Entertainment Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Cobb
    In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.
  2. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    Fantastic Beasts is two-plus hours of meandering eye candy that feels numbingly inconsequential.
  3. Beloved Sisters
    It only makes you wish for the unintellectual bodice ripper that the movie should have been.
  4. Bandslam
    Misfit teens in the process of forming a high school band learn life lessons and raise their goblets of rock. But there's enough of a strong filmmaking backbeat in Bandslam to carry the movie's light tune.
  5. Mission: Impossible III
    A gratifyingly clever, booby-trapped thriller that has enough fun and imagination and dash to more than justify its existence.
  6. Sommersby
    If Sommersby is finally more pleasant than exciting, that may be because its post-Civil War setting robs the story of much of its exoticism.
  7. Mystery Men
    This hip send-up of the superhero lifestyle has a bunch of great comic bits from a group of great, eccentric talents, but not enough bourgeois discipline to see the story through.
  8. Soylent Green
    Richard Fleischer’s dystopian thriller set in an overpopulated, famine-stricken 2022 New York is a wonderfully silly slice of future schlock, featuring some of Heston’s zestiest overacting.
  9. Frankie and Johnny
    Frankie & Johnny does what any true romantic movie should: It makes the mysterious, push-and-pull alchemy of love seem, once again, worth the effort.
  10. The Source
    The rare case in which a filmmaker's unadulterated worship of his subjects adds force and resonance--and not just luster--to the way that we see them.
  11. Robot Stories
    The collection can be summed up in four words I never thought I'd see together: science-fiction chamber music.
  12. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.
  13. Deadpool 2
    It’s in Deadpool’s DNA to channel the wild id of a 12-year-old boy — a very clever one who happens to love boobs, Enya, and blowing stuff up. Which is dizzy fun for a while, like eating Twinkies on a Gravitron. Eventually, though, it just wears you out.
  14. The Way Back
    Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way.
  15. Puzzle
    Director Marc Turtletaub pulls thoughtful, carefully shaded performances from Denman, Khan, and, most of all, Scottish actress Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men), who refuses to let Agnes be an easy avatar for midlife longing and suburban discontent.
  16. I Care a Lot
    Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.
  17. The Infiltrator
    The Infiltrator may not be as innovative as "Breaking Bad," but it sure is fun to watch Cranston at his best again, masterfully walking the tightrope between good and bad.
  18. Pitch Perfect
    Without the music, the movie might have been painful, but the songs, Auto-Tuned and processed as they are, generate a hooky bliss. They're the chewy center of this ultra-synthetic hard candy.
  19. Mary Poppins Returns
    Spoonfuls of sugar always help the movie magic go down; if only this Mary had gotten a necessary twist of lemon, too.
  20. Félix And Meira
    Quebecois director Maxime Giroux mistakes long, wordless scenes of characters gazing at each other for tenderness, but he imaginatively uses gospel music as the forbidden food of love.
  21. Vivo
    Have tissues ready, and thank Vivo for teaching the little ones a valuable lesson: Do not go into a swamp alone, or you will meet a tree-size python who sounds just like Michael Rooker.
  22. You're Next
    It's so deliciously twisted, it will make you walk out of the theater feeling like you just endured a grueling, giddy workout.
  23. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    Star Trek VI is just pleasantly diverting, business-as-usual hokum.
  24. Hope Springs
    Hope Springs dares viewers to look closely at the remarkable sight of naked adult intimacy and its discontents.
  25. Catfish
    In Catfish, the camera's-rolling readiness to trawl for drama leaves a slimy aftertaste.
  26. I Am Legend
    In spirit, I Am Legend is caught in some abstractly doom-laden sci-fi past. For what it is, though, the film is well-done, a case of suspenseful competence trumping questionable relevance.
  27. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    A lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you.
  28. Coffee and Cigarettes
    Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Missouri Breaks
    It’s quite good.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Miss Stevens
    Though its heart beats with the same blood as something like "Lost in Translation," in which a daunting age gap inspires lasting platonic chemistry between two drifting souls, Miss Stevens feels fresh in its take on human vulnerability.
  31. Basquiat
    Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.
  32. The Wedding Song
    Has a sensuous, intimate filmmaking style that overrides The Wedding Song's more precariously loaded plot parallels.
  33. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One would have been a very good stand-alone sci-fi movie if it came out under a different name. But what makes it especially exciting is how it perfectly snaps right into the Star Wars timeline and connects events we already know by heart with ones that we never even considered.
  34. A United Kingdom
    It’s their quiet devotion and enduring dignity that give A United Kingdom not just a romantic center, but its soul.
  35. Last Night in Soho
    Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.
  36. White Men Can't Jump
    Perhaps the first sports movie ever made in which the characters talked as good a game as they played.
  37. Buried
    The political angle is gratuitous, even foolish, and certainly a distraction from the movie's visual strengths.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    White Girl
    Somewhere between Catherine Hardwicke’s "Thirteen" and Harmony Korine’s "Spring Breakers" lies the rebellious mood of Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl, a Sundance firecracker that easily finds its place among the cinematic canon of great dramas cut from the good-girl-gone-bad cloth.
  39. Married Life
    Married Life congratulates its audience on a sophisticated, humorous complicity in the obvious immorality of Harry's murder plans, as well as in Richard's own ungentlemanly designs on his pal's gorgeous girl. Every adult, the movie suggests, has got a secret.
  40. Grace Is Gone
    Grace Is Gone grabs on to a name, a war, and the metaphor-come-to-life of a theme park with rides going nowhere. And we, the people, are spun around and shaken for tears.
  41. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    The film sweeps us up like a thriller, forcing us to at least ask whether terrorism like the ELF's (which targeted property, never human lives) might ever be justified.
  42. Black Dynamite
    Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high.
  43. Body Snatchers
    Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.
  44. Lemming
    The movie, which has the slightly glum perversity of early Chabrol, is a dream of betrayal, with the squirmiest attack-of-nature tableau since Willard.
  45. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Effective horror relies on the actualization of some deep-seated cultural fear, but Ouija: Origin of Evil supplies only ineffective clichés and half-hearted attempts at franchise building.
  46. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    As Cecil, Whitaker is mesmerizing. The actor seems to shrink into his imposing frame, summoning a performance of quiet, bottled-up force.
  47. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.
  48. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    That sense of déjà vu is at once this Harry Potter's balm and its limitation: many charms, but few surprises.
  49. Alone with Her
    Intriguing creepout.
  50. Closer
    The last thing Marber's quartet of modern miserables needs is to be admired; they are the very worst of average people, but on screen they have become the very best of the baddest.
  51. Shampoo
    There’s a self-awareness to Shampoo that gives the movie a cleansing sadness and, oddly, makes Beatty an affectingly amoral roue.
  52. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    Gazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people.
  53. Foxes
    It’s really one of the very first, very early Gen-X movies (the true first one, to me, is 1978’s terrific Over the Edge), and I was struck all over again by the freshness of what it captured: these four prematurely jaded adolescent girls, led by Jodie Foster as the sensible one, living like baby adults, cut off from their parents and the past, bonded only by attitude, consumerism, and the pop-culture decadence they share.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is simply the closest any TV or movie incarnation has ever come to the spirit of the original Batman comic books.
  55. In the Valley of Elah
    It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.
  56. The Debt
    The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    For a movie that's mostly a plotless mix of old sci-fi flicks and Bowie-esque gender-bending, Rocky Horror continues to charm. That's due in part to the honest delight we take in the freedoms this movie so cheerfully flaunts.
  58. My Best Friend
    An unlikely comedy charmer.
  59. The Client
    The movie keeps you occupied, but in a processed, unexciting way.
  60. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    You still feel that every delirious allusion, every snidely on-the-mark observational quip, is tickling a different part of your cerebral cortex. Yet the movie lacks the manic highs of the show’s best episodes; it’s a bit too rote and becalmed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Land of the Pharaohs
    Joan Collins and her pointy bras are a hubba-hubba hoot.
  62. Father of the Bride
    The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue.
  63. Mr. Malcolm's List
    Despite the source material's similar popularity, though, the movie drags, a confluence of silly plot points and mile-wide archetypes with too little natural chemistry between its ridiculously good-looking leads.
  64. The Good Lie
    It's a deeply touching story about survival, perseverance, and hope.
  65. Gay Sex in the 70s
    The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no.
  66. The Great Debaters
    The Great Debaters is like one of those sentimentally revved youth-sports-team crowd-pleasers. This time, though, the sport is debating, and the setting is an elite black college in Marshall, Tex., in 1935
  67. The Bay
    One hell of a creepy little eco-horror picture.
