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. Rio
    The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.
  2. The Great Buck Howard
    The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, the backwaters of showbiz, and true magic. It's a wee charmer that left me enchanted.
  3. Triangle of Sadness
    Triangle hits more marks than it misses, and in a somber, often underwhelming season of would-be arthouse hits, the movie is a bona-fide trip: not the funhouse mirror we need for these ridiculous times, maybe, but one we deserve.
  4. Let Him Go
    As an instrument of righteousness and retribution, Let Him Go can feel both familiar and at times shockingly brutal, especially in its final climactic moments. Still, there's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale.
  5. Eden
    Eden lacks the technique to give its stifled domestic-erotic feelings their full power.
  6. Things We Lost in the Fire
    No matter what panache Bier adds, Things We Lost is still a TV-scaled tear-duct drama about a beautiful woman who pushes past sadness in her House & Garden home.
  7. City of Men
    As heavy with message as any Hollywood delinquent drama of the late '50s.
  8. Cry-Baby
    There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.
  9. World War Z
    It's scary good fun.
  10. Maria
    This is a portrait of all that an artist must sacrifice for their work and the ways that is amplified further as a female artist. It's a fable of fame and control, but it's also an ode to a woman who could only find peace by singing her heart out.
  11. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    What defines the slacker-geek twentysomething men and women who wander through Joe Swanberg's too-hip-to-be-romantic comedy Hannah Takes the Stairsis that they treat their libidos as minor accessories -- only to stammer through every casual conversation as if they were on a first Internet date.
  12. The Foot Fist Way
    Not short on broad physical humor. But Simmons is a brilliantly detailed grotesque capable of withstanding comparison to his most obvious inspiration, Ricky Gervais' "Office" boss David Brent.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    Wenders’ weird and wired view of the near future tempts replay as often as the sensational soundtrack (U2, Talking Heads, Patti Smith).
  14. I Capture the Castle
    Smith's book is a charmer, but the keys to this ''Castle'' have been misplaced.
  15. Life
    Life desperately wants to let Murphy and Lawrence be actors, but it can't imagine them as anything more than rowdy showmen. That's a kind of prison as well.
  16. The Hole in the Ground
    The Hole in the Ground never seeks to differentiate itself from the established horror movie aesthetic: we get creepy jangling lullaby music, a decrepitly old hooded women mumbling to herself ominously, bare feet on creaking wooden floors, broken mirrors.
  17. The Upside of Anger
    The Upside of Anger is overly therapized, yet Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.
  18. The Dreamers
    In The Dreamers, Bertolucci wants to take us back to a more revolutionary time, but mostly he ends up recalling the faded revolution of his own glory days.
  19. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    A smart, playful, informative pleasure.
  20. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    Hamilton, in her movie debut, is a find: the kinkstress next door.
  21. This Christmas
    Everyone in this madly good-looking clan has got soapy problems as befits an aspirational, say-amen holiday movie.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    Robinson takes on a few too many satirical targets, but star Richard E. Grant gives a great over-the-top performance. It’s hard to dislike a film where a giant zit gets all the best lines.
  23. Laggies
    What saves Laggies is Knightley, who's all gangly limbs and pouty faces, schlepping around in pajamas, acting exactly like a teenager trapped in a grown-up world.
  24. True Lies
    True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.
  25. SubUrbia
    Driven by Bogosian's finger-snapping dialogue and theatrical structure, subUrbia doesn't allow for much pleasurably Linklaterish lounging; each character has got some serious orating to do before the night is over.
  26. Free Fire
    If you’ve always believed that the climactic Mexican standoff in "Reservoir Dogs" should have been the whole movie, then you’ll love Free Fire.
  27. Keanu
    Even if it can’t compete with the best highlights from their TV show, Keanu is a solid first step into movie stardom for both Key and Peele.
  28. A Haunting in Venice
    Amidst all this, Venice is also just a heck of a lot of fun, from its eerie Venetian mask costumes to the intriguing ways in which its central mysteries unfold. With heaps of atmosphere and a general spookiness, it's the perfect choice for a Halloween party.
  29. Megamind
    Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.
  30. The Signal
    Mostly comes down to rage fiends going at one another with baseball bats, knives, pesticide tanks, and power drills.
  31. Burn After Reading
    The movie is overplowed, even if Brad Pitt's debut as a Coen comedy player is eye-catching.
  32. Invincible
    Wahlberg, with shaggy hair and a pumped bod he wears more convincingly than any actor, plays Vince as a guy who truly doesn't expect to win. That makes his rib-bruising triumph all the more believable and touching.
  33. The Matrix Resurrections
    Resurrections does eclipse its predecessors for full-on, kick-you-in-the-heart romance: Reeves and Moss, comfortable with silences, lean into an adult intimacy, so rare in blockbusters, that's more thrilling than any roof jump (though those are pretty terrific too). Their motorbiking through an exploding city, one of them clutching the other, could be the most defiantly sexy scene of a young year.
  34. Shutter Island
    Shutter Island holds you, but it doesn't grip you. It's as if Scorsese had put his filmmaking fever on psychotropic drugs.
  35. Boiler Room
    Younger, in his debut feature, is as canny as he is derivative.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    A black comedy about a rural family that’s devolved into cannibalism, Spider Baby probably struck the few people who saw it as disturbing, but post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s more Gidget than gore, interesting mostly for its cast (Lon Chaney is surprisingly affecting) and black-and-white, early-’60s ambiance.
  37. Bubble
    Of the idiosyncratic ''little'' movies that Soderbergh has made to clear his head (Full Frontal, Schizopolis), this is the first that truly connects.
  38. ATL
    The more rink time, the better: As directed by hip-hop music-video king Chris Robinson from a story by "Antwone Fisher's" Antwone Fisher, the skate scenes are a blast.
  39. Youth in Revolt
    Timing is everything. And Youth in Revolt is late -- arriving not just at the tail end of the star's sell-by date for this particular kind of character, but more importantly at the tail end of the intended audience's attention span for an inconsequential Sundance-y tale of sexual coming-of-age.
  40. Art & Copy
    An entertaining but also oddly naive documentary about American advertising.
  41. Stander
    Riveting true-life drama.
  42. Julia
    This overlong, lurchy homage to John Cassavetes' 1980 film "Gloria" is a mess, but a fascinating one, given Swinton's desperately avid performance in the title role.
  43. Severance
    The chintzy characters, hair-raising deaths, and one spectacular rocket-launcher joke aren't enough to give "Hostel" a run for its blood.
  44. Sugar Town
    That durable, sexy powerhouse Beverly D'Angelo steals every scene she's in.
  45. Happy, Texas
    A comedy of '90s sexual inclusiveness as effervescent as a cold sody pop -- and about as intoxicating.
  46. V for Vendetta
    As a fix of pop iconography, V for Vendetta is eyeball grabbing, even if it lacks the relentless videogame bravura that sold the Matrix films. As a movie, however, it's merely okay, with a pivotal dramatic weakness: Evey, for all the attentions of her revolutionary Svengali, remains, in essence, a bystander, and Portman, her head shaved, plays her like Joan of Arc as a tremulous Girl Scout.
  47. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Spiderwick is set in the present, but goes for an overall design look of dainty, cozy, William Morris-y arts-andcraftiness.
  48. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    In total effect, Prince Caspian feels a lot more earthbound than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
  49. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Speaking of Glover, it’s no spoiler to say that the Atlanta star is easily the best thing in this good-not-great movie.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Mask of Zorro
    This pleasant movie anachronism, an assemblage of traditional Robin Hooded scenarios (and superior swordplay) that, in the right light, is a nostalgic treat, and in shadow evokes Monty Python.
  51. Iron Man 3
    Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.
  52. Alien: Resurrection
    By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  53. Hollywoodland
    The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable.
  54. Executive Decision
    Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.
  55. Dogma
    It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.
  56. Set It Off
    Enough does work, and well, to make Set It Off a valuable model for a new kind of girl-pack story: one that’s not just for girls.
  57. Skin
    A tragic, enraging, and uplifting tale.
  58. 42
    Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.
  59. Disturbia
    If it's possible to be a rip-off with wit, Disturbia qualifies.
  60. California Solo
    There's a lovely gravity and specificity to the story that transcends instances of bumpy filmmaking.
  61. 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.
  62. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    The film’s first half feels almost as directionless as its characters, but the detailed specificity of the milieu and story proves engrossing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Saving Shiloh
    Saving Shiloh is like one of those wholesome, old-fashioned films that you used to watch with your third-grade classmates during visits to the library.
  64. Piglet's Big Movie
    A collection of shorts, here presented as flashbacks. All three derive from A.A. Milne's original tales, but retain only a smidgen of his droll, easy-chair wit.
  65. Outside Providence
    This unexceptional 1970s coming-of-age story is neither outrageous, new, nor comedic.
  66. Godzilla
    He doesn't seem too interested in his actors — they're more plodding than their reptilian costars and you don't care about a single one of them — but Edwards does know how to fashion some serious monster mayhem.
  67. Jesus Camp
    As a documentary, Jesus Camp could lose its haunted-house score and contrapuntal Air America refrains and still deliver its message: that, here and elsewhere, fundamentalism is no longer content with a separate peace. It wants the meat.
  68. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    The whole film is cracked, but in a stylish, downtown way.
  69. Jacob's Ladder
    The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.
  70. Cherry Blossoms
    There's a grace to it all, and moments of oddball poetry.
  71. Killer Joe
    Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.
