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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Abyss
    The Abyss ends with a whimper. But it starts out with a bang that lasts for an exciting hour and a half. And that's enough to make it worth taking the plunge.
  2. The Negotiator
    The Negotiator, once it gets going (there's a rather lengthy prosaic setup), is a satisfyingly tense and booby-trapped thriller about the meeting of two relentless minds.
  3. The Man Without a Face
    Gibson stages the movie episodically, as a series of quiet actors' moments; his direction is scrupulous, tasteful, and, I'm afraid, rather sodden. By the end, he wrings a tear or two, but more from the story's sentimental outline than from anything he does to fill it in.
  4. Contact
    If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.
  5. Lamb
    Based on a lauded 2011 novel of the same name, Lamb is about as strange as it sounds: a Lolita story almost more unsettling for the lines it doesn’t explicitly cross.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lucy
    By the time the film exhausts itself—in a brisk 89 minutes — it feels like there's literally nowhere that Lucy and Besson can't go, no boundaries, no laws, no logic. Just go with it.
  7. The Devil Wears Prada
    The story is glossy junk begat of just-plain junk anyway: Lauren Weisberger, who wrote the hiss-and-tell roman à clef best-seller on which the picture is based, was herself an assistant to Wintour.
  8. Hello I Must Be Going
    Working from a script by his wife, Sarah Koskoff, "High Fidelity" actor-turned-director Todd Louiso shapes the movie to Lynskey's rhythms.
  9. Apostle
    Netflix feels like a proper home for a film this idiosyncratic. After all, you’ll know within 30 minutes stumbling onto it whether you want to keep following its unsettling descent into blood-soaked madness or pick up your remote and head over to the relatively sunnier and safer comforts of "Broadchurch."
  10. Touched With Fire
    Touched With Fire has something to say about a thorny, serious subject, but the light it shines doesn’t really illuminate anything new.
  11. The American
    The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.
  12. African Cats
    Not coincidentally, African Cats opens on Earth Day. Meeting these magnificent fellow creatures might be a fine way to celebrate.
  13. Zoolander
    In theory, Zoolander is ''Pret-à-Porter'' on laughing gas. In practice, however, the movie is an ill-fitting suit of gags, too long in the crotch even at 90 minutes.
  14. 2 Days in New York
    It's a pleasure to meet up again with Marion, the distractible, acerbic, New York-based French photographer played once more by Julie Delpy in 2 Days in New York. This bouncy hand-knitted comedy of cross-cultural relationships, also directed and co-written by Delpy, makes a jaunty sequel to "2 Days in Paris."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Kline turns in a bravura performance -- he's one of the few in this star-packed cast who actually knows what to do with Shakespeare's poetry.
  16. Stop-Loss
    A painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.
  17. Trollhunter
    It was an effective choice to shoot these majestic creatures vérité-style, with a jittery camera, but Trollhunter, unfortunately, is such an under-imagined knockoff of The Blair Witch Project that whenever the trolls aren't on screen, it verges on tedium.
  18. How to Train Your Dragon
    There’s honestly no real reason for this iteration to exist. At least, though, it doesn’t cheapen its source material, trusting in the good (dragon) bones that have always been there.
  19. The Good Shepherd
    Here, he's (Damon) the ultimate enigma machine, a man willing to erase himself for his country. Does that make him a hero? The Good Shepherd is too closemouthed to let on.
  20. Crazy/Beautiful
    Dunst, in her finest performance yet, has now transcended her fellow teen stars. She is arguably the first actress of her generation poised to take on Gwyneth and Julia.
  21. Runaway Jury
    The already heavy-footed clomp of Grisham's declamatory storytelling style has been given an extra-thick-soled, wing-tipped, liberal-leaning, reality-tampering kick thanks to a screenplay credited to four writers.
  22. September 11
    In the most shocking contribution to this self-conscious but fascinating sampling of art challenged by life, Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu (''Amores Perros'') makes a horrifying suspense story.
  23. Valhalla Rising
    When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.
  24. Big Miracle
    Big Miracle is harmless enough, but what's annoying about it is its aura of fake activism. The movie doesn't seem to get that it's exactly when the news media began to devote more time to subjects like whales that it started to turn into news not for activists but for couch potatoes.
  25. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Gibran’s little life lessons have been turned into three-minute haiku by different animators and spread across the film. Each one soars (especially clay painter Joan Gratz’s color-bursting snippet, “On Work”), even if the plot holding them together is frustratingly Disneyish.
  26. The Year of Spectacular Men
    A dizzy, fizzy comedy with occasional flashes of real wit.
  27. Margaret
    Lonergan's dialogue can sweep you up in a whoosh of personality and ideas, but it's hard to see what, apart from ego, convinced him that this story was so epic.
  28. Kindergarten Cop
    The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.
  29. Ice Age
    Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.
  30. The Boxtrolls
    The script lacks the wit of "Wallace & Gromit."
  31. He Named Me Malala
    Davis Guggenheim’s latest documentary is a forceful and exquisitely made piece of advocacy journalism.
