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. Spaceship Earth
    It's a fascinating story, this clash of 1960s idealism with the cold realities of modern science, though not one that director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Story of Arthur Russell) is fully able to bite off and chew in Spaceship Earth, his fitfully enthralling but frustratingly incomplete documentary.
  2. Driveways
    A gentle, almost willfully recessive story about love and loss and all the ways that people find to share the burden of them both, one unhurried day at a time.
  3. Blue Story
    As a director, Onwubolu brings a tender, vivid touch the film’s relationships — particularly Timmy’s giddy plunge into first love with the fiercely independent Leah (Karla Simone-Spence) — though he stumbles when it comes to building deeper storylines around them; there's almost no narrative turn that doesn't seem telegraphed from the jump.
  4. All Day and a Night
    A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.
  5. The Half of It
    If The Half of It lacks the pizzazz and energy of similar Netflix fare, and doesn't have much to say beyond its initial setup, it at least takes a stab at doing something different.
  6. To the Stars
    To the Stars seems downcast, at first glance, but it serves as a gentle, lovely reminder that one true friendship, even forged amid adversity, can be enough to keep you looking skyward.
  7. Bad Education
    Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.
  8. True History of the Kelly Gang
    You can see gifted actors like Hoult and MacKay struggling to make the most of the material, and add finer shadings to Shaun Grant's bare-knuckled script. But for all its real visual flair, it's hard not to feel that the film misses something crucial about Kelly in the end — trading machismo for manhood, and sensation for true history.
  9. Extraction
    Extraction mostly delivers what its swaggering trailer promises: international scenery; insidious villains; a taciturn, tree-trunk Aussie. And the comfort of knowing that the kids — or at least the one he came for — are probably alright.
  10. Endings, Beginnings
    If ever there was a movie to suffer to, Endings, Beginnings is it.
  11. Love Wedding Repeat
    If only hilarity ensued; instead, Wedding manages to feel both overwrought and underbaked, consistently squeezing the natural charm out of its players in order to bang their hapless miscommunications and personality quirks into the ground. It's enough to make it through once; Repeat may be a bridge too far.
  12. Trolls World Tour
    Despite falling for some classic sequel potholes, Trolls World Tour continues the fun energy of its predecessor in a way that should provide some quarantine relief for families.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Camp, like last year's "American Factory," is a Netflix project with the not-inconsiderable heft of executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama behind it, which will undoubtedly earn it some extra attention. That's great if it helps the film, though it's clear who the real heroes are here: a group of kids that society consistently marginalized, mistreated, and ignored, until they fought their own way off of the sidelines and into the world.
  14. Lost Girls
    It helps immensely that the film has an actress like Amy Ryan (Birdman, Beautiful Boy) to play Mari Gilbert, whose years-long battle to get anyone at all — the press, the police, the people of New York — to care about her daughter Shannan forms the emotional core of the story.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bloodshot
    It’s a lot of bog-standard action stuff glommed onto a deeper metaphysical muddle; Inception drawn in extra-thick Sharpie and testosterone. If the whole thing is ultimately a shell for Diesel to do what he does, the ending also takes care to sing in the key of sequel too: Come fast cars, Avatars, and farther galaxies, there will be blood, again.
  16. The Hunt
    The Hunt stuffs a satire grenade down America’s pants, hoping the shrapnel spreads from sea to shining sea. The explosion is messy, but it sure is an explosion, with a brisk hour-and-half runtime full of violent twists and cackling turns.
  17. Spenser Confidential
    Fists will smash; pecs will flex; hard consonants, like dirty cops, don't stand a chance. It's the only sure thing in this crazy world, kids — except maybe a sequel.
  18. First Cow
    A bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life.
  19. Hope Gap
    If Bening’s genteel British accent sometimes feels a little wobbly, her character is by far the most vivid force in the film.
  20. The Way Back
    Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way.
  21. Onward
    Even at a relatively brief hour and 37 minutes, the familiar contours of Scanlon's story line struggle to conjure the wonder that Pixar’s most transcendent movies do; instead of truly new, it’s mostly old things borrowed, and tinted blue.
  22. Big Time Adolescence
    If Big Time isn’t exactly a PSA for good adulting, it’s still an endearingly messy portrait of boyhood and manhood and all the lessons in between.
  23. The Invisible Man
    If the buildup and catharsis of its final minutes are more than a little silly, and marred by Whannell’s urge to put too neat bow on it all, the movie still has its satisfying jolts — including possibly one of the single most shocking screen deaths so far this year.
  24. Emma.
    The freshness is found, primarily, in the energy of her storytelling and her vital young cast.
  25. The Call of the Wild
    Though this tale of redemption and survival doesn’t feel particularly relevant or essential in today’s media landscape, it still has the capacity to entertain and move, well over a century after the story first was published. And Ford’s presence and performance inject it with a wild heart it desperately needs.
  26. Downhill
    As an attempt to scale the craggy heights of a marriage in crisis, Downhill may be more bunny slope than black diamond — a force mineure, but still worth the trip.
  27. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
    Though it also feels like the kind of movie you wish they made more often for all the boys, and girls, still figuring out who they are — especially the ones who don’t tend to see themselves nearly enough on screen: a reflection shinier than real life maybe, but generous and good-hearted to the core.
  28. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.
  29. The Rhythm Section
    In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis. But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.
  30. 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.
  31. Minari
    Minari works quietly and methodically, embracing its lush rural setting with striking glimpses of its characters, alone against vast and empty landscapes. Chung’s directing feels drawn from memory, the scattered and sparkling quality of recollections, carefully assembled. It’s perhaps why every second rings so true.
  32. Black Bear
    It’s brainy, sure, but the emotional experience is what’s most vivid. The plot beats may confound you, but the feelings behind them are crystal-clear.
  33. Wendy
    Zeitlin has a gift for casting vivid new talent, and for creating images that read like fevered visual poetry: gorgeously saturated tableaus of the natural world, all luminous light and color. But he also tends to strip away nearly every necessary aspect of plot and character development in his strenuous pursuit of whimsy.
  34. On the Record
    If the subject ultimately proves to be more slippery and diffuse than in the duo’s previous films (The Invisible War addressed sexual assault in the military, The Hunting Ground, campus rape), it also never feels like less than required viewing: brutal, heartbreaking, and — with or without Oprah’s co-sign — utterly necessary.
  35. Promising Young Woman
    As satire, Woman‘s first two acts are fun but broad: a winky, wildly stylized slice of girl-powered revenge porn. And Mulligan, who’s always given smart, delicately shaded performances in movies like Far from the Madding Crowd and An Education (she was great in 2018’s underseen Wildlife) is an entirely different animal here: furious, damaged, ferociously funny.
  36. Shirley
    The plot, admittedly, is scattered; this is par for the course for Decker, but in a movie with more conventional bones, the shagginess sticks out. Shirley gorgeously invokes its subject’s style, however, via a disarmingly off-kilter score; handheld camerawork that gets intimate with characters’ psyches; and, most strikingly, a series of unforgettable images that intensify this study of female awakening and decay.
  37. The Courier
    Ironbark might not be a great film in the end, but it is a satisfying good one — a story that’s at its best when it colors outside the black and white (or Communist red, as it were) lines of war and hones in on the real, fallible men and women who fight it, one quiet inglorious step at a time.
  38. Zola
    If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.
  39. The Assistant
    Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach.
  40. Bad Hair
    You sense Simien’s pushing into uncharted territory. Yet his distinctive gifts as a director are increasingly relegated to the margins, propelling a narrative that works better in theory than execution.
  41. Miss Americana
    You wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago. But that’s the point of the whole movie, maybe: She was always there; it just took her 30 years to get to here.
  42. The Gentlemen
    The Gentlemen is nothing if not a callback to the Locks of yesteryear, star-stacked and defibrillated with enough juice to jolt a gorilla out of cardiac arrest.
  43. Dolittle
    The film is so eager to please, so relentlessly quippy and quirky and tipped with antic whimsy, it often feels like visiting a zoo built into a Tilt-A-Whirl.
  44. Bad Boys for Life
    Banter and bullets is the action-movie MO, and the duo at the center of it hardly seem to have to stretch to spread their bickering charm on thick. By the shock-and-awe climax, though — when everything but the goatee pretty much goes up in flames — other things have worn thin.
  45. Like a Boss
    The film tries to replicate the formula that made "Bridesmaids" sing, pairing a heartfelt story exploring the complexities of female friendship with bawdy, over-the-top comedy. But the first half of the equation only partly succeeds, and the latter falls totally flat.
  46. Underwater
    She’s (Stewart) just another action hero — albeit a smart, flinty one with exceptionally good hair — learning the hard way that under the sea, as in space, no one can hear you scream.
  47. The Grudge
    The Grudge is overly reliant on jump scares and the sheer number of characters involved here means that some are thinly-drawn, though the crackerjack cast of actors breathes at least some life into their respective parts. The real asset here — as well as the movie’s main likely problem for many viewers — is its bleak tone.
  48. Clemency
    Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.
  49. Cats
    Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all. And yet that somewhere under the Jellicle moonlight, it is somehow, too, an A++.
  50. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    We need a new franchise designation for this stumbling, bloodless conglomeration of What Once Was. Rise of the Skywalker isn’t an ending, a sequel, a reboot, or a remix. It’s a zombie.