  72. Lord of War
    The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.
  73. Prelude to a Kiss
    Prelude to a Kiss is squishy yet blah. It teaches the characters a lesson they don’t need to learn.
  74. Dead Man
    The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.
  75. Bitter Moon
    Sadly, the movie indicates that Polanski’s erotic narcissism may have consumed not just his life but, by all appearances, his art as well.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The German Doctor
    The family he preys on is a tad too unsuspecting to be believable, but the film still hits notes of deep tension. And the cast is superb, especially Àlex Brendemühl as the “Angel of Death” himself.
  77. A Jazzman's Blues
    [Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.
  78. White Fang
    Despite some splendid snowcapped vistas and one rather frightening grizzly-bear attack, White Fang, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel is dramatically inert. Nothing in the picture really takes hold — certainly not the relationship between young Jack (Ethan Hawke) and White Fang, who seem like near-strangers even at the final clinch.
  79. Begin Again
    "Once" was a small and well-loved heirloom, its imperfections part of the charm. But Begin Again has been burnished to a shiny dullness.
  80. The Year of the Yao
    A skillful and winning piece of honest booster portraiture.
  81. The Dying Gaul
    Has too many contrivances, but as an act of sinister staging, it proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker.
  82. Shopgirl
    In their way, Mirabelle and Ray are the deracinated West Coast equivalents of a Woody Allen couple.
  83. Catch a Fire
    With the same affinity for stories of culture clash he showed in "The Quiet American" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence," director Phillip Noyce embraces the tale with gusto.
  84. Saving Grace
    Wrings laughs from the antics of affable, eccentric villagers who cheerily break the law.
  85. Ocean's Thirteen
    In a world ruled by process, is compassion still real? Or is it just another scam? In Ocean's Thirteen, it is deviously, and merrily, both.
  86. Made
    Little more than a rambling chain of combative buddy mishaps, but the interplay between Vaughn and Favreau, who does great double takes of thrusting chin frustration, spins you through the weak patches.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Human Factor
    The Human Factor, a spy saga and Preminger’s final film, is an overlooked gem.
  88. Amulet
    At times, Amulet can feel a little too in love with style over story; immoderately hung up on gooey close-ups of gutted fish or Magda engaged in a sort of jerky, mesmerizing dance whose offbeat rhythms rival Elaine on Seinfeld. But even as it builds toward a more conventional climax — only the first, it turns out, of several twist endings — the movie casts a grim sort of spell; a brooding, stifled dread that creeps in quietly from the margins, and lingers long after the last triumphant frame.
  89. The Duchess
    Fiennes speaks with his body what the script cannot formulate about what it's like to be a man apart. The actor creates particulars of time, space, class, and personality with one crook of a finger, one twist of a wrist. I call that nobility of craft; he's the actors' prince.
  90. Set It Up
    The true strength of the film lies in Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance. It’s impossible to watch this film and not come to the conclusion that the actress (Vampire Academy) is a soon-to-be major star, as soon as she hits on a major project that makes use of her effortless humor and charisma.
  91. Beautiful Boy
    Beautiful Boy keeps you strung on that line for nearly all of its run time, and sometimes it feels less like a movie than an endurance test — one that’s lovingly, meticulously made but almost too much like real life: an impressionistic series of highs and lows, relapses and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a cohesive arc.
  92. Torremolinos 73
    Has the dubious distinction of being just about the mildest porno comedy ever made. It's like something the teenage Pedro Almodóvar might have written to shock his 10th-grade creative writing teacher.
  93. Big Eyes
    Despite its sharp feminist sting, Big Eyes never loses its light touch. Maybe the lesson here is that Burton should venture out of his dark, creepy comfort zone more often.
  94. Air Force One
    Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  95. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.
  96. The Gift
    It's got the pleasing proportions of a stocking stuffed with agreeable little treats in the absence of an exciting big surprise.
  97. Curious George
    I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the new cartoon of Curious George, featuring the voice of Will Ferrell as the Man in the Yellow Hat, doesn't veer all that far from the soothing tone of the books.
  98. Klown
    Klown, a comedy from Denmark about two men on a canoe trip who descend into all sorts of desperate debauchery, demonstrates how the semi-improv, jitter-cam mode of filmmaking has gone from being a style to a tic - a way to disguise how unreal a movie can be.
  99. Henry & June
    In Henry & June, Kaufman, trying to deepen the erotic explorations of Unbearable Lightness, ends up with a triangle movie that’s watchable but also arty and rather stilted.
  100. The Children Act
    Even the cast’s uniform excellence can’t quite crack Children’s outer carapace, or bring full life to Fiona’s emotional struggle as she’s forced to confront her own failings. Instead the story drifts iceberg-like toward its carefully muted conclusion, only a small part of its true scope visible above a beautiful, chilly surface.
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