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. SuperFly
    Neither as satisfying as the remake of "Shaft" nor as objectionable as the remake of "Death Wish," the second coming of Superfly wants to tap into that same ’70s grindhouse allure and put a similarly slick modern gloss on it. The results are pretty mixed.
  2. Krystal
    Krystal feels like the result of an elaborate blunder wherein three different scripts were accidentally shuffled together and then — presumably through a series of hijinks — the director accidentally shot it all straight through.
  3. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The real magic of the movie comes in its echoes of the first — namely, Black’s performance as the Goosebumps mastermind.
  4. Kodachrome
    Kodachrome isn’t a bad movie, it just never for a moment feels like a real one: A road-trip dramedy so schematic and loaded for emotional bear it feels like it was generated by a Sundance screenwriting app.
  5. Sleeping with the Enemy
    As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.
  6. Star Maps
    An ambitious debut feature.
  7. Kids
    If Kids is simultaneously engrossing and detached, observant and just plain showy, that may be because the film is so caught up in trying to be a statement that it never develops its characters beyond their rowdy, bellicose facades.
  8. Executive Decision
    Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.
  9. Destination Wedding
    The script, by writer-director Victor Levin (Survivor’s Remorse, Mad About You) comes on like a rom-com David Mamet freight train; its verbal turns are so wildly overwritten that all the actors can really do is hold on to the wheel well, racing through reams of ratatat dialogue. But Ryder and Reeves surrender to it gamely, and sprinkle a sort of movie-star pixie dust over the too-muchness of the text.
  10. 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.
  11. The Aftermath
    Sadly, director James Kent’s sappy and utterly unconvincing new film The Aftermath shows that even the most foolproof ideas wither in the face of turgid, overripe melodrama.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    Neither as fun nor as faithful to the spirit of the original comics. It’s a bigger, slicker movie, but not a better one.
  13. Jungle 2 Jungle
    Tim Allen doesn’t do anything new in Jungle2Jungle, but he’s got that Allen-via-Disney persona operating at maximum efficiency.
  14. Stuart Saves His Family
    Stuart Saves His Family is a hit-or-miss satire in which Stuart, for too many scenes, comes off simply as a goofy neurotic butterball.
  15. The Vanishing
    [Sluizer's] original, pitch-black ending would have sent people out of the theater giddy with shock; it’s doubtful anyone will remember his new one long enough to tell their friends.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Angels in the Outfield
    At Angels‘ end, Al tells Roger, ”We’re always watching.” That’s more than audiences will say about this disappointing movie.
  17. A Walk in the Clouds
    With (Keanu's) stiff body language and wooden delivery, his every word falls like drops of flat Diet Coke rather than intoxicating wine.
  18. 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++.
  19. High Flying Bird
    Written by Oscar-winning Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, the new film feels stagey, confusing, and didactically obvious. You can tell that it was written by a playwright (which McCraney was and is).
  20. Her Smell
    What it does have at the center is an actress who commits completely to the mess, even if Perry never quite deigns to show us the underlying talent that might justify her terrible behavior — or at least the loyalty of the countless friends, fans, and enablers who suffer the brunt of it.
  21. Aladdin
    The ever-quickening half-life of pop culture has gotten so short that we’ve now officially entered the era of diminishing returns. It’s the new normal. What’s old is new again — but not quite as good as you remembered it. Aladdin is…fine, but it has no real reason for being beyond, you know, capitalism. A whole new world, it’s not.
  22. Brightburn
    The movie is more or less all premise. The rest is just an occasionally suspenseful, occasionally gory sci-fi riff on any number of earthbound creepy-kid thrillers.
  23. The Secret Life of Pets 2
    As 86-minute kids’ movies go, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is shockingly padded. It’s the same old dogs with no new tricks.
  24. Annabelle Comes Home
    Annabelle Comes Home is only a little scary, and too religiously dedicated to its own ongoing cash-printing megafranchise for big laughs. But the best moments in this low-key domestic horror film have a tossed-off quality, like the whole production cycle was a fun weekend for everybody.
  25. Jingle All the Way
    For all its garishness, though, the film is punchy and fast, and it has an engagingly preposterous cheeseball climax, with Schwarzenegger, in full Turbo Man regalia, zooming through the skies like a consumer-king Rocketeer.
  26. Nightbreed
    Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.
  27. The Secret Garden
    The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.
  28. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    There are some jokes here — Paul Rudd brings a little lightness to the proceedings as the kids' science teacher, Mr. Grooberson — but it's hard to escape the overall sensation of, well, a corpse being exhumed.
  29. Wine Country
    There’s plenty of drinking, bonding, and bickering. But none of the jokes feel as barbed-wire sharp as the material you know these brilliant comic actresses could have come up with if they tossed out the script and just ad-libbed.
  30. The Suicide Squad
    The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.
  31. Child's Play
    By giving Chucky a reason to kill, the new movie’s arc can’t help but dilute his menace a bit.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Charly
    The premise is certainly alluring. But director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant make a multitude of jaw-dropping choices.
  33. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy in the Sky’s attempt to sync cosmological visions with a believable human drama never quite works.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Scrooge
    [Finney] plays Scrooge less like a Dickens character and more like that crooked man who walked a crooked mile, of Mother Goose nursery rhyme fame. But it’s fun to see him cut a rug at Scrooge’s own funeral to the tune of Leslie Bricusse’s Thank You Very Much, the great show-stopping tune of this otherwise ho-ho-hum musical.
  35. 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.
  36. Wasp Network
    Visually, the appeal of Wasp Network is undeniable — all warm, colorful, open spaces, elegantly shot and peopled with beautiful actors. The intrigue could have used some of that heat, too.
  37. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Cloying though it is, Always and Forever does understand how all-consuming first love can be, how bittersweet graduation, how scary choosing one's own path.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lionheart
    By never fessing up to its own bloodlust, Lionheart is, at bottom, chickenhearted.
  39. Black Christmas
    A sort of forgettable Christmas wisp, a black-hearted jingle bell only half-rung.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Suddenly, Last Summer
    A deliciously bad film.
  41. Cry-Baby
    There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.
  42. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    If we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Brain That Wouldn't Die
    The Brain That Wouldn’t Die has an equally familiar basic plot (mad scientist tampering in God’s domain), but it’s grimmer (a fair amount of gore), sleazier (B-girl catfights), and cruel to its leading lady, an attractive actress who spends most of the picture shot from the neck up, with her seemingly disembodied head sitting in a laboratory pan.
  44. Operation Dumbo Drop
    The whole concept, supposedly based on a true story, is weird — this is what Vietnam movies have come to? But at least the Disney quadruped has the grace to say nothing, and Leary, still an interesting motormouth, knows enough not to smoke or swear when there are elephants around.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Good Son
    (Culkin's) attempt to broaden his range with the not-for-kids thriller The Good Son — in a part that calls for complex emotions rather than amusing reactions-comes up way short.
  46. Fire in the Sky
    A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Magic
    From the start, Hopkins forgoes the subtle route and heads straight over the top, squeezing what fun there is out of William Goldman’s humorless script.
  48. Respect
    It isn't nearly as compelling a movie as Franklin was a singer, but while the film never fully captures her brilliance, it does at least effectively allude to it.
    • 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.
  50. 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.
  51. The Rookie
    The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.
  52. Under the Cherry Moon
    It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.
  53. Double Impact
    What makes Double Impact, for all its dull-witted theatrics, an energizing experience is the picture’s astonishing level of ballistic mayhem.
  54. Made in Italy
    It feels almost churlish to fault the film for its weightlessness, when light is exactly what movies like this are meant to provide: a fizzy, sun-drenched escape from the pale monotony of our own lives.
  55. Something to Talk About
    Tack on a jarringly upbeat coda that looks like the kids at the studio demanded a ”happily ever after” ending before they would agree to put the picture to bed, and Something to Talk About becomes a safe, generic family story of no particular personality.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Butterfield 8
    Taylor’s work is several notches above the botched material, adapted from the John O’Hara novel.
  57. Freaky
    There's a better, weirder story in here somewhere — about teenage desire and social Darwinism, gender and perception — but the movie seems happy enough to settle for familiar, goofy jokes and jump scares; a freak flag half-flown.
  58. Marry Me
    It's all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.
  59. Deep Water
    Deep Water isn't really thrilling or erotic, but it accomplishes a kind of diagonal camp sincerity, plummeting its glamorous characters into ever-tawdrier situations. I wouldn't marry it, but I wouldn't kill it. Remind me, what's the third option?
  60. Black Adam
    Black Adam is what happens when artists say they want to go dark but don't really have the stomach for it. Cue scenes of humorless mid-air wrestling, shake vigorously, wait for the sequel.
  61. Medicine Man
    In the end, there’s something opportunistic and glib about the way that Medicine Man yokes together medical wish fulfillment and save-the-rain-forest agitprop into a neat, messagey package. Nothing takes the fun out of romance quite like liberal earnestness.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Just Cause
    By the end of Just Cause, you’ll be wondering if the world really needed a second remake of Cape Fear. But its first two thirds are tense if not exactly taut, and Fishburne’s performance is a lesson in how a truly inspired actor can breathe quirky life into a tired cliché.
  63. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    Much of the time, the film itself veers perilously close to becoming the sort of high- body-count action spectacular it’s supposed to be parodying. When gags are tossed off in the midst of bomb blasts and deafening machine-gun fire, is it any wonder that audiences will tend to ignore the comedy and focus on the mayhem? If Hot Shots! Part Deux proves anything, it’s that making fun of big, raucous, sky-high explosions is a joke of rapidly diminishing returns.
  64. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    It’s engagingly junky entertainment with a healthy sense of its own ludicrousness.
  65. Passenger 57
    In a few of the action sequences, director Kevin Hooks evokes the entertaining preposterousness of the James Bond series. Still, as high-wire action melodrama Passenger 57 is almost laughably implausible.
  66. Silk Road
    There's only so much real-world intrigue a crime committed almost entirely via ones and zeroes can entail, and the script's halfhearted attempts to make it all Mean Something feel more than a little callow in the end.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    True Colors
    The movie does have the gifted Spader, superb in the thankless role of the Good One. The lightweight Cusack, however, doesn’t have the authority to play an incipient demagogue. His juvenile performance turns True Colors hopelessly monochromatic.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Look Who's Talking Now
    Though Alley, Travolta, and their canine counterparts do their zany best to be irresistible, Look Who’s Talking Now! probably won’t become a yuletide classic. Even so, the happy ending of this harmless comedy serves one purpose: reassuring doubting kids that Santa really does exist, a lesson parents might like — at least until the li’l ones climb into the big guy’s lap and ask for a dog for Christmas.
  69. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alive
    As engrossing as it is, the movie still tells only half the story: the other, nobler half.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Dennis the Menace
    If you loved Dennis the Menace as a kid, do yourself a favor: Skip this film and hold on to your memories.
  72. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Selby’s book is considered a gutbucket classic of the post-Beat era, but its hellish vision was, in part, a reaction to the stifling postwar optimism of ’50s America. Now, it seems overdone — especially when recreated with this much hyperbolic showmanship. Last Exit to Brooklyn is so relentless it’s not of this world.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    The whole thing sinks on the shoulders of its pretty teen stars (Hussey and Whiting), who exhibit all the raw talent and sensuality of bit players in some bad Spanish soap.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Fat Man and Little Boy
    There is scarcely a performance in Fat Man and Little Boy that is less than commendable. Almost every scene is thoughtfully and tastefully (though not imaginatively) devised. But the characters and shots do not work together to tell a story. Instead, we get a bunch of inconclusive vignettes.
  75. White Hunter Black Heart
    White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer’s instinct, not to mention his modesty.
  76. Things Heard & Seen
    The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all.
  77. The Protégé
    Martin Campbell's cat-and-mouse assassin thriller is self-aware enough as a kinetic genre entry. As it spills more blood and more convoluted backstory, however, it reveals an empty center.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bride of Re-Animator
    The original Re-Animator was made by an artist working on a wicked, energetic high. Bride of Re-Animator is a smart piece of hack work. In the end, it’s best left standing at the altar.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jennifer 8
    A lukewarm thriller.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ruby in Paradise
    Ultimately, though, it’s the film that’s tentative-and more than a little plodding. Instead of following through on the relationships, Nunez allows Ruby in Paradise to get bogged down in his heroine’s economic woes. The film ends up being about whether she’ll land on her feet, when what we really want to see is whether she can stand tall.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Fire Birds
    The only sensible thing to do with a picture as intentionally unreal as Fire Birds is just to lie back, pump up the volume, and pretend that you’re playing Nintendo.
  82. Spaced Invaders
    Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.
  83. Old
    Old comes close to seeing its metaphysical mystery through. In the end, though, it settles for something more like supernatural camp, with telegraphed twists and jump scares.
  84. Romeo Is Bleeding
    Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all.
  85. The River Wild
    Most of The River Wild moves at an annoyingly maladroit, stop-and-go tempo — it feels too much like a camping trip — and almost nothing that happens is very believable.
  86. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    The film can't seem to stop piling on idiosyncrasies, a kind of willful kookery that mixes uneasily with the more serious elements of personal tragedy and mental illness that run through it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Dark Backward
    Somewhere here, an ironic show-biz parable is trying to take shape. But director Adam Rifkin generally ignores it, preferring to flaunt the chops he has borrowed from David Lynch and John Waters.
  88. The Guilty
    Guilty, for all its wild-eyed excess, does find some blunt-force propulsion for a while, particularly if you're coming to it new. But the movie seems to mistake the taut minimalism of the original for something that needs to be goosed and adrenalized, a thriller on constant defibrillator.
  89. The Humans
    The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance: the rambling anecdotes, latent passive aggressions, and aimless small talk of ordinary people just living their lives.
  90. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Globe-trotting tomfoolery ensues, in ways never quite as witty or engaging as you want them to be, though Hugh Grant and Josh Hartnett bring a certain insouciant zing.
  91. Posse
    Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish.
  92. Vengeance
    Novak, who spent years refining the squirrelly ticks of his self-regarding salesman Ryan on nine seasons of The Office, isn't a demonstrably different dude here. His callow-millennial act — and the navel-gazing vagaries of modern content culture — make fertile ground for satire, and many of the jokes here do find their soft targets. But it can also feel hollow and exhausting in main-character movie form.
  93. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    There's a secret blandness behind the frantic insider gags.
  94. Ticket to Paradise
    There's no doubt both actors deserve sharper, less silly material than this, but when they're playing beer pong in a Bali bar and drunkenly pogo-ing to House of Pain's "Jump Around," Paradise is almost, for a moment, a place on Earth.
  95. Amsterdam
    The production and costume design are, unsurprisingly, impeccable. But the resolution of the central mystery is both rushed and obtuse, and it all unfolds in a frenetic, flailing whirl of pomp and nonsense that Amsterdam's strange circuitous journey and almost embarrassing surplus of stars never quite justifies: a whirring music-box curiosity in search of some elusive purpose, and a point.
  96. Operation Mincemeat
    A better, subtler movie lurks somewhere in Mincemeat; for dads and history buffs, the pleasant hash it presents instead is passable enough.
  97. Crimes of the Future
    Crimes of the Future . . . sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours.
  98. Persuasion
    This Persuasion chooses to wear its source material like a thin disposable skin, discarding many of the vital organs (brain, heart) and most ideas of subtlety as it goes. Austen may be immortal, but she's not inexhaustible; maybe it's time to tell another story and let her rest in peace.
  99. Beast
    It's August and we have Idris, Beast seems to say; do you really have anywhere better to be?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Phantom
    Yet the raiders-of-the-lost-bones plot and period detail remind us that post-Indiana Jones, a cliff-hanger needs action more blockbuster than lackluster, plus dialogue better balanced between winking kitsch and comfort-food corn.
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