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. Mission: Impossible
    It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.
  2. Independence Day
    It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sliding Doors
    The story is hackneyed, and the gimmick only doubles the dullardry.
  4. Confidence
    Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.
  5. American Pimp
    Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.
  6. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Feel-good ethnocomedy.
  7. Dawn of the Dead
    Don't leave before the final frame -- if you're still breathing.
  8. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.
  9. Limitless
    In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.
  10. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World is a blockbuster of its moment. It’s not deep. There aren’t new lessons to be learned. And the film’s flesh-and-blood actors are basically glamorized extras. But when it comes to serving up a smorgasbord of bloody dino mayhem, it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do beautifully.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Barney Thomson
    Ultimately, Barney Thomson’s roots are exposed too easily, and the question of “where’d they get that from?” often trumps our curiosity of where the film at hand is going, and that’s a problem.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Day Watch
    The sequel is a minor wackjob head trip.
  13. Junior
    Schwarzenegger’s willingness to flirt with femininity, to become truly radiant, is the most engaging aspect of Junior. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t portray his transformation to starry-eyed pregnant bliss with much comic ingenuity.
  14. Michael Collins
    For whatever reason, Michael Collins is a troublesome movie, a film about a religious war in which religion is almost entirely absent; a flick that gives us our kicks with thrillingly shot terroristic violence while paying lip service to pious antiviolence sentiments.
  15. We Are Wizards
    This charm-filled documentary about passionate Harry Potter fans (and one foe) leaps all over the place.
  16. Naqoyqatsi
    If Microsoft and Nike ever merged into one corporate megalith (MicroNike?) and commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to direct its visionary new Super Bowl commercial, the result might look something like Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi.
  17. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Smart enough to hook us with the best thing it has going: Cedric the Entertainer's gruffly uproarious and lived-in performance as Eddie.
  18. The Shape of Things
    What it isn't is a believable relationship. Yet that may scarcely matter to LaBute, a gifted and corrosive wordsmith who appears intent, by now, on shoving all romantic couplings into the meat grinder of his misanthropic design.
  19. I, Robot
    A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.
  20. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    A lot of Money Never Sleeps - too much - is about Gekko père's desire to reconnect with his very angry daughter.
  21. 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.
  22. The Whistleblower
    Rarely has a movie captured the obscene violence of sex trafficking with such unvarnished grubbiness. In the end, though, The Whistleblower is a corporate thriller.
  23. Miss You Already
    A movie about love and loss that doesn’t dissolve into soft focus when the hard parts start.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Don't Trip ... He Ain't Through with Me Yet
    Harvey's stand takes place live in front of 16,000 believers at Bishop T.D. Jakes' church event MegaFest, and the intriguing novelty of the movie comes from watching one of the R-rated Original Kings of Comedy try to go the whole night without swearing.
  25. More Than a Game
    It's the die-hard camaraderie that undergirded this squad and lifted it to the top.
  26. Memphis Belle
    The characters in Memphis Belle may have ethnic names, but in spirit the actors are all playing WASPs — fresh-faced, pretty-boy WASPs, the kind that make the little girls swoon. It’s Dead Poets Society Goes to War.
  27. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.
  28. Bad Boys for Life
    Banter and bullets is the action-movie MO, and the duo at the center of it hardly seem to have to stretch to spread their bickering charm on thick. By the shock-and-awe climax, though — when everything but the goatee pretty much goes up in flames — other things have worn thin.
  29. The Lover
    Of course, the hollow drama of The Lover might not matter so much if these two actually did something interesting in bed. As it is, they barely get out of the missionary position. With far more explicit (and inventive) erotic films available at almost any video store, one has to wonder: How much point is there to portraying sexual passion as serious and ”adult” if you only end up taking all the fun out of it?
  30. Ballerina
    Like dining at Burger King, it's undeniably enjoyable, but may leave you with a queasy feeling when it's all over.
  31. Paranormal Activity 3
    The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films, but I watched Paranormal Activity 3 in a state of high anxiety.
  32. Definitely, Maybe
    Absolutely, probably more comfortable with human romantic complication than the usual stuff released on Valentine's Day.
  33. Les amants criminels
    This remains the one and only fusion of ''Deliverance'' and ''Hansel and Gretel'' that I ever hope to see.
  34. The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    A gaily busy kid flick.
  35. The Little Mermaid
    The human world, it's a mess, but with Halle Bailey, life under the sea is better than anything Disney live-action has done in nearly a decade.
  36. Magic Trip
    It's like seeing the birth of the '60s, with great moments (including Neal Cassady doing speed-freak monologues).
  37. Little Lili
    Because the talk never gets beyond statement making, and because the characters emit none of Chekhov's radiantly lived-in soulfulness, there's plenty of time to appreciate the sun-kissed landscape.
  38. What If
    An unctuous rom-com that runs its characters through every plastic cliché of a pre-Oscar McConaughey vehicle, ultimately causing us to root against the vacuous couple and their predetermined happy ending.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Ref
    The performances are uniformly excellent — even Leary knows when to shut up and just listen — and this nasty romp delivers so many honest laughs, you may end up watching it twice in the same night to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    One more feel-great sports movie with a teen-poetry title and Kurt Russell will have himself a trilogy.
  41. 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.
  42. Unfriended
    Though not particularly ground-breaking — last year’s Elijah Wood-starring Open Windows pulled the same trick, and much more ambitiously — we’re still going to “like” the result.
  43. Sharkwater
    This beautiful and urgent eco-doc takes a bite out of the shark mythology made indelible by "Jaws."
  44. American Swing
    Plato's Retreat was a buffet of bodies, and the film catches the moment America could think that was tasty.
  45. This Is 40
    This Is 40 isn't always hilarious, but it's ticklishly honest and droll about all the things being a parent can do to a relationship. And why it's still worth it.
  46. Cliffhanger
    Despite the don't-look-down Olympian settings, Cliffhanger's spirit is brutal and earthbound.
  47. Cruella
    Cruella comes off as a curious animal, eager to change its spots and trying a little bit of everything along the way.
  48. Nanny McPhee
    One of those raucous, hyperactive kiddie flicks that knocks you upside the head from its opening frame.
  49. Onegin
    Tatyana, the embodiment of a heroine whose still waters run deep, requires more maturity than Tyler as yet possesses.
  50. Wimbledon
    Nothing more than amiable fluff, yet Bettany infuses it with a brazen dash of reality. You believe in him, even when you don't quite believe in the movie.
  51. The Ant Bully
    An effortlessly clever animated confection.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The First Saturday in May
    The First Saturday in May soon digs in its heels with acute portraits of six trainers, including a paralyzed ex-cyclist in California and an MS-stricken Lexington native who works for the royal family of Dubai.
  53. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    You can have a reasonably nice time at Salmon Fishing in the Yemen if you accept that it's the tidiest movie imaginable to ever say that falling in love is like swimming upstream.
  54. Viva
    It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Scrooge
    [Finney] plays Scrooge less like a Dickens character and more like that crooked man who walked a crooked mile, of Mother Goose nursery rhyme fame. But it’s fun to see him cut a rug at Scrooge’s own funeral to the tune of Leslie Bricusse’s Thank You Very Much, the great show-stopping tune of this otherwise ho-ho-hum musical.
  56. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Complete Unknown
    Complete Unknown is perhaps most titillating when it quietly observes moments between its central duo, two long-lost lovers hurling nearly two decades’ worth of unresolved pain at each other over the course of a single evening.
  58. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    It's galvanizing to see it played out through the furious contradiction of Carter's personality. He is pious, stubborn, compassionate, testy, moral, unreasonable, and wise.
  59. The Glorias
    As a reverent highlight reel and a history lesson, The Glorias gets the job done; as a movie, though, it rarely sings.
  60. Pipe Dream
    The film satirizes, and celebrates, an idea pivotal to both Hollywood and love: that in a world of impostors, the pretender with the most conviction can become exactly what he pretends to be.
  61. NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    This otherwise entertaining, aficionado-oriented production, with its circus-act technology that lets a viewer feel, briefly, like a member of the Petty racing dynasty, is as gaudily patched with corporate sponsorship as the sport itself.
  62. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    Welcome to the Jungle isn’t a bad movie. It’s a diverting, mildly amusing, competent bit of big-budget studio product. And maybe those are the stakes we’re now playing for these days.
  63. Wildling
    A clever, sharp-fanged mélange of classic midnight-movie horror and modern indie ingenuity.
  64. The Fast and the Furious
    Works hard to be exciting, but the movie scarcely lives up to its title. It could have used a bit of a fuel injection itself.
  65. To the Wonder
    Through the character of a saddened priest, Malick seems to be saying that the reason for our breakups, for our fragmented lives and relationships, is that we can no longer see God. If we could, we would be whole again. That may be true, but in To the Wonder, it's Terrence Malick who isn't letting his characters be whole.
  66. The Accountant 2
    The ludicrousness on display here is enormous.
  67. Hitch
    Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.
  68. Operation Finale
    It’s the psychological duel between the terrific Isaac and Kingsley as captor and prisoner that delivers the film’s most charged jolts of electricity.
  69. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Anderson's adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying any real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an abusive, drunken man.
  70. Before I Fall
    A teen melodrama that’s steeped in clichés but still has an unexpectedly poignant message.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Life in a Day
    It's our equivalent of that '80s art-film kaleidoscope "Koyaanisqatsi."
  72. Dolphin Tale 2
    This is innocuous, heart-in-the-right-place family fare, but its well-earned points about animal rights and preservation would be better taken if the relentless sentimentality didn't force viewers into flippers-in-the-air submission.
  73. August: Osage County
    The movie is red meat for anyone who thrives on a certain brand of punchy, in-your-face emotional shock value. Yet the pull of what happens on screen came, for me, with a major qualification: I went with it, but I didn't totally buy it. The film is a contraption that spreads its darkness like whipped butter on a roll.
  74. It: Chapter Two
    The main problem with Chapter Two is that it goes on, and on, for so very long. If brevity is not necessarily the soul of a good scare, it would certainly serve a story that sends in the clowns, and then lets them just stay there — leering and lurking and chewing through scene after scene — until the there’s nothing left to do but laugh, or leave.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Twice in a Lifetime
    ”With her it’s sex?” a weepy Ellen Burstyn asks husband Gene Hackman in Twice in a Lifetime, a sensitive divorce drama that finds her wondering why Hackman’s steel-mill man is jilting her late in life for jezebel barmaid Ann-Margret. ”Of course it’s sex,” Hackman replies testily. ”It’s important.” Good scene, but it’s jarring, too, because it reminds you just how rarely this master actor has been asked to play a man in heat over the course of his long career.
  76. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Peculiarly bloodless.
  77. The Mist
    There's a grim modern parable to be read into the dangerous effects of the gospel-preaching local crazy lady Mrs. Carmody (brilliantly played by a hellfire Marcia Gay Harden) on a congregation of the fearful.
  78. F9: The Fast Saga
    F9 sure sounds like a lot of fun. Why is it only a little fun?
  79. X-Men: The Last Stand
    This is interesting stuff. So why does The Last Stand feel driven to dumb itself down, as if embarrassed by its own ideas?
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    You've Got Mail
    A perfectly enjoyable star vehicle that does exactly what it sets out to do. [7 May 1999, p.66]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  81. Adam Resurrected
    The director, Paul Schrader, tries for cleansing audacity, but ends up too close to farce.
  82. Jarhead
    Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today.
  83. Cosmopolis
    The film comes off as an elaborately didactic and overheated lecture.
  84. Footloose
    Stepping into sacred shoes once worn by Kevin Bacon, Wormald handily owns the role for a new audience. Same goes for a terrific Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) in the sidekick role of Willard so memorably originated by the late Chris Penn.
  85. Jason Bourne
    Director Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93) has always had a taste for the topical and political, and his third Bourne outing augments the usual truth-and-justice talking points with a strenuously current nod to digital privacy issues via a Zuckerberg-like social-media mogul (Riz Ahmed). If anything, he underplays those assets, shorting deeper story development for exotic zip codes, bang-up fisticuffs, and adrenalized chase scenes.
  86. Love Liza
    Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.
  87. Kansas City
    So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.
  88. Year of the Horse
    Bluntly put, Neil Young’s music now has too much integrity and not enough hooks, and so does Year of the Horse. The rough-grain Super-8 images, while a nifty visual correlative to the Crazy Horse sound, deny us the fundamental pleasure of a concert movie — a sense of intimacy with the band’s performance.
  89. Disclosure
    The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.
  90. Victoria and Abdul
    Uneven but endearing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Help!
    The music (including Ticket to Ride) is wonderful and the European scenery an eyeful, but this is ultimately a movie starring the Beatles rather than a Beatles movie, and there’s a big difference.
  92. Pirate Radio
    Pirate Radio is, in the end, about as rock-revolutionary as a tea break. But the choppy production floats on a great soundtrack (the real pirates are the Rolling Stones) and is buoyed by an inviting cast.
  93. 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.
  94. Balls Out
    There’s some chuckleworthy meta-commentary about the absurdity of sports movies, but Balls Out feels more like a long sketch than a feature.
  95. Freaky Tales
    It’s a hyperspecific vision of the Bay that won’t connect with everyone, and in truth, Freaky Tales seems destined to be more of a cult favorite than a genre-hopping blockbuster. But even with all the psychic energy and violent revenge fantasies, it’s the performances that help keep this tale grounded.
  96. Life Is Beautiful
    Starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch.
  97. Defamation
    This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way.
  98. The Firm
    No one is going to confuse The Firm with art, but its high- cholesterol virtues-a story that keeps you guessing, a dozen meaty character turns-are enough to send you home sated.
  99. Stoker
    The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.
  100. The King
    Just about the only way to make sense of the film is to view its Christian family the way that the director, James Marsh, does -- with a contempt masquerading as social criticism. William Hurt, for one, deserves better.
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