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. She Hate Me
    She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.
  2. Garden State
    Certainly Garden State is a very American specimen of debut indie form, its loose, goof-about scenes of comic melancholy reinforced with the glue of quirkiness over cracks in the narrative development.
  3. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.
  4. Catwoman
    I wouldn't call Catwoman incompetent, yet it has no visual grandeur, and very little surprise; you can tick off the story beats as if they'd been graphed.
  5. A Home at the End of the World
    Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.
  6. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    The movie, quite simply, goes to sleep whenever Zatoichi isn't fighting. When he is, it's a pulp dazzler.
  7. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Divided into chapters, the film jumps around in time, which means that we get to observe Shimizu's utter failure to develop his characters from endless narrative angles.
  8. The Bourne Supremacy
    A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.
  9. Zhou Yu de huo che
    The movie follows convoluted narrative tracks. By the end of the drowsy journey, the characters are indistinguishable from the scenery.
  10. A Cinderella Story
    When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.
  11. Maria Full of Grace
    Unfolds with a simplicity that's as breathtaking as its inevitability is harrowing.
  12. Touch of Pink
    Rashid's optimistic fairy tale is inventive, in a show-queen way.
  13. I, Robot
    A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Flavors
    Earnest and intermittently diverting, this cheerful little movie isn't the sort of thing you see every day.
  15. The Door in the Floor
    Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.
  16. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.
  17. Sleepover
    Yes, it's all a harmless lark. Which is why the only thing that could redeem this sour patch of candy-coated crud would be a final shot of Earth exploding.
  18. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    The movie is funny when it's nasty, as when Ron and Veronica trade insults at the anchor desk. Most of the time, though, it's not nasty enough.
  19. Riding Giants
    Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga.
  20. King Arthur
    In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    America's Heart and Soul
    The travelogue cinematography is often gorgeous, and the movie's folks, however hastily presented, are winning.
  22. 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.
  23. Before Sunset
    The new film, which unfolds in real time over the course of 80 minutes, is a deeper, darker, altogether more memorable experience. It doesn't extend the characters so much as fulfill them.
  24. De-Lovely
    De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.
  25. Spider-Man 2
    This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned.
  26. The Notebook
    You know what you want to see if you want to see The Notebook...You want to see girls in pretty 1940s dresses, soldiers in stirring World War II uniforms, handsome automobiles and equally handsome Southern landscapes. You want to see romance overcome adversity.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kaena: The Prophecy
    Originally conceived as a videogame, Kaena is now, instead, a creamy-colored yet derivative sci-fi fantasy with a few rip-offs so blatant (''The Empire Strikes Back,'' ''Alien,'' etc.) that even kiddie fans not yet mentally agile enough to make sense of the loopy plot could pick them out.
  28. Time of the Wolf
    There are no zombies out of ''28 Days Later'' to alleviate the slow creep of realistic doom in this chilly, tense corker.
  29. Two Brothers
    That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.
  30. White Chicks
    A tawdry excuse for a movie, but it has a handful of shameless giggles.
  31. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.
  32. The Hunting of the President
    The film is a sobering chronicle of the depressing circus of persecution and pseudo-scandal that was the Clinton years. But why did the President provoke such ire? A movie with insight into that might actually feel new.
  33. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce.
  34. Father and Son
    Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.
  35. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around.
  36. The Terminal
    I didn't mind The Terminal, but I didn't really buy it, either. Spielberg has crafted the film with a proficiency as seamless, and impersonal, as the setting, and you may feel, after a while, that you're longing for your departure time.
  37. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.
  38. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.
  39. Around the World in 80 Days
    What's new and nutty, though, is the physical comedy of Jackie Chan as Fogg's manservant.
  40. The Chronicles of Riddick
    This is a movie so devoted to metal that it couldn't care less about the flesh it destroys.
  41. The Stepford Wives
    At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.
  42. Garfield
    Cloddish, unfunny dud.
  43. Napoleon Dynamite
    Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.
  44. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry.
  45. The Corporation
    The Corporation has better manners and a longer fuse than ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' But the acerbic, sardonically illuminating Canadian documentary shares with its American cousin a certain bleak leftist glee in pursuit of its cause.
  46. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.
  47. I'll Sing for You
    One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.
  48. Bukowski: Born into This
    It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.
  49. Soul Plane
    If you're looking for comic insights beyond the well-documented ass differential between whites and blacks, well, golly, you ought to try another carrier.
  50. Saved!
    The director-cowriter, Brian Dannelly, has great fun tweaking the way American Christianity has been born again as a commodified, suburbanized, pop-saturated belief system.
  51. The Mother
    Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.
  52. Baadasssss!
    The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.
  53. The Day After Tomorrow
    A decent disaster pic comes down to the handful of colorful individuals who will live (or, depending on the prominence of their billing, die), as it has since the days of chewy disaster meatballs like ''The Towering Inferno'' and ''Earthquake.'' And the heaviest lifting in Emmerich's production falls to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal.
  54. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    The only metatwist missing in the twittering self-regard of this indulgent home movie is the participation of a documentary video crew -- ideally helmed by some TV exec's USC-grad son -- shooting the filmmakers shooting the play within the play.
  55. The Five Obstructions
    As he rises to each challenge, you realize that von Trier, the most exalted of prankish sadists, has orchestrated the filmmaking equivalent of the story of Job. The Five Obstructions glories in art, life, and the faith that binds them.
  56. Raising Helen
    Hudson's sunny, ringlet-tossing appeal fits snugly into the film's happy-homemaker ideology: She makes caring for three kids she barely knows look downright glamorous.
  57. Stateside
    If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?
  58. Love Me If You Dare
    The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.
  59. Control Room
    Anxiety-provoking documentary.
  60. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Yet S21, unlike many documentaries about the Nazi era, isn't a sickening panorama of brutality. Shot on video, it's quiet and intimate.
  61. Shrek 2
    Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.
  62. With All Deliberate Speed
    Sober and honorable, yet it's far from searching.
  63. Carandiru
    Lays on the compassion a little thick, yet its heartfelt squalor stays with you.
  64. Breakin' All the Rules
    The rules of good screenwriting are mostly broken, though Jamie Foxx's smash-and-grab charisma remains intact.
  65. A Slipping-Down Life
    Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.
  66. Strayed
    André Téchiné's beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed drama Strayed has less to do with the events and moral choices of the era that continue to shape French identity than with the timeless psychological effects of finding oneself unmoored from the familiar.
  67. Springtime in a Small Town
    There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable.
  68. Coffee and Cigarettes
    Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.
  69. Troy
    The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.
  70. The Mudge Boy
    It's not the homosexuality that's dubious here, it's the chicken.
  71. Godzilla
    Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters.
  72. Valentin
    Agresti fattens us up with the kind of kid's-eye-view tragi-comic adventures that regularly supply empty calories in artificially sweetened foreign-language imports.
  73. Super Size Me
    A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.
  74. Van Helsing
    Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.
  75. New York Minute
    The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.
  76. Superstar in a Housedress
    In Superstar in a Housedress, Curtis remains frozen in his flamboyance. The most resonant parts of the movie are, oddly, the interviews with his fellow glam bohemians.
  77. Laws of Attraction
    Operates on such outdated, unimaginative conventions of movie chemistry that Moore and Brosnan end up appearing older and stodgier than necessary.
  78. Since Otar Left
    Superb family drama.
  79. Godsend
    The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.
  80. Envy
    Leaves you with the dismaying sensation that Levinson, who should probably be off making his own version of ''The Player,'' has instead crafted a comedy of self-loathing, burying himself in a movie that deserves to be Vapoorized.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    It's pleasing to see Jones triumph, digging his way out of sand traps with miraculous wedge shots, but ''Stroke of Genius'' is proof that when a movie is nothing but inspirational, it can sink and disappear into a field of dreams.
  82. The Saddest Music in the World
    Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.
  83. Mean Girls
    A vinegary fable with a Splenda aftertaste -- is a harbinger of hope not only for future feminist comedies of any grit but also for ''SNL''-staffed feature films that don't disproportionately suck.
  84. People Say I'm Crazy
    People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.
  85. The Agronomist
    As Demme's audienc we're at the mercy of political passion overshadowed by style.
  86. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    Wide-ranging and beautifully edited -- it's a vivid evocation of a moment when even the ugliest guitar feedback could be taken as a serious political statement.
  87. Close Your Eyes
    A cheaply made piece of ''psychological'' occult schlock, subjects you to that depressing stop-and-go rhythm that defines inept fantasy thrillers.
  88. Man on Fire
    The movie's mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.
  89. The Twilight Samurai
    It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.
  90. 13 Going on 30
    The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.
  91. Morlang
    A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.
  92. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.
  93. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.
  94. The Punisher
    The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.
  95. 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.
  96. Young Adam
    The clammy power of Young Adam lies as much in the frank, emotional nakedness the actors bring to their roles under Mackenzie's care as in the baroque hopelessness of the plot.
  97. Twentynine Palms
    This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring.
  98. The Girl Next Door
    "Risky Business" had a great opening act and then descended into contrivances. This genial cardboard knockoff is contrived from the start but gets better as it goes along.
  99. The Whole Ten Yards
    It's every bit as nonsensical and overitalicized a mess as ''The Whole Nine Yards.''
  100. I'm Not Scared
    With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.
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