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. It Comes at Night
    With his follow-up, It Comes at Night, Shults has conjured another master class in anxiety, claustrophobia, and dread. He’s a natural-born filmmaker.
  2. Okja
    Okja in it. It’s the antithesis of cookie-cutter, made-by-committee filmmaking. Prepare to be amazed, grossed out, provoked, punchdrunk, and tickled.
  3. The Land of Steady Habits
    As the tone wobbles between absurdity and tragedy, it also starts to shift toward something deeper and more bittersweet than mere midlife ennui. A lot of that is down to Mendelsohn, an actor who seems born to embody Holofocener’s kind of hero: weary and wounded but still putting it out there, a beautiful mess in progress.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Current War: Director's Cut
    Cumberbatch’s talent for giving the impression that his brain’s moving a little faster than everyone else’s suits his new subject perfectly — if only the movie moved with the same thrilling momentum.
  5. The Nightingale
    At nearly 140 minutes, the narrative takes its time wending toward a final, inevitable confrontation, and the incidents that punctuate it can sometimes feel like singularly ugly stations of the cross to be marked off; a series of random man- and nature-made cruelties meted out without pity.
  6. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    A tar-black comedy so caustic it nearly burns a hole in the screen, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri banks a lot on the gale force of Frances McDormand, and nearly pulls it off.
  7. Home Again
    Witherspoon can easily carry an entire movie in her dimples, but it’s hard not to measure Alice against a role as richly written as her recent turn on "Big Little Lies." Here, she’s mostly just a winsome proxy for midlife wish fulfillment — a bubbly brunch mimosa you drink up before the fizz is gone.
  8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    It’s smart, relatable, laughter-through-psychic pain entertainment that happens to be elevated by a handful of wonderful performances even if it, at times, feels like a lesser version of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
  9. Alex Strangelove
    Subtle it is not; Strangelove can feel aggressively self-aware, nouveau John Hughes with a pocket full of f-bombs and carefully worked one-liners.
  10. Lucky
    Directed by another great character actor, John Carroll Lynch (Zodiac, American Horror Story), Lucky is an elegiac and ultimately affirming meditation on mortality, regret, and smiling through hardship. You couldn’t ask for a more poignant swan song from a more singular artist.
  11. 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.
  12. Dark Phoenix
    For what is being called a final installment, it all tends to feel both anticlimactic and a little grim in the end.
  13. Frozen II
    Frozen 2 makes a valiant effort to live up to its predecessor, but can’t escape its shadow.
  14. In the Fade
    In the Fade is a flawed filmgoing experience, but still a viscerally affecting one.
  15. Support the Girls
    To see a black female over 40 holding the center of a story about ordinary, unsung lives makes Support a low-key pleasure; one that transcends its own shaggy narrative.
  16. The Florida Project
    The story begins to feel more like a series of strung-together anecdotes: an intriguing project, incomplete.
  17. Wonderstruck
    Even a ravishingly shot finale — Queens has never looked so enchanting — can’t quite paper over the weak resolution of the plot’s central mystery.
  18. The Villainess
    The characters come to life when they fight, and seem half-dead when they talk.
  19. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    A shiny-bright jukebox musical with a heart of gold and a plot of pure polyester, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again works hard to be the feel-giddy movie experience of the summer. And it mostly succeeds in its own glittery, aggressively winsome way.
  20. Top Gun
    Top Gun has always been more than just an action flick about a cocky young fighter pilot who feels the need for speed.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
    This latest installment — the best of the Stephen King-derived series — offers some unexpected plot developments and surprisingly chilling gore. But fear not, it’s unlikely Urban Harvest will cause nightmares, due to its hilariously inept climax.
  22. White Boy Rick
    What sets it a notch or two above rote familiarity is its cast, featuring a charismatic, white trash-with-a-heart-of-gold turn from a mulletted Matthew McConaughey and a naturalistically low-key performance from newcomer Richie Merritt.
  23. Addams Family Values
    Wittier and more consistent than the first Addams Family movie. Paul Rudnick’s script offers sharp-edged variations on the topsy-turvy Addams worldview, and it’s much better at getting the Addamses out into the straight world, where they can really do some damage.
  24. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t quite have the same frayed-wire electricity as "Nightcrawler," but what it does have on its side is Denzel Washington.
  25. Eddie Murphy: Raw
    Watching his deft, effortless character work chafe against the outermost boundaries of the stand-up format, you sense the transgressive energy of Richard Pryor filtered through leading-man charisma — albeit tinged with hostile paranoia.
  26. Benny & Joon
    Benny & Joon turns out to be a whimsical (and not very well paced) heart tugger in which two nice couples spend 98 ever-so-slightly flaky minutes figuring out that they’re perfect for each other.
  27. Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    A tasteful, surprisingly sedate biopic slathered in the traditional signposts of heavy exposition, gold-toned cinematography, and note-perfect period detail.
  28. Wonder Woman 1984
    It takes some time to get to the major action set pieces (other than the prologue, which is gorgeous), but it’s too much of a pleasure to live in this well-realized place, populated by a quartet of capable and charismatic stars, to really care.
  29. 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.
  30. Brad's Status
    Some of Status’s cringe comedy feels forced or simply wasted on soft targets.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    School Ties
    In illuminating how upper-class bigotry can encompass both the actively fascist and the politely passive, School Ties is actually one of the more realistic — and least insufferable — entries in the recent prep-school genre.
  32. Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult
    Naked Gun 33 1/3 has a sluggish, one-gag-at-a- time rhythm, and it aims at too many soft targets. Aside from the Oscar sequence, the movie’s big satirical coup is a send-up of prison-escape pictures (yawn).
  33. The Death of Stalin
    Despite the rich settings and crowded cast, the film can’t help feeling a little airless too: These players aren’t history’s masterminds, they’re wasps trapped in a jar, bumbling against the glass in sting-or-be-stung chaos.
  34. Our Souls at Night
    The real draw is seeing these two legends together again.
  35. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Day of the Soldado is our generation’s Rambo: First Blood, Part 2, a half-mad sequel transforming a traumatized political parable into a fantasy of all-American murder gods.
  36. The Object of Beauty
    A mild but charmingly off-kilter romantic comedy that gently satirizes love in an era of buy-now-pay-later brinkmanship.
  37. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two is a strange work, slippery, out of focus.
  38. First Reformed
    First Reformed is a bleak, punishing movie and the furthest thing imaginable from an easy crowdpleaser. But Hawke juices it with an austere sense of grace.
  39. 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.
  40. On Chesil Beach
    Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.
  41. Zama
    The film makes a compelling portrait of how job assignments can eventually become jail sentences, and how years can drift into each other with little care for unfulfilled dreams. As it goes, Zama ponders the unanswerable question of what kind of life, exactly, is worth living.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    References to vibrators and cattle prods mark the emergence of a hipper style of comedy, and, for the kids, there are gratuitous numbers by the Lovin’ Spoonful.
  43. Boy Erased
    Boy Erased is the kind of topical, well-intentioned movie that makes you wish it was slightly better than it is.
  44. Long Shot
    Not that there’s a ton of competition, but Long Shot may be the most deliriously raunchy comedy with a pivotal semen gag since "There’s Something About Mary."
  45. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    Jim & Andy is fascinating, but it lands on a weird message: Thank goodness Andy Kaufman existed so Jim Carrey could play him in a movie.
  46. 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.
  47. Smallfoot
    Smallfoot has its own silly, beastie charm.
  48. Light Sleeper
    Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.
  49. Life of the Party
    A charming and generally painless way to spend two hours. It’s not nearly as sharp as some of the best stuff she’s done, but it’s pointedly kinder too, wrapping even its nastiest characters.
  50. Humor Me
    Clement channels his wry hangdog humor into a slightly more grounded performance than he often gives. His charm and absurdist tendencies help elevate Nate from a potentially self-centered man-child to a lost soul who is genuinely compelling.
  51. Alice
    Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin.
  52. Come Sunday
    Ejiofor’s performance make the movie; the rest, you may just have to take on faith.
  53. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Hale and Posey are likable leads and director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2) injects proceedings with a propulsiveness which allows you to mostly ignore the odd plot strand which doesn’t really pay off or the general air of preposterousness.
  54. Blindspotting
    Over 95 minutes, Blindspotting builds tension like a simmering cauldron on the verge of boiling over. Its themes of racial prejudice, class conflict, friendship and loyalty find a voice that’s both disarmingly funny and heartbreakingly tragic.
  55. Crazy Rich Asians
    If the storyline is strictly something old and borrowed, though, a peek at the crazy-rich rainbow of Asian experience — even one as razzle-dazzlingly too-much as this one — feels not just new, but way overdue.
  56. Under the Silver Lake
    No matter how shaggy and self-indulgent it is, or how anticlimactic its big so-what of an ending ends up being, I was never bored. More than that, I kind of dug its sheer swing-for-the-fences insanity.
  57. Unicorn Store
    The result is a candy-coated, willfully quirky wisp of a film; like a Michel Gondry fantasy dipped in glitter and rainbow sprinkles.
  58. Fresh
    After a rich, anecdotal first half, Fresh, inspired by the lessons of his derelict-chess-whiz father (Samuel L. Jackson), ends up setting his own human chess game in motion. You may not believe a minute of it, though you won’t forget Nelson’s face.
  59. Skate Kitchen
    Shot by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner in hazy, endless-summer half-light, Kitchen finds a kind of urban poetry in the swooping parabolas of the skate park and the rumbling scrape of wheels on pavement.
  60. The Happy Prince
    Everett’s utterly fantastic performance as Wilde slightly exceeds his grasp as a first-time filmmaker.
  61. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Gyllenhaal, bright-eyed and brittle, brings her signature intensity to the role, though Lisa’s true inner world remains murky; it’s never quite clear if she’s just deeply unhappy or certifiably ill. Instead, the movie remains an intriguing but ambiguous portrait of a flawed, fascinating woman who knows herself either too well or not at all
  62. 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.
  63. Adrift
    It’s all done expertly and with an unexpectedly deft sleight-of-hand twist in the homestretch that proves once again that Kormakur is the kind of overachieving director that one pigeonholes at their own risk. He has a knack for making the familiar feel more surprising than it is.
  64. Bugsy
    What’s finally missing from Bugsy is the dirty, low-down kick of the crime genre — the quality that marked last year’s The Grifters, and that was there in The Godfather, too. Levinson would like to be bad, but his approach is reverent, ironic, tasteful. He’s made a gangster movie that, for all its lithe pleasures, enunciates too well.
  65. Pass Over
    The dialogue mixes Sunday school and the streets, and it’s funny, profane, and occasionally poignant when it’s not a bit too on the nose.
  66. The Nun
    When it leans into its camp, (I.e. when the French-Canadian “Frenchie” is on screen), The Nun comes closest to its ideal form of go-to midnight-movie, the fun younger cousin of the Conjuring movies with less build-up but more of the money shots you’ll come to a theater to see.
  67. The Endless
    Benson and Moorhead masterfully ratchet up the sense of unease, before the third act takes a turn for the truly terrifying.
  68. Book Club
    In an industry that defines “mature audiences” as anyone old enough to vote, a movie centered entirely on women over 65 — a sex comedy, no less — feels like some kind of small Hollywood miracle.
  69. Down in the Delta
    Roots matter, is Angelou’s Hallmark-style lesson. So for good measure, novice screenwriter Myron Goble also includes an unsubtle subplot about a candelabra that has been in the family since slaves were freed, thereby throwing one more ingredient into this thick dramatic gumbo.
  70. Fast Color
    Mbatha-Raw brings a fierce, quiet containment to the lead role, and Hart builds so much mood through her atmospheric cinematography and deliberately slow pacing that it nearly papers over the sketched-in quality of the script. Eventually, though, you start to wish her characters would speak in more than just vague koans and disaster-movie platitudes.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Meatballs
    More Murray-centric scenes were shot after a test screening showed that little without him worked.
  72. Fighting with My Family
    Most of Fighting’s narrative moves are as choreographed as any undercard match — and the outcome as clearly forecast — but the tears brought on by the movie’s last ten minutes of rhinestoned Rocky triumph taste salty, and real.
  73. Bad Times at the El Royale
    It’s British stage actress Erivo who feels like the real star. Her steely charisma and gorgeous powerhouse of a voice (Goddard takes every plausible opportunity to let her loose on a classic 1960s songbook; can you blame him?) is what gives the movie not just a different kind of heroine, but a heart.
  74. 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.
