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. Assassination Tango
    Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater.
  2. The Core
    It's a schlockier ''Armageddon'' crossed with ''Fantastic Voyage,'' minus the fun.
  3. Head of State
    Rock and Mac exult in the kind of highly charged verbal and physical antics that are star-turn rewards for performers currently at the tops of their games.
  4. Raising Victor Vargas
    The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.
  5. Basic
    Another depressingly empty action thriller.
  6. Piglet's Big Movie
    A collection of shorts, here presented as flashbacks. All three derive from A.A. Milne's original tales, but retain only a smidgen of his droll, easy-chair wit.
  7. Chuen jik sat sau
    Too scattershot to take hold.
  8. Boat Trip
    Had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.
  9. View from the Top
    A romantic comedy with all the confectionary value of one of those watery diet shakes; it practically evaporates while you're watching it.
  10. Dreamcatcher
    The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.
  11. Willard
    The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.
  12. The Hunted
    The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.
  13. Agent Cody Banks
    The real mission is product placement, of course: The movie seems to be set against the silvery backdrop of the Sharper Image catalog.
  14. Spun
    Spun is accomplished, but it's also numbing. It's hard to have much connection to people who never connect with each other.
  15. Bend It Like Beckham
    The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.
  16. Laurel Canyon
    The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale. Everything good in this rock & roll fantasy belongs to the sexy, worldly-wise McDormand, who makes Jane ripe, real, and irresistible.
  17. Nowhere in Africa
    Audience empathy for the displaced Redlichs, coupled with the filmmaker's proffered charms of wise natives and their mysterious rituals, goes a long way toward making this lyrical travelogue a crowd pleaser.
  18. Bringing Down the House
    Stock farce characters and stale scenes of mayhem fill the downtime between the Martin-Latifah skirmishes.
  19. The Safety of Objects
    The disciplined performances play against schmaltz, and the casting is inspired.
  20. Irreversible
    After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.
  21. Tears of the Sun
    Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.
  22. Ten
    A glimpse into a society that has grown more open, more free, and also more casually selfish in its interpersonal aggression.
  23. Cradle 2 the Grave
    By the time Li enters the obligatory ''ring of fire'' to face his final opponent, you realize just how forthrightly rote and businesslike ''Cradle'' is. And you don't mind. Because business, it turns out, is good.
  24. Poolhall Junkies
    Plays out like a variation on an old design dictum: If you can't make it good, make it big.
  25. Open Hearts
    Well-made film. Indeed, discovering such a small pleasure is the kind of experience that rewards film lovers who browse with open eyes as well as hearts.
  26. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal.
  27. Dark Blue
    Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness.
  28. Lawless Heart
    The storytelling structure is far more interesting than the story itself. And the elegiac pictures of boats and water are, dismayingly, most engrossing of all.
  29. Gods and Generals
    Bloodless and false.
  30. Old School
    Under Reitman's deanship, Ferrell lets his freak flag fly and Vaughn unlooses a notably funny, light-on-his-feet lunkheadedness.
  31. The Life of David Gale
    A self-righteous mishmash that can't decide whether to be a tribute to the fanatical leftist passion that thrives in college towns, an indictment of that very same fanaticism, or a ghoulishly didactic snuff-video thriller.
  32. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The songs of the South African freedom fighters were a literal call to arms. The music succeeded -- magnificently. The movie, on the other hand, is only so-so.
  33. Painted Fire
    Art history majors may write in with corrections. Meanwhile, I'm declaring that the masterly, big-canvas biographical drama Chi-hwa-seon: Painted Fire is about the Jackson Pollock of 19th-century Korea.
  34. The Jungle Book 2
    The same money-minded dreamers who found a way to ''Return to Neverland'' have hacked a path back to Baloo heaven.
  35. Gerry
    The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.
  36. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    The fact that it's difficult to believe someone who looks as dewy as Tautou would be so dangerous is much of the game.
  37. All the Real Girls
    It's thrillingly original, lyrical, and wise, and the filmmaker conveys the mutable intensity of young love with the authoritative originality of an important filmmaker.
  38. Daredevil
    Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.
  39. Stone Reader
    It's ''Moskowitz's March,'' really -- and it ends in stirring victory
  40. Zus & zo
    The title translates, roughly, as ''This & That,'' a confectionary shrug that pretty well sums up the blasé inconsequentiality of it all.
  41. Deliver Us from Eva
    Union, who looks so chic and can talk so bitchy-funny, doesn't so much establish a character as roll out a series of attitudes. That's all she's called on to do. That's all anyone is called on to do: Be very tame, and make much ado about zilch.
  42. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    With its ungainly double-deception premise, How to Lose a Guy feels like it was made out of two connect-the-dots drawings laid haphazardly on top of one another.
  43. Shanghai Knights
    This is an action-comedy sequel so indefatigably preposterous and farklemt -- as they say in certain Upper West Side saloons -- that it actually improves on the original.
  44. May
    Though ultimately too waterlogged with student-film self-seriousness to revel fully in its low-rent joie de cleaver -- nevertheless taps into a furious atavistic energy that reflects well on the filmmaker and his fully committed cast.
  45. Biker Boyz
    A blatant re-spin of ''The Fast and the Furious'' that also happens to be a far better movie.
  46. Lost in La Mancha
    Nothing more than a modest, streamlined ''making of...'' diary about a movie that never got made -- it's ''Project Greenlight'' with bigger stars and bigger disasters.
  47. The Guru
    Bright dialogue and finely embroidered performances adorn The Guru like festive beading on a pair of made-in-India bedroom slippers.
  48. Final Destination 2
    The only pleasure to be derived from the resulting carnage comes from the Rube Goldbergesque chain reactions that precede each fatality.
  49. The Recruit
    From the get-go, The Recruit is one of those thrillers that delights in pulling the rug out from under you, only to find another rug below that.
  50. Darkness Falls
    Darkness Falls is like something salvaged from Stephen King's wastebasket.
  51. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    Her memories lack the quality of revelation -- that is, up until the remarkable final section, in which she describes the last weeks in the bunker with Hitler and Eva Braun.
  52. Divine Intervention
    Too fragmented to be much more than a flip of the finger to history; the movie, with its mostly mute characters, is too content to plod.
  53. A Guy Thing
    Jason Lee seems to have been bitten by a vampire who sucked out all his prickly charisma. You see the promise of stardom dribbling through his fingers.
  54. National Security
    The funny thing about Lawrence is he's often paired with a partner (e.g., ''Blue Streak,'' ''Bad Boys,'' etc.), yet has no aptitude for sharing the screen.
  55. Kangaroo Jack
    A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.
  56. City of God
    Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.
  57. Crimson Gold
    A fable of money as the root of jealousy, discord, violence, but the film's slippery fascination as sociological exposé is the flip side of its thinness as drama.
  58. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.
  59. Just Married
    Collapses into the most generic sort of teen movie-ville, just at the moment it's convinced you that its lightly appealing stars are capable of better.
  60. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.
  61. Love Liza
    Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.
  62. Nicholas Nickleby
    At a little over two hours, this is a pared-down but no less essential Dickensian feast.
  63. Max
    It challenges, this nervy oddity, like modern art should.
  64. The Hours
    While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.
  65. The Pianist
    The result is a movie, and Cannes Palme d'Or winner, of riveting power and sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker -- and star, too.
  66. Chicago
    Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''
  67. Pinocchio
    Benigni's Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977.
  68. Catch Me If You Can
    The film's charm ends up worn out by the very perfection of Frank's con. We look at this teen wizard of rotating identity, and we realize we know everything about him except who he is.
  69. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    An average kid-empowerment fantasy with slightly above-average brains.
  70. Two Weeks Notice
    Knows what it needs to do for both its stars, does it, and doesn't make a federal case about it. I'd watch these two together again in a New York minute.
  71. Morvern Callar
    A movie's refusal to judge bad behavior can be a subtle way of trumping the audience -- a passive-aggressive form of one-upmanship.
  72. Spider
    Fiennes' very skin participates in the project -- his fingernails are nicotine-stained the color of tea bags. The performance works; it's a ballet, a concerto of big, big Acting.
  73. Narc
    Narc is as cop movie as a cop movie can be.
  74. Gangs of New York
    Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.
  75. Antwone Fisher
    Intense but dignified.
  76. 25th Hour
    Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.
  77. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.
  78. The Guys
    A small, heartfelt film.
  79. Evelyn
    Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, and Alan Bates play Desmond's legal eagles, and when joined by Brosnan, the sight of this grandiloquent quartet lolling in pretty Irish settings is a pleasant enough thing, 'tis.
  80. Maid in Manhattan
    No maid, and no fancy lady either, would swoon for a fellow as damp as the hero so grudgingly coughed up by Fiennes. In the words of Cinderellas everywhere, no effin' way.
  81. Star Trek: Nemesis
    A little bit obsessed with replication.
  82. Intact
    Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.
  83. Drumline
    Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.
  84. The Hot Chick
    At this point, we don't go to Rob Schneider movies looking for laughs: We go for comfort. They're the cinematic equivalent of meatloaf, dependable and filling in their quotidian idiocy.
  85. About Schmidt
    The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.
  86. Analyze That
    It's not just that Tony Soprano is richer, darker, cooler, and scarier. The dude gets more laughs.
  87. Empire
    Leguizamo owns Empire, the first film to capture the live-wire crackle of his one-man stage shows -- He's front and center in nearly every scene, and he holds the screen with a simmering self-assurance.
  88. Adaptation.
    The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it.
  89. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi.
  90. Russian Ark
    It was only with the advent of digital technology that the notion of an entire film done in a single take became possible. Mike Figgis got there first with ''Time Code,'' and now the Russian director Alexander Sokurov has brought off a comparably startling feat with Russian Ark.
  91. They
    The hilarious diminuendo of that title is such that the movie might as well have been called ''Wes Craven Presents: Not a Hell of a Lot.''
  92. Extreme Ops
    Less a movie than a 93-minute Mountain Dew commercial.
  93. Solaris
    Soderbergh, in essence, has come up with a plodding and far less psychologically arresting version of ''Ghost.''
  94. Eight Crazy Nights
    You know all that artistic cred Adam Sandler built up with his acclaimed work in ''Punch-Drunk Love''? Well, he flushes it down the crapper with Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights -- the most ill-conceived animated comedy since the 1991 dog ''Rover Dangerfield.''
  95. Die Another Day
    The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it.
  96. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.
  97. The Emperor's Club
    A traditionally dressed, old-fashioned drama, starring Kevin Kline in the Robin Williams role -- is as much about the moral development of the adult as about his boys'. More so, maybe.
  98. The Quiet American
    Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet.
  99. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.
  100. Talk to Her
    Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.
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