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. Think Like a Man
    Think Like a Man is so busy tracking courtship as if it were a science project that the bite-size love stories lack spontaneity.
  2. The Woman in Black
    An old-fashioned, tastefully constrained supernatural thriller, The Woman In Black embraces the elements of gothic horror movies with pleasing seriousness.
  3. The Guilt Trip
    The Guilt Trip is not about Rogen, bubbeleh. Streisand is her own once-in-a-lifetime trip, looking gawjuss with that divine voice and those killer fingernails, and the sight of the lady scarfing down four pounds of beef at a Texas steak joint is one a Streisand lover can now cross off her bucket list.
  4. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.
  5. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Writer-director W.S. Anderson's overseeing of the Resident Evil zombie franchise has proven to be both lunatically haphazard and dementedly enthusiastic.
  6. Hotel Transylvania
    It's the parental mush about trusting one's kid to make her own discoveries and blah blah blah (spoken in a Sandlerized version of a Dracula voice) that drains the movie of blood. What's left are platitudes, and Sandler singing a novelty song in a Transylvanian-accented falsetto.
  7. Good Deeds
    Perry holds back on the finger-wagging, eye-bulging tantrums. There were moments when I was grateful for that. There were others, like the kissy scenes between Perry and Newton, when I began to miss them.
  8. Django Unchained
    DiCaprio, having a blast, makes Candie the equivalent of Waltz's Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds": a racist villain who mesmerizes us by elevating his ideology into a puckishly thought-out vision of the world. Yet Django isn't nearly the film that Inglourious was.
  9. Act of Valor
    When the bullets are flying, Act of Valor is undeniably tense and thrilling.
  10. Pacific Rim
    In a sense, Pacific Rim winds up being not enough of a Guillermo del Toro movie. It's more like a mash-up of "Real Steel" and the "Transformers" pictures. Which is a shame, because the idea is undeniably cool.
  11. The Ward
    At least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.
  12. Thor: The Dark World
    Hiddleston, with pleading eyes and a mad-dog grin, plays Loki as a wounded sociopath who's cackling at the world but seething on the inside. Which makes you realize he's just about the only character in the movie who has an inside.
  13. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    The movie is creepy, but it has no texture or depth. It's like "The Omen" directed by Miranda July.
  14. Red Tails
    As long as it stays in the air, Red Tails is a compelling sky-war pageant of a movie. On the ground, it's a far shakier experience: dutiful and prosaic, with thinly scripted episodes that don't add up to a satisfying story.
  15. Margaret
    Lonergan's dialogue can sweep you up in a whoosh of personality and ideas, but it's hard to see what, apart from ego, convinced him that this story was so epic.
  16. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    A polarizing load of quirkiness in Extremely Loud gunks up (at least for this hometown mourner; your results may vary) what is at heart a piercing story.
  17. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    The movie should have been called Diary of a Wimpy Forrest Gump. It's genuinely soft-hearted (you're all but guaranteed to cry) but mush-brained, too.
  18. Anna Karenina
    In making the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage, Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices.
  19. The Raid: Redemption
    I do wish that Evans were a better storyteller. When he isn't turning mad-dog violence into visual rock & roll, The Raid shreds narrative coherence to ribbons.
  20. The Woman in the Fifth
    Heavy on mood and murk.
  21. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Sarcastic quips and cynical attitudes abound, maybe as a way for the movie's makers to telegraph that they know this is all just so much kid stuff. But if the characters can't muster genuine awe for their adventure, it's a tall order to ask us to do it for them.
  22. To Rome with Love
    Woody Allen has become such a beguiling travel agent that he rolls through these stories with a relaxed effervescence that is rather infectious.
  23. The Great Gatsby
    It's a dazzling time capsule of a shimmering era and a devastating look into the dark side of the American dream. Too bad Luhrmann, the caffeinated conductor, doesn't trust that story enough. He'd rather blast your retinas into sugar-shock submission. Uncle, old sport! Uncle!
  24. Broken City
    The truth is that we're way past being outraged by these sorts of Crimes of the One Percent, not because they don't happen, but because the real version is so much more interesting.
  25. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.
  26. Sparkle
    Sparkle is never more than an overheated mediocrity. The one thing it isn't, however, is dull.