  32. Meet the Robinsons
    Who knows whether the project is meant to be earnest, ironic, post-ironic, made for adults, made for kids, made to teach lessons, or made to be watched in an altered state? All or none...jeez, this thing is one bumpy ride.
  33. Land
    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.
  34. Stuck
    Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of "Re-Animator," pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.
  35. Sunshine Cleaning
    This peachcolored comedy about a wacky family who shove their sadness into a bulging closet is being marketed as ''from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine'' All that's missing from the formula is a Volkswagen Microbus.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Wondrous Oblivion
    Wondrous Oblivion goes awry in its sloppy racial drama, and although the cricket-training montages are good, they're still training montages, and this is just that kind of overfamiliar movie.
  37. The Polar Express
    The screenplay, by Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr., plumps Van Allsburg's simple fable about the purity of childhood faith in what can't be seen with all sorts of wholly invented characters, complications, and declarations.
  38. La Cage aux Folles
    Like many of the best farces, from The Importance of Being Earnest to Cactus Flower, it draws its humor from characters pretending to be something they’re not.
  39. Edmond
    We're in David Mamet World. William H. Macy -- the quintessential player of Mamet men in all their impacted rage -- stars in this claustrophobic adaptation.
  40. The Wackness
    The best thing about it is Peck, who shows you the sweet, virginal kid hiding inside the outlaw poseur.
  41. Night and the City
    For all its promising elements, Night and the City confronts us, yet again, with one of the most dismaying paradoxes in contemporary movies: that the actor who once seemed the heir to Brando, Clift, and, yes, Widmark — the actor who once got so far inside his roles that he just about detonated the screen — now plays characters who don’t seem to have any inner life at all.
  42. Unpregnant
    Richardson and Ferreira have a sweet, sharp chemistry: one the type-A perfectionist trying desperately to keep it together, the other a hedonist in green fun fur whose outrageous exterior masks a deeper hurt.
  43. Conviction
    The ever-magnetic Sam Rockwell is Kenny, Minnie Driver is full of beans as Betty Anne's best friend, Melissa Leo is wicked good as an ornery cop, and, in her two chewy scenes, Juliette Lewis reminds fans why we want her to run free forever.
  44. Brick Lane
    One of those feminist cries in the dark in which the heroine, a saintly sufferer, is more admirable than interesting.
  45. 10 Years
    There's a relaxed, unforced, melancholy sweetness and swing to this modest iteration of the "Big Chill/Return of the Secaucus 7" formula, a pleasing directorial debut for screenwriter Jamie Linden (We Are Marshall).
  46. Mail Order Wife
    It took gifted hucksters to make this movie, a funny and spirited - what to call it?
  47. Willard
    The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.
  48. The Faculty
    In a strange way the Williamson of "Dawson's Creek" is now at odds with the sophisticated joker who wrote "Scream."
  49. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The best thing in The Count of Monte Cristo is Guy Pearce's snot-nosed hauteur. He gives this scoundrel some wounded edges, and frills as well.
  50. Broken Arrow
    With its lightweight hero and its random spray of ''high-powered'' action, Broken Arrow is like an underpopulated version of The A-Team. It's not just John Woo who gets swallowed up by the impersonal mechanics of big-budget mayhem. It's the audience, which pays for a sleek, dark thriller and gets recycled pulp instead.
  51. Reign Over Me
    A strange, black-and-blue therapeutic drama equally mottled with likable good intentions and agitating clumsiness.
  52. Triple Frontier
    There may be no honor among thieves, but Triple Frontier certainly makes watching them pretty entertaining.
  53. Somewhere in Queens
    It's quiet and charming and has some beautiful, if also familiar things to say about fathers and sons, and the question of legacy. But it's not breaking any new or revelatory ground.
  54. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Big Country
    William Wyler’s sprawling Western about iron-willed ranchers squabbling over desirable land, The Big Country, is one of the prime wide-screen epics of the late ’50s, but today it’s remembered mostly for composer Jerome Moross’ magnificent Big Sky score.
  56. The Secret Life of Pets
    Like a dog that endlessly chases its tail in circles, Pets is amusing for a while, then it just tires itself out.
  57. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    It's still plenty hilarious in a reheated sort of way.
  58. New Jack City
    It’s got some talented actors and a certain jagged inner-city atmosphere, yet this first feature directed by Mario Van Peebles (son of the veteran black director Melvin Van Peebles) is little more than a sketchy exploitation melodrama.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Jerk
    The Jerk‘s threadbare plot follows the brilliantly convoluted story.
  60. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    El Bulli becomes a haunting celebration of the human desire to turn food into art - even if the results are consciously insane.
  61. Babylon
    Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.
  62. Don't Bother to Knock
    Don't Bother to Knock was the first film to truly grant her a juicy dramatic leading role, one that allowed Monroe to tap into her own childhood traumas and abuse.
  63. Cool It
    The telegenic Lomborg is the on-camera "star" of the show, while his angry critics growl on cue.
  64. Rush Hour
    The two characters barely even have a relationship; they're a union of demographics--the "urban" market meets the slapstick-action market.
  65. Oculus
    Unless you’re Billy Bob Thornton, old furniture just isn’t all that scary.
  66. Broken English
    As charmingly verklemmt New York women with bad luck in men and good luck in apartments go, Nora Wilder in Broken English has all the breaks.
  67. Barrymore
    Among the drawbacks: Director Érik Canuel jumps through hoops in an effort to make the stage piece (by William Luce) move like the movie piece it isn't.
  68. Romper Stomper
    As an expose of the new wave of racist youth-gang violence, Romper Stomper lacks depth, psychology, a sense of social background. Yet Wright’s flagrant attempt to humanize his skinheads-to turn them into bona fide movie characters-is, in its way, dramatic and vaguely honorable.
  69. Get Bruce
    An affectionate puff profile.
  70. Matchstick Men
    Actually, there's one other way to approach Matchstick Men, and that's to forget all about neuroses and con artistry and admire the movie instead for the unsettlingly beautiful directorial study in geographical mood that it is.
  71. White Oleander
    Impressively unflappable and natural, 23-year-old Lohman -- whose best known credit is perhaps a role on Fox's short-lived ''Pasadena'' -- holds the whole plot together skillfully.
  72. I'll Sing for You
    One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.
  73. The To Do List
    A summer-adventure comedy, and its tone is fairly synthetic, yet it gets major props for giving us the first movie heroine who is clueless and easy in such a hardcore way.
  74. Dust to Glory
    It turns out that speeding along dirt roads isn't nearly as photogenic - or as varied - as surfing is.
  75. Trucker
    Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker
  76. The Big Chill
    And there's that perfect soundtrack, jammed with hit after timeless hit. So integral is the music to the heat of Chill that even a now-hackneyed scene like ensemble-dancing-while-cleaning-the-kitchen (to the Temptations' ''Ain't Too Proud to Beg'') takes on a glow far lovelier than the chore warrants -- as does this ingratiating, fake movie.
  77. Spoiler Alert
    Anchored by the ridiculously charming Aldridge's chemistry with Parsons (distant but effective in comparison), Spoiler Alert defies expectations throughout, refusing to adhere to one genre or storytelling convention.
  78. Star Maps
    An ambitious debut feature.
  79. Lucie Aubrac
    Manages to take great characters and a great plot and leach them of all blood, terror, and excitement.
  80. Stuart Little
    A Little goes a long way.
  81. Frida
    A revolutionary life has rarely felt less edgy, or the biography of an iconoclast more bourgeois.
  82. Taking Sides
    The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.
  83. Magic Mike XXL
    Director Gregory Jacobs worked under original Magic Mike helmer Steven Soderberg for years, but sadly he has almost none of his former boss’s ability to elevate material that is essentially one lamé thong away from a TLC reality series.
  84. Anastasia
    Anastasia has the Disney house style down cold, yet the magic is missing. Perhaps that's because the story's somber emotional hook--Anastasia's thwarted desire for home--is asserted rather than dramatized.
  85. In the Pit
    The soft-spoken, impressionistic documentary (with a hypnotic score built from the sounds of construction) climaxes with a six-minute helicopter-cam view of the colossal structure to which these somebodies have been dedicating their sweat, and sometimes their very lives.
  86. The Soloist
    It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy.
  87. Ladies in Lavender.
    His (Charles Dance) cinematic style mixes the scent of mothballs with that of the lavender in which these ladies are preserved.
  88. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    Escape 2 Africa is pretty tame, but it knows how to keep its own turf tidy.
  89. The White Crow
    There’s something about the movie that makes it all feel as though it’s being presented under glass. Nureyev is more of an idea than an actual flesh and blood character. The only time The White Crow truly shoots off sparks is during its dance sequences. For those brief, beautiful moments, you can almost feel what it must have been like to witness a one-of-a-kind artist at the spellbinding height of his powers taking flight. But then the spell is broken, and the crow falls back to earth.
  90. Vice
    The shrewd, relentless winkiness of McKay’s filmmaking style may have worked better, though, for breaking down subprime mortgages in The Big Short than it does chronicling a deadly misbegotten war. What remains then is the cipher at the center of Vice: the Man Who Wasn’t There, and probably never will be.
  91. Ocean's 8
    Ocean’s 8’s girls-just-wanna-have-grand-larceny conceit is the kind of starry, high-gloss goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero-gravity standards of the genre.
  92. The Weather Man
    The Weather Man is what indie misery looks like when re-created by one of Hollywood's big studios.
  93. Respect
    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.
  94. Hot Shots!
    Hot Shots! offers a satisfying kick in the pants to a movie (and an era) that has more than earned it.
  95. 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.
  96. Traitor
    A slippery entertainment that's all feints and few punches thrown at a fight card of indistinguishable terrorists, Muslim and otherwise.
  97. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.
  98. Laurel Canyon
    The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale. Everything good in this rock & roll fantasy belongs to the sexy, worldly-wise McDormand, who makes Jane ripe, real, and irresistible.
  99. Welcome to Collinwood
    Excitement trumps incompetence as one colorful loser recruits another. Pretty soon, the screen is filled with hip actors playing clueless lowlifes, pretending they're in a Bizarro World production of ''Ocean's Eleven.''
  100. Blue Crush
    The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.
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