  68. Puss in Boots
    Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.
  69. Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D
    Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.
  70. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    Mostly, the joy comes from watching Reeves and Winter on screen, two holy fools just doing their best to bring light and love and non-heinous riffs — and remind the bleary-eyed citizens of 2020, perhaps, of a simpler, sweeter world gone by.
  71. Being Julia
    Being Julia flirts too heavily with soap opera clichés, but it has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.
  72. American Made
    The movie spins like a top for two hours. With his pearly shark’s grin, always-underestimated comic timing, and macho daredevil streak, Cruise rips into the role and summons a side of himself that he rarely lets his guard down enough to reveal.
  73. Not Fade Away
    Not Fade Away is Chase's reward to himself - a transparently autobiographical work, his first feature-length film, and one that he's said he has wanted to make for years.
  74. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    It’s a minor-key tale by any measure: a May-December romance played out in the fading shadow of Old Hollywood glamour. But it also has the benefit of a thoughtful script, sensitive direction, and leads gifted enough to breathe fresh air into nearly every moment.
  75. The End of the Affair
    The affair itself, in its genteel way, does catch fire, but it's the end of the affair that needs to move us to rapture, and the movie, instead, just drifts away.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    La Femme Nikita
    It's like "The Terminator" as reimagined by the editors of French Vogue.
  77. Jindabyne
    Jindabyne -- named for the lakeside town in which the troubles spill -- can't contain all that the filmmakers want to throw in. Best to keep glued to the taut performance by Laura Linney.
  78. The Conjuring 2
    There are some solid scares (Wan is too gifted in the dark art of gotcha manipulation to not make you leap a few times), but there’s nothing on par with the first film’s brilliant hide-and-clap scene with Lili Taylor. If there’s going to be a Conjuring 3—and this movie is just decent enough to suggest there will be—our heroes should be a little choosier about which case they dust off next.
  79. Velvet Goldmine
    Velvet Goldmine is no masterpiece, but, at its best, it's a ravishing rock dream.
  80. Vengeance
    Novak, who spent years refining the squirrelly ticks of his self-regarding salesman Ryan on nine seasons of The Office, isn't a demonstrably different dude here. His callow-millennial act — and the navel-gazing vagaries of modern content culture — make fertile ground for satire, and many of the jokes here do find their soft targets. But it can also feel hollow and exhausting in main-character movie form.
  81. Lucky Them
    The movie is disappointingly flat-footed about both rock and journalism, and its shaggy plot sheds logic as it goes. Still, the actors are excellent; they’re triple crème slathered on an odd little undercooked biscuit of a script.
  82. The TV Set
    If only for the comedy glory of Sigourney Weaver as a TV network president who confuses acid reflux with gut instinct, this very smart, very funny movie about the making of a network sitcom is a cut-glass gem of a showbiz conceit.
  83. Sneakers
    Sneakers is an agreeably lightweight caper thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Reeboks or basketball.
  84. The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.
  85. Circumstance
    Here, love and attraction between two teenage girls put them on a collision course with Tehran society in general and one girl's troubled, increasingly religious brother in particular.
  86. Love Jones
    Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.
  87. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.
  88. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    As is so often the case since his "Monty Python" days, Gilliam is best at visual games and weakest at storytelling.
  89. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    it’s consistently funny and inventive.
  90. Arlington Road
    Slippery issues about trust, parental responsibility, and the inalienable American right to personal and political freedom are ceded to Hollywood's inalienable right to stage high-pitched chase scenes and a shocking big finish.
  91. Unexpected
    Unexpected isn’t particularly interested in driving the plot forward or holding its leads up as avatars for a cinematic lecture on poverty and white privilege. Instead, it just lets them live and breathe and make mistakes — not for the aim of any greater message or grand epiphanies, but because that’s what people do.
  92. Operation Mincemeat
    A better, subtler movie lurks somewhere in Mincemeat; for dads and history buffs, the pleasant hash it presents instead is passable enough.
  93. The Runaways
    The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.
  94. Pawn Sacrifice
    The achievement of Edward Zwick’s new Fischer biopic, Pawn Sacrifice, is that it does just that. It manages to turn thinking into action.
  95. My Week with Marilyn
    Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder. Working opposite a suitably florid Kenneth Branagh as that high thespian Sir Larry.
  96. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.
  97. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
    Walker forged an out-of-time mystique that is vividly captured here.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »