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 2.2 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. Into Great Silence
    The movie has a hushed sensual resonance, but it turns faith into an endurance test.
  2. Wild Tigers I Have Known
    Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.
  3. The Astronaut Farmer
    After teeny indies, this studio release retains the trademark love of warped American gothic that the Polishes share with David Lynch and the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. But the unexpected streak of yearning sunniness -- the Spielbergian touch of boyhood dreams propelling a grown man -- gives The Astronaut Farmer a warmth that's new for them.
  4. Reno 911!: Miami
    The characters are perfectly evolved screwups and the premise has potential. It lacks only the discipline of a 30-minute episode -- or a YouTube video.
  5. The Abandoned
    The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Amazing Grace
    It's earnest, solemn stuff. The movie sings an old tune -- Albert Finney is the blind minister who wrote the title ditty -- and it leaves the blood unstirred.
  7. Gray Matters
    Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance.
  8. Starter for 10
    There's a tidiness and affection to this British homage to John Hughes movies.
  9. Breach
    Now Ray has directed his second film, the abysmally titled Breach, and it's a bona fide companion piece, another true-life tale of duplicity gone secretly insane.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bridge to Terabithia
    The movie -- which never decides if it's a fantasy or coming-of-age story -- spends a lot of time away from Terabithia; that also leaches out the wonder. The boy seems more excited that Zooey Deschanel is his hottie music teacher than he is to see tree men in the forest.
  11. Ghost Rider
    So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.
  12. Avenue Montaigne
    For Yank color in her soap-bubbly movie, director Daniele Thompson has her pal Sydney Pollack appear as...a famous director.
  13. Close to Home
    One of the rare movies from Israel that refuses to spell out its politics, and you may wind up grateful for the ambiguity.
  14. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    The dramatic conflicts are soapy and unsubtle, but Karanovic pours intense authority into Esma's scarred psyche.
  15. Daddy's Little Girls
    This latest market-savvy bit of circuit preaching is less cartoonish than Perry's previous big-tent revival meetings.
  16. Music and Lyrics
    Grant is game for a new level of meta-ha-ha, joke's-on-me in Music and Lyrics. But with Drew Barrymore as his costar, this bland, light romantic comedy insists on keeping the commentary as disposable as one of the '80s gumball tunes Grant used to swivel to as Alex Fletcher, a washed-up '80s pop star.
  17. Bamako
    The serious accusations are leavened by the moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits.
  18. Hannibal Rising
    Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.
  19. Norbit
    Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.
  20. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.
  21. Because I Said So
    This slapdash, charmless, baldly boomer-chasing romantic comedy, directed by Michael Lehmann (Heathers) from a clunky, orgasm-obsessed script by Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson, is the lazy studio's answer to a call for more age-appropriate entertainment for "More" magazine readers.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Messengers
    There are a few decent jolts in The Messengers, but every one of them is accompanied by a cheap freak-out on the soundtrack so you know to be decently jolted.
  23. The Situation
    An overstuffed, unengaging drama that makes time for a love triangle.
  24. Puccini for Beginners
    The plot, which spins around Allegra's lovers having just been an item, is awkward bedroom farce, but the tone is Woody Allen-meets-"The L Word," with a patina of literary cuteness that now seems like the sound of a vanished Manhattan.
  25. Constellation
    Deeply odd films are often deeply personal ones, and Constellation, a dazed, inchoate drama about a mixed-race Alabama family, tells a story that's clearly close to the heart of writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman.
  26. East of Havana
    East of Havana picks at these politico-philosophical threads rather than pulling them, and the sense of a larger movement is fleeting. There's a beat, but we never quite see who's dancing to it.
  27. 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.
  28. An Unreasonable Man
    Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.
  29. Blood and Chocolate
    Werewolves are tame with overuse, and movies like Blood and Chocolate -- where moments of inspiration vie in vain with Goth cliché -- play like underlit "Charmed" reruns.
  30. Catch and Release
    I just don't know any chick who will make sense of this flick -- it's that blitheringly out of touch with present psychosexual (never mind feminist) time and space.
  31. Epic Movie
    Epic Movie is just timely enough to conclude with a wink and a nod to Borat. I only wish that it had been bold enough to go Borat on HIM.
  32. Smokin' Aces
    A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.
  33. Seraphim Falls
    Neeson and Brosnan are supremely well-matched foils, though I do wish that the filmmaker, David Von Ancken, had lent his sparsely mythic tale just a twinge of something...new.
  34. The Hitcher
    A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.
  35. The Italian
    The result is a picture half sweet, half bitter. Charles Dickens would approve.
  36. Mafioso [re-release]
    Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.
  37. Alone with Her
    Intriguing creepout.
  38. Alpha Dog
    Cassavetes throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Primeval
    Pit a reptile the size of a school bus against an American TV-news crew in war-scarred Burundi, and you get "Hotel Rwanaconda," a horror movie interested in cheesy scares and drawing attention to the plight of poor Africans. (So no, Primeval is not the '"serial killer'" film promised by the ads.)
  40. Stomp the Yard
    The shallow frat-on-frat rivalry and the poor-boy-loves-rich-girl subplot don't mean a thing. But the stepping does got that swing.
  41. God Grew Tired of Us
    God Grew Tired of Us never brings us half as close to its subjects as the far more penetrating "Lost Boys of Sudan" did in 2004.
  42. Tears of the Black Tiger
    A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.
  43. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    For 20 years, Megumi's family doesn't know where she is; when they find out, the frustrations and uncertainties only mount. But as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.
  44. Comedy of Power
    Chabrol has fashioned a mystery that caves in on itself, but unfortunately, it caves in on the audience, too.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Happily N'Ever After
    Stuffed with stock characters -- the vain prince, the critter sidekicks -- who adamantly stay stock.
  46. Freedom Writers
    Square, sincere, and proud of it.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Code Name: The Cleaner
    Get Lucy Liu better roles!
  48. Pan's Labyrinth
    Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss.
  49. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.
  50. Miss Potter
    Miss Potter, right to the end, is the definition of a "nice" movie, and that makes it a genuine oddball in a universe of increasingly distressed and uncivilized pop culture.
  51. The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.
  52. Factory Girl
    As Factory Girl more than acknowledges, Edie Sedgwick's downward spiral was ultimately her own doing. Yet even as the film captures the silk-screen outline of her rise and fall, it never quite colors in who she was.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Arthur and the Invisibles
    "The Professional's" Luc Besson has made a fair share of artfully bad movies. Arthur and the Invisibles -- half-live-action, half-CG kid's adventure -- is (by a hair) more bad-bad, like "The Fifth Element," than good-bad, like "The Big Blue."
  54. Notes on a Scandal
    It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there.
  55. Children of Men
    It's a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Twice as many accidental laughs as scares.
  57. 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.
  58. Night at the Museum
    What a dull, nice movie, wrenched from a wild premise and battered into docility.
  59. We Are Marshall
    We Are Marshall has little of the bone-crunchingsincerity of the recent pigskin rouser "Invincible." This one is more like Unconvincing.
  60. Venus
    Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.
  61. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's "Hero."
  62. Letters from Iwo Jima
    Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, "Flags of Our Fathers."
  63. The Painted Veil
    The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.
  64. Rocky Balboa
    There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.
  65. Dreamgirls
    Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.
  66. The Good German
    The leisure-time viewer will say, ''Hey, this is sort of like "Casablanca," so why play it again?''
  67. Breaking and Entering
    However admirably Minghella urges a break from complacency and an entry into a state of local/global compassion, his characters are position holders rather than people.
  68. Charlotte's Web
    What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Eragon
    Though the movie, which was adapted from a book written by Christopher Paolini when he was a teenager, aims high by ripping off the classics (even down to Eragon’s murdered uncle), what it most recalls are the cheesy lost sword-and-sorcery epics from the '80s, awful movies in the vein of "Yor: The Hunter From the Future" and "The Blade Master."
  70. The Pursuit of Happyness
    It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.
  71. Home of the Brave
    Evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Secret Life of Words
    Can a single scene save a movie? An hour and 20 minutes into The Secret Life of Words, Sarah Polley delivers a halting, evocative 10-minute monologue that finally unlocks the mystery behind her guarded character.
  73. Apocalypto
    There's so much dark material jammed into this complicated, conflicted, challenging, and charismatic man's (Gibson) own noggin that sometimes he knows not, I think, what he's done. Here, behold, Mel Gibson has made the weirdest, most violent movie of the year.
  74. Blood Diamond
    There is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.
  75. The Holiday
    The dialogue has a perky synthetic sheen, and with the exception of Diaz, Meyers brings out the best in her actors.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Unaccompanied Minors
    Feig does wring out a few fleeting fun/heartfelt moments from the minors, and the movie's Christmas treacle is smoother than "Santa Clause 3's." But anyone old enough to go see this without a parent or guardian will have seen it all before.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Off the Black
    Sucking at the top of many a can, and greedily slurping the sides of an overflowing bottle, Nolte gives a master class in how to drink a beer on screen. The rest of his work here is sad, understated, and worth seeking out.
  78. Screamers
    The film offers true insight into the patterns of war crimes, even if the songs sound disquietingly close to a call to violence.
  79. Family Law
    Well acted.
  80. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.
  81. The Bergman Trilogy
    After a lifetime of flogging the demons of cosmic despair, Ingmar Bergman, at 88, comes off as lean and vigorous in this fascinating memoir-interview.
  82. Days of Glory
    The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so.
  83. The Lives of Others
    Utterly riveting fictional drama.
  84. The Nativity Story
    The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.
  85. Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
    Everything old is old again in this rickety extension of 2002's already rickety "Van Wilder."
  86. 10 Items or Less
    I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.
  87. The Architect
    Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.
  88. Turistas
    The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller.
  89. Two Weeks
    The movie's warm advocacy of hospice, with all the dignity such end-of-life care provides, does real, influential good.
  90. Our Daily Bread
    What the activist drama "Fast Food Nation" does with talk and the aid of movie stars, Our Daily Bread, a riveting documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does even better, with no voice-over and barely a word spoken by the unidentified workers involved in matter-of-fact killing and harvesting.
  91. The Fountain
    I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.
  92. Deck the Halls
    In this year's lump of coal, Matthew Broderick is the control freak who lives for toasty yuletide cheer, and Danny DeVito is the vulgar pest who wants his holiday lights seen from space. The dueling-neighbor crankfest is blah.
  93. Deja Vu
    Déjà Vu is watchable trash, meticulously edited in Scott's skip-stutter style, but there's something ultimately unsatisfying about a thriller that more or less makes up its rules as it goes along.
  94. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    Works just like a Tenacious D song. The movie feels giddy and eruptive, dopily enthralled with itself, and more or less made up on the spot.
  95. The History Boys
    The History Boys is as much about the meaning and value of reading and learning as it is about the ho-humness of genital fondling by sir with love.
  96. Casino Royale
    Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.
  97. Happy Feet
    A moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Let's Go to Prison
    Nearly laughless.
  99. Candy
    A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.
  100. Fast Food Nation
    Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.
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