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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Myth of Fingerprints
    The first-rate cast is wasted serving up this melodramatic turkey.
  2. The Game
    An intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity.
  3. Fire Down Below
    The star hasn’t lost his gift for making sadism seem impish. After a while, however, you may notice that the film’s mayhem is accomplished almost entirely through editing.
  4. Excess Baggage
    What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.
  5. She's So Lovely
    Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.
  6. Hoodlum
    The director, Bill Duke ("A Rage in Harlem"), stages all of this with proficient confidence, yet he never truly summons the operatic power of the genre -- the pulp tragedy of ambition built on (and drowned in) blood.
  7. G.I. Jane
    Were women put on earth to be warriors? Demi Moore certainly was. The role of Jordan fits her as snugly as a new layer of muscle.
  8. Mimic
    A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.
  9. Fire
    As a director, Mehta would do well to stop smothering her empathy in glibness (she uses the family's ancient mute grandmother as a sitcom prank), but her empathy pokes through nonetheless.
  10. Cop Land
    Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power -- a design but not a vision.
  11. Event Horizon
    Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.
  12. The Full Monty
    The comic moments in this ingratiating bit of malarkey from director Peter Cattaneo and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (both TV trained, both making their feature debuts) are winning.
  13. Conspiracy Theory
    You're set up for when director Richard Donner -- who worked with Gibson on all three audience-pleasing Weapons -- switches the movie from a really interesting, jittery, literate, and witty tone poem about justified contemporary paranoia (and the creatively unhinged dark side of New York City) to an overloaded, meandering iteration of a Lethal Weapon project that bears the not-so-secret stamp of audience testing and tinkering.
  14. Career Girls
    It isn't easy to get close to these two women. But the effort yields a rewarding take on the resiliency and therapeutic importance of friendship.
  15. In the Company of Men
    Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.
  16. Picture Perfect
    Another contemporary story about a woman with a successful career punished with a lousy personal life.
  17. Spawn
    Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.
  18. One Eight Seven
    The prospect of a teacher driven to his students’ level of sociopathic vengeance might have packed a ghoulish wallop had the film viewed it as tragic. Reynolds, however, is just grinding out exploitation thrills.
  19. Air Force One
    Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  20. Star Maps
    An ambitious debut feature.
  21. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Elegant yet surprisingly remote royal-court drama.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kiss Me, Guido
    If writer-director Tony Vitale ladles on the cliches with extra sauce, Guido still has a hey-Ma-I'm-makin'-a-movie enthusiasm that's more infectious than it has a right to be.
  23. George of the Jungle
    Hits you on the head until you laugh.
  24. Contact
    If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    4 Little Girls
    Surprisingly, given Lee's penchant for experimentation, there's nothing remotely innovative about this sober, often intensely moving exploration of a community's lingering grief and outrage -- just the usual talking heads, stock footage, montages of stills, and such.
  26. Men in Black
    The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.
  27. Face/Off
    But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller.
  28. Hercules
    Hercules, like Aladdin, zips Disney’s house animation style past sentimentality and into an age of ironic media-wise overload. That’s not a bad place for it to be.
  29. My Best Friend's Wedding
    And when [Roberts is] on screen with Mulroney, who seems a frat-house jerk -- all dimples and a perma-tan -- we don't feel much of anything.
  30. Batman & Robin
    Unfortunately, the charming Batfamily can't stay in their cave indefinitely; they've got to go out and fight crime. And that's where this elaborately high-style production from Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher hits an iceberg.
  31. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    Yet Speed 2 is as slow-moving as a garbage scow. Those blinking lights might as well be emanating from a vital-signs monitor. The story is dead in the water.
  32. Ulee's Gold
    Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.
  33. Con Air
    It's so shameless, so psychotically nervous about keeping you ''thrilled,'' that the phrase over the top won't do it justice. It's like a drug designed for people who've done every drug and now want to be jet-propelled into numbness.
  34. The Pillow Book
    I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.
  35. Addicted to Love
    Commits the cardinal sin of too many modern movies: It never gives the audience a clue why any of these people were ever attracted to one another in the first place. [30 May 1997, p. 54]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  36. Brassed Off
    There's a double meaning in the title of this folksy, relentlessly political, heavy-handed story, written and directed by Mark Herman and set among the coal mines of Yorkshire, England, in 1992.
  37. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    But the great revelation in this version is the terrific, beautifully controlled work of Alexander -- Seinfeld's most gifted actor, whose recent movie roles have not allowed him to show his range.
  38. Night Falls on Manhattan
    Night Falls on Manhattan makes you nostalgic for Lumet's truly first-rate corruption movies, like the great, underrated "Q&A" (1990).
  39. The Fifth Element
    The future-shock details are witty, the sets and skyscapes spectacular. Besson may not be a good director, exactly, but he's a wizard at retrofitting cliches.
  40. Fathers' Day
    If Fathers’ Day really had been released in the mid-’80s, I’d have said it was so funny I forgot to laugh.
  41. Nowhere
    A visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f—-d up-ness.
  42. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but no one does it better than Myers.
  43. Breakdown
    Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise.
  44. Children of the Revolution
    Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm.
  45. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    This sloppy, pleasant comedy by playwright and TV producer Robin Schiff (Almost Perfect) is an amiable mess, a padded-out expansion of a play called "Ladies' Room."
  46. Volcano
    I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.
  47. 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
    Aims for dark farce but ends up playing more like Weekend at Bernie's Part VIII. [25 Apr 1997, p. 50]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  48. Murder at 1600
    As directed by Dwight Little ("Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home," a morph of "The Day of the Dolphin" and "Lassie Come Home"), the tension-to-action sequences unspool efficiently.
  49. Traveller
    This fresh and interesting story about a tight-knit clan of Irish grifters in the rural South who make their living scamming is a ''con men on the road'' picture all the more welcome during a season of junky action thrillers and indie-style explorations of kinky sex.
  50. Grosse Pointe Blank
    High school reunions should only be this satisfying.
  51. Anaconda
    Directed by Luis Llosa with all of the subtlety of a snake-oil salesman, is in the great tradition of cinematic cheese, as processed as Kraft Singles slices. [18 Apr 1997, p. 48]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  52. Shall We Dance?
    Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It's the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself.
  53. Paradise Road
    Beresford, who'd like to teach the world to sing, makes the moment as moving as a Coca-Cola jingle. It's not the real thing, but it's effective.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Schizopolis
    When it works, it's the best film of the year. When it doesn't, take cover.
  55. Inventing the Abbotts
    The only real heat among the group comes from Jennifer Connelly, who, as the bad-girl middle daughter, raises the stakes any time she's on screen.
  56. Chasing Amy
    The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.
  57. The Saint
    Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.
  58. Double Team
    Double Team becomes an enjoyably decadent spectacle of gymnastic preposterousness.
  59. Love and Other Catastrophes
    A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.
  60. The Devil's Own
    In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.
  61. Selena
    The best thing going for Selena is Selena herself, played with verve, heart, and a great deal of grace by the increasingly busy Jennifer Lopez (Money Train, Jack, Blood & Wine).
  62. Liar Liar
    Jim Carrey entertains himself mightily in Liar Liar, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crash
    The only entertainment value is in imagining Turner's apoplexy when he watched Spader having sex with Rosanna Arquette's leg wound.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Substance of Fire
    Rifkin's descent into madness is Shakespearean in scope, but the rest (except Parker) are precious. Fire? Duraflame. [18Jul1997 Pg.90]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  65. Love Jones
    Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.
  66. Private Parts
    Shaped and softened by producer Ivan Reitman, screenwriters Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko, and director Betty Thomas, however, the movie-star Stern is a defanged tiger, funny but tranquilized.
  67. 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.
  68. The Daytrippers
    The Daytrippers has some of the wacky dysfunctional chic that made David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster such a grating experience, but writer-director Greg Mottola has a lighter, warmer touch; his characters don’t have to act like pigs in order to prove they’re human.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Donnie Brasco
    It's the electric interplay between Pacino and Depp that will make it a Mob movie classic.
  70. Hard Eight
    Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable.
  71. Smilla's Sense of Snow
    Drips along about as slowly as a polar ice cap and leaves both those who know the international thriller on which this creepy-doings-off-the-coast-of-Greenland yarn is based and those who don't out in the cold.
  72. Booty Call
    There are moments of lewd hilarity, like a game of footsie that turns genderifically confused. But Booty Call loses its dirty-minded, how-low-will-they-go-to-get-laid edge when the boys venture out into the New York night to buy condoms.
  73. Lost Highway
    Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.
  74. Rosewood
    As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.
  75. Fools Rush In
    The result is a stilted culture clash and a lot of monochromatically conflicted facial expressions from Perry before he's thawed by the love of an ethnic woman.
  76. Absolute Power
    Glum and depersonalized, as if Eastwood couldn't muster the energy to guide us through this maze of improbable twists. [14 Feb 1997, p. 39]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  77. Dante's Peak
    It hardly helps, of course, to have no characters to root for. What is it about Pierce Brosnan? He's got dimples, grace, charm; he's not a movie star, exactly -- he looks as if he should be hosting something.
  78. SubUrbia
    Driven by Bogosian's finger-snapping dialogue and theatrical structure, subUrbia doesn't allow for much pleasurably Linklaterish lounging; each character has got some serious orating to do before the night is over.
  79. Waiting for Guffman
    A madcap gem.
  80. Fierce Creatures
    Mostly a mess: toothless when it should be nasty, not so much madcap as merely frantic.
  81. Prefontaine
    But in this standard athlete-dies-young presentation, we never do catch the magic that made Steve Prefontaine a towering figure. Instead, this Pre is a shaggy-haired, sentimental favorite -- a teen angel rather than an Olympian.
  82. Mother
    The best reason to see Mother is the deliciously off-kilter performance of Debbie Reynolds, who speaks in pure honey-sweet tones yet keeps planting tiny seeds of disapproval, using her maternal ”concern” as an invisible form of warfare. You never quite catch her doing it; the character doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She just is who she is, and by the end you realize that that’s her glory.
  83. Albino Alligator
    Ultimately, the talented cast -- among them M. Emmet Walsh, Faye Dunaway, Skeet Ulrich, and Viggo Mortensen -- play to their easiest star turns rather than their most interesting strengths.
  84. Beverly Hills Ninja
    But when the writers run out of ideas, they simply have Farley walk into a lamppost, or cop from old SNL skits.
  85. Metro
    In Metro, he’s been replaced by a slick, businesslike machine of an actor, playing an uninspired variation on the Axel Foley character he’s done for over a decade now, since starring in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop. Only this time he’s not even funny.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Relic
    If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghosts of Mississippi
    What with Goldberg’s somnambulistic nobility, and the fact that this is yet another civil rights movie in which the struggles of black Americans take a backseat to the heroics of wealthy white guys, Woods’ presence is the least of Ghosts‘ problems.
  88. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.
  89. Evita
    Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.
  90. Michael
    The director, Nora Ephron, displays her peerless gift for making everything seem snappy and mushy at the same time, and Travolta's performance has a slovenly, I-can-do-anything-and-you'll-still-love-me obnoxiousness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Thieves
    The cumulative effect in Thieves is quite haunting.
  92. The Portrait of a Lady
    In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.
  93. Scream
    A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."
  94. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    Scene for scene, the duo are in good form. Yet this is one case where more turns out to be less.
  95. My Fellow Americans
    Enthusiastic as one might be that Jack Lemmon has found a new lease on movie life with his Grumpy Old Men series, the funny-crankpots genre wears mighty thin on this road trip.
  96. One Fine Day
    Clooney proves himself to be a true movie star and romantic leading man. His charm, his energy, even his ease with children (one of any adult actor’s most terrifying challenges) carry One Fine Day into irresistibility.
  97. Marvin's Room
    The three are so full-bodied and so powerfully affecting that you're carried along on the pleasure of being in the presence of their extraordinary talent.
  98. Bastard Out of Carolina
    The agonizing moments that convey what it's like for Bone to feel helpless and afraid of Daddy Glen even when he's not torturing her are where the art is. The pornographic violence is artifice. [13 Dec 1996]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  99. Jerry Maguire
    Brashly engaging.
  100. Mars Attacks!
    In its nothing's-quite-at-stake way, Mars Attacks! has Tim Burton's flaked-out spirit -- it makes you feel like a very knowing 8-year-old, seeing through the artifice yet believing in it at the same time.
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