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 1.9 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 Magdalene Sisters
    The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.
  2. Sunset Boulevard
    There's a long tradition of filmmakers poking fun at the movie business. But no one bit the hand that fed him more viciously or with sharper fangs than Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard.
  3. Go
    The one truly thrilling movie I've seen so far this year.
  4. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.
  5. Shakespeare in Love
    The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.
  6. The Sweet Hereafter
    Leaves you shaken and ecstatic at the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.
  7. American Splendor
    American Splendor presents Pekar as drawn on the page, Pekar as brilliantly interpreted by Paul Giamatti, and the actual Pekar, in the double role of narrator and interview subject -- sometimes all at once. The magic act is thrilling, and truly surprising.
  8. Two Girls and a Guy
    The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.
  9. Nine Queens
    As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick.
  10. 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.
  11. Far From Heaven
    Bold and brilliant.
  12. Run Lola Run
    An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.
  13. What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai builds this shimmering story with deft, deadpan wit and a warm, understated love of the absurd, both in life and afterlife.
  14. You Can Count on Me
    Beautiful, compassionate, articulate domestic drama.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Say Anything...
    It all comes down to one scene: John Cusack, standing at dusk, boom box aloft, blaring Peter Gabriel's ''In Your Eyes'' outside Ione Skye's window. This, friends, is what rapturous, heartrending, soul-spinning love is all about.
  16. The Five Obstructions
    As he rises to each challenge, you realize that von Trier, the most exalted of prankish sadists, has orchestrated the filmmaking equivalent of the story of Job. The Five Obstructions glories in art, life, and the faith that binds them.
  17. The Limey
    A small cubist masterpiece about crime and punishment set in that most split-level of environments, Los Angeles.
  18. Dead Man Walking
    A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  19. Topsy-Turvy
    Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.
  20. The Return
    Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion.
  21. To Be and to Have
    So superb, so graceful, so strong -- another beauty in this year of good documentaries -- that I do believe it will influence career choices, sending inspired viewers to study pedagogy, or cinematography.
  22. Saving Private Ryan
    A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.
  23. Boys Don't Cry
    It's Swank, however, who's the revelation. By the end, her Brandon/Teena is beyond male or female. It's as if we were simply glimpsing the character's soul, in all its yearning and conflicted beauty.
  24. Fargo
    Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.
  25. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition]
  26. All the Real Girls
    It's thrillingly original, lyrical, and wise, and the filmmaker conveys the mutable intensity of young love with the authoritative originality of an important filmmaker.
  27. Election
    Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore."
  28. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.
  29. About Schmidt
    The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.
  30. Boogie Nights
    Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."
  31. Distant
    Ceylan, who also served as cinematographer, frames the affecting, unstudied performances in gorgeously chosen shots and nonevents that sometimes teeter on the edge of comedy before knocking us breathless with their emotional power.
  32. In the Bedroom
    The uncoagulated anguish of parents mourning the death of a child has rarely been more powerfully depicted than in the collected vignettes of grief, rage, and retribution that make up the riveting domestic drama In the Bedroom.
  33. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.
  34. Memento
    Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.
  35. Waiting for Guffman
    A madcap gem.
  36. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  37. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    Stunning, fully formed masterpiece.
  38. Sexy Beast
    Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''
  39. Love and Death on Long Island
    A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.
  40. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Potent and eye-opening documentary.
  41. Antz
    Sophisticated, funny, and joyously subversive animated bug epic.
  42. Toy Story 2
    It's a great, IQ-flattering entertainment both wonderful and wise.
  43. Toy Story
    The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.
  44. The Godfather: Part III
    In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.
  45. Moolaadé
    The result: This great work of art has the potential to change the world.
  46. Lilya 4-Ever
    A haunting and incandescent work of art.
  47. Gods and Monsters
    Achieves its exquisite tension--deepening beautifully from a "Death in Venice" setup to an imaginative meditation, on art and life, of uncommon sensitivity.
  48. Wet Hot American Summer
    The movie is so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that at times it appears to take in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese.
  49. Talk to Her
    Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.
  50. All About My Mother
    Almodóvar's masterwork, is a spectacular synthesis of everything that has always interested him -- proud women, lovely boys, beautiful drag queens, grand movie stars, gorgeous frocks, wild wallpaper .
