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 2.2 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. The Spectacular Now
    The Spectacular Now doesn't shrink from being an all-out teen movie (it has hookups and a senior prom). Yet it's one of the rare truly soulful and authentic teen movies. It's about the experience of being caught on the cusp and not knowing which way you'll land.
  2. The Smurfs 2
    The trouble with this stunted sequel is that the doughy, blobby-hatted Smurfs are mostly window dressing for an abrasive slapstick bash built around a tiresome kidnap plot, pancake-flat gags about Facebook and ''Smurf-holm Syndrome,'' and Neil Patrick Harris mugging his way through the role of a daddy with daddy issues who once again helps out our heroes.
  3. 2 Guns
    2 Guns is a much-needed reminder that the best summer surprises can come when you least expect them.
  4. Blue Jasmine
    The movie is rich with class tension, and if Allen nails the moods of the wealthy, he also gets surprising, dynamic performances from Hawkins, Cannavale, and Andrew Dice Clay as the folks who have no money but may have a fuller sense of what life is.
  5. The To Do List
    A summer-adventure comedy, and its tone is fairly synthetic, yet it gets major props for giving us the first movie heroine who is clueless and easy in such a hardcore way.
  6. The Wolverine
    You have to hand it to Marvel for managing to leave audiences breathless in anticipation of a sequel after making them sit through two-plus hours of merely satisfactory storytelling.
  7. R.I.P.D.
    While he's (Bridges) having more fun than anyone in the audience is likely to be having, it's such a rip-snorting go-for-broke performance that it almost makes R.I.P.D. worth the price of admission. Almost.
  8. RED 2
    The best thing about RED 2, like its predecessor, is its lightness of tone. Too many movies with comic-book roots come on too seriously, even when the comics themselves have a loose, fast, jocular wit about them.
  9. Only God Forgives
    It's a solemnly preposterous piece of designer revenge pulp, with actors who stand around bathed in red and blue light like David Lynch mannequins in between scenes of torture and murder.
  10. The Conjuring
    Wan masterfully tightens the vise on the audience's nerves, using mood and sound effects for shocks that never feel cheap (the harmless kids' game of hide-and-clap has never been so bloodcurdling).
  11. Grown Ups 2
    For Sandler, it's not just when he grew up. It's the garden of idiotic innocence, something that, in Grown Ups 2, he is helping to keep alive.
  12. Turbo
    While there's no denying that the film is a harmless, wholesome, and heart-warming ride crafted with polish and skill, it's also so predictable that you'll see every twist in the story driving down Fifth Avenue.
  13. Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station is great political filmmaking because it's great filmmaking, period.
  14. Pacific Rim
    In a sense, Pacific Rim winds up being not enough of a Guillermo del Toro movie. It's more like a mash-up of "Real Steel" and the "Transformers" pictures. Which is a shame, because the idea is undeniably cool.
  15. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass is austere enough to make Frederick Wiseman's films look like Jersey Shore episodes, yet it has its own suspense.
  16. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    Unfortunately, Hart seems to have taken the whole ''leave the audience wanting more'' maxim a little too much to heart. The film clocks in at a hair over an hour. That might be enough for an HBO special, but it feels a little thin for a feature film.
  17. The Lone Ranger
    The action climax just goes on and on, making The Lone Ranger the sort of movie that delivers too much too late and still manages to make it feel like too little.
  18. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
    If Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me leads even one person to listen to Big Star for the first time, this movie will have done a great service.
  19. The Heat
    With Bullock doing a variation on her Miss Congeniality geek-tomboy-who-has-to-bloom character, and McCarthy letting her acidly oddball observations rip, the two actresses make their interplay bubble.
  20. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    A remarkable doc about a life well lived.
  21. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    While it won't win any Oscars, Matthew Cooke's new documentary How To Make Money Selling Drugs may take the prize for being the shallowest and most glib film of the year.
  22. Byzantium
    The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on "Let the Right One In."
  23. Some Girl(s)
    The things that once made Neil LaBute's movies seem like tossed grenades — the loutish protagonists, the sadism toward women — now come off as more dated than scandalous.
  24. I'm So Excited
    The actors are charming, but the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it.
  25. Despicable Me 2
    By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety.
