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 2.1 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. The Heartbreak Kid
    Grodin always seems like a real guy, whereas Stiller, even working it, is just the designated loser-clown of the megaplex era. He's too harmless to break any hearts.
  2. Gone Baby Gone
    Affleck the director shows excellent instincts, not least of which is letting his younger brother, Casey, hold the center as a young guy not as smaht as he thinks he is.
  3. Why Did I Get Married?
    Perry is of the spell-everything-in-capital-letters and act-it-out-loudly schools. Yet his sensitivity to women is a tonic.
  4. We Own the Night
    The story is too patterned and too contrived.
  5. Darfur Now
    The film gets a little ''We can fix this!'' inspirational for a chronicle of such staggering darkness.
  6. The Perfect Holiday
    Why throw in a bizarre device involving Queen Latifah as a narrating angel and a creepy, sallow Terrence Howard as her adversary? Their A-list names may be a draw, but it's too bad no one thought the endearing performances in this charming (if cliché) family romance would be enough.
  7. Southland Tales
    Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.
  8. Nanking
    Nanking, a carefully nonpunitive documentary of remembrance, is emotionally draining, as it should be, but it's also overstructured, as it needn't be; the actors are intrusive in a story that isn't theirs.
  9. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Director Jon Turteltaub has fun with Indian glyphs, giant stone pulleys, and an Indy Jones-worthy City of Gold located beneath the rocky shoals of Mount Rushmore.
  10. City of Men
    As heavy with message as any Hollywood delinquent drama of the late '50s.
  11. Mad Money
    Latifah coasts on grit and verve, and Holmes has a goggle-eyed sweetness, but it's Keaton who rules.
  12. Rambo
    Rambo teaches that fighting sucks, good intentions can be futile, and coalitions of the willing are a charade: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.
  13. Untraceable
    Lane skillfully sells the tech-heavy script. But after a much-too-early reveal of the murderer's identity, the ''low battery'' signal starts to flash on this film by thriller specialist Gregory Hoblit, director of last year's far superior "Fracture."
  14. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    Cyrus, an apple-cheeked dumpling, resembles Pia Zadora, but when she exhorts the crowd, it's with the martial efficiency of Hillary Clinton.
  15. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Has a loosey-goosey, what-the-hell spirit that's easy and fun to hook into.
  16. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    Mo'Nique is similarly given little opportunity to show off her indisputable comedic chops, though her freewheeling monologue during the closing credits hints at what might have been.
  17. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Spiderwick is set in the present, but goes for an overall design look of dainty, cozy, William Morris-y arts-andcraftiness.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Step Up 2: The Streets
    In a sequel that features the original's Channing Tatum only in cameo, a Baltimore teen (Briana Evigan, very winning) enrolls at an arts academy, leaving her street-dancing pals behind. So far, ho hum. But when she decides to form a new crew with her classmates, Step Up 2 the Streets improves considerably -- and it doesn't skimp on cool pretzel moves.
  19. Be Kind Rewind
    There's nothing not to like about the movie, a teensy, hand-crocheted trifle, fitted with embroidered pockets of guest stardom, including Mia Farrow as the nice local lady who wants to see what "Ghostbusters" is all about and "Ghostbusters'" own Sigourney Weaver as a movie-studio corporate meanie, ha-ha.
  20. Diary of the Dead
    Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.
  21. Chop Shop
    As he did in his striking 2005 first feature film, "Man Push Cart," about a Pakistani street vendor in New York, perceptive indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani looks at what others overlook and finds drama in everyday details.
  22. Meet the Browns
    The importance of faith, church, kin, staying off drugs, sharing food, repenting from sin, forgiving sinners, appreciating a good black man, rejecting a bad one, and honoring black matriarchy is enumerated with typical, reassuring Perry broadness.
  23. My Brother Is an Only Child
    The movie is a veritable scrapbook of tropes from the heyday of art film. Maybe that's why it feels gauzy and quaint. Yet time passes pleasantly.
  24. Stop-Loss
    A painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.
  25. My Blueberry Nights
    Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut as a wistful wanderer, is a beautiful blank, and the fragments barely add up to a movie.
  26. Bra Boys
    Partly a straightforward surf movie with impressive wave-catching footage. However, other sections track the legal troubles of Jai Abberton, a Bra Boy who was tried and acquitted of murder. This makes for an often fascinating but awkward mix.
  27. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.
  28. What Happens in Vegas
    Kutcher, who gives his most energized performance to date, and Diaz, darting between the caustic and shrill, look as if they're warming up to groovy hate sex, not love, which may be why the film goes flat the moment it turns friendly.
  29. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    In total effect, Prince Caspian feels a lot more earthbound than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
  30. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.
  31. Savage Grace
    The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.
  32. The Strangers
    Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.
  33. The Incredible Hulk
    The Incredible Hulk is just a luridly reductive and violent B movie -- one that clears a bar that hadn't been set very high.
  34. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    Journey is just the new version of a 1950s comin'-at-ya roller coaster, with a tape measure, trilobite antennae, and giant snapping piranha thrust at the audience.
  35. Mother of Tears
    As a lissome art restorer, Asia Argento (the director's daughter) comes off as the sanest human on screen, which is pretty scary.
  36. The Wackness
    The best thing about it is Peck, who shows you the sweet, virginal kid hiding inside the outlaw poseur.
  37. Berlin
    Berlin is far from the lost masterpiece the movie wants it to be.
  38. Transsiberian
    Who doesn't have a sweet tooth for intrigue on a train?
  39. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men.
  40. Death Race
    Soft sexual and racial jabs replace the more daring political commentary of the original, a crude classic from the Roger Corman factory.
  41. The House Bunny
    The movie flaunts its comedy roots like a messy bleach job.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Longshots
    Hopelessly clichéd.
  43. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    Brisk and sweet, even if the script veers toward fussy and lame.
  44. Towelhead
    As it becomes clear that Ball, in essence, has just restaged American Beauty with a socially conscious paint job, the sensationalism of Towelhead looks more and more like a dramatic tic.
  45. Appaloosa
    A throwback to the age when Westerns were quaint.
  46. Ghost Town
    Diverting enough, but it's also the kind of high-concept studio concoction Ricky Gervais might have ridiculed in his great backstage-showbiz sitcom "Extras."
  47. The Lucky Ones
    The Lucky Ones isn't dull, and the actors do quite nicely, especially McAdams, who's feisty, gorgeous, and as mercurial as a mood ring.
  48. Sex Drive
    Seth Green is uproarious as an Amish farmer who speaks in sentences so passive-aggressive, they're like tiny slaps.
  49. Flash of Genius
    The individual components of director Marc Abraham's David-and-Goliath drama are roundly unexceptional; the script, soft and teach-y; the performances, earnest.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    City of Ember
    The story, which follows two kids who try to save their burg from blackouts, isn't well-executed, losing itself to unclear mythology and sci-fi gibberish.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Express
    Has Dennis Quaid really never played a college football coach before? With his handsome, craggy face and likable intensity, he was born for the job, and he's the main attraction in The Express.
  52. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    The facts are so awful that Dear Zacharycan be forgiven much of its antsiness--as a memorial, as a condolence to Bagby’s parents (who became activists for judicial reform in their late son's honor), and as a howl of grief.
  53. Eden
    Eden lacks the technique to give its stifled domestic-erotic feelings their full power.
  54. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.
  55. Four Christmases
    Crassly enjoyable.
  56. Crossing Over
    Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.
  57. The Reader
    The film is notable for its nice performances, its handsome photography, and its very active music. If the preceding praise sounds generic, so is the movie.
  58. Yes Man
    This is basically a nerd-loosening-his-tie romantic comedy done in the manic-compulsive mode of "Liar Liar."
  59. Last Chance Harvey
    Hoffman and Thompson are each good enough to bring out a glow in the other.
  60. Defiance
    Zwick offers excitingly staged moments, but once you get past the novelty of WWII Jews acting this heroically macho, Defiance bogs down in a not very well-developed script.
  61. The Unborn
    Indeed, Goyer has penned many scripts superior to this one (he co-wrote cult gem Dark City), but he does make sure you're never far away from a big "Boo!"
  62. The Pink Panther 2
    Provides genial chuckles, but it's never excitingly rude.
  63. The International
    There's something almost endearingly out of sync about the sleek but now dated Euro-thriller The International.
  64. Angels & Demons
    The new movie is an opulent-bordering-on-hysterical mass of chitchat and chase scenes.
  65. Fired Up!
    The teensploitation premise is like something a porn filmmaker from the '70s might have come up with. But Fired Up! has one added quirk: The script, credited to Freedom Jones, is a riot of tongue-twisting ironic sleaze -- it sounds like the first (and last) collaboration between Diablo Cody and Artie Lange.
  66. Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
    To fully savor Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, it's best to watch with an audience overwhelmingly populated by girls and young women.
  67. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Ritter, who's like the young Ethan Hawke on a bender of violence, is an actor to watch.
  68. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    Cyrus, as always, is a professional charmer (it's hard to resist when she leads a hip-hop hoedown), and the crusty folkiness of Billy Ray Cyrus as her real-life dad is as welcome as ever.
  69. Tyson
    The result is flashy, but the meaning is a bit of a bob and weave.
  70. Battle for Terra
    Tentle, dreamy animated sci-fi tale.
  71. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    The movie is cheesy, tacky, and gimmicky. But as directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), it's also prankish and inventive enough to be kind of fun.
  72. 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.
  73. Year One
    This is just silliness run mildly wild.
  74. Easy Virtue
    The picture itself is only mechanically breezy.
  75. Tennessee
    Mariah Carey is perfectly fine playing a waitress who dreams of becoming, yes, a singer -- even if the superstar's presence in such a small venture seems jarring.
  76. Tetro
    Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter.
  77. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    The movie settles into a mode of nice, sweet, safe, and -- sorry, I have to say it -- slightly dull family fun.
  78. Aliens in the Attic
    A pointless but ultimately harmless family adventure that doesn't mentally assault the 12-and-over set. (Extra points for being 100 percent fart-joke-free).
  79. Adam
    It's hard to buy this relationship even for a moment. Adam is sweet, meticulous, and, at times, sort of clever, but it's also a not-quite-surprising-enough heartwarming trifle.
  80. Beeswax
    There are fine, fresh observational moments, but the film is much ado about not so much.
  81. Five Minutes of Heaven
    A forceful Neeson and an even more intense Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) both show their stuff and obscure the unrelieved pain endured by the men they portray.
  82. Taking Woodstock
    Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.
  83. Paris
    There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.
  84. Motherhood
    Parenthood seems only half aware of Eliza's REAL problem: that she thinks she's superior to the choices she's made.
  85. The Yellow Handkerchief
    Here the fascination is Hurt, so deft at steering his character away from booby-trap clichés that he guides his young costars safely out of sap's way and brightens an otherwise very yellowed tale.
  86. The Runaways
    The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.
  87. Clash of the Titans
    As Zeus, Liam Neeson twinkles where Laurence Olivier kvetched, and Ralph Fiennes, as Zeus' dark brother Hades (who has egged on the revolt to challenge Zeus), has a slinky nastiness.
  88. Invincible
    Half-baked Herzog, though it has twinkles of theatrical purity that remind you of when his vision was grand.
  89. Cradle 2 the Grave
    By the time Li enters the obligatory ''ring of fire'' to face his final opponent, you realize just how forthrightly rote and businesslike ''Cradle'' is. And you don't mind. Because business, it turns out, is good.
  90. The Weight of Water
    In the heaving cross-century swirl of the climax, ''Weight'' makes its point: Jealousy is timeless; Hurley is not.
  91. Divine Intervention
    Too fragmented to be much more than a flip of the finger to history; the movie, with its mostly mute characters, is too content to plod.
  92. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    Bouncy animation and catchy songs keep the film from tasting too much like spinach.
  93. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    An average kid-empowerment fantasy with slightly above-average brains.
  94. DysFunktional Family
    That Griffin tells some of the most intolerant jokes since Andrew Dice Clay should hardly obscure his talent, even if it does tarnish it.
  95. The Guys
    A small, heartfelt film.
  96. Where the Money Is
    I don't know that Where the Money Is would work at all were it not for what we, the audience, bring into the theater.
  97. Splendor
    It gradually loses wattage. Robertson, however, is a real sparkler.
  98. 42: Forty Two Up
    It would be tempting to describe the Up movies as a miracle in the history of nonfiction filmmaking, if they didn't also represent one of the cinema's most singularly squandered opportunities.
  99. Evelyn
    Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, and Alan Bates play Desmond's legal eagles, and when joined by Brosnan, the sight of this grandiloquent quartet lolling in pretty Irish settings is a pleasant enough thing, 'tis.
  100. The Brothers McMullen
    The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
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