-lawyer corn pone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
  75. 12
    Has none of the crisp passion or suspense of the 1957 Sidney Lumet version; it's bloated, heavy-handed, and lugubrious.
  76. The Invisible Man
    If the buildup and catharsis of its final minutes are more than a little silly, and marred by Whannell’s urge to put too neat bow on it all, the movie still has its satisfying jolts — including possibly one of the single most shocking screen deaths so far this year.
  77. The Batman
    It falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.
  78. The Ice Storm
    Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting.
  79. Arctic
    Penna’s concept is hardly new, but his execution is sharp, clean, and smartly paced; a harrowing postcard from the void.
  80. Undefeated
    For a documentary that's almost engineered to lift your heart, Undefeated is very well done.
  81. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    The flourishes don't answer the question most on Potterites' minds -- who lives, who dies? -- but they briefly stupefy.
  82. Fed Up
    Some lessons are overfamiliar (almonds good, corn syrup bad), but the section on corporate influence over school lunches is enough to make you spit out that 20-ounce soda from the concession stand.
  83. Smashed
    What's new about the unsensationalized portrait of one-day-at-a-time progress (and setbacks) is the low-key energy of this drunks' tale, by and for a generation with a high tolerance for humor and a low tolerance for soapiness.
  84. Paradise Now
    Of all the shocks in the riveting and timely political thriller Paradise Now, the most unsettling may be the dignity bestowed on a pair of prospective Palestinian suicide bombers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cry, the Beloved Country
    Alan Paton's seminal novel of apartheid in 1940s South Africa receives a sanitized and overly sentimental treatment, trivializing the book's relentless power.
  86. What Doesn't Kill You
    A tough, authentic street drama born, bred, and shot in the no-spin zone of working-class South Boston.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Waking Ned Devine
    Unfolds with such unforced inevitability that absurdity never condescends to sticky adorableness.
  88. Land of the Dead
    In Land of the Dead there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired.
  89. Inspector Bellamy
    Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.
  90. The Boss of It All
    This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.
  91. A Family Thing
    Any other writers handed this premise would probably play it for cheap laughs, but Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson have made an earnest drama out of it, one lightened by a few affectionate laughs and much heartfelt sentimentality.
  92. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    A marvelous movie.
  93. Monument Ave.
    But where would these lads be without the pop-culture-happy language of Quentin Tarantino to fuel their bull sessions? Nowhere, that's where.
  94. The Imitation Game
    The film is anchored by yet another hypnotically complex Cumberbatch performance. He's turning greatness into a habit.
  95. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?
  96. London Road
    The result, alas, is totally bolloxed, as a Brit might say, by execution.
  97. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Elegant yet surprisingly remote royal-court drama.
  98. 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.
  99. Chasing Amy
    The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.
  100. The Water Horse
    Parents can trust that none of their wee ones will ask for a stuffed water horse for Christmas. The star of this Scottish fable, about the mythical Loch Ness monster, looks like a raw chicken breast with teeth when he hatches.
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