Entertainment Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    The movie is a true folly, yet there's no denying that Gilliam has gotten some of the hallucinogenic madness of Thompson's novel on screen.
  2. Bulworth
    It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.
  3. Godzilla
    There are some clever and exciting sequences, but this $120 million epic of reconstituted Atomic Age trash lumbers more than it thrills.
  4. The Horse Whisperer
    All the nuggets of spoken wisdom rattle around with a tad too much space and (at 2 1/2 hours plus) too much length.
  5. Clockwatchers
    There’s a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls.
  6. Deep Impact
    Leder establishes a syncopated rhythm unlike anything we're used to in a catastrophe spectacle.
  7. Shooting Fish
    Wafer-thin, content-light, structure-wobbly, and whimsy-heavy.
  8. He Got Game
    As is often the case with Lee, though, the film left me wishing for even more scenes of casual intimacy, still the most powerful way to carry any message.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wilde
    Restrained, sober, decorous.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sliding Doors
    The story is hackneyed, and the gimmick only doubles the dullardry.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Big Hit
    It's tempting to brand the film anti-Semitic, but it's so utterly pointless it lacks even that distinction.
  12. Two Girls and a Guy
    The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.
  13. The Object of My Affection
    So riddled with cultural stereotypes, woe-is-me neurotic mopiness, and glib therapeutic compassion that by the end all it leaves you with is a waxy buildup of falseness.
  14. Suicide Kings
    Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies without sitting through another imitation of early Quentin Tarantino, along comes Suicide Kings.
  15. Nightwatch
    Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.
  16. Species II
    "Species" at least had the benefit of Henstridge's glazed porn-doll perversity, but this time any glimmers of sexual ominousness are buried in a lame, desultory chase plot and in the woefully underimagined special effects.
  17. City of Angels
    This is the sort of movie in which everyone on screen is swathed in gauzy benevolence. You practically have time to say a prayer in the dead spaces between lines.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spanish Prisoner
    For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.
  19. Lost in Space
    Is any of this, you know, fun? Just barely. But I'm sure I would have loved it at 6.
  20. Mercury Rising
    The nuttiest thing about Mercury Rising is that when Alec Baldwin, as the silky-voiced evil defense honcho, explains that he took his cutthroat actions to protect the lives of American undercover agents, he actually sounds quite reasonable. You can just about feel the imbecility rising.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Barney's Great Adventure
    Barney’s Great Adventure is insipid, but it’s also harmless, and, besides, why shouldn’t toddlers enjoy the pleasures of their own kitsch?
  22. The Newton Boys
    Scored to a disarmingly quaint array of fiddle-and-banjo tunes, The Newton Boys has so little in the way of blood or rancor that before long, you begin to notice that there's no real drama in it, either.
  23. Wild Things
    A tricky-bordering-on-gimmicky film noir with a glaze of soft-core kink.
  24. Primary Colors
    One of those thrilling confluences in pop culture that rewards audiences for thinking the worst about politicians and the best about movie stars.
  25. 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.
  26. Wide Awake
    The movie actually makes you long for the rockin’ entertainment value of a good catechism session.
  27. The Man in the Iron Mask
    Wallace, unfortunately, writes lazy, anachronistic dialogue, and the picture is abysmally shot (by Peter Suschitzky), with a prosaic, low-budget look that never allows you to experience the enraptured majesty of a fairy-tale historical setting.
  28. U.S. Marshals
    Efficient, uninspired sequel.
  29. Love and Death on Long Island
    A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.
  30. The Big Lebowski
    Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.
  31. Hush
    When you watch this failed horror thriller -- which has been under studio doctors' care for some two years, undergoing futile title changes and reshoots -- there's no respite from the odor of flop sweat stinking up the screen.
  32. The Real Blonde
    Modine, as a morosely self-involved actor, looks as if he's about to strangle someone -- and the movie, an attack on superficiality, never quite makes it out of the shallow end.
  33. Senseless
    Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.
  34. Palmetto
    Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dark City
    It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic.
