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. Manhattan Murder Mystery
    The plot is clever and absorbing, with one wild Hitchcockian twist (a comic variation on Vertigo). Manhattan Murder Mystery is both a genuine thriller and a cheeky goof on thrillers. It is also, in part, another Woody Allen relationship movie — and I’m afraid that’s the one way in which it falls flat.
  2. Don't Breathe
    Thought-provoking but rather lacking in the second-by-second scares genre fans tend to expect.
  3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
    The Voyage Home is pure, joyful cinema.
  4. Molly's Game
    Molly’s Game is a cool, crackling, confident film that appeals to your intelligence instead of insulting it. At the movies, it may be the closest we’ll get to a Christmas miracle.
  5. Beyond the Gates
    John Hurt is magnetic as a Catholic priest running a school where terrified Tutsi have taken refuge, while Hugh Dancy, as a naive teacher, represents white commitment to black Africa at its most impotent and unreliable.
  6. Training Day
    There's no denying that Washington can play a rococo villain with flip ebullience, but I fervently wish he were doing it in a movie that paid more than lip service to the real world.
  7. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    With minimal conspiratorial bluster, Berlinger unmasks the compliant faces of evil.
  8. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    Out of costume, Spinney is as impossibly sunny as his alter ego (with none of the crankiness of his other incarnation, Oscar the Grouch). At 80, he has no plans to hang up his feathers—welcome news for kids and parents everywhere.
  9. Aliens of the Deep
    Gorgeous as the underwater life-forms are, the excitement of Aliens of the Deep comes from that most old-school, low-tech of elements: real human beings.
  10. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Gentle Bingenheimer, who retreats from being ''figured out,'' is dubiously honored with unenlightened commentary by people hell-bent on doing so.
  11. Blinded by the Light
    Love, faith, Springsteen; that and a Sony Walkman are all it takes to surrender to the pure, ingenuous joy of Blinded by the Light, a Technicolor ode to the power of music so deeply tender and heartfelt that it disarms even the most misanthropic critic’s instincts.
  12. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Gehry sketches and free-associates about how he's not nearly the menschy aw-shucks pussycat from Canada he appears to be but rather a wily, complicated L.A. lion.
  13. Yes, God, Yes
    The subject matter brings to mind another great teen indie, 2004's brilliant "Saved!," but Yes, God, Yes doesn't skewer "moral" sex ed with the same satirical bite as that much more heightened take on the subject (a highly satisfying needle drop in the closing moments, however, could be interpreted as a quiet nod to the earlier film).
  14. Tape
    Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.
  15. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    The pace is quick, the violence is rough, and the visual style is documentary as Padilha hammers home his point: Someone is forever in the pocket of someone else as The System constantly adapts to protect itself.
  16. Black Book
    Black Book may be the looniest use of the Holocaust as a playground since Roberto Benigni served up his infernal clown act in "Life Is Beautiful."
  17. Girls Trip
    The jokes that are there are shocking and hysterical, and unlike some similar comedies about grownup friends, the four core characters are actually likeable.
  18. Ed Wood
    A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    A Walk on the Moon
    The tone of this tale is more easy-listening than acid rock.
  20. Little Man Tate
    Little Man Tate keeps introducing characters and narrative lines that seem promising, but it doesn’t sustain them. The movie feels like three Afterschool Specials welded together.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    It’s hard to believe that these two people, so dissimilar in every way, would be attracted to each other in the first place. It’s even harder to listen to the drone of the numbingly unsympathetic Michael (Noonan, also the movie’s writer and director). When there are only two characters on screen, you’d better rouse concern for both so your viewer is not fatally tempted by the stop button.
  22. Florence Foster Jenkins
    It would be easy to mine Jenkins’ story for silly farce and 1940s set pieces and let it coast from there, but director Stephen Frears (Philomena, The Queen) is too kind, and too nuanced, to do that. Even when she’s murdering a high C, his Florence finds the melody.
  23. Dragonslayer
    With its propulsive punk-rock soundtrack and beautifully rough cinematography, Dragonslayer makes you care about this scrawny young man, skating to nowhere.
  24. Drinking Buddies
    The actors all blend terrifically, making this the film equivalent of great hang time.
  25. The Theory of Everything
    I couldn't help wishing that The Theory of Everything had more theory. Hawking famously excels at explaining complicated thoughts with layman simplicity, but the film never translates the originality and depth of his ideas — or even what they are.
  26. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.
  27. The Descent
    The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore.
  28. REC
    Shot in shaky handheld style, [REC] is a bit like George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, but, you know, actually scary.
  29. A Perfect World
    The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.
  30. Dogman
    Marcello may remain a mystery, but the thing that makes Dogman worth checking out is the actor who portrays him. It’s a performance that never barks too loudly, but leaves you with an unmistakable bite.
  31. Sunshine
    While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.
  32. Rain
    As it moves from the drizzly to the overly stormy, Rain freights a young girl's self-destructive eagerness to lose her virginity with so much danger and even horror that it's as if the events were trying to make up for the film's previous lack of drama.
  33. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    The events may be accurate, but Mesrine is so episodic that it's slightly maddening to watch.
  34. Get On Up
    Get On Up too often plays it safe when it needs to be dangerous.
  35. I Like Killing Flies
    The result is an unabashedly home-cooked homage to New York eccentricity.
  36. Donnie Darko
    Kelly, the 26-year-old writer-director of this excitingly original indie vision, shares more artistically with Wes Anderson or Paul Thomas Anderson than he does with Spielberg or John Hughes, but the point is, he's out on his own here. He swings big -- with flair.
  37. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    In The Great Buster, Bogdanovich has provided a brilliantly enthralling primer.
  38. Shazam!
    Shazam! is basically two movies in one. One with Levi and his wiseass foster brother (a fresh Jack Dylan Grazer), the other with Strong and all his snarling, computer-generated gobbledygook. And they both have the other in a headlock, wrestling for the soul of the story. I loved one, yawned through the other.
  39. Our Brand Is Crisis
    A fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy.
  40. Games of Love and Chance
    The vérité fascinates, even if the artifice is obvious.
  41. Mrs Henderson Presents
    This makes for a friendly romp, and also a dull one.
  42. The Room Next Door
    Even with its preoccupation with death, The Room Next Door is not a dour film. In fact, it’s rather optimistic, celebrating the beauties of life and meaningful connection in the face of death with a thoughtful, pensive tone.
  43. Light Sleeper
    Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Swan Princess
    With its modern sensibility and a visual look beautifully steeped in tradition, The Swan Princess takes a well-deserved place in the circle of animation.
  45. Prisoners
    The thriller that's exciting, cathartic, and powerfully disturbing. Prisoners is that type of movie. It's rooted in 40 years of Hollywood revenge films, yet it also breaks audacious new ground.
  46. Year of the Dog
    I mean no impertinence when I say that as a portrait of love and grief, writer-director Mike White's exceptional film Year of the Dog deserves the same admiration accorded Joan Didion's exceptional memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking."
  47. Batman Begins
    A confidently original, engrossing interpretation.
  48. Earth Days
    A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.
  49. The Tao of Steve
    It's a tiny, sunny character study about a fat guy who's an unlikely chick magnet. And as such it's a pip.
  50. Hamlet
    Almereyda excises big chunks of plot to shape his vision, but retains Shakespeare's language and pays such rigorous attention to meaning and subtext that what's missing isn't missed.
  51. Quills
    Quills bleaches the danger -- and fascination -- out of De Sade, turning him into a kind of mad saint of ''Masterpiece Theatre'' porn.
  52. Amélie
    The charming movie, already an international success, seduces.
  53. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Horton's attempt to authenticate the painting in the face of a hostile art establishment becomes a study in forensics, taste, money, and class warfare.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.
  55. Standard Operating Procedure
    Morris, using a welter of photographs (many of which we haven't seen), constructs a day-to-day sense of how Abu Ghraib descended into a medieval hell.
  56. 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.
  57. I Love You, Man
    By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.
  58. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Donald Trump was less kind, essentially abandoning him after his then still-secret diagnosis. Tyrnauer smartly doesn’t overplay the symbolism of their relationship, or work too hard to connect the dots; it’s all there to take or leave in the film’s shrewd, illuminating exploration of a man whose influence, for better or worse, may have far outdone even his wildest dreams.
  59. Ushpizin
    The unusual intimacy and authenticity can't be faked: The cast is peppered with nonprofessionals, most notably Michal Bat Sheva Rand.
  60. The Walk
    The 17-minute wire-walking sequence is the most majestic simulation of a real event since the ship sinking in Titanic—a dazzling triumph of photorealistic digital effects, which exhibits Zemeckis’ mastery of both CGI and pace.
  61. The Barbarian Invasions
    I kept wondering how Arcand could have chosen as his generational representative a man not just flawed in his hedonism but one so fundamentally lacking in tenderness for others.
  62. Companion
    Bathed in a pink-pop glow, its pastiche of romance and horror collide in a viciously mischievous parable of technology and control that speaks to these most anxious times.
  63. The Paper
    Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.
  64. Maidentrip
    After 519 days at sea, Dekker finally achieves her goal...and decides to keep sailing, only this time with a hunky boy as her mate. If I were her parents, I wouldn't have signed off on that, either.