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Room with a View
    A movie with exquisite period detail. [8 Apr 1994]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  52. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    A gripping documentary that uses voluminous period evidence — unedited news footage, tape recordings of SLA leader Cinque's rants — to brilliantly reconstruct the entire freak event.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Princess Mononoke
    Has the effect of making the average Disney film look like just another toy story.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reservoir Dogs
    You may not like the terms Tarantino sets, but you have to admit he succeeds on them.
  55. Capturing the Friedmans
    An extraordinary film; it may be the most haunting documentary since ''Crumb.''
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jaws
    Steven Spielberg overcame the lumpy plotting of Peter Benchley's novel to create an efficient, graceful fright machine in Jaws.
  57. Malcolm X
    With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pulp Fiction
    [Tarantino's] ability to take what seem like minor conversational themes and dovetail them onto later exchanges for maximum comic effect is close to genius. And the action can be literally heart-stopping.
  59. Super Size Me
    A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.
  60. Titanic
    Titanic floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.
  61. Schindler's List
    Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.
  62. The Truman Show
    A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.
  63. Beau Travail
    (Denis's) visual style is hypnotic, rapturous, and she makes barren landscapes look gorgeous, hard men look vulnerable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Brazil
    One of those rare gems that prove equally stunning on both aesthetic and cerebral levels.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  65. Breaking the Waves
    True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.
  66. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Soaring and romantic, wild and serene, feminist and gutsy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies of the year.
  67. Ed Wood
    A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.
  68. Rushmore
    Murray, meanwhile, turns in a thrillingly knowing, unforced performance--an award-worthy high point in a career that continues, Max Fischer style, to defy the obvious at every turn.
  69. Dawn of the Dead
    Don't leave before the final frame -- if you're still breathing.
  70. Lost in Translation
    What's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own.
  71. Waking Life
    An amazing thing -- a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing.
  72. Spirited Away
    A triumph of psychological depth and artistic brilliance offered as the magical adventures of one skinny little girl.
  73. Ocean's Eleven
    It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.
  74. Mystic River
    Eastwood directs Mystic River with an invigorated grace and gravitas. This is a true American beauty of a movie, a tale of men and their bonds told by and for adults who value the old-fashioned Hollywood-studio notion of narrative.
  75. Man on the Moon
    Jim Carrey's performance is an impersonation on the level of genius.
  76. Yi Yi
    These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raging Bull
    Another harsh character study, with poignant echoes of "Taxi Driver."
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    A hypnotically engrossing thriller that spins along on the dreams and anxieties of its characters.
  79. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    The film is at times harrowing to watch, yet it's also wry and delicate and absorbing. It's infused with the messy excitement of imperfect passion.
  80. Being John Malkovich
    The most excitingly original movie of the year.
  81. Dangerous Liaisons
    Pfeiffer reveals an emotional nakedness that's almost shocking. Never has she exposed so much and done it so simply. Who knew she could be this good?
  82. Finding Nemo
    You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.
  83. Spider-Man 2
    This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned.
  84. Before Sunset
    The new film, which unfolds in real time over the course of 80 minutes, is a deeper, darker, altogether more memorable experience. It doesn't extend the characters so much as fulfill them.
  85. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.
  86. The Incredibles
    Dazzlingly beautiful, funny, and meaningful.
  87. Maria Full of Grace
    Unfolds with a simplicity that's as breathtaking as its inevitability is harrowing.
  88. The Piano
    By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.
  89. Requiem for a Dream
    May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.
  90. School of Rock
    The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.
  91. Shower
    Without ever dipping into indignity among wet, half-naked men, Shower sparkles with joy.
  92. Thirteen
    With an authenticity that is tender and merciless, the movie shows you what it looks like when youth rebellion becomes a form of fascism.
  93. Open Water
    In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.
  94. Bend It Like Beckham
    The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.
  95. The Bourne Supremacy
    A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.
  96. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Vibrantly, intricately alive on its own terms. This is what magic the movies can conjure with an inspired fellowship in charge, and unlimited pots of gold.
  97. Vera Drake
    Stunning and compassionate period drama.
  98. I Shot Andy Warhol
    As riveting as its title.
  99. When We Were Kings
    It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.
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