Entertainment Weekly's Scores

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:
7797 movie reviews
  1. For all of Larraín's artistry, Spencer would crumble in the hands of the wrong actress, and Stewart gives one of the best performances of her career so far as this highly subjective version of Diana.
  2. Nothing in Souvenir Part II is obvious; one could argue it's even obtuse to the point of excluding most casual moviegoers. But surrendering to Hogg's slow alchemy still feels like a rare treat: a beguilingly meta portrait of the artist as a young woman learning to find herself not just in the mirror of others, but in her own hand behind the camera.
  3. 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.
  4. The looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos.
  5. The film can't seem to stop piling on idiosyncrasies, a kind of willful kookery that mixes uneasily with the more serious elements of personal tragedy and mental illness that run through it.
  6. There are some jokes here — Paul Rudd brings a little lightness to the proceedings as the kids' science teacher, Mr. Grooberson — but it's hard to escape the overall sensation of, well, a corpse being exhumed.
  7. The movie's stark Nordic mood and obscure mystery are as coolly immersive as nearly anything on screen this year — and in the hammy world of supernatural horror, that ambiguity alone feels like a small, spooky gift.
  8. Duel is entirely, often sensationally watchable without ever quite justifying why it needs to remind us what the world has done to women for centuries.
  9. If you want royal intrigue and insight, do yourself a favor and revisit Harry and Meghan's Oprah interview because Diana: The Musical is rather like the royal family itself these days, expensive and pointless.
  10. Rocket is leisurely episodic and at over two hours, almost certainly longer than it needs to be, but the director's singular gift for street casting — beyond Rex, hardly anyone here has acted professionally before — and deeply embedded sense of mood works its own kind of unhurried alchemy.
  11. If we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in.
  12. 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.
  13. In an era when nearly everything that can be done on film already has been, Titane forges something sensational from nerve and pure metal, and makes it new.
  14. Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit. But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.
  15. Laurent, an actress known Stateside for movies like Inglorious Basterds and Beginners, has adapted Ball from the bestselling novel by Victoria Mas, whose facts are rooted in actual history. She shares Mas' justifiable outrage at the casual inhumanity of it all — the brutal experiments and biased theories, the rampant physical and emotional abuse — and also her sense for melodrama.
  16. Riz Ahmed takes Encounter a long way. But he can't single-handedly carry a film that never quite figures out what it wants to be — stark sci-fi paranoia? Psychological family drama? Desert road-trip apocalypse?
  17. Guilty, for all its wild-eyed excess, does find some blunt-force propulsion for a while, particularly if you're coming to it new. But the movie seems to mistake the taut minimalism of the original for something that needs to be goosed and adrenalized, a thriller on constant defibrillator.
  18. Comes drawn in bold, broad strokes — a fond treatment of a flawed but fascinating American icon whose revelations feel mostly cosmetic in the end.
  19. Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.
  20. Unless you're one of the few who's read Thomas Savage's 1967 book of the same name, on which the script is based, there's rarely a moment that doesn't feel racked with the queasy, thrilling promise of sudden violence or epiphany.
  21. Green (who made the small, affecting 2018 indie Monsters and Men and this year's little-seen Joe Bell) hasn't reinvented the underdog wheel, but he has made something fresh out of the familiar — a smart reminder that when a story is told well it can hit all the beats we know, and still somehow surprise us.
  22. Branagh's genuine affection and nostalgia for his subject suffuse the movie; if only the misty romanticism of his story could match it.
  23. Another rich creation in Mills' bittersweet, gently profound collisions of art and life.
  24. Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display.
  25. The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.
  26. Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.
  27. It might be just as well that Padgett is not given a real emotional arc, nor anything resembling an internal life. Even when little is asked of her, Rae's acting is not up to the challenge.
  28. 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.
  29. Martin Campbell's cat-and-mouse assassin thriller is self-aware enough as a kinetic genre entry. As it spills more blood and more convoluted backstory, however, it reveals an empty center.
  30. Who can take a reboot, sprinkle it with something new, cover it with blood and bumblebees and a pointed social commentary or two? Candyman can, at least for a little while, even if the movie doesn't really find its more-than-body-horror groove in the end.
  31. They'd be crazy not to give Meng'er Zhang, as Shang-Chi's ferociously watchable sister Xialing, her own spin-off, and Awkwafina, who spends at least a third of the movie in a fanny pack and lime-green parachute pants, polishes her sardonic slacker M.O. to a high one-liner shine.
  32. Writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) seems to be aiming for an Inception-style metaphysical mind-bend, with the sci-fi jolt of Minority Report and a bleak splash of Waterworld. But her intentions get lost in some cloudy marine layer in between, sunk by hammy hard-boiled dialogue and a story that leaves logic at the door.
  33. It isn't nearly as compelling a movie as Franklin was a singer, but while the film never fully captures her brilliance, it does at least effectively allude to it.
  34. 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.
  35. Val
    The result is undoubtedly a canny mediation on the vagaries of fame, but it feels more intimate and essential than that: a lifetime of searching and self-regard distilled, somehow, into a state of grace.
  36. In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.
  37. In a way, the movie feels almost like Marvel antimatter, an auteur's willful response to whiz-bang emptiness and Infinity Stones. Knight is ultimately a tale of honor though, and a deeply moral one — inscrutable, but haunting too.
  38. The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.
  39. Unfortunately, director Robert Schwentke (RED, R.I.P.D.) uses a lot of razzle-dazzle, and too often the quick cuts and close-ups obscure the action rather than highlight it.
  40. Old
    Old comes close to seeing its metaphysical mystery through. In the end, though, it settles for something more like supernatural camp, with telegraphed twists and jump scares.
  41. Algorithmically speaking, it's no slam dunk.
  42. Is Annette a farce, a metaphor, a noir meditation on fame? Only God and maybe the Maels know for sure. But like so many of the best and strangest moments that festivals like this bring, it's nearly impossible to witness it all and not walk away feeling altered (irrationally, emotionally, chemically) in some way.
  43. 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.
  44. F9 sure sounds like a lot of fun. Why is it only a little fun?
  45. The story's bright swirl of Pixar pixie dust, jangle soundtrack, and gentle lessons on accepting otherness and learning to move past fear feel like a temporary passport: a sweetly soulful all-ages dip in la dolce vita.
  46. Roadrunner, steeped in the jittery punk-rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document­, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived
  47. Cruella comes off as a curious animal, eager to change its spots and trying a little bit of everything along the way.
  48. For all its rich tapestry and radiant ingenues, it's that casual centering of so many marginalized voices that makes the movie feel, in its own way, revolutionary: a Technicolor marvel as heady as Old Hollywood, and as modern as this moment.
  49. With [Crawford's] proud, wounded performance at the center, the film's raw vérité style and unforced naturalism do more than set a mood; in its best moments, it breaks your heart.
  50. A kind of popcorn movie that doesn't just let wit and storytelling serve as the garnish for big-bang action, but makes that its actual priority.
  51. A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.
  52. Army of the Dead grills its cheese to a crisp, but Bautista adds some healthy flavor. His headshots never miss your heart.
  53. Once again, Krasinski manages to render relatively straightforward tasks — nursing a baby, tuning a radio, walking through a train car — harrowing; dialogue, by necessity, is rarely wasted, and his actors feel far more sympathetically human and real than most meat-puppet horror chum.
  54. The final 30 minutes of the film descend into something so bloody and outrageous it nearly works as camp. Still, it's hard not to think of the better movie buried somewhere in Window's odd feints and histrionics, if only its makers had trusted themselves — or been trusted — to tell it.
  55. A film literally made from thin air, the French thriller Oxygen (on Netflix starting Friday) is a neat little sci-fi nightmare; a cool-toned exercise in claustrophobia that nearly pulls off the innate improbabilities of its high-concept nonsense.
  56. Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.
  57. Wrath is just another loose bag of lizard-brain thrills and wood-block dialogue: too ugly to be camp, too grimly familiar to feel new.
  58. The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all.
  59. Vengeance is wrought without remorse and even less sense. The only sure thing, judging by the promise of a post-credits scene, is a sequel.
  60. Fatalities are the closest we get to the fun of playing a Mortal Kombat game, but future adapters would be better off realizing that video games are art precisely because of their unique gameplay, and not because of the silly lore that stitches cutscenes together.
  61. Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.
  62. Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.
  63. If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.
  64. Nobody could play well for anyone desperate to visit a recently reopened theater, but this is a rather chilly festival of carnage, too rigid to ever really spark to life. It's wickless.
  65. Yet even compared to the glacial Marvel-Netflix Dramas, Zack Snyder's Justice League is a chore. At the end of the rainbow, viewers are left with the promise that the actual cool things will happen next time. This cut is no worse than the theatrical edition, but it sure is longer. "So begins the end," Steppenwolf declares. When he says that, there is one hour left.
  66. Most illuminating are the various journalists, attorneys, witnesses, and admissions counselors who testify to the case
  67. Coming 2 America is cute and fun, a lovingly made exercise in nostalgia that delivers several genuine laughs, even if it never achieves the comedic excellence of its predecessor.
  68. Mikkelsen has played iconic villains before, and while Prentiss isn't nearly as memorable as Hannibal Lecter or Le Chiffre, he still manages to imbue Chaos Walking with a sense of danger.
  69. If Raya's outlines and endpoint are strictly fairy-tale familiar (evil is vanquished, good triumphs, reconstituted dragons romp), the movie feels fresh not just for the mere fact of its female-forward and predominately Asian cast, but for the breeziness with which it bears the weight of Disney history.
  70. As her success spikes exponentially, so does the film's momentum, shifting toward the more familiar touchstones of a traditional music doc: The smear of foreign cities seen through a town-car window; the endless roundelay of interviews, meet-and-greets, and promo signings.
  71. The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own.
  72. There's only so much real-world intrigue a crime committed almost entirely via ones and zeroes can entail, and the script's halfhearted attempts to make it all Mean Something feel more than a little callow in the end.
  73. For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns — and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before.
  74. Daniels has a way of molding the chaotic murk of history into something neat and shiny — whether it be the roots of Holiday's addiction or the decidedly 2021 cut of Rhodes' rippling torso.
  75. 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.
  76. The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.
  77. Cloying though it is, Always and Forever does understand how all-consuming first love can be, how bittersweet graduation, how scary choosing one's own path.
  78. Like some of the old-timey classics it recalls — Blazing Saddles, Airplane, the first Austin Powers — Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too.
  79. Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.
  80. Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces.
  81. Obsessed though it is with the past, throughout its whole runtime, the best part always lies ahead.
  82. A wry low-key dramedy that lands with surprising sweetness.
  83. Barring any greater lessons on motivation or forgiveness, the movie becomes little more than an endurance test; one far easier — at least for the viewer — to fall away from than to stay.
  84. The insights of the doc don't reverberate far beyond the story it's telling. But oh, what a story.
  85. It feels like an actor's film: a delicate, melancholy study in black and white, nearly every scene filled with careful silences and subtext.
  86. Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya — alternately raw, tender, and incendiary — duly electrifies every scene he's in. Righteous as the road may be, his Fred hasn't been flattened to fit the broad Wikipedia-worn contours of a martyr or a hero; he lives and breathes, down to the last indelible frame.
  87. The movie settles into the blackest kind of buddy comedy — a lacerating slice of nihilism rooted in real despair, and real I-love-you-man tenderness too.
  88. Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.
  89. Jones — who trained intensively in voice work and American Sign Language for the role — has the gift of coming off like a genuine teenager, and more particularly a girl torn between her unique obligations to the people she's always loved and known and the bigger dreams she holds for herself.
  90. What does come through are the good intentions of everyone involved. There's a great sincerity here, even in the schmaltzier bits, demonstrating a real belief in the humanity on display — however contrived the vehicle for it.
  91. The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.
  92. The film loses steam when the plot drifts the women apart, but Clark's fearsome performance anchors the surreal final act. Her body is a stage for Saint Maud's demonic dance.
  93. In the larger sense of whatever a movie like this promises to be — that you will laugh (in a properly low-key English way) and cry (but not too outrageously), and feel the sudden, urgent need to drink milky tea and own a pair of dungarees — The Dig more than fulfills its destiny.
  94. It's the combined incandescence of the stars at the center of the screen, not the ones meant to be gazed at through telescopes, that carries the movie; its best and truest source of light.
  95. In the absence of a clean ending, then, what's left is the familiar intrigue of smart men squinting dolefully at distant horizons and bloodied crime scenes, an ocean of bottled-up feeling, and a movie that takes a good half of its secrets to the grave.
  96. The whole movie comes across as deeply self-conscious, more concerned with how it sounds than what it's saying, consumed with impressing people rather than expressing something.
  97. If Hathaway and Ejiofor are sometimes saddled with talky theatrical monologues that sound far more like a screenwriter's fever dream than the words of any ordinary human, they also commit in a way that manages to makes the leaps in tone and logic work, probably better than they should.
  98. Gourav is frankly devastating, his face a cracked mask of pain and disbelief. In others he's ruthless, calculating, even cruel. It's the kind of performance that can either make or break a movie like this, and the broad sweep of Tiger, with its cavalcade of outsize themes and incidents, sometimes threatens to overtake him. But through his eyes, Balram's singular story — in all its wild, exuberant improbability — roars to life
  99. Though an overwrought final hour dissipates the power of the first and its soft-focus end notes feel unearned, the film still leaves a bruising kind of mark.
  100. Love’s most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness — that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we’d mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all.

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