  65. Friday Night Lights
    Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.
  66. The Bikeriders
    Though the panoply of accents the actors choose could easily fill out a Midwestern grocery store checkout line, there's not a performance here that isn't admirable for its sheer chutzpah. Nichols has assembled an estimable ensemble, and they bring to life the antics and erratic violence of their characters with great authenticity.
  67. The Cup
    Little more than a plodding celebration of global television trumping everything in its midst.
  68. Swimming Pool
    The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.
  69. Sweet and Lowdown
    Allen draws a snappy, loose-limbed performance from Penn.
  70. Narc
    Narc is as cop movie as a cop movie can be.
  71. Galaxy Quest
    A fast, loose, and very funny parody that pulls off the not-so-simple feat of tweaking Trekkies and honoring them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    The director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate is more at home with minute personal tensions than with the epic hysteria this project required, so file the film under botched masterpieces.
  73. King Corn
    Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.
  74. East of Havana
    East of Havana picks at these politico-philosophical threads rather than pulling them, and the sense of a larger movement is fleeting. There's a beat, but we never quite see who's dancing to it.
  75. 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.
  76. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men.
  77. Public Enemies
    As filmmaker Michael Mann takes pains to emphasize in his handsome, underheated gangster drama Public Enemies, the gent may have been murderous, but he had style.
  78. Tsotsi
    More calculated than a Starbucks sampler CD, the picture could win the up-from-hardship award.
  79. Lost Embrace
    It's in the brightly observed vignettes from mall-society life, captured with a low-key, on-the-run visual style, that Burman shows his best stuff and deadpan wit.
  80. Countdown to Zero
    Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.
  81. Final Portrait
    With its de-saturated grays and layered textures, Final Portrait itself is like a still portrait of Giacometti. You, as the viewer, are lucky just to get to spend time with these men during twenty or so days in their lives, privileged to be allowed inside Giacometti’s studio, watching the painting come together.
  82. Her Smell
    What it does have at the center is an actress who commits completely to the mess, even if Perry never quite deigns to show us the underlying talent that might justify her terrible behavior — or at least the loyalty of the countless friends, fans, and enablers who suffer the brunt of it.
  83. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Tim Skousen and Jeremy Coon’s new documentary, Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, isn’t the kids’ finished film. It’s a film about the making of their film — and it’s amazing.
  84. The Nice Guys
    Gosling and Crowe have a surprisingly fizzy, ferret-and-bull chemistry, and the hedonistic Me Decade setting is groovy.... But the one-liners and shoot-outs feel a bit threadbare, handed down from older, better Shane Black movies.
  85. Bob Roberts
    This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.
  86. The Little Prince
    At its inventive best—like the creation of a little cloth fox who never speaks but steals almost every scene he’s in—it does capture the odd, tender wonder of his world.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wilde
    Restrained, sober, decorous.
  88. Quo Vadis
    Golden era MGM takes on Christ! The lavish story of Roman-Christian conflict was universally loved, thanks to star turns by Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and supporting players Peter Ustinov and Leo Genn.
  89. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    A curious case indeed: an extravagantly ambitious movie that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.
  90. Smoke
    The best vignette, at the very end of the film, is the story Auster originally wrote for a newspaper as a Christmas piece, the one that inspired Wang to make Smoke in the first place. It's the one you'll want to inhale.
  91. Owning Mahowny
    Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.
  92. Girlfight
    While Rodriguez punches through the indie clutter to announce herself as a superb new movie talent, so Kusama scores big points in her first main event.
  93. Unstrung Heroes
    Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence.
  94. The Friend
    It gracefully captures the remarkable, singular relationship that human beings share with their pets, tapping into the poignancy and warmth that comes from such a bond.
  95. Colossal
    Even if the script’s psychological reach ultimately falls short, Colossal is still a clever, comic, wildly surreal ride — right up until the last sucker-punch frame.
  96. In & Out
    As a sharky, gay TV journalist investigating the story, Tom Selleck charms by playing in contrast to his own determinedly hetero persona.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bad Lieutenant
    For all its scenes of degradation (five minutes of which have been shorn for an R-rated cut; we recommend the original NC-17 version), Bad Lieutenant is a deeply moral movie. It's not pretty-it's not even very realistic-but it does matter.
  98. Emilia Pérez
    Despite a slow start and its wildly varying tones, Emilia Pérez works best when you give yourself over to its harried, shaggy magic. It's an ambitious, provocative, big swing of a picture — and if it's not always a home run, at least it manages to consistently get on base.
  99. Big Fan
    The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.
  100. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Ant-Man and the Wasp is working too hard to look unconvincingly relaxed.
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