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 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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cinderella
    The character gags work, the dreamlike ball sequence still induces swooning, and if you aren’t on the edge of your seat for the climactic fitting, it’s time to get back on the romanticism meds.
  2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful and transporting experience — the best, I think, of Disney’s serious animated features in the multiplex era.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pumping Iron
    Arnold conquers all comers, your heart, and the world!
  4. Pink Flamingos
    In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.
  5. Apollo 11
    The NASA mission at the heart of the must-see documentary Apollo 11 reminds you what it feels to be truly awestruck.
  6. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    It’s not a movie for admiring in freeze frame; it’s the kind you fall into with your whole heart and emerge from feeling, for two hours at least, what it is to fully be transported by the magic of film.
  7. Nomadland
    It's hard, too, to picture any actress other than McDormand (who also has a producer credit) in the part. She doesn't just become Fern, she creates her: melding Zhao's screenplay to her own fierce character in a way that feels almost uncannily real. Together, they've managed to make that rare thing: a film that feels both necessary and sublime.
  8. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    Gazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nashville
    One of the greatest American films of the ’70s, Nashville remains Altman’s crowning achievement.
  10. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    It features the best real-life husband-wife pairing onscreen ever.
  11. Charade
    Hepburn doesn’t know whom to trust and neither does the audience, which is what makes this Hitchcock-lite thriller so much fun. The chemistry between the two leads — something surprisingly missing between Depp and Jolie — is electric.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Apartment
    Wilder’s movie manages to be a scathing social satire and cautionary tale (the corporate lingo is prescient: ”preliminarywise,” ”manpowerwise”); a brilliant physical comedy (Lemmon’s tennis-racket-spaghetti-straining skills are superb); and a devastating romance between Baxter and Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). All of which makes Wilder’s masterpiece tough to take if you’re looking for a laugh riot.
  13. Stagecoach
    Action-packed and jaw-droppingly epic (it was the first time director John Ford ever shot in Monument Valley), Stagecoach is the perfect Western to show to people who don’t like Westerns.
  14. The Hustler
    Paul Newman won his Best Actor Oscar for its 1986 sequel, The Color of Money, but he executed an equally award-worthy turn in Robert Rossen’s jazzy, boozy pool-hall morality play.
  15. A Woman Under the Influence
    Rowlands gives a harrowing performance as a housewife coming unhinged.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Force of Evil
    A highly stylized tale.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    French Connection II
    French Connection II is not exactly a fun flick (there’s a harrowing sequence where the bad guys shoot Hackman full of heroin, for example), but in its own twisted way it’s something of an art film — perhaps the most profoundly absurdist and pessimistic detective film ever made.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Freshman
    The Freshman is the smartest and most slyly amusing American farce in years.
  19. The Incredible Journey
    Assuming you love animals — hell, even if you don’t — this is one of the best buddy movies ever made.
  20. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    There’s no need to heavily editorialize here; Hittman is an assured enough filmmaker to portray this drama honestly and non-manipulatively, trusting her audience to interpret the complicated heartbreak of Autumn’s predicament without having to explain it to them.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Boy and His Dog
    Though the film may not have one decent character, A Boy and His Dog (rereleased after a six-year moratorium) manages to be a likable celebration of friendship among the ruins.
  22. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Swing Time
    Top Hat is tops with two of the duo’s most sublime numbers. The George Stevens-directed Swing Time, featuring glorious Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields songs, is just as good.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Shop Around the Corner
    What makes Shop timeless, ironically, is the specificity of its setting: a small department store in Budapest at the end of the global Depression.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    The gloriously baroque Bride of Frankenstein is in every way a richer, more imaginative experience than its straight-arrow predecessor.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    The film’s air of doom isn’t what some would call romantic, but as in The English Patient, it heightens the leads’ ardor.
  27. Woodstock
    Describing Woodstock as a concert movie is a little like calling Notre Dame a house of worship. In its scope and grandeur, its feel for the paradoxical nature of an event in which half a million middle-class bohemians created their own scruffy, surging community — a metropolis of mud — Woodstock remains the one true rock-concert spectacle, a counterculture Triumph of the Will. [1994]
  28. Taste of Cherry
    This outstanding work — so meditative — is clearly an affirmation of life (and never more provocatively than in the film’s unusual coda, in which moviemaking itself becomes part of the discussion). It’s also so grounded in the real emotional scope of ordinary people that the magnitude of the subject is answered in the most mysteriously matter-of-fact way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Naked City
    Nearly 50 years later, The Naked City‘s Oscar-winning cinematography and editing still have resonance.
  30. The Killing
    The kind of Swiss-watch precision and attention to detail that would eventually get Kubrick labeled Hollywood's most notorious perfectionist.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    One of the five essential Paramount comedies.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    Top Hat is tops with two of the duo’s most sublime numbers (The Piccolino, Cheek to Cheek), plus Fred’s rat-a-tat solo, a funnier-than-you-remember script (Erik Rhodes’ English-mangling designer exclaiming: ”Never again will I allow women to wear my dresses!”), and the hummable Irving Berlin score.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    The repartee is sharp, the plot is delightfully ridiculous, and the numbers — like ”Night and Day” and the epic Oscar winner ”The Continental” — are knockouts.
  34. Z
    A pulse-pounding procedural that pieces together the murder of a left-wing youth leader (Yves Montand). A baroque government cover-up is foiled by a tenacious inspector (Jean-?Louis Trintignant) whose rat-a-tat interrogations are like machine-gun fire. This is an amazing film.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Written on the Wind
    Boiling over with heated acting and schmaltzy scores, Douglas Sirk’s ’50s melodramas tap neatly into our collective trash psyche. Penetrate the surface, however, and they’re as serious and heartfelt as their director was.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Witches
    The wit is highly sophisticated, but there’s also action, suspense, adventure — to say nothing of the spectacular visual effects produced by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
  37. Chimes at Midnight
    It’s a feast for the ears, eyes, and soul.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Battleship Potemkin
    It’s required viewing in virtually every Film 101 class. Look at any MTV video or any slick million- dollar minute of advertising, and you’ll see its origins in that assemblage of shots in Potemkin.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Hidden
    The Hidden is hands down the best movie ever made about a homicidal alien slug that oozes from human host to human host.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    This decorous production brought Shakespeare’s rapture of first love to timeless life — and death — with achingly sensitive performances in a voluptuous period re-creation.
  41. A Shock to the System
    The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Spellbound
    The Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence is still a dazzler, and deciphering it points to the real killer. Analysis the way it oughta be!
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Meaning of Life
    Life is Python at its most relentlessly tasteless and uncompromisingly Swiftian.
  44. The Best Intentions
    The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.
  45. The Worst Person in the World
    Worst has no shortage of gorgeous-people problems — more than enough, in fact, to fill 12 cinematic "chapters" — but it vibrates with real life, a film so fresh and untethered to rom-com cliché it might actually reshape the idea of what movies like this can be.
  46. The Lost Daughter
    It's a moviegoing experience, sure — and if you need to hear it, one of the best of the year. But it's really a call to compassion, which makes it transcendent.
  47. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    Mitchum looks like a doomed slab of granite and gives a dynamite performance. The tough-guy dialogue and working-class Boston locations are so realistic it almost feels like you’re watching a documentary.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    Mason gives a grand performance, his voice racked with desperation and pain yet sonorous.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Big Sleep
    Bogart’s portrayal of the detective as wisecracking moralist now seems to be what makes The Big Sleep the best of the eight Philip Marlowe pictures made to date.
  50. Aftersun
    Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment.
  51. TÁR
    The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession.
  52. Oppenheimer
    Though they may seem disparate, the many elements of Oppenheimer refract and reflect each other, like a bunch of atoms creating a chain reaction or a group of scientists building off each other's ideas to forge something new.
  53. The Crucible
    As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly.
  54. The Eternal Daughter
    Obliquely related to her recent movies, Hogg's latest is either her slyest joke to date, or another swerve in an especially fecund career phase.
  55. Gladiator II
    As with its predecessor, what elevates Gladiator II in the cinematic arena is the ways its themes and dialogue underpin its outrageous spectacle. David Scarpa's script is also fiercely intelligent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Them!
    The movie’s then-state-of-the-art mechanical beasties aren’t entirely convincing, but this archetypal ’50s monsters-on-the-loose flick can still tingle your carapace, thanks to taut direction, an intelligent script, a believable cast, and a nail-bitingly effective climax in the sewers of Los Angeles.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    National Velvet
    No other child actor — nor adult one — has ever captured the pure, unconditional love between human and animal as Elizabeth Taylor does here. And few other films have caught the can’t-wait-another-second excitement of childhood fixation.
  58. Saltburn
    The film is not for the faint of heart, but it is viscerally compelling and unafraid to luxuriate in its own elegant weirdness. Its endless visual and literary layers will bring its ardent admirers back to it again and again, because it is a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    White Heat
    Walsh’s White Heat, starring Cagney in great form as psychotic mamma’s boy Cody Jarrett, is shot by shot, frame by frame, the hard-boiled masterpiece of the bunch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ladybird Ladybird
    Although based on a true story, Ladybird Ladybird is also a parable of how government’s giant cogs sometimes crush individuals and never miss a turn. Loach puts us where we can hear the people crying.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Know Where I'm Going!
    The writing-directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is best known for Technicolor wonders The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, but I Know Where I’m Going!, a far less famous black-and-white romantic fable, is as charming as anything in their oeuvre.
  62. The Last Showgirl
    [Coppola] crafts an elegy to a Vegas of a different era and the tarnished reality of once sparkling dreams.
  63. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Buddha
    This adventure, interwoven with the spectacular tale of Siddhartha’s journey toward enlightenment, makes for magical, mind-broadening entertainment.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    The movie simultaneously exploits and condemns our fear of the other — we suspect the stranger we know nothing about simply because we know nothing about him, and we almost hope that he's the killer because we so desperately want to be right.
  66. Diva
    Diva is based on one novel in a series about Gorodish and Alba by the pseudonymous ”Delacorta,” but the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.
  67. Star Trek
    The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.
  68. An Education
    Afterward, you'll want to listen to the Beatles sing ''She's Leaving Home.'' It might be a girl like Jenny the lads had in mind.
  69. Frozen River
    A tale of ordinary Americans scraping bottom, yet there's a redemption in that. The film asks: If you were this desperate, wouldn't you do the same?
  70. A Single Man
    Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.
  71. Fish Tank
    The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station.
  72. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.
  73. A Serious Man
    Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."
  74. Broken Embraces
    Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.
  75. Paranormal Activity
    With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.
  76. The Dark Knight
    At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. It's a ride for the gut AND the brain.
  77. In the Loop
    The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on "The West Wing" are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop.
  78. No Country for Old Men
    The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success.
  79. Bright Star
    Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.
  80. Adventureland
    For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.
  81. The Departed
    The very title The Departed suggests a James Joycean take on Irish-Catholic sentiment when, of course, this story is anything but: It's Scorsesean, and he's in full bloom.
  82. Séraphine
    Moreau is bewitching -- she simply breathes her role, without a hint of vanity.
  83. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The most beautiful movie ever made about a man who could only move one eyelid -- almost dangerously beautiful.
  84. Cold Souls
    Darkly funny, twisty-cool existential tragicomedy, loaded with smart notions and filmed like a surrealist dream.
  85. The Lives of Others
    Utterly riveting fictional drama.
  86. Hunger
    A disturbingly avid re-creation of the last six weeks in the life and slow, self-imposed wasting of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.
  87. Gran Torino
    A movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness. Don't let the star's overly familiar squint fool you: This is subtle, perceptive stuff.
  88. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    It's probably the impresario's best-made movie yet, his most joyful, and his most moving.
  89. Million Dollar Baby
    A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.
  90. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    A curious case indeed: an extravagantly ambitious movie that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.
  91. The Queen
    Helen Mirren's allure lies not in finding what's regal in every woman she plays, but in finding what's womanly in every royal.
  92. Juno
    A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy, leaves political debate at the ticket counter and focuses solely on what it's like for Juno MacGuff to be Juno MacGuff.
  93. Tell No One
    Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching.
  94. The Edge of Heaven
    Hopping from Germany to Turkey and back again, Akin is out to capture the ways that a globalized world can tear up our hearts, and repair them, too.
  95. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation.
  96. Thirst
    A gaudy, daring, operatic, and bloody funny provocation of a melodrama from Park Chan-wook.
  97. House of Flying Daggers
    An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression. At the same time, it offers something we rarely encounter in a whirling martial-arts extravaganza: a romantic passion that's woven into the very fabric of the action.
  98. State of Play
    Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.
  99. Into the Wild
    The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he's running TO.
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