  36. The Wedding Singer
    As a romantic comedy, the picture is pleasant, predictable, and utterly weightless.
  37. Sphere
    Stripped of the pleasures of terror, flattened of grandeur (with a tacked-on coda that fairly groans with storytelling defeat), the movie sinks from the weight of its own heavyhandedness.
  38. The Replacement Killers
    Between cycles of gunfights and glowering, Yun-Fat displays some of the dignity and suave good looks that account for his star status (without much chance to show his wit).
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Blues Brothers 2000
    The Blues Brothers may now just qualify as the most overextended one-joke shtick in history.
  40. Great Expectations
    The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.
  41. The Gingerbread Man
    Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 16 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Phantoms
    It's nearly unwatchable, a farrago of confusing direction, stupid plot coincidences, and banal dialogue.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spice World
    Shabbily filmed, thoroughly harmless Official Product.
  44. Hard Rain
    The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Half Baked
    Sitting on your couch watching these morons sit on their couch and get wasted is like being the only straight guest at a pot party. Everyone else is laughing, and you're left wondering why.
  46. Live Flesh
    Almodovar is positively mature, adapting a novel by Ruth Rendell so deftly that the plot now also describes the invigorating and sometimes disorienting effects of democracy after long years of repression under the Franco regime.
  47. The Boxer
    Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?''
  48. Oscar and Lucinda
    It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength.
  49. Afterglow
    Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.
  50. The Postman
    What willful streak of perversity inspired Kevin Costner to take on this wacky tale of a letter carrier-turned-postapocalyptic hero?
  51. Wag the Dog
    If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.
  52. Kundun
    At once spectacular and inert -- a mosaic impersonating a movie; an empty-shell epic.
  53. Jackie Brown
    Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don't arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.
  54. Mr. Magoo
    With Mr. Magoo, it’s the filmmakers who seem blind.
  55. As Good as It Gets
    A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.
  56. Tomorrow Never Dies
    The film forgets that Bond's most dangerous actions have always been his quietest ones, in which he uses his charisma to turn his enemies against themselves.
  57. Titanic
    Titanic floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.
  58. Mousehunt
    The charms of Evans (from 1995's oddball Funny Bones) and Lane (who's at his best playing to the balcony) are lost in all the detailed hubbub.
  59. The Apostle
    Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  60. Deconstructing Harry
    Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.
  61. Scream 2
    This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Amistad
    Becomes a too-stately courtroom drama, with the Africans in the dock, the issue of slavery on trial at didactic length, and the top-billed Morgan Freeman as an abolitionist shunted to the sidelines with too little to do. [26 Jun 1998, p. 130]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  63. Good Will Hunting
    Stuffed--indeed, overstuffed--with heart, soul, audacity, and blarney. You may not believe a minute of it, but you don't necessarily want to stop watching.
  64. Alien: Resurrection
    By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  65. Flubber
    As computer-generated special effects have grown more advanced, they threaten to overwhelm such minor matters as story, character, and emotion. This, however, is not a problem in Flubber (Walt Disney), an agreeably unhinged slapstick jamboree.
  66. Welcome to Sarajevo
    The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism
  67. The Sweet Hereafter
    Leaves you shaken and ecstatic at the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.
  68. The Rainmaker
    Any random episode of Law & Order would be more sophisticated than this heavy-handed, moralistic Southern-lawyer corn pone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
  69. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    By the time Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is over, it may send more than a few viewers scurrying off to the bookstore. They'll surely want to see what all the fuss was about.
  70. Anastasia
    Anastasia has the Disney house style down cold, yet the magic is missing. Perhaps that's because the story's somber emotional hook--Anastasia's thwarted desire for home--is asserted rather than dramatized.
  71. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    Fragmented and monotonous, without a semblance of the gymnastic cleverness that at least made the first Mortal Kombat film into watchable trash, Mortal Kombat Annihilation is as debased as movies come.
  72. 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.
  73. The Tango Lesson
    The Tango Lesson is about as far away from Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman hotdogging as you can get; it really is about the scent of a woman, in all her fascinating peculiarity.
  74. Starship Troopers
    The movie is sensationally exciting, but its hey-kids-let s-put-on-a-war! story line plays like Beverly Hills, 90210 recast as a military-recruitment film for the Third Reich.
  75. Bean
    In this slapdash production directed by Mel Smith ("The Tall Guy" but also, alas, "Radioland Murders"), written by Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings") and Robin Driscoll, there's just enough unrepentant self-centeredness missing to take the hilariously brutish edge off Bean's game for those who know him.
  76. Eve's Bayou
    But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.
  77. Mad City
    Director Costa-Gavras packs a whole lotta hectoring into this high-strung morality play about the broadcast media's culpability in the escalation of human drama into camera-ready Greek tragedy.
  78. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    If you see only one movie this year about a twisted, cuddly, courageous, fatally diseased, self-mutilating love slave, make sure that movie is Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.
  79. An American Werewolf in Paris
    The cruddy, shot-in-a-warehouse settings are especially depressing, since the computer-generated special effects seem to be taking place in another movie entirely (a far livelier one). [9 Jan 1998, p. 47]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  80. Happy Together
    The vignettes don't add up to a story, but Wong's nervy brio and subterranean-fantasy style make for an arresting work about an exotic subculture.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gattaca
    Sets, music, and imagery are rigorously controlled and undeniably stunning, but after a while flaws creep into the plot's double helix.
  82. A Life Less Ordinary
    The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.
  83. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    The story has more holes than the bodies do, but the shocks are efficient, and Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt knows how to scream with soul.
  84. The Devil's Advocate
    Embarrassingly entertaining.
  85. Gummo
    There's no artistic or thematic point — except maybe to demonstrate that a young filmmaker is as much in need of someone to say no as the characters in this disingenuous exercise.
  86. Telling Lies in America
    Kevin Bacon's passionate, sharply drawn portrayal of Billy Magic, a slick, finger-snapping, payola-pocketing disc jockey in early 1960s Cleveland, is the best thing about this conventional but heartfelt semiautobiographical coming-of-age story
  87. Boogie Nights
    Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."
  88. The House of Yes
    The House of Yes is knowingly overripe, a kitsch melodrama that dares to make incest sexy.
  89. Seven Years in Tibet
    French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who brought his interest in self-discovery and untamed places to Quest for Fire, The Lover, and the IMAX 3-D film Wings of Courage, is at his best re-creating the serene exoticism of the Dalai Lama's Tibet. But the spark of the holy that the Dalai Lama lights in Harrer flickers only fitfully in all the wind in this production.
  90. Year of the Horse
    Bluntly put, Neil Young’s music now has too much integrity and not enough hooks, and so does Year of the Horse. The rough-grain Super-8 images, while a nifty visual correlative to the Crazy Horse sound, deny us the fundamental pleasure of a concert movie — a sense of intimacy with the band’s performance.
  91. Gang Related
    Belushi certainly proves that he can play an uncharismatic lout with conviction, but the talented Shakur is — literally — wasted in his final screen performance.
  92. Kiss the Girls
    Kiss the Girls is a fake psychological thriller that turns into a garishly schlocky and implausible bogeyman hunt.
  93. U Turn
    U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.
  94. The Ice Storm
    Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting.
  95. The Peacemaker
    The essential spark of surprise is missing. The mechanics of ''breathless'' suspense are blanketed by an atmosphere of creeping caution.
  96. Soul Food
    In the tradition of such food-as-love films as "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Big Night", kitchen work is idealized as a form of communion in this indulgently nostalgic story -- deep-fried with plot, script, and character cliches but honey glazed with goodwill...
  97. The Edge
    Tamahori proves that he can shape a studio picture effectively to his specs; his action sense is as personal as his screenwriter’s. As for Hopkins and Baldwin, the well-matched actors grab their parts with disciplined ferocity.
  98. L.A. Confidential
    Voluptuously engrossing.
  99. In & Out
    As a sharky, gay TV journalist investigating the story, Tom Selleck charms by playing in contrast to his own determinedly hetero persona.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »