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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  1. Joe Dirt
    Ends up blowing its own joke. Instead of making Joe blissfully arrogant in his Southern rock dude myopia, it turns him into a shuffling masochistic loser.
  2. 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.
  3. National Treasure
    The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.
  4. Remember the Titans
    Denzel Washington, by now, could do this sort of role in his sleep.
  5. 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.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    The film's moral? Turn off the TV, young 'uns, and go outside and play! And avoid Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 matinees while you're at it.
  7. Forrest Gump
    It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.
  8. Fat Albert
    The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.
  9. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    The film's generic feminism pales beside its bloated sense of privilege, only underlined by a nonstop cabaret of sideshow acts.
  10. Troy
    The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.
  11. Barb Wire
    This rusted-future comic strip comes at you in shards -- exhaustingly derivative images of mayhem and titillation, with Lee, in her bad-girl bondage gear, as its blank vixen. If you didn't call her babe, she wouldn't exist.
  12. Sleepers
    By the end, the main thing that's been abused is the audience's intelligence.
  13. The Chamber
    The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.
  14. The Jackal
    A trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal is mired in blood, cheap shocks, and a random network of improbability.
  15. Cube
    This very Canadian thriller (i.e., no humor, lots of literal-minded future-shock portentousness) certainly does a number on you, though not necessarily a pleasurable one.
  16. A Time to Kill
    A slick, synthetic, self-important drama that thinks it is saying more than it is simply because of its subject matter.
  17. Pocahontas
    As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated.
  18. 101 Dalmatians
    But when it comes to that great puppy pilgrimage, the movie, which was written and produced by John Hughes, falls astoundingly flat.
  19. Indecent Proposal
    Indecent Proposal starts out kinky and turns into a languid-and shockingly banal- domestic soap opera.
  20. Sleepless in Seattle
    The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.
  21. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
    As always, the verbal comedy is nonsensical and vulgar, and the physical humor is rigorously thought out and really vulgar.
  22. The Santa Clause
    Watch for the ''Mrs. Doubtfire'' syndrome: In Santa drag and padded for laughs, Scott demonstrates how to be a more sensitive, more funsy parent than boring old Mom.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Schizopolis
    When it works, it's the best film of the year. When it doesn't, take cover.
  24. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is suffused with a rarefied emotional glow, and that's something contemporary audiences may be almost desperate to respond to. Yet the movie is also tentative, rambling, and maddeningly shapeless.
  25. Devil in a Blue Dress
    Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.
  26. This Boy's Life
    For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cry, the Beloved Country
    Alan Paton's seminal novel of apartheid in 1940s South Africa receives a sanitized and overly sentimental treatment, trivializing the book's relentless power.
  28. Higher Learning
    Higher Learning starts out as a liberal message movie, but it turns into a demagogic rabble-rouser, a shrewdly incendiary exploitation of these wayward days of rage.
  29. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  30. The Hudsucker Proxy
    For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.
  31. Jefferson in Paris
    Bereft of any flesh-and-blood honesty, the last half of the movie plays like a ludicrous PBS version of "Mandingo."
  32. Jack
    it's a synthetic, rather drab movie, one that seems linked less to experience, or even to fantasy, than to other movies - "Big," of course, and also "E.T.," "Mask," and "Phenomenon."
  33. Wyatt Earp
    This strenuously dark biographical Western plays more like a choppy, self-important miniseries.
  34. Fair Game
    A thriller primarily about the movement of Cindy Crawford's breasts beneath a succession of ever-smaller T-shirts.
  35. The Quick and the Dead
    The Quick and the Dead is too light to pack the dramatic punch of a true Western and too flat to pass as cheeky revisionism. It ends up in its own amiable, slowpoke limbo.
  36. Broken Arrow
    With its lightweight hero and its random spray of ''high-powered'' action, Broken Arrow is like an underpopulated version of The A-Team. It's not just John Woo who gets swallowed up by the impersonal mechanics of big-budget mayhem. It's the audience, which pays for a sleek, dark thriller and gets recycled pulp instead.
  37. Falling Down
    Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.
  38. The Distinguished Gentleman
    All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.
  39. Far and Away
    Far and Away looks like an epic, but it lacks flavor and texture. It's so predigested there's nothing left to chew on.
  40. Kindergarten Cop
    The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.
  41. Renaissance Man
    The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.
  42. Newsies
    It has been put together with just enough efficiency to qualify as an oddball labor of love.
  43. The Governess
    Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''
  44. Cool World
    Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.
  45. Dinner for Schmucks
    No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.
  46. Man of the Century
    A premise masquerading as a movie.
  47. A Hole in My Heart
    To call Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart the feel-bad movie of the year would be an understatement -- it's the feel-sick movie of the millennium.
  48. Trust
    Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.
  49. El cantante
    Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exiled
    One of those wearisome Hong Kong action movies where characters engage in Mexican standoffs not so much to ratchet up excitement or generate tension but rather to look cool for as long as possible.
  51. Quiet Chaos
    Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience.
  52. Blue Beard
    Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.
  53. The Greatest
    A histrionic mess.
  54. Furry Vengeance
    Still, it's refreshing that the animals don't talk.
  55. The Last Airbender
    The movie is "Star Wars" with martial arts, plus a touch of "The Last Emperor." Technically, it's not badly done; I enjoyed the physical clash of elements, the water balls rising like sculpture in the air.
  56. Holy Rollers
    Feels staged and exoticized in the way stories about insular communities often do when told by outsiders.
  57. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    The movie, by Dutch director Jan Kounen, is all surfaces, set pieces, Significant Looks, and voguing -- the same strictures Chanel and Stravinsky sought to bust.
  58. You Again
    Yes, You Again. We've met before.
  59. The Extra Man
    What feels enjoyably outré in the 1998 coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Ames (creator of HBO's Bored to Death) feels oppressively outré in this deadened, literal adaptation.
  60. The American
    The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.
  61. Alpha and Omega
    Underwhelming in the style of most off-brand CG, Alpha and Omega is livened by pretty Rocky Mountain backdrops and leadened by stock characters and the wolves' weirdly prissy behavior.
  62. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    I'm confounded by the fact that, aside from the Pevensie siblings and their nicely obnoxious cousin, absolutely everything and everyone aboard the Dawn Treader looks one-dimensional.
  63. Tamara Drewe
    This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.
  64. Made in Dagenham
    Waving a dubious flag of feminist inclusivity, Cole and screenwriter William Ivory turn cartwheels insisting that girl power, even in the 1960s, trumped class divisions.
  65. Wild Target
    The cast, though, includes a great bunch of Brit faves who have all done better work elsewhere.
  66. Red Dawn
    Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!
  67. The Tourist
    The Tourist isn't a debacle, but it's a caper that's fatally low on carbonation.
  68. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.
  69. Restless
    Annabel and Enoch learn from each other, even as time ticks away and the end draws near. Weeping is invited, but by no means required.
  70. Season of the Witch
    The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.
  71. The Mechanic
    As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" taking itself seriously.
  72. Rio
    The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.
  73. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    On Stranger Tides isn't nearly strange enough. Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.
  74. The Other Woman
    Opportunities for bad behavior abound in Waldman's novel - the author's prerogative. Roos, though, hasn't cracked the puzzle of how to explore that behavior on screen in such a way that the characters behave badly in interesting, rather than arbitrary, ways.
  75. I Am
    An earnest, lumpy macramé of a personal nonfiction project.
  76. The Adventures of Tintin
    Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we're always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can't capture is our hearts.
  77. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    Nothing is new, which is a problem. Nothing is particularly funny or endearing, which is a worse problem.
  78. The Conspirator
    The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.
  79. Bad Teacher
    We're just watching a film try to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as "edge."
  80. The Change-Up
    Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights.
  81. The Sitter
    A needlessly frenzied, pseudo-raunch comedy that whips up a whole lot of R-rated antics only to arrive at crunchy PG-13 lessons in love and tolerance.
  82. Conan the Barbarian
    There's something and nothing for everyone in Conan the Barbarian 3D.
  83. Colombiana
    Colombiana is silly fun at first, but as her break-ins and escapes grow absurdly complex - and her motivations increasingly muddy - it turns into the same silly stuff we've seen before, a dish of revenge served not so much cold as reheated.
  84. Puss in Boots
    Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.
  85. The Rum Diary
    To the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We're supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.
  86. The Three Musketeers
    It floats, but it's mainly filled with hot air.
  87. Abduction
    Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo.
  88. The Raven
    The film, devising events that led up to his mysterious death in 1849, is also the most gruesomely literal-minded of period detective stories.
  89. Submarine
    The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.
  90. Monogamy
    Irksome dither of an indie drama.
  91. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    The movie can't be saved from its own vices of manic pacing and tediously pro forma pop culture jokes.
  92. Courageous
    How you like Courageous - an overtly Christian-targeted production about four police officers learning lessons about God and family - will likely mirror how you view church: It's either an overlong ordeal filled with talky sermonizing or an uplifting communion with your deity and values.
  93. Lockout
    With no thriller cliché left unused, the gaily outlandish plot is matched by tin-eared dialogue, ripe tough-guy overacting from the very game Pearce, and best-that-she-could acting from Grace.
  94. Meet Monica Velour
    The role of a former star of the "golden age" of porn sounds perfect for Kim Cattrall, and she handles it nicely - at least, in the rare moments when this indie comedy isn't terminally contrived.
  95. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    The best stuff: Wow, can those kids hoof - and so, even past his half-century mark, can the preening, Chicago-born Mr. F.
  96. Rock of Ages
    Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.
  97. Total Recall (2012)
    This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.
  98. Hesher
    As the checkout girl everyone's got a crush on, Natalie Portman makes a winsome return to her "Garden State" gawkiness.
  99. Salvation Boulevard
    The comedic slaps are too limp to leave a mark. Director George Ratliff applied a much clearer eye to "Hell House," his chilling 2001 documentary about a real church.
  100. Man on a Ledge
    Despite the occasional dumb fun - especially with the heist portions - the leap of logic required to make it all work is enough to leave your brain pancaked on the sidewalk.
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