  27. Seeking Justice
    The movie is never dull, though, and Cage acts every moment as if he means it. As the cult's leader, Guy Pearce, looking deeply creepy with a shaved head, has a cruel playfulness.
  28. Life Happens
    It's a trifle, but at least it doesn't star Katherine Heigl.
  29. The Wolverine
    You have to hand it to Marvel for managing to leave audiences breathless in anticipation of a sequel after making them sit through two-plus hours of merely satisfactory storytelling.
  30. Intruders
    Owen devotes himself to the horror-flick role of a father battling his daughter's monsters with the same trademark efficiency and intensity he brings to every project, whether pulpy like "Killer Elite" or pure like "Shadow Dancer."
  31. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures, more than the "Twilight" films, lacks danger and momentum. The audience, like Ethan, spends way too much time waiting around for Lena to learn whether she's a good girl or a bad girl.
  32. Identity Thief
    The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.
  33. Chernobyl Diaries
    If nowhere near as scary as the original Paranormal, the result is superior to many of the low-budget terror flicks that have arrived since (yes, The Devil Inside, we're talking about you) and benefits hugely from Dimitri Diatchenko's performance as moviedom's Worst. Tour. Guide. Ever.
  34. The Intouchables
    The power dynamic may charm the French, but it's likely to push the cringe buttons of local moviegoers in Obama's post-"The Green Mile America." Apart from the wince-inducing moments, The Intouchables is often a pleasant buddy picture.
  35. Jack and Diane
    Love and sex are scary in Bradley Rust Gray's over-Freuded exercise in semi-horror/gender studies.
  36. RoboCop
    The film has lots of energized mayhem, and Murphy's unraveling of the conspiracy against him isn't dumbed down, yet it's as if the comic-book action poetry of the original has been encased in a suit of generic armor.
  37. Lola Versus
    Gerwig is adorable, but that's both good and bad, as the movie can't stop cuing us to see that Lola's winsomeness will rescue her.
  38. The Hangover Part III
    You should stick around for the end credits because there's a Helms sight gag that's absolutely priceless. The movie could've used more laughs like that one.
  39. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    Make no mistake, there will be a sequel. Clary may not wind up having the same pop-culture impact as Bella and Katniss, but like it or not, this won't be the last time you hear from her.
  40. Maleficent
    The characters are boiled down to their essentials, the humor is timelessly broad, and Jolie's at her best when she's curling her claws and elongating her vowels like a black-sabbath Tallulah Bankhead.
  41. Carrie
    But now we're a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized, shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X-Men team. She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud.
  42. The Broken Tower
    It’s a pensive and heartfelt movie, assuming that you let yourself get caught up in its moody-minimalist, more-visual-than-verbal style.
  43. The Good Dinosaur
    While the story attempts the moves that a Pixar film typically makes—nonverbal storytelling, death, a bittersweet ending—most of The Good Dinosaur’s punches land soft, made worse by the disconnect that exists between the overly cartoonish style of the characters and the photorealistic landscapes.
  44. White House Down
    Skip it, and you'll be depriving yourself of one of the summer's most satisfyingly stupid pleasures.
  45. Red Lights
    As a sinister ESP showman, Robert De Niro is corny and fun.
  46. Pitch Perfect
    Without the music, the movie might have been painful, but the songs, Auto-Tuned and processed as they are, generate a hooky bliss. They're the chewy center of this ultra-synthetic hard candy.
  47. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    In the end, Walter Mitty is a film about acting out our dreams. But Stiller never quite shows us the soul of his dreamer.
  48. Searching for Sugar Man
    The yarn is too irresistible: We're fed plenty of sugar in this authorized fairy tale, but are left hungry for beef.
  49. Collaborator
    Donovan, acting with ironic reserve, hands the movie to Morse, who makes his character the kind of crank you can care about just because he's so abysmally lost.
  50. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    The biggest problem with the new Hunger Games movie is right there in the title: Part 1. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins' best-selling YA trilogy, wasn't conceived in two parts.
  51. Klown
    Klown, a comedy from Denmark about two men on a canoe trip who descend into all sorts of desperate debauchery, demonstrates how the semi-improv, jitter-cam mode of filmmaking has gone from being a style to a tic - a way to disguise how unreal a movie can be.
  52. The Paperboy
    Much of what happens in The Paperboy is so luridly bizarre you can't quite believe what you're seeing.
  53. The Awakening
    Not to be confused with a dramatization of Kate Chopin's great 1899 proto-feminist novel, this by-the-numbers British ghost story, set just after WWI, devotes a lot of energy to set decoration.
  54. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    Still, my real beef with these movies — and this one in particular — is how same-y they’ve started to feel. Each time out, everything is at stake and nothing is at stake.
  55. The Collection
    Remarkably, the result manages to be both more preposterous and more efficient than its predecessor, with a couple of deaths occurring so swiftly they border on the subliminal.
  56. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Branagh did a nice job of directing "Thor," but all he can do here is try to energize the recycled pulp of the script.
  57. Stand Up Guys
    Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.
  58. Last Vegas
    After a while, you truly start to see the formula gears churning, but given that, it helps to have an actress like Mary Steenburgen, who at 60 still possesses an amazing glow, as well as a snappier comic timing than ever.
  59. Dark Skies
    While there are some scares along the way, Stewart foolishly gives away the whole kit and caboodle plot-wise with an opening quotation from Arthur C. Clarke.
  60. The Family
    Doesn't just wink at De Niro's history, it leans on it, hard.
  61. A Haunted House
    If the result features around 1,783 too many fart gags, to be fair, it also boasts a couple of genuine minor scares. Although there's no doubt that the film's most horrible sight is a way-too-long shot of Swardson's naked rump.
  62. A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.
  63. Struck by Lightning
    Struck by Lightning sticks to generic character sketches of high school student types - the jock, the goth, the cheerleader, etc. - and gives Carson the best lines. In between, some charming, buzzy talents pitch in on this short little lark.
  64. The Purge
    The Purge clearly has a lot on its mind, but it never really manages to express it.
  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. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    What we get is the usual mash of swashbuckling nonsense and soggy mythology: There will be romance, and revelations, and some silly gold-plated cameos (hello there, Sir Paul McCartney! And whoops, goodbye). Through it all, Norwegian duo Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki) feel less like directors than shepherds.
  67. Emperor
    Emperor explores the delicate postwar dance of revenge, justice, and realpolitik, yet its focus on the issue of Hirohito's guilt or innocence (did he order the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or did he, in fact, oppose the Japanese military machine?)
  68. The Iceman
    Ultimately, this is a grim (both visually and thematically) character study of an unsympathetic character, leaving Shannon, who manages to deliver another impressive performance, twisting in the ice-cold wind.
  69. She's All That
    The two stars are like cool kids pretending to be tortured poets pretending to be cool. Neither can match the screen presence — the shameless self-infatuated ebullience — of Matthew Lillard, who does a wickedly grotesque turn as Brock Hudson, a kind of goggle-eyed Puck manqué in the film's dead-on send-up of "The Real World."
  70. I'm So Excited
    The actors are charming, but the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it.
  71. The Maze Runner
    The first two-thirds of The Maze Runner are a clever feat of fantasy world building. It's thrilling, twisty, and as mysterious as the mammoth Skinner Box environment the film takes place in. But the promising set-up raises so many puzzle-piece questions that when it's all finally explained in the final reel, you can't help feeling a bit gypped.
  72. Die Hard 2
    A number of scenes have been staged with satisfying kinetic flair, and Willis once again makes an appealing superhero. Yet without that great big booby-trapped skyscraper to hold the action together, the suspense dissipates.
  73. The Boxtrolls
    The script lacks the wit of "Wallace & Gromit."
  74. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    All of the highlights are dutifully hit, as in a made-for-TV movie (albeit a lavish, gorgeously photographed one). Unfortunately, they're hit with a sledgehammer.
  75. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    The climax makes for a satisfying conclusion to the franchise—an ending which this writer expects, and even hopes, all concerned will studiously ignore when they get around to making the next one.
  76. Interstellar
    Interstellar, his (Nolan) sci-fi spectaculorama helixed around a father-daughter love story, is a gamble like no other in his career. It's his longest film, his headiest, his most personal. And, in its square-peg-in-a-round-wormhole stab at being the weepy motion-picture event of the year, it's also his sappiest.
  77. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    Star Trek VI is just pleasantly diverting, business-as-usual hokum.
  78. Austenland
    Austenland is kind of a one-joke movie, and the film's rhythm is a bit flaccid, but the joke, at least, has a twinge of wit.
  79. Aftershock
    The first, pre-'quake half hour is such a patience-testing slow burn that director Nicolás López runs the risk of extinguishing the viewer's interest altogether. But when things head (metaphorically) south they do so with an escalating, apocalyptic ferocity which continues until the very last second.
  80. Arthur Newman
    The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!
  81. 22 Jump Street
    To cover up the script's lack of originality, screenwriters Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman pummel us with a string of self-aware meta-commentary jokes that poke fun at bloated sequels.
  82. Lone Survivor
    Berg has made a powerful film and an important reminder of what really happens when we send men and women off to war. It's just too bad that subtlety isn't a stronger weapon in his arsenal.
  83. The Best Man Holiday
    The Best Man Holiday is an eggnog that's sticky-sweet and heavy at the same time.
  84. The Other Woman
    This one has its own wonky charm and intermittent moments of genuine, depraved hilarity; it's like "Bridesmaids" drawn in crayon.
  85. Heli
    The film’s nihilism serves as a metaphor for the merciless death pit of Mexico’s drug war, but not much else.
  86. A Touch of Sin
    Sin, more stylized than the director’s previous work, is also more detached.
  87. Hook
    Hook is jam-packed with ''entertainment value,'' enough to give you your money's worth, and to guarantee (in all probability) that Spielberg earns his. Yet something has clouded this director's vision... The problem isn't that Spielberg has lost his gift for fantasy. It's that he no longer seems to know (or care) about anything else.
  88. Vincent & Theo
    Vincent & Theo looks and feels like a half-baked PBS drama, and at two hours and 20 minutes the movie is hopelessly plodding. Still, see it for Roth, whose warts-and-all portrait of Van Gogh is an offbeat triumph.
  89. Kansas City
    So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.
  90. Into the Woods
    The first two-thirds of the film, which are like the Brothers Grimm's Greatest Hits on laughing gas, have a fizzy, fairy-dust energy. But as soon as the baker couple's scavenger hunt is over and a rampaging giant appears, Woods loses its magic and momentum and sags like an airless balloon.
  91. Alan Partridge
    Like so many reunions, this one starts off all smiles and quickly grows tiresome.
  92. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    The film chooses style over substance, emphasizing how cool the children’s powers are without fleshing them out as full characters. To compete with Burton’s best, his heroic weirdos need a little more heart—and the monsters need sharper teeth.
  93. Fifty Shades of Grey
    I spoil nothing by reporting what readers already know, that when Fifty Shades is not a dirty story, it is, as the trilogy unfolds, a study in cartoonishly weird family dynamics.
  94. The Book Thief
    It would make for a pretty ghastly pageant if not for smart, understated turns by Watson and Geoffrey Rush as the charmingly Teutonic couple who rescue both Liesel and a stranded Jew (Ben Schnezter) — not to mention the movie itself — with honorable matter-of-factness.
  95. SPECTRE
    It’s possible that Skyfall created expectations that were too high for Spectre to match. But with all he’s done for the franchise, Craig deserves to go out with a bigger, smarter bang.
  96. Godzilla
    He doesn't seem too interested in his actors — they're more plodding than their reptilian costars and you don't care about a single one of them — but Edwards does know how to fashion some serious monster mayhem.
  97. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    At the end, when the grandson, in drag, enters a little-girl beauty contest, the movie far outdoes the crowning moment of "Little Miss Sunshine." But most of Bad Grandpa lacks that delirious mad kick of surprise.
  98. Foxcatcher
    The most haunting thing in Bennett Miller's latest film, Foxcatcher, is Steve Carell. That's right, the same rubber-faced comedian who gave us the dim-witted meteorologist of "Anchorman" and the oblivious corner-office boob of "The Office."
  99. Million Dollar Arm
    It's the latest male weepie cast from the same Disney mold as "The Rookie and "Miracle," and it's essentially "Jerry Maguire Goes to Mumbai."
  100. Get On Up
    Get On Up too often plays it safe when it needs to be dangerous.
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