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. Citizen Ruth
    Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.
  2. Daylight
    Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.
  3. Sling Blade
    It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  4. 101 Dalmatians
    But when it comes to that great puppy pilgrimage, the movie, which was written and produced by John Hughes, falls astoundingly flat.
  5. The Crucible
    As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly.
  6. Star Trek: First Contact
    By the time Worf (Michael Dorn), knocking off a slimy attacker, growls a Schwarzeneggerish ''Assimilate this!'' we've already done so, with pleasure.
  7. 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.
  8. Ridicule
    Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.
  9. Shine
    Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  10. The English Patient
    Lusts for catharsis yet never quite gets there, because, for all of its bitter romantic anguish, it ultimately coalesces in your head rather than your heart.
  11. Space Jam
    This mediocrity disguised as entertainment, this greed promoted as synergy — this, to paraphrase that seminal media study, Broadcast News, is what the devil looks like.
  12. Breaking the Waves
    True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.
  13. Ransom
    Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.
  14. Set It Off
    Enough does work, and well, to make Set It Off a valuable model for a new kind of girl-pack story: one that’s not just for girls.
  15. Romeo + Juliet
    Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.
  16. Larger Than Life
    The trek is long, the direction (by Murray’s Quick Change colleague Howard Franklin) is soft, the script (by Roy Blount Jr.) is windy, and the occasional laughs are as heavy-footed as the thunking lead pachyderm herself.
  17. High School High
    The Naked Gun writing team and actor-turned-director Hart Bochner do unto the stereotype of inner-city high schools what needs to be done to stereotyped inner-city high schools -- parody them silly -- in this high-flying, low-comedy production.
  18. When We Were Kings
    It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.
  19. Thinner
    Instead of exploiting the mystery and dread, or even the comedy, of Billy’s condition, Thinner turns into an excruciatingly low-grade pursuit thriller, with Billy hunting down the old Gypsy sage (Michael Constantine) who put the curse on him.
  20. Swingers
    The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  21. Sleepers
    By the end, the main thing that's been abused is the audience's intelligence.
  22. Jude
    It's worth seeing this stark adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure just for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Eccleston as Jude Fawley, the stonemason in turn-of-the-century England whose dreams of university scholarship are thwarted. And British telly director Michael Winterbottom sustains a fine atmosphere of dank misery.
  23. Get on the Bus
    In Get on the Bus, director and material come together with perfect ease — one of those occasional confluences of subject and strengths that make a moviegoer go, ”Of course!” Of course Spike Lee throws all of his bravado, all his storytelling talents, and all his artistic chutzpah into a movie about last year’s Million Man March.
  24. The Chamber
    The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.
  25. Michael Collins
    For whatever reason, Michael Collins is a troublesome movie, a film about a religious war in which religion is almost entirely absent; a flick that gives us our kicks with thrillingly shot terroristic violence while paying lip service to pious antiviolence sentiments.
  26. The Long Kiss Goodnight
    Ultimately, however, Kiss is too ridiculous to engage us as a thriller yet too cringingly self-conscious to amuse us as camp.
  27. Trees Lounge
    Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made.
  28. The Ghost and the Darkness
    But the very thing that drew the two actors to this ripping yarn — their enchantment with playing archetypes of male power — is the very thing that undoes their awfully big adventure.
  29. Microcosmos
    The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.
  30. Bound
    The true pleasures of Bound lie in the Wachowskis' inventive updated take on film noir traditions, sensuously realized by cinematographer Bill Pope ("Clueless").
  31. That Thing You Do!
    That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).
  32. Secrets & Lies
    A crowd-pleaser, all right, but, for all its appeal, a naggingly sanctimonious one.
  33. 2 Days in the Valley
    Writer-director John Herzfeld blends violence and top-heavy absurdism, creating a self-conscious muddle of indie-style hackery. Strip away the goofball nihilism, though, and what’s left is as formulaic as any straight-to-tape opus with a title like "Dangerous Instinct."
  34. Extreme Measures
    Apted keeps the speechifying and dramatic poses away from Grant (poor Hackman’s the one forced to say, ”If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t that be the brave thing to do?”). And he gives the star room to do clean work without the fussiness that marred Nine Months.
  35. Big Night
    The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive.
  36. The First Wives Club
    The First Wives Club has all the conviction a comedy of female vengeance needs. But as soon as the dumb plot takes over, the wit leaks out of the movie like helium from a balloon.
  37. Surviving Picasso
    Cool, assured, emotionally remote, Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso is never less than watchable, but it's also a cinematic paradox, a movie that works to capture Picasso from every angle yet somehow misses the fire in his belly.
  38. Last Man Standing
    Writer-director Walter Hill follows up last year’s nuanced, underrated Wild Bill with this numskull, overwrought shoot-’em-up.
  39. Feeling Minnesota
    Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.
  40. Fly Away Home
    Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.
  41. Bulletproof
    Universal should have marketed this formulaic drivel as the taboo love story it really is, and then watched its stars run for cover.
  42. The Trigger Effect
    Until he wraps things up much too neatly and idealistically, Koepp puts together a sturdy and efficient thriller.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 33 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Carpool
    Carpool is affably stupid Saