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. I Am David
    The movie meets the requirements of the "Life Is Beautiful" school; those loyal to the tougher, more stringent Osama academy of realism need not apply.
  2. Around the World in 80 Days
    What's new and nutty, though, is the physical comedy of Jackie Chan as Fogg's manservant.
  3. Connie and Carla
    The surprise -- and intermittent delight -- of Connie and Carla is the way that it taps into the everybody-is-a-star passion of the new sing-along culture.
  4. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The film's lures, while undeniable, are synthetic, and we never do learn what fuels all the greed besides pints of beer.
  5. After the Sunset
    A fun-in-the-sun heist caper that director Brett Ratner stages as if he were the activities director of a cruise ship.
  6. Saw
    Saw is a gristle-cut B psycho thriller that would like to tap the sickest corners of your imagination. It has a few moments of nightmare creepiness, but it's also derivative and messy and too nonsensical for its own good.
  7. King Arthur
    In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.
  8. The Clearing
    The Clearing is what's known in the biz as an alternative for adult moviegoers. Which is to say the film is a performance-driven drama devoid of special effects and loud noises. On the contrary, it's a meditation on midlife weaknesses and compensation.
  9. Control Room
    Anxiety-provoking documentary.
  10. Luther
    Rising above the throng is the great wreck of Sir Peter Ustinov, who, as the canny, saucy German Prince Frederick, distinguishes both himself and the movie.
  11. Sleepy Hollow
    Little more than a lavish, art-directed slasher movie.
  12. Signs
    It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.
  13. The Village
    It gives nothing of the plot away to say that there's a fine line between an ''Aha!'' and an ''Oh, brother!'' Whether you feel The Village crosses that line may hinge on whether you think Shyamalan's screenwriting ability is beginning to lag behind his skill as a director.
  14. Alfie
    The new Alfie is so irresistible that he hardly requires contempt. Without it, the movie is little more than a feature-length roll in the hay.
  15. Ned Kelly
    A boggy mix of fact, fiction, and changeable wigs and beards worn by Heath Ledger in the title role, manages to shrink the grandness of the myth without clarifying our understanding of the man.
  16. Blade II
    Del Toro lays on the operatic head-trip gore, but his heavy-handed embrace of the ''Blade'' mythology allows Wesley Snipes to give more of a performance than he did in the first film.
  17. As Good as It Gets
    A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.
  18. Space Cowboys
    Poorly engineered: lurchingly paced, the dramatic conflicts duct taped together.
  19. Michael Jordan to the Max
    A highly conventional 2-D infomercial.
  20. May
    Though ultimately too waterlogged with student-film self-seriousness to revel fully in its low-rent joie de cleaver -- nevertheless taps into a furious atavistic energy that reflects well on the filmmaker and his fully committed cast.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bringing Out the Dead
    Works more in your head than on the screen.
  22. The Big Lebowski
    Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.
  23. Bring It On
    It's an okay brat movie.
  24. Kitchen Stories
    The icy whimsy of Kitchen Stories is certainly well sustained, but you don't laugh at the movie so much as wait for the joke to thaw.
  25. Cold Mountain
    Minghella's adaptation of the 1997 Charles Frazier novel is emotionally detached and almost too studiously carpentered: a willed exercise in mythmaking.
  26. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    If anything, the real surprise here is how affecting he makes the Grinch's ultimate big hearted turnaround, as Carrey the actor sneaks up on Carrey the wild man dervish. In whichever mode, he carreys the movie.
  27. 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.
  28. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    A kinder, gentler teensploitation comedy, but Hartnett's Matt, at least, invites the audience to graduate to something better.
  29. The American President
    In the end, the movie says that the President's private life matters, all right -- that Shepherd should get the girl and reestablish his leadership by giving in to the noble liberal he always was inside. Even for a modern Capra fable, that's a bit much to swallow.
  30. 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.
  31. Chocolat
    It's as agreeably sweet as advertised, with a particularly yummy performance by Juliette Binoche.
  32. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    A triumph of performance, production, and adaptation over the empty-calorie dither of its source material.
  33. Camp
    The sum is no greater than the ''Fame''-style saga of any one of them, and Graff, an actor and screenwriter making his directing debut, is less successful at developing each story than at conveying his general affection for the curtain-call species.
  34. Pearl Harbor
    The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ''simpler times'' gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II.
  35. Touch of Pink
    Rashid's optimistic fairy tale is inventive, in a show-queen way.
  36. Without a Paddle
    There are some genuinely clever moments of physical comedy, and the inevitable crudeness is offset by winning whimsy. Without has all the freshness of moldering Playboys stashed under a mattress, but it evokes what few boys-will-be-boys larks can: chumminess.
  37. Closer
    The last thing Marber's quartet of modern miserables needs is to be admired; they are the very worst of average people, but on screen they have become the very best of the baddest.
  38. House on Haunted Hill
    Trash, but always just a little creepier than you expect.
  39. I, Robot
    A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.
  40. The Manchurian Candidate
    What this Manchurian Candidate for a new generation makes up for in timing, it lacks in discipline and edge.
  41. The Woodsman
    Worth seeing for Bacon's lived-in minimalist purgatory, but the movie soft-pedals the nature of the desires he's at war with: the fact that they will never go away.
  42. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The best moments in his first movie outing are those that feel most TV-like, just another day in the eternally optimistic undersea society.
  43. Swept Away
    Ritchie made a movie that never pretends to be more than a guilty pleasure of soft-core kitsch, and Madonna and Giannini (son of Giancarlo, costar of the original) achieve a lively S&M chemistry.
  44. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    As someone who has warmed up to Anderson's work only gradually, I'd call this a step back for him, but I also can't help but wonder: Will he ever take that crucial step forward and stop saying, Isn't it ironic?
  45. Meet the Fockers
    The old-pro twosome of Streisand and Hoffman make such sexy and inviting ethnics (as a certain kind of movie likes to think of a certain kind of Jewish character) that they blithely prevail over the been-there-done-that gags.
  46. High School High
    The Naked Gun writing team and actor-turned-director Hart Bochner do unto the stereotype of inner-city high schools what needs to be done to stereotyped inner-city high schools -- parody them silly -- in this high-flying, low-comedy production.
  47. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    Scene for scene, the duo are in good form. Yet this is one case where more turns out to be less.
  48. Volcano
    I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.
  49. Murder at 1600
    As directed by Dwight Little ("Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home," a morph of "The Day of the Dolphin" and "Lassie Come Home"), the tension-to-action sequences unspool efficiently.
  50. The Rock
    Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage inject tasty bits of personality into their roles.
  51. Brassed Off
    There's a double meaning in the title of this folksy, relentlessly political, heavy-handed story, written and directed by Mark Herman and set among the coal mines of Yorkshire, England, in 1992.
  52. Event Horizon
    Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.
  53. Flubber
    As computer-generated special effects have grown more advanced, they threaten to overwhelm such minor matters as story, character, and emotion. This, however, is not a problem in Flubber (Walt Disney), an agreeably unhinged slapstick jamboree.
  54. Mad City
    Director Costa-Gavras packs a whole lotta hectoring into this high-strung morality play about the broadcast media's culpability in the escalation of human drama into camera-ready Greek tragedy.
  55. Night Falls on Manhattan
    Night Falls on Manhattan makes you nostalgic for Lumet's truly first-rate corruption movies, like the great, underrated "Q&A" (1990).
  56. Soul Food
    In the tradition of such food-as-love films as "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Big Night", kitchen work is idealized as a form of communion in this indulgently nostalgic story -- deep-fried with plot, script, and character cliches but honey glazed with goodwill...
  57. Spawn
    Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.
  58. Ransom
    Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.
  59. While You Were Sleeping
    Only when you look closer do you realize that While You Were Sleeping exhibits precious few genuine feelings. It's a movie cranked out by machine, about supposedly delightfully idiosyncratic characters who only do what they do because the highly structured plot requires it.
  60. The Crossing Guard
    The Crossing Guard is a work of talent and, on occasion, raw passion, but it's also a willed exercise in purgative alienation (imagine "Death Wish" remade by Michelangelo Antonioni).
  61. Cliffhanger
    Despite the don't-look-down Olympian settings, Cliffhanger's spirit is brutal and earthbound.
  62. Free Willy
    It's an irony too significant to ignore that the movie, which proselytizes against penning up whales in order to make them do cute tricks for humans, spends much of its time making Willy do cute tricks for humans.
  63. Ever After
    Between bouts of decisive action, the characters mill around the French countryside (in lovely costumes, to be sure, by Jenny Beavan) as if unsure of which sexual stereotype to bust next.
  64. Monument Ave.
    But where would these lads be without the pop-culture-happy language of Quentin Tarantino to fuel their bull sessions? Nowhere, that's where.
  65. Walking and Talking
    Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.
  66. Boys on the Side
    Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.
  67. Circle of Friends
    As Benny, a small- town Irish teenager in the '50s who goes off to university in Dublin, Minnie Driver has a touchingly awkward prettiness. Her jaw may be as square as a picture frame, but her smile lights her up from within.
  68. Fire
    As a director, Mehta would do well to stop smothering her empathy in glibness (she uses the family's ancient mute grandmother as a sitcom prank), but her empathy pokes through nonetheless.
  69. Strictly Ballroom
    The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.
  70. A Family Thing
    Any other writers handed this premise would probably play it for cheap laughs, but Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson have made an earnest drama out of it, one lightened by a few affectionate laughs and much heartfelt sentimentality.
  71. Rumble in the Bronx
    Rumble in the Bronx never quite achieves the smack-you-around zest of Chan's Hong Kong pictures. Still, it's hard to dislike a movie with such a friendly sense of the preposterous.
  72. Philadelphia
    But Philadelphia turns out to be a scattershot liberal message movie, one that ties itself in knots trying to render its subject matter acceptable to a mass audience.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Grumpy Old Men
    Relaxed, valedictory, exquisitely titled, Grumpy Old Men feels like an odd couple's last hurrah.
  74. The Portrait of a Lady
    In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.
  75. White Squall
    White Squall is lovely to look at, but frustrating to behold.
  76. The Basketball Diaries
    It's an energetic, watchable mess.
  77. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.
  78. Happy Together
    The vignettes don't add up to a story, but Wong's nervy brio and subterranean-fantasy style make for an arresting work about an exotic subculture.
  79. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is watchable but also stiff and remote.
  80. Crooklyn
    Crooklyn has a warm, nostalgic, spilling-over-the-edges effusiveness that is new to Lee's work. At the same time, the movie often seems every bit as high-strung as the family it's about.
  81. Girl 6
    Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone.
  82. Father of the Bride Part II
    Sure, Martin and Keaton squander their talents on this sentimental piffle, but it's hard to begrudge these two stars a couple of commercial hits. And oh, those adorable babies at the conclusion! The audience I saw Father of the Bride Part II with loved this big, corny, old-fashioned movie; as crowd-pleasers go, it's a shrewd one.
  83. Bastard Out of Carolina
    The agonizing moments that convey what it's like for Bone to feel helpless and afraid of Daddy Glen even when he's not torturing her are where the art is. The pornographic violence is artifice. [13 Dec 1996]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  84. Mad Dog and Glory
    Mad Dog and Glory turns out to be a light-spirited urban fairy tale. Despite occasional flashes of violence, its atmosphere is one of moonstruck romanticism.
  85. 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.
  86. Rocky V
    This sweetly downtrodden, punch-drunk Rocky is often appealing to watch. Yet as a character, he doesn’t have much drive — and neither, I’m afraid, does the movie.
  87. My Blue Heaven
    The movie itself, with the exception of a few scenes, doesn't really have the wit it's aiming for, and among Steve Martin vehicles it's middle-drawer, at best. Yet that mood of silly exuberance reigns through most of the picture.
  88. The Two Jakes
    The Two Jakes is competent and watchable.
  89. Days of Thunder
    The film, though sleek and easy to sit through, replaces genuine dramatic involvement with a superficial, rock & roll empathy-it's as though we were watching Cruise's character and playing air guitar to his emotions. There are plenty of soulless movies around. What's special about Days of Thunder is that it works overtime trying to convince you it's not one of them.
  90. What About Bob?
    What About Bob? is just funny enough to make you wish it had been wilder and less predictable.
  91. Swing Kids
    The movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.
  92. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall.
  93. Shallow Grave
    Danny Boyle's glittering, deadpan, nihilistic little thriller.
  94. The Pillow Book
    I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Clue
    This screwball comedy turned a rainy-day board game into inspiration — and attempted to answer the question of what Colonel Mustard has up his sleeve.
  96. Step Up 3-D
    Step Up 3D isn't, in dramatic terms, a very good movie, but it's the first film in a while to use 3-D as more than a marketing ploy; it points toward an original way of making a musical.
  97. Piranha 3-D
    I call Piranha 3D ''exploitation,'' rather than a quality scare movie, because it serves up well-timed gross-outs instead of genuine suspense and because the movie has no pretense of providing character, plot, acting, or dialogue that's anything more than boilerplate.
  98. The Killer Inside Me
    The Killer Inside Me may be the darkest film noir ever made.
  99. Shrek Forever After
    Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately. But the magic is gone, and Shrek Forever After is no longer an ogre phenomenon to reckon with. Instead, it's a "Hot Swamp Time Machine."
  100. The Back-up Plan
    As a romantic comedy, The Back-up Plan is friendly but also a bit drab.
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