  51. Spies in Disguise
    It’s a proud piece of family entertainment with a good heart, an eye for inventive action, and a delightfully wacky sense of humor.
  52. Black Christmas
    A sort of forgettable Christmas wisp, a black-hearted jingle bell only half-rung.
  53. A Hidden Life
    A Hidden Life’s cinematographer is Jörg Widmer, Malick’s longtime camera operator. His work is handsome and a tad too dutiful. There are so many gorgeous shots of Franz scything through farmland, and I kept wishing someone had scythed a half-hour off the running time.
  54. Richard Jewell
    As a filmmaker, Eastwood may not be famed for subtlety, but he does have a way with economy. And he delivers Jewell’s story with almost no unnecessary flourishes; a taut, streamlined drama leavened by crucial doses of empathy.
  55. Uncut Gems
    A vibrantly madcap dark comedy.
  56. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Even if The Next Level doesn’t set a new high score, it still proves this franchise isn’t out of lives just yet.
  57. The Two Popes
    As these vastly different men parry, spar, and circle one another, Meirelles’ intimately talky two-hander — not counting, depending on how you might choose to qualify these things, a third invisible hand upstairs — works with wit and quiet humor to demystify perhaps the most powerful and insular post in the world.
  58. Bombshell
    Bombshell belongs to its three main female stars. It’s their fierce, finely shaded performances that transcend the film’s drab visual style and drier episodic moments — not just by speaking truth to power, but by confronting the audience’s own ideas of who the right to do that belongs to.
  59. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    There’s almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn’t be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. That’s how visually ravishing it is to experience writer-director Céline Sciamma’s arthouse swoon of movie — winner of both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
  60. The Aeronauts
    Jones reportedly did nearly all the stunts herself in a real balloon, and she makes the stakes feel fretfully real despite the dreamy, almost painterly quality of George Steel’s cinematography. By the time the story comes back to earth, though, that urgency is largely gone with the wind, and the film returns to what it was: a whimsical, oddly airless curiosity.
  61. Queen & Slim
    Violent and sexy, balanced between hope and despair, definably too-much and unapologetically mythic. The road is bumpy, but what a trip.
  62. 1917
    The film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.
  63. Little Women
    If Gerwig’s woke Women-hood verges on anachronism, though, it also feels fully loyal to the spirit of Alcott, a woman always well ahead of her time. And like a sort of balm too, for an era when the novel’s long-held values — courage, kindness, strength in vulnerability — still feel a lot further away than they should.
  64. After Parkland
    What feels important in Parkland is less about pushing any kind of political agenda or viewpoint than about simply listening, and bearing witness.
  65. 21 Bridges
    It’s not a bad setup, and Bridges would be a better movie, easily, if it had let a little more nuance creep into its script. Instead, it lays the task squarely on Boseman’s shoulders — having him fill in all those broad strokes with his own fine lines, and spraying bullets and mayhem across the rest.
  66. Frozen II
    Frozen 2 makes a valiant effort to live up to its predecessor, but can’t escape its shadow.
  67. Dark Waters
    These Waters never quite run as strong or as deep as they should.
  68. Waves
    In the sometimes overstuffed script there’s more than a touch, too, of the TV projects two of its stars are best known for: This Is Us (Brown) and Euphoria (Demie). If the pairing of those two wildly different shows sounds counterintuitive, it speaks, maybe, to how much Shults seems to want to fit into Waves both dramatically and style-wise. In end though, substance — or at least his sincere approximation of it — wins.
  69. Charlie's Angels
    This new Charlie’s Angels gets very crush-y between silly excess and striving ambition, but even the sugar is flammable.
  70. Last Christmas
    It takes a lot of talent, apparently, to make a movie like Last Christmas — a pile-on of dingle-bell schmaltz so deeply ridiculous it’s almost hard to believe all the top-tier names that went into it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Current War: Director's Cut
    Cumberbatch’s talent for giving the impression that his brain’s moving a little faster than everyone else’s suits his new subject perfectly — if only the movie moved with the same thrilling momentum.
  72. Doctor Sleep
    Doctor Sleep is a mess. It’s way too long, clashing somber sobriety with loony cheap thrills. The Shining homages turn shameless and cheap. The jumpscares are more funny than scary.
  73. Black and Blue
    Harris, eyes blazing, brings a humanity and an urgency that serve the story maybe more than it deserves: a performance above and beyond the call of duty.
  74. Terminator: Dark Fate
    At least Dark Fate is frequently bad in a funny way, without the dutiful dullness of the last couple sequels.
  75. Tell Me Who I Am
    But the truth, when it does come out, is devastating — to the point that it can feel invasive to watch such a profoundly private moment unfold on camera for our benefit.
