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. Clerks
    The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.
  2. The Cooler
    A lot of fun early in the evening, when the Rat Pack ambiance is novel, but gets bleary by 4 a.m. in the story.
  3. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    A hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum.
  4. Mostly Martha
    Nettelbeck has a particularly lovely sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant choreography. And her warm, patient understanding of little girls' psyches guides young Maxime Foerste, as the turbulent niece, to a terrific performance.
  5. Road to Perdition
    There's much that's simplistically grand, worthy, and fine in Perdition. If I yearn for less measured filmmaking that cries out with more reckless despair, it's because I think hell on earth is a meaner, much more interesting, and far less tidy cinematic place than Mendes trusts his audience to handle.
  6. Shanghai Knights
    This is an action-comedy sequel so indefatigably preposterous and farklemt -- as they say in certain Upper West Side saloons -- that it actually improves on the original.
  7. Waterworld
    Costner's surfer-bum affectlessness works here; he turns the Mariner into the world's most jaded lifeguard.
  8. 10 Things I Hate About You
    The film's crank-case snappishness doesn't break any molds, but it certainly gives you a lift.
  9. Not Another Teen Movie
    A big, fat, juicy spitball lobbed, with mostly dead-on aim, at the teen-smarm clichés that have accumulated like so much earwax over the last three years.
  10. The Brown Bunny
    It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.
  11. Changing Lanes
    Teasing drama whose relentless good-deed/bad-deed reversals are just interesting enough to make a sinner like me pray for an even more interesting, less symmetrical, less obviously cross-shaped creation.
  12. We Were Soldiers
    The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too.
  13. Blow
    Carries little in the way of passion or revelatory charge.
  14. The Reckoning
    The Reckoning, with a script by Mark Mills, demands close attention; it's a play of words and ideas crowding for consideration.
  15. Open Range
    There's nothing corny, however, about the climactic shoot-out, which Costner has staged superbly as an extended logistical mini-war that surges and rifle-cracks with bloody abandon through what feels like every building in town. Call it dances with guns.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Own Private Idaho
    But Van Sant, whose vision is otherwise sharp, pushes the connection to Shakespeare's Henry IV too far, having Reeves at one point declaim in rhyming couplets, which severely tests even the most forgiving viewer.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  17. What Lies Beneath
    Bears the weight of too many genres jostling for screen time.
  18. A Bug's Life
    So obsessed with wowing you, in every corner of every frame, that as a movie it doesn't quite breathe.
  19. Monsters, Inc.
    Monsters, Inc. has got that swing, that zippity, multilevel awareness of kids'-eye sensibilities and adult-pitched humor.
  20. Spun
    Spun is accomplished, but it's also numbing. It's hard to have much connection to people who never connect with each other.
  21. The Usual Suspects
    Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.
  22. Three Kings
    So overstuffed with random fireworks that despite its politics, it's easy to imagine the film getting a four-star rave from Bush or Saddam.
  23. George of the Jungle
    Hits you on the head until you laugh.
  24. Bridget Jones's Diary
    Bridget's most attractive asset is that she's played by Renée Zellweger.
  25. Elephant
    Beauty competes with vacuity in Elephant, and for a good stretch of writer-director Gus Van Sant's maddeningly passive ode to high school innocence and Columbine-age youthful evil, beauty wins.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Thelma & Louise
    Never quite connects with us emotionally, yet the more it shades off into the gonzo-poetic, the more fun it becomes.
  27. Jackass: The Movie
    Provokes a suspense halfway between comedy and horror. I'm not sure if I enjoyed myself, exactly, but I could hardly wait to see what I'd be appalled by next.
  28. The Mother
    Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.
  29. Robot Stories
    The collection can be summed up in four words I never thought I'd see together: science-fiction chamber music.
  30. Good Will Hunting
    Stuffed--indeed, overstuffed--with heart, soul, audacity, and blarney. You may not believe a minute of it, but you don't necessarily want to stop watching.
  31. The Kid
    A parable for adults -- particularly men.
  32. The Ring
    The best thing about the movie, which is a very elegantly crafted piece of gothic snuff hokum, is the way it teases and intrigues us with the revelation of what's on that tape.
  33. Ali
    For everything it gets right, Ali, following its superb first hour, begins to lose the vision, clarity, and structure necessary to bring its hero into full focus.
  34. Series 7: The Contenders
    The murder as entertainment premise of Series 7 is proof that even the blackest of humor is no longer particularly outrageous.
  35. Tokyo Godfathers
    Like the comic strips of Ben Katchor, Tokyo Godfathers artfully appreciates the beauty and humanity in junked lives and landscapes.
  36. The Matrix Reloaded
    If The Matrix Reloaded is a trip through high-toned mediocrity, not nearly as suggestive or cohesive as ''The Matrix,'' it's one of the most wizardly mediocre movies I've seen in quite some time.
  37. Any Given Sunday
    The film's cumulative effect is as exhausting as it is exciting.
  38. Primary Colors
    One of those thrilling confluences in pop culture that rewards audiences for thinking the worst about politicians and the best about movie stars.
  39. What Planet Are You From?
    Nothing more than a sort of dumb, sort of clever fish out of water comedy.
  40. The Salton Sea
    A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme.
  41. The Deserted Station
    Slow going, but I mean it as no insult when I say that it bored me, in the end, to tears.
  42. Happy Times
    Had O. Henry set his stories in China, he might have come up with Happy Times, a comedy for which the adjective ''bittersweet'' could have been invented.
  43. In America
    Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.
  44. 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.
  45. The Devil's Advocate
    Embarrassingly entertaining.
  46. Overnight
    I do wish that Overnight caught in more precise detail what Duffy, who finally made his film on the cheap at an obscure studio, did to tick off the Miramax powers. Imagining it, though, is half the fun.
  47. Liar Liar
    Jim Carrey entertains himself mightily in Liar Liar, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
  48. American Pie
    A lively, disposable hybrid of the sincere and the synthetic.
  49. Minority Report
    The mechanical beauty and android possibilities of the future excite the filmmaker, and that's where Minority Report becomes an alluring postcard from the edge. But it's an edge over which Spielberg never seems to want to step.
  50. The Last Samurai
    A handsome epic, a brave-hearted 19th-century man-saga from the director who made the period piece man-sagas ''Glory'' and ''Legends of the Fall.''
  51. Scary Movie
    The whole thing wobbles, like the garish, trashy, sexy shoes the young folks are wearing this summer on their way (in droves) to movie theaters, intent on abandoning themselves to pleasurable mindlessness.
  52. Seven
    This homicide thriller has a tantalizingly morbid atmosphere of unease.
  53. The Powerpuff Girls
    The three kindergarteners make up for their lack of irony with laser-power eyes, radical post-post-postfeminist blithe confidence, and some of the coolest retro-futuristic animation style this side of Gerald McBoing-Boing.
  54. The Young Black Stallion
    The hoofbeats are seismic, the music is like hot cheese, and the sandy vistas thrill appropriately: It's a perfectly rousing Ben-Her of a centerpiece.
  55. Bowling for Columbine
    Even Moore's target ticket-buyers are likely to squirm with concern, unsure of who the real weasels and idiots are in this large, unkempt, rambunctious country of ours.
  56. 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.
  57. Noi the Albino
    Paced a bit too glacially for my taste, yet it's worth sitting through for its trick ending, a twist of events as ominous as the landscape.
  58. Party Monster
    As stagy and awkward as some of the Warhol/Morrissey films of the early '70s.
  59. The Way of the Gun
    Plays like an unusually ritzy festival circuit audition film, though McQuarrie, it must be said, aces the audition.
  60. The Blair Witch Project
    As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    True Crime
    Woefully misconceived reporter-saves-innocent-man-from-execution cheese grater.
  62. Unforgiven
    As enjoyable as most of Unforgiven is, Eastwood's shades-of-gray moralism feels like a whitewash.
  63. Blood Work
    Eastwood is now playing a man whose will is stronger than his body, and it's that tension -- between anger and frailty, steel and decay -- that powers the movie.
  64. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    The movie, quite simply, goes to sleep whenever Zatoichi isn't fighting. When he is, it's a pulp dazzler.
  65. Whale Rider
    An inviting international audience-pleaser.
  66. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.
  67. The Passion of the Christ
    Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.
  68. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    In its wildly overwrought, burrito-Western way, is about as close to a home movie as you're likely to see in a megaplex.
  69. The Others
    The gimmicks, in the end, are too arbitrary to tie together in a memorably haunting fashion, though they do culminate in a Big Twist, a nifty one that almost -- but not quite -- makes you want to see the movie again.
  70. Barton Fink
    Barton Fink has an atmosphere of languid comic anxiety (it's like a cross between "Eraserhead" and "Angel Heart"), and it's fun to watch, if only because you have no idea what's coming next.
  71. Big Fish
    The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.
  72. Jackie Brown
    Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don't arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.
  73. Flight of the Phoenix
    Refreshingly, it's actually about action, albeit arbitrary action, and how it defines us and keeps us alive.
  74. Hellboy
    Directed by Guillermo del Toro with a colorfully kinetic visual imagination that seldom lets up.
  75. Ladder 49
    Aside from the awesome flames and pyrotechnic scenes of crisis, danger, and part-of-the-job bravery, the movie is a quiet salute; it does its job.
  76. Mean Girls
    A vinegary fable with a Splenda aftertaste -- is a harbinger of hope not only for future feminist comedies of any grit but also for ''SNL''-staffed feature films that don't disproportionately suck.
  77. The Sea Inside
    The classy production, with its aesthetic graces, is especially convincing about the charisma of the man, a performance specialty of the great Bardem.
  78. Son frère
    Son Frère is hushed, clinical, grimly paced, and moving.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    Always entertains, just like ''Pearl Harbor'' and the rest of the best of Hollywood's dumb war movies.
  80. Team America: World Police
    I was amused more or less throughout by the ingeniously designed and executed stunt that is Team America.
  81. Garden State
    Certainly Garden State is a very American specimen of debut indie form, its loose, goof-about scenes of comic melancholy reinforced with the glue of quirkiness over cracks in the narrative development.
  82. Wimbledon
    Nothing more than amiable fluff, yet Bettany infuses it with a brazen dash of reality. You believe in him, even when you don't quite believe in the movie.
  83. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.
  84. Finding Neverland
    Depp portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.
  85. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.
  86. Love Actually
    It's a toasty, star-packed ensemble comedy in which a handful of lonelyhearts attempt, with some success, to come out of their shells, and it's going to make a lot of holiday romantics feel very, very good; watching it, I felt cozy and charmed myself.
  87. Peter Pan
    A bright, whirling pinwheel of a movie that tosses around special effects like confetti, but the techno magic is graced with a touch of sensuality.
  88. Spider-Man
    A canny franchise escapade; it gets the job done. But it also leaves you hungry for something more, and I don't necessarily mean the next episode.
  89. The Aviator
    Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.
  90. From Dusk Till Dawn
    Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.
  91. Mission: Impossible
    It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Patton
    George C. Scott's Oscar-winning portrait of the megalomaniacal warrior general is still the glue holding together this blunt study of war as the ultimate human (and dehumanizing) game.
  93. Bean
    In this slapdash production directed by Mel Smith ("The Tall Guy" but also, alas, "Radioland Murders"), written by Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings") and Robin Driscoll, there's just enough unrepentant self-centeredness missing to take the hilariously brutish edge off Bean's game for those who know him.
  94. Hoodlum
    The director, Bill Duke ("A Rage in Harlem"), stages all of this with proficient confidence, yet he never truly summons the operatic power of the genre -- the pulp tragedy of ambition built on (and drowned in) blood.
  95. The House of Yes
    The House of Yes is knowingly overripe, a kitsch melodrama that dares to make incest sexy.
  96. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    But the great revelation in this version is the terrific, beautifully controlled work of Alexander -- Seinfeld's most gifted actor, whose recent movie roles have not allowed him to show his range.
  97. Scent of a Woman
    In the end, Scent of a Woman offers little more than lumbering simulation of Rain Man's nimble magic. But Pacino's performance-scabrous, tender, ripely theatrical-is a master showman's trick.
  98. Eraser
    And the guy is really good at his job: He knows how to combine impossibly macho action plus attractive self-amusement into a reliable rhythm of ooof! and wink-wink.
  99. Stealing Beauty
    Can Tyler act? Impossible to say. Bertolucci's neatest trick is to have constructed the movie around Tyler's gawky unself-consciousness.
  100. Batman Forever
    Although the film's frenetic rhythm is reminiscent of an "Indiana Jones" picture, visually Schumacher directs it like a musical, turning each image into eye candy, weaving one lush set piece into the next, as if he were the Vincente Minnelli of blockbusters.
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