  26. The Way, Way Back
    There's something slightly formulaic and familiar about Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's coming-of-age film The Way, Way Back, but not enough to dampen its crowd-pleasing charm.
  27. White House Down
    Skip it, and you'll be depriving yourself of one of the summer's most satisfyingly stupid pleasures.
  28. Monsters University
    Speaking of second chances, Monsters University is exactly the rebound Pixar needed after 2011's "Cars 2" left some wondering if the studio had lost its magic.
  29. World War Z
    It's scary good fun.
  30. The Bling Ring
    For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.
  31. Man of Steel
    The local multiplex is lousy with celluloid crime fighters. So what turf is left for good old Clark Kent? That's the nagging question that director Zack Snyder's Man of Steel tries — and ultimately fails — to answer.
  32. The Internship
    There’s a reason that it lacks the highs of "Wedding Crashers": The Internship puts us on the side of those who are trying to hold on to respectability, not tear it down.
  33. Tiger Eyes
    Best to forget the movie version exists and keep your happy childhood memories intact.
  34. This Is the End
    It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest.
  35. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film isn't as fast and funny as it could be, although Nathan Fillion's easily offended constable injects some sorely needed comic relief.
  36. The Purge
    The Purge clearly has a lot on its mind, but it never really manages to express it.
  37. Now You See Me
    At times, Now You See Me suggests Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" made with a throwaway wink.
  38. After Earth
    The movie takes off from a concept as basic as a videogame, and it sticks to that concept, without surprise.
  39. Epic
    Epic isn't quite destined for the “Again, again!” re-watchability of some of the Pixar classics, but for a satisfying explosion of color on a lazy summer day, it does the trick.
  40. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them.
  41. The East
    The East is still a compelling portrait of what gets lost (and found) when a cause becomes an obsession.
  42. Fast & Furious 6
    Check your brain at the door and fasten your seat belt.
  43. The Hangover Part III
    You should stick around for the end credits because there's a Helms sight gag that's absolutely priceless. The movie could've used more laughs like that one.
  44. Frances Ha
    Gerwig, who previously starred in Baumbach's "Greenberg," is charmingly awkward. And Sumner (Sting's daughter) is an ace with deadpan one-liners.
  45. 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.
  46. Aftershock
    The first, pre-'quake half hour is such a patience-testing slow burn that director Nicolás López runs the risk of extinguishing the viewer's interest altogether. But when things head (metaphorically) south they do so with an escalating, apocalyptic ferocity which continues until the very last second.
  47. Peeples
    Director Tina Gordon Chism keeps the innocuous class-meets-crass jokes bubbling, and the actors are amiable, but Peeples often seems to want to turn these characters into benignly goofy role models. Maybe that's why the basic comic collision never explodes.
  48. Stories We Tell
    By the end, the rug gets pulled out from under us, showing that even the reality we think we see may be an illusion.
  49. The Great Gatsby
    It's a dazzling time capsule of a shimmering era and a devastating look into the dark side of the American dream. Too bad Luhrmann, the caffeinated conductor, doesn't trust that story enough. He'd rather blast your retinas into sugar-shock submission. Uncle, old sport! Uncle!
  50. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Penn Badgley saunters around with an air of spooky self-possession, and he does a dead-on impersonation of Buckley's high-vibrato wail.
  51. The Iceman
    Ultimately, this is a grim (both visually and thematically) character study of an unsympathetic character, leaving Shannon, who manages to deliver another impressive performance, twisting in the ice-cold wind.
  52. What Maisie Knew
    In this bleak indie bummer that confuses hopelessness with depth, they're really nothing more than selfish, one-dimensional monsters. Maisie's better off without them.
  53. Iron Man 3
    Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.
  54. The Big Wedding
    The movie, in its basic concept, is corny and contrived, but as written and directed by Justin Zackham, it's executed in a pleasantly wry and understated fashion.
  55. Arthur Newman
    The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!
  56. 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.
  57. Pain & Gain
    With Pain & Gain, his surprising true-crime comedy, Bay has finally decided to lighten up a bit.
  58. The Lords of Salem
    Unfortunately, it’s just a witchy mess.
  59. Oblivion
    Oblivion has enough special-effects artistry to keep you distracted for a while. But all the eye candy in the world can’t mask the sensation that you’ve seen this all before…and done better.
  60. Scary Movie 5
    Somehow, it actually looks cheaper than "Paranormal Activity." It's less funny, too.
  61. To the Wonder
    Through the character of a saddened priest, Malick seems to be saying that the reason for our breakups, for our fragmented lives and relationships, is that we can no longer see God. If we could, we would be whole again. That may be true, but in To the Wonder, it's Terrence Malick who isn't letting his characters be whole.
  62. 42
    Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.
  63. Trance
    I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.
  64. The Company You Keep
    Shia LaBeouf, who appears to be on hand to prove that a movie with a crusading newspaper reporter can still exist, perks up his scenes, and Redford acts with his usual hyperalert, placid control.
  65. Evil Dead
    The new Evil Dead's delirious gross-out scenes spoke to me, and they go further than any mainstream picture I can think of.
  66. The Host
    It's really a dramatic sinkhole.
  67. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    A few wild, third-act twists give Perry's middling melodrama some soap-opera kick. But all the finger-wagging sure does get tiring after a while.
  68. Room 237
    Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.
  69. The Place Beyond the Pines
    It's a slow-burner that burns so slowly its wick completely fizzles out.
  70. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.
  71. The Sapphires
    The Sapphires is a movie for your heart (and your ears and moneymaker), not your head.
  72. Admission
    Admission, a likably breezy campus movie directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), is blissfully non-insulting.
  73. The Croods
    A handful of adrenalizing sequences of animated anarchy can't save this story from feeling overly primitive.
  74. Olympus Has Fallen
    The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Call
    Surprisingly good, and surprisingly gruesome, fun.
  76. Ginger & Rosa
    A touching drama from British art-house filmmaker Sally Potter, who broke through to wider audiences with 1992's "Orlando" and has now made her most mainstream movie yet.
  77. Upside Down
    Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.
  78. Spring Breakers
    Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done.
  79. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.
  80. Emperor
    Emperor explores the delicate postwar dance of revenge, justice, and realpolitik, yet its focus on the issue of Hirohito's guilt or innocence (did he order the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or did he, in fact, oppose the Japanese military machine?)
  81. Oz the Great and Powerful
    The film is stuffed with three endings too many. You can't blame Raimi for wanting to give us our money's worth. But after a while, you just want him to get to the Happily Ever After already.
  82. The Last Exorcism Part II
    Unfortunately, no one involved seems to have bent over backwards to make the movie either original or even all that scary.
  83. Snitch
    The film tries to paint in shades of gray with vague criticisms of the war on drugs, but the absurdity of its he-man Everyman plot ends up turning its moral palette a muddy brown.
  84. Stoker
    The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.
  85. Jack the Giant Slayer
    This is how a fairy-tale movie gives us our money's worth today. Even if once upon a time, it was called overkill.
  86. Dark Skies
    While there are some scares along the way, Stewart foolishly gives away the whole kit and caboodle plot-wise with an opening quotation from Arthur C. Clarke.
  87. Red Flag
    It's conventional stuff, only executed with a smart, improv-y verve.
  88. Rubberneck
    The movie is scattershot (intense at some moments, slack at others), but it earns its docu-style creepiness, and Karpovsky's stretch as an actor is daring and authentic.
  89. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    No less sweet for being unoriginal: A guy (Charlie Sheen) mourns a bad breakup with the woman he loves (Katheryn Winnick). The execution, on the other hand, is perilously self-absorbed.
  90. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.
  91. Like Someone in Love
    The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.
  92. Lore
    This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape.
  93. No
    The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.
  94. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures, more than the "Twilight" films, lacks danger and momentum. The audience, like Ethan, spends way too much time waiting around for Lena to learn whether she's a good girl or a bad girl.
  95. A Good Day to Die Hard
    In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo.
  96. Koch
    As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.
  97. Side Effects
    Side Effects is mostly a good Saturday-night movie, but by the end, it's caused a few unintended side effects of its own: a bit of head-scratching, and a giggle or two of disbelief.
  98. Identity Thief
    The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.
  99. The Gatekeepers
    The film, by seasoned cinematographer Dror Moreh, is a feat — of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.
  100. Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head doesn't try to adapt its star to 2013. It just pretends that we're still living in 1986. And for 91 minutes, it just about works.
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