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. Hustle & Flow
    The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.
  2. A Civil Action
    Starts out well, but it turns into an almost perversely undramatic legal thriller.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Watch on the Rhine
    Lillian Hellman’s WWII potboiler Watch on the Rhine feels dated.
  4. Richard Jewell
    As a filmmaker, Eastwood may not be famed for subtlety, but he does have a way with economy. And he delivers Jewell’s story with almost no unnecessary flourishes; a taut, streamlined drama leavened by crucial doses of empathy.
  5. Winter Sleepers
    It's slow and pretentious, full of craggy Bavarian snowscapes and dour "mystical" portents that seem to circle back to nothing but themselves.
  6. Heaven
    Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.
  7. Miracle
    Miracle -- the title taken from TV announcer Al Michaels' famous game-clinching cheer, ''Do you believe in miracles? Yes!'' -- wins not when it exhorts by word but when it shows by action.
  8. Bon voyage
    Bon Voyage arrives like one of those old soldiers who stumbles from his hiding place unaware that the war is over and the world has changed -- and with it, French cinema.
  9. The Bourne Identity
    It has a few whispers of intrigue, but at the heart of The Bourne Identity lies a dispiriting paradox: The more that Jason Bourne learns about himself, the less arresting he seems.
  10. The Night House
    Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner (V/H/S, The Ritual) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall (The Gift, Godzilla vs. Kong), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief.
  11. American Animals
    A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.
  12. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    If it’s not exactly unforgettable, it’s still pretty fun.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Take This Waltz
    By never standing back from Margot, the movie courts vagueness as well.
  14. Everybody Knows
    If there’s one nit to pick with Everybody Knows, it’s that Farhadi’s films, as excellent as they are, are starting to feel a bit same-y. He’s plying the same family-in-crisis formula he’s worked before. That formula still works like gangbusters, but it’s becoming a formula nonetheless: Happiness and community curdle into paranoia and suspicion.
  15. Bears
    There's an elemental appeal to watching these animals hunt and play in the Alaskan wildnerness, and the Disneynature team has mastered the art of capturing it.
  16. Off the Map
    This is a character study more than a forward-moving drama, plopped down with exquisite photographic care in a beautiful New Mexico desert, and starring good actors who make a feast of their flavorful roles.
  17. Hustle
    Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.
  18. Heartbeat Detector
    It's a thin line between 20th-century Nazism and 21st-century corporate culture in Heartbeat Detector, Nicolas Klotz's rewardingly chilly psychological thriller.
  19. Thank You for Your Service
    Thank You For Service is so successful at capturing the Iraq War’s effects on American lives.
  20. Imperium
    Subtlety is not Imperium’s strength. But as a solid thriller, it’s far more successful, and Radcliffe is brilliant as the quick-on-his-feet agent.
  21. Walking and Talking
    Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.
  22. I Am Heath Ledger
    What it does offer, however, is a touching celebration of his life — and it largely does so by using a collection of home videos Ledger recorded throughout his career.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    If you’re looking for cool, here’s Elvis Presley at his absolutely arctic.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Secret Life of Words
    Can a single scene save a movie? An hour and 20 minutes into The Secret Life of Words, Sarah Polley delivers a halting, evocative 10-minute monologue that finally unlocks the mystery behind her guarded character.
  25. Avengers: Infinity War
    What saves Infinity War from being just another bloated supergroup tour – and what will end up being the thing that blows fans’ minds to dust – is the film’s final stretch.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Maps to the Stars
    The goal here is cynical satire. The result, sadly, is just a yawn.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    True Confessions
    While True Confessions boasts big themes (redemption, reconciliation) and big names, the plot and performances are painfully subtle. It proffers too many details and not enough payoff.
  28. F1: The Movie
    For flash and rumble, F1 doesn't have an equal this summer. Roll down the windows and enjoy the ride.
  29. John Wick
    John Wick, is not only a return to badass form for the actor, it's also one of the most excitingly visceral action flicks I've seen in ages.
  30. 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.
  31. Chef
    The first two thirds of Chef crackle with hunger-inducing imagery and laughter-provoking gags.
  32. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.
  33. Missing Link
    It all goes down easily if not exactly unforgettably; a wispy slice of hirsute whimsy.
  34. Why We Fight
    Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.
  35. Dream Horse
    A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.
  36. Women Without Men
    Stronger on beautiful imagery than on narrative flow.
  37. Anita
    The film itself feels a bit padded and clunky.
  38. Down Terrace
    A dark and hilarious thwomping of the whole miserablist British gangster genre.