  76. The Cave
    It delivers something more and better, too: a moving, beautifully humanistic story whose inevitable hardships are laced with real hope and levity.
  77. The Lighthouse
    The mannered aye-matey dialogue often gives Lighthouse the performative feeling of a play, but Eggers (The Witch) is also a masterful stylist; judging by several cues, the story is set in some version of the 19th century, though it tends to treat time less as a set fact than a sort of metaphysical condition.
  78. Zombieland: Double Tap
    For all the flying intestines and skulls that split open like past-due melons, Double Tap has another squishy organ at its center: a big, goofball heart.
  79. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    For kids maybe this is still magical; grownups, though, will waste many long, busily bedazzled minutes wondering why the powers that were able to bring Pfeiffer and Jolie together on screen couldn’t do at least marginally better by them both, and give them parts to truly sink their movie-star teeth into.
  80. The King
    What’s left is primarily a series of grand battleground set pieces — filmed crunchily, and well — and a series of consistently strong performances. (Has Mendelsohn every not been menacing and great in anything?).
  81. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    What’s lacking in this entertaining pulp quest, I think, is some essential surprise.
  82. Parasite
    A serrating, brilliantly stylized portrait of class and fate and family in modern-day Korea.
  83. Little Monsters
    It’s Nyong’o who makes Monsters worth spending 90 breezy, bloody minutes on; wielding her tiny guitar like she did a fateful pair of scissors earlier this year in Jordan Peele’s "Us," she’s both a warrior queen and a fallible, believable human woman — and never not a movie star in every scene.
  84. Gemini Man
    Somehow though, the film registers as a strange, airless whiff — stale, inert, and oddly melancholy. The script rarely rises above the schematics of a thousand thrillers that languish on late-night cable, and the almost willfully cliché dialogue sounds as if it’s been generated by some kind of free-with-purchase screenwriting app.
  85. Dolemite Is My Name
    Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    For those who saw it back in 1972, The Harder They Come was a revelation, evocative of a poor but vibrant Jamaican culture few Americans knew about, with a bombshell reggae soundtrack that for all intents introduced the musical genre here.
  87. The Laundromat
    If a motley crew of movie stars is what it takes to shine more light on government malfeasance, then let Meryl carry that torch in a wig and a bucket hat. But as a pure movie-going experience, it’s all kind of a wash.
  88. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy in the Sky’s attempt to sync cosmological visions with a believable human drama never quite works.
  89. The Irishman
    It all becomes a sort of muddle for a while midway, one that’s not nearly as compelling as the acting itself, which is largely phenomenal, frequently surprising, and often more than a little bit heartbreaking.
  90. Pain and Glory
    In the scheme of Almodóvar’s rich catalogue, Pain is probably too small, too sad, and too obtuse to really recommend as any kind of starting point. For longtime fans, though, it’s a gift; the kind of quiet glory worth waiting a few decades for.
  91. Abominable
    Abominable’s themes and arc are familiar kids’ movie fare, with only one real plot twist. But its reverent attitude toward nature and wonder is a welcome addition to the cartoon canon.
  92. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Donald Trump was less kind, essentially abandoning him after his then still-secret diagnosis. Tyrnauer smartly doesn’t overplay the symbolism of their relationship, or work too hard to connect the dots; it’s all there to take or leave in the film’s shrewd, illuminating exploration of a man whose influence, for better or worse, may have far outdone even his wildest dreams.
  93. Ad Astra
    The result is a genuine space epic which also succeeds in being a very personal film, thanks in large part to Pitt’s performance.
  94. Hustlers
    Beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart.
  95. Marriage Story
    Though it may not be an easy movie to watch, or even a particularly original one — there’s still Kramer vs. Kramer, after all — Marriage still feels like something special on the screen: a movie that somehow makes its intimacy seem like a radical act, one messy, heart-wrecking moment at a time.
  96. Harriet
    If its aim to inspire and educate inevitably leaves the movie feeling a little classroom-bound, Harriet is still an impassioned, edifying portrait of a remarkable life, and a fitting showcase for the considerable talents of its star, Tony-winning British actress Cynthia Erivo.
  97. Knives Out
    A silly, stabby, supremely clever whodunnit that only really suffers from having too little room for each of its talented players to fully register in the film’s limited run time.
  98. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    Hanks plays Fred as he lays: a sort of secular Buddha in a red knit cardigan whose gently probing questions and Zen proclamations work as a slow dissolving agent on Lloyd’s resistance.
  99. The Goldfinch
    The Goldfinch feels like more than the sum of its disparate parts; a painting in the wrong frame, maybe, but one whose imperfect beauty still draws you in.
  100. Downton Abbey
    Life is hard; Downton Abbey is easy.
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