Entertainment Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    It's not every day that one of our rogues' gallery of iconic psycho killers gets to be played by a creepy and fascinating actor -- in this case, Jackie Earle Haley taking on the role of Freddy Krueger.
  2. I'll Sing for You
    One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.
  3. Sky Blue
    When a brilliant fish wriggles by, even a less than ardent anime viewer will want to freeze the frame and gape.
  4. Daybreak
    The snappish domestic infighting is effectively staged, yet beneath its ''raw'' atmosphere Daybreak traffics in pop-sociological clichés.
  5. 39 Pounds of Love
    In moments that have nothing to do with representing the weight of love (whatever that is), the film comes alive: when Ami Ankilewitz isn't a symbol - just a man who, for instance, loves a woman.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner
    Wrestling with Angels could use some brouhaha: It's a bit too much of a pleasant air kiss from a fan, and doesn't engage inquisitively enough with Kushner's often controversial and very political ideas.
  7. Family Law
    Well acted.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    The writers act shocked at how low they are stooping, but given their desire to write sitcoms, you have to wonder.
  11. Severance
    The chintzy characters, hair-raising deaths, and one spectacular rocket-launcher joke aren't enough to give "Hostel" a run for its blood.
  12. The Treatment
    The filmmaking is rudimentary in The Treatment, Oren Rudavsky's adaptation of Daniel Menaker's novel, but the feeling for the patient-and-shrink dynamic is authentic.
  13. Hollywood Dreams
    Jaglom's scruffy style doesn't carry it through. He puts enough toxic insincerity on screen to singe, though.
  14. The Boss of It All
    This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.
  15. The Life of Reilly
    Reilly, in his 70s, takes us through his hilariously awful childhood: Eugene O'Neill as toxic high camp.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    What Would Jesus Buy?
    The movie has a sharp point -- Americans shop too much -- but it's a problem that its bellowing hero, always accompanied by his red-robed Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, is so off-putting; a crazy guy who wouldn't sound so crazy if he just didn't act so crazy.
  17. The Black Balloon
    Toni Collette gives it the old "Little Miss Sunshine" try in The Black Balloon as an edge-of-kooky, very pregnant mama presiding over a chaotic household.
  18. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
    Walker forged an out-of-time mystique that is vividly captured here.
  19. Explicit Ills
    Webber has a knack for bringing out actors at their showiest, but he palms off too much first-draft sketchiness as ''ambiguity.''
  20. My One and Only
    A weightless movie as cheerily artificial as the Old Navy pitchman's bronze skin tones.
  21. Still Walking
    A film of droll and dry observational precision, its emotional minimalism is almost fetishistic -- and, by the end, a tad frustrating.
  22. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    At times, the movie could have been called "Me and You and Every One of the Bastards We Know," but Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.
  23. Splinterheads
    Splinterheads, which aims to be a quirkier "Adventureland," never rises above mildly amusing.
  24. Don McKay
    The premise of the short-story-size comic thriller Don McKay is as thin and crumbly as a corn chip.
  25. Paper Man
    Concentrate instead on the delightful performances. A thespian shoutout goes to Reynolds (his hair bleached bright yellow for the gig) for his jaunty way with a cape, tights, and the hands-on-hip poses of superherodom.
  26. The Good Heart
    The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility.
  27. Kites
    It's a romantic noir chase thriller made in the violently schlocky spirit of Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway."
  28. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The Sorcerer's Apprentice is too long, and it's ersatz magic, but at least it casts an ersatz spell.
  29. Grown Ups
    For a while, the movie looks like "Couples Retreat" or a Tyler Perry house party, only instead of cookie-cutter conflicts, everyone just grows happier and more relaxed.
  30. Buried
    The political angle is gratuitous, even foolish, and certainly a distraction from the movie's visual strengths.
  31. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    Filmmaker Reed Cowan (himself gay and raised Mormon) documents the church's considerable financial influence on Prop 8's passage. Then he expands his sad and furious homegrown film to record the misery of gay Mormons sometimes driven to suicide over being rejected by their church and families.
  32. Restrepo
    It's doubtful you'll ever see a combat documentary that channels the chaos of war as thoroughly as this one.
  33. Ramona and Beezus
    On the other hand, this proud graduate of the School of Cleary Classics wishes that, like the young heroine herself, Ramona and Beezus dared more often to color outside the lines.
  34. Mama Africa
    It understands, in a way that speaks forcefully enough about the mechanisms of poverty to transcend the rather simplistic filmmaking.
  35. Get Low
    Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.
  36. Lottery Ticket
    If Lottery Ticket had as much conviction as laughs, it could have hit the jackpot.
  37. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Thompson, who also wrote the script, has skittery, baffling fun enjoining her plummy guest actors (including Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans, and Maggie Smith) to play broad Brit types.
  38. Saw 3D
    Now that the series is, it can be said that the most disturbing thing about the Saw films is the way that they turn torture into a wink of megaplex vengeance. They're made, and consumed, as a big bloody joke, and that's scary.
  39. Secretariat
    This pleasantly rote movie will rouse you.
  40. Easy A
    Easy A has some agreeable fast banter, but it's so self-consciously stylized that it wears you out.
  41. Due Date
    And so by the time the pair admire the Grand Canyon and, Due Date has lost its way, relying on its leading men to lead by charisma alone, even though their characters have nowhere interesting to go besides the happily-ever-after of dull, responsible male maturity.
  42. Yogi Bear
    There's nothing particularly inventive in the plot or grade-school humor, but the movie skates by on the timeless, undemanding charm of watching a tie-wearing bear try to steal people's lunches.
  43. The Virginity Hit
    Works cleverly because it emerges right out of the everyone's-an-exhibitionist YouTube age
  44. Morning Glory
    Where Broadcast News mourned the trivialization of the nightly news, Morning Glory asks you to learn to stop worrying and love the trivia.
  45. Today's Special
    The cooking scenes are fun, but Samir's reawakening and romance with a co-worker (Jess Weixler) hold about as many surprises as a prix fixe meal.
  46. Hereafter
    The signature Eastwoodian music that the director lays over the proceedings - piano tinkle, guitar pluck, and an echo of Rachmaninoff out of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter - can't hold the assemblage together.
  47. Miral
    Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision.
  48. The Tempest
    Theatrically ambitious, musically busy, and in the end cinematically inert - clearly reflects the authorship of myth-loving director Julie Taymor.
  49. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    The affectionate, bemused, structurally unkempt portrait is at its best capturing Merritt's close collaboration with his longtime friend and bandmate Claudia Gonson.
  50. Cool It
    The telegenic Lomborg is the on-camera "star" of the show, while his angry critics growl on cue.
  51. Inspector Bellamy
    Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.
  52. Gnomeo and Juliet
    Every movie about cuddly dwarf statues in an English garden should have music this big.
  53. Rango
    The biggest strike against Rango, though - for both the movie and the hero - is that the lizard is so damn ugly.
  54. Poison
    Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.
  55. Hall Pass
    Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three.
  56. Scream 4
    Some of the riffs are really funny and/or expertly scary. Others have the feel of awfully snappy dialogue crafted by middleaged people trying a little too eagerly to sound like the young people from whose mouths the banter flows.
  57. Haywire
    Haywire cavorts around the world - Barcelona, Dublin, upstate New York, New Mexico - with Bourne-again energy and timeline shuffles, making only cursory attempts at plot coherence
  58. Madea's Big Happy Family
    While I was watching Madea's Big Happy Family, I couldn't deny that it PLAYS. Madea, as always, is a figure of towering low-down wit.
  59. Carancho
    Worth seeing.
  60. Friends with Benefits
    I'm not exactly sure this is a situation that a lot of people are going to identify with. More to the point, it gives the movie a faulty design. Dylan and Jamie sleep together and get along famously. Where's the dramatic motor?
  61. The Beaver
    This is high-quality work from a professional (Gibson) who, news reports have suggested, has recently sunk to terrible lows in his nonprofessional life.
  62. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Yet here, as before, part of the movie's perversely cheeky design is that it throws away its own cleverness.
  63. Cars 2
    Not to get all Dorothy about it, but when it comes to Cars, there's no place like home. The emotional punch of the original is inextricably rooted in the movie's appreciation of off-the-beaten-track America, and all that homegrown vintage car culture signifies.
  64. Zookeeper
    Zookeeper (I can't believe I'm even writing this) is a dumbed-down "Paul Blart."
  65. Winnie the Pooh
    In execution, it is charming...and also a little monotonous.
  66. Hobo with a Shotgun
    There's a pomo twist to the whole overeager enterprise, in all its theoretical, film-school charm: Similar to 2010's "Machete," the movie was born from a fake 
 trailer commissioned by Grindhouse directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
  67. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to.
  68. On the Road
    What Salles doesn't conjure is the rapture of Kerouac's bohemian romanticism. Without it, On the Road is a remote experience, all reason and no rhyme.
  69. The Cabin in the Woods
    The movie's biggest surprise may be that the story we think we know from modern scary cinema - that horror is a fun, cosmic game, not much else - here turns out to be pretty much the whole enchilada.