  75. Second Act
    What’s fun is just watching Lopez and her supporting cast — including her real-life best friend Remini, Tony winner Annaleigh Ashford as her tightly wound coworker, and a loopy Charlyne Yi as her phobic new assistant — move through the scenes so easily.
  76. Single White Female
    A clever, by-the-numbers gothic thriller. Single White Female is entertaining claptrap.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Matilda
    Clearly, a lot of grown-up types are going to despise Matilda: gym teachers, school psychologists, used-car salesmen, critics who like their family fare immobilized by homiletic virtue. But kids will understand.
  78. Cargo
    The Australian setting brings a fresh, and epic, quality to this now done-to-death genre, and the directors introduce a few nice new kinks to the zombie mythology, notably a desire on the part of the undead to literally — and hauntingly — bury their heads in the sand. But the real treat is Freeman.
  79. Hotel Artemis
    Writer-director Drew Pearce must have done something right to get a cast like this to sign on for what is essentially a loving, highly stylized homage to the kind of camp apocalyptia John Carpenter used to make; the only thing missing here is an Ernest Borgnine cameo and Kurt Russell scowling in an eye patch.
  80. The Escape
    Its title sounds like the premise for some kind of high-adrenaline adventure about maze-running or outgunning a nuclear apocalypse. But The Escape is both less thrilling and much scarier, in its own way — a quiet domestic-drama chamber piece with a vein of pure desperation thrumming beneath it.
  81. Woman Walks Ahead
    Woman could use some of the quieter character nuance of a movie like last year’s "Wind River," another fact-based drama that reflected the struggle of indigenous people with a sensitive, unvarnished kind of naturalism; White’s well-meant version is undoubtedly incomplete, and gilded with a certain amount of Hollywood silliness.
  82. Under the Tree
    By trading in all its intrigue and emotional subtleties for the gotcha moment it’s clearly been waiting for, Tree wins the battle but loses the war.
  83. All About Nina
    All About Nina works best as a showcase for Winstead, even if she’s performing material we’ve already heard before.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Yellow Submarine
    Sure, some of the puns and in-jokes sound a little dated, but any movie that strings together lines from Shakespeare merely as a throwaway comic riff is, in my book, a film for the ages.
  85. 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.
  86. The Year of Spectacular Men
    A dizzy, fizzy comedy with occasional flashes of real wit.
  87. 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.
  88. The Sisters Brothers
    Sisters gets sadder and more eccentric as it goes along, and the ending actually tugs sweetly on a few heart strings, though it’s also hard not to wonder why exactly, with all the Westerns already in the cannon, this movie got made — other than to give its crew of excellent actors a chance to put on their boots and ride off, cock-eyed and whimsical, into some kind of sunset.
  89. 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.
  90. The New Age
    A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.
  91. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    A lightweight teen rom-com that isn’t likely to clear up anyone’s grasp of what the studio stands for, but it is breezy and charming enough to merit a watch contingent on reasonable expectations.
  92. Like Father
    The movie’s arc is too conventional by half, but the appeal of the two main actors keeps it (sorry) afloat, maybe more than it should.
  93. Restoration
    Blinking his puppy-moist eyes and grappling with an English accent, Downey struggles so manfully in the role that one cuts him a lot of slack; working earnestly on her Irish brogue and mussing up her cupcake demeanor in the service of verisimilitude as a wise madwoman, Meg Ryan’s performance is, refreshingly, less precious than she’s been in a long while.
  94. Bisbee '17
    There’s no denying that Bisbee ’17 has some moments of deep elegiac power or, for that matter, that Greene’s ambition is boundless. But by the end, I often felt like his blurring of the past and the present was an experiment that was easier to admire than be swept up by.
  95. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    Even if you’ve seen it all before, Sierra Burgess will still satisfy your end-of-summer sweet tooth.
  96. On the Basis of Sex
    A suitably inspiring biopic despite its narrative unevenness and occasional reliance on schmaltz, seeks to show audiences the origin story of a cultural icon.
  97. State of Grace
    The movie has been shot with a pleasingly overripe visual flair, and on its own terms it’s fairly entertaining. Yet it isn’t about anything so much as its own explosiveness.
  98. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    A far funnier movie than its predecessor.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wayne's World 2
    It also made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen at the movies this year.
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