  39. Twister
    And for a movie that stars acts of God, this work of mortals provides surprisingly little liftoff. The stuff that whips through the angry skies in Twister is the most exciting part of the spectacle. Essentially, we're turned on by debris.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Avalon
    The movie is the visual equivalent of a stranger picking out highlights from his family album and providing brief descriptions of them. Everything that happens in Avalon, be it happiness or trauma, is infused with the same tone. The result is test-pattern emotion; everything’s on the same level. There’s no discrimination and, hence, no drama.
  41. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to.
  42. Son of the Bride
    Has an appealing modesty, but director Juan José Campanella works so hard to keep everything soft and winsome and charming that he cushions the understatement into blandness.
  43. The Black Balloon
    Toni Collette gives it the old "Little Miss Sunshine" try in The Black Balloon as an edge-of-kooky, very pregnant mama presiding over a chaotic household.
  44. Friends with Money
    There is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence.
  45. Enola Holmes
    While the mystery might be elementary (my dear, notably absent, Watson), the storytelling is winkingly subversive, proclaiming that a new and welcome game is afoot.
  46. A Quiet Place: Day One
    As with the others in the series, this is not an upbeat picture, but it is effective and unsettling without being too gory.
  47. My Cousin Vinny
    My Cousin Vinny is the definition of obvious, and it’s way too long (do films like this really need an hour’s worth of setup?). But Pesci and Tomei make a first-rate team — they’re Punch and Judy gone Brooklyn.
  48. X2: X-Men United
    X2 sparkles with a lightness of spirit that was missing from ''X-Men.''
  49. Delirious
    It would be nice to see a sharp, funny, penetrating satire of the new, kicked-up culture of empty media fame, but Tom DiCillo's scattershot buddy movie Delirious isn't it.
  50. Paranormal Activity
    With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.
  51. No Time to Die
    The levity of the first half is soon sorely missed, and the run length alone — the movie clocks in at just under 165 minutes — dilutes the intended emotional resonance of the final scenes; Never Say Time might have been a truer title.
  52. Kisses
    A superior lyrical ragamuffin Irish drama.
  53. Honeydripper
    True to his stolid, humanist instincts and characteristically stodgy directorial style, writer-director John Sayles creates a story more educational than engrossing.
  54. The Double
    Director Richard Ayoade (Submarine) gets a huge impact from minimal expressionist sets, but the thin story — loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella — plays like a pale reflection of a more exciting tale.
  55. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Is Kumiko simply naive, or is she mentally ill? The film’s perfect ending doesn’t try to solve that riddle, but it will make you feel as if you’ve just seen something hypnotically original.
  56. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    The documentary takes on its own engaging shape - one of edgy editorial and political ambivalence.
  57. Night on Earth
    Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    French Connection II
    French Connection II is not exactly a fun flick (there’s a harrowing sequence where the bad guys shoot Hackman full of heroin, for example), but in its own twisted way it’s something of an art film — perhaps the most profoundly absurdist and pessimistic detective film ever made.
  59. Just Mercy
    It’s solidly rewarding to watch the wheels of Mercy turn, though the direction ... can’t seem to help falling into certain schematics that tend to follow movies like these: the original sin; the uplift; the leering good-old-boy sheriffs; the big-moment court scenes.
  60. The Place Beyond the Pines
    It's a slow-burner that burns so slowly its wick completely fizzles out.
  61. Notting Hill
    Blithe and exhilarating romantic comedy.
  62. Purple Butterfly
    Too often, Purple Butterfly is as impenetrable as Zhang's placid, obdurate beauty.
  63. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    It's not quite the same thrill as glimpsing the man behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz, but for journalism junkies, the fascination of Page One: Inside The New York Times is something like that.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Rescuers Down Under
    The Rescuers Down Under, directed by Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel, carries its ambitions with an easy grace, expanding the art of animation to fresh ground without losing sight of the silly fun we love cartoons for.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    The result has the dingy grace of pigeons flying across an urban wasteland.
  66. The Cool School
    The rare footage of '50s and '60s L.A. alone is a treasure; the City of Angels has rarely looked so hip. Bonus: cool music from the likes of Charles Mingus and the Velvet Underground.
  67. Beatriz at Dinner
    Years from now, when the orbital politics of the film have dissolved, what will resonate about Beatriz at Dinner will be the sight of Hayek — leaps and bounds more enchanting a screen presence than the performers surrounding her — as a poignant object of neglect.
  68. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    The one figure in Revenge of the Sith who taps the true spirit of Star Wars is Ewan McGregor: With his beautiful light, clipped delivery, he plays Alec Guinness' playfulness, making Obi-Wan a marvel of benevolent moxie.
  69. Paris
    There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.
  70. Superman
    With a cast this excellent, there's a capacity for something truly super in a future film — if only Gunn chooses to put the characters' humanity first.
  71. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke.
  72. Fracture
    Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.
  73. Departures
    Departures is tender and, at times, rather squishy. It's sure to squeeze the tear ducts of anyone who has lost a parent.
  74. Ghost Stories
    Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.
  75. No No: A Dockumentary
    The fact is, Dock Ellis was...complicated. Probably a lot more so than No No makes him out to be.
  76. The Valet
    A satisfying contraption of twists, missteps, and blithe repartee that produces old-fashioned, honestly earned guffaws.
  77. People Places Things
    Even though there’s not a lot to Jim Strouse’s new relationship comedy, it has a real warmth and charm thanks to the undeniable appeal of comedian Jemaine Clement.
  78. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    Boils down to a performance film with abysmal sound in which you rarely get to see a good, revealing close-up of the stars.
  79. The Italian Job
    There's a fair amount of filler in The Italian Job, but it all boils down to the big heist, which has been staged as if it were Fort Knox being robbed by Evel Knievel.
  80. Protagonist
    If all this sounds awfully classroom-bound, it isn't -- far from it. Each man's story as he tells it is riveting, truly stranger than fiction, and awesome, too, in the way of unfathomable humans.
  81. Jurassic Park
    As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.
  82. Neighbors
    Speaking in her native Aussie twang, Byrne shows that she's a deadpan comic ace. And thanks to her chemistry with Rogen, Neighbors proves that just because you grow up doesn't mean you have to be a grown-up.
  83. Jude
    It's worth seeing this stark adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure just for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Eccleston as Jude Fawley, the stonemason in turn-of-the-century England whose dreams of university scholarship are thwarted. And British telly director Michael Winterbottom sustains a fine atmosphere of dank misery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Top Secret!
    The result is a monkeyshine that lumbers when it should swing.
  85. Noah
    Noah is a movie about big ideas (environmentalism, heavenly obedience versus earthly love) and even bigger directorial ambitions (how to tell a personal story on the grandest of grand scales). But, in the end, it's also a disappointment. Maybe not one of Biblical proportions, but a disappointment nonetheless.
  86. Crimes of the Future
    Crimes of the Future . . . sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours.
  87. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.
  88. Black Widow
    If Widow, with its winky one-liners and spandexed catsuits, is purely pop feminism, the movie's female gaze still reads like more than a cynical marketing ploy; it's one step closer to real, messy life, Marvel-size and amplified.
  89. Whip It
    The movie is Drew Barrymore's directorial debut (she also plays fellow Hurl Scout Smashley Simpson), and it's clear she's more attuned to grrrlishness than real athletic power.
  90. Dick Tracy
    Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip.
  91. Z for Zachariah
    The lack of drama and heat keeps Z for Zachariah joyless without much despair. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and you’ll feel bored.
  92. American Woman
    As more than a decade passes on screen, the one constant is Miller’s presence in every scene: a messy, chain-smoking sex kitten stumbling from delayed adolescence toward a grown womanhood — painful, honest, and flawed — worth waiting for.
  93. Praying with Lior
    Though the film gets a bit repetitive, in its moving climax Lior does more than just have his bar mitzvah -- he earns it.
  94. The Housemaid
    The class warfare in The Housemade feels dated, but there's something nicely kinky in this lusciously photographed erotic Korean thriller by Im Sang-soo.
  95. Primer
    Consider Primer a successful lab experiment with, as they might say in techie chat rooms, significant indie-cred applications, IMHO. Oh, and :-).
  96. The Girl on the Train
    Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel.
  97. Four Lions
    These guys are not charming; they're horrifying in their ignorance, and they cause real damage. But there's a weird relief to be found in the opportunity to laugh ourselves sick at their expense, if only for an instant.
  98. Rustin
    The broader recognition of Rustin's efforts may be long overdue, but that doesn't mean a cinematic rendering of his life should feel as dated as our nation's own historical shortcomings.
  99. The Good Thief
    The trouble with all this is that it's thin movie tinsel that, while lovingly polished, never becomes more than tinsel. The Good Thief has a glib stylishness (the rapid freeze-frames at the end of scenes signify...nothing), yet it lacks a blast of reality to balance its fable.
  100. Monsters and Men
    Reinaldo Marcus Green’s quiet drama still carries its own kind of big stick, even if the story’s impact is ultimately muffled by his meditative, low-key style.
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