  70. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Marigold Hotel achieves what it sets out to do: Sell something safe and sweet, in a vivid foreign setting, to an underserved share of the moviegoing market.
  71. The Big Year
    The more I sat through it, the more it won me over in its very benign high-concept way. It's like "City Slickers" remade for the Discovery Channel.
  72. Goon
    He can barely skate, but it hardly matters: As a goon, he's a genius.
  73. New Year's Eve
    New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening.
  74. Albert Nobbs
    Close's passion for the character she plays - 
a role, she has explained in interviews, that has absorbed her since she first played Nobbs on stage 30 years ago - contains its own intrigue.
  75. Everything Must Go
    Like Bill Murray and Greg Kinnear before him, this funnyman reveals serious acting chops.
  76. Jane Eyre
    The film never conveys that something larger is at work - like, say, the hand of fate. And without that, there's more busyness than beauty to Brontë.
  77. My Week with Marilyn
    Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder. Working opposite a suitably florid Kenneth Branagh as that high thespian Sir Larry.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Take This Waltz
    By never standing back from Margot, the movie courts vagueness as well.
  79. Trust
    David Schwimmer directs this smarmy Hot Topic drama with empathy for the craft of acting but less interest in the craft of making a movie move.
  80. Skateland
    The film hinges on too many conventional crises (a car accident, a divorce), but the fact that Burns is better at atmosphere than story isn't all bad.
  81. Beautiful Boy
    Michael Sheen and Maria Bello both have wrenching moments in this quiet, oblique drama. Yet the movie isn't really convincing.
  82. Dolphin Tale
    While the plot occasionally feels like "Free Willy" without the drama, it's a cute story if you don't mind temporarily trading in your cynicism for a bag of popcorn.
  83. Joyful Noise
    The movie's musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful.
  84. Underworld: Awakening
    Why are they fighting again? Never you mind. Just sit tight till the next action sequence (it won't be long), and get ready to laugh - with equal parts scorn and fanboy joy - as Beckinsale strikes another Rodinesque pose under a slo-mo shower of inhuman innards.
  85. Safe House
    Compared with a superior potboiler like "Salt," which messed with your brain in entertainingly far-fetched ways, Safe House is action-movie porridge gussied up into a less-clever-than-it-seems mystery.
  86. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    Always the smooth showman, Spurlock avoids answering his own question: Is he selling out or buying in?
  87. Rise of the Guardians
    It's all more lightweight-likable than exciting.
  88. That's My Boy
    Never underestimate the importance of guy-on-guy sentimentality in the Adam Sandler universe. It's his way of making his fans feel as if he's high-fiving them, or maybe giving them a group hug. But Sandler, bottom line, is too good at playing louts like Donny to spend this much energy getting us to like them.
  89. Moonrise Kingdom
    For some viewers, Moonrise Kingdom may be movie heaven, another bric-a-brac-jammed bauble to place alongside "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited." Personally, though, I wish that Anderson would come out from under the glass, or at least change what he's doing under there.
  90. Wrath of the Titans
    For a movie like Wrath of the Titans, which is basically "Gladiator" crossed with "Lord of the Rings" crossed with a special-effects demo reel (call it Lord of the Rinky-Dink), he's (Worthington) the perfect actor.
  91. A Little Help
    Fischer's performance is sweet and subtle, but the film can be so understated in tone and plot that it's hard to tell if it's actually saying anything.
  92. 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.
  93. Lucky
    It is fun, though, 
 to see the younger Hanks play a murderer - it's like seeing Justin Bieber work blue.
  94. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    The Myth of the American Sleepover has fresh, lovely moments, but it could have used more psychological heft.
  95. The Last Mountain
    The movie's power is undercut by the overemphasized presence of celebrity traveling environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
  96. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    In essence, this is an indie Adam Sandler comedy, and when its heroes are psyching themselves up for the big event, it's kind of funny. But the orgy doesn't make you laugh - it makes you cringe.
  97. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    At once overly episodic and playfully arty, like a TV movie made by Fellini.
  98. Janie Jones
    With Ethan and Janie sharing folkie duets, it has a certain small, wan charm, like a father-daughter gloss on "Once." Breslin is a clear-eyed delight.
  99. 3
    German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) noodles around with form, composition, and sexuality in 3, a playfully pieced-together, beautifully shot, and secretly ridiculous drama about a triangular relationship among blasé Berliners.
  100. Poltergeist
    The only really frightening thing about the 2015 version of Poltergeist is how haunted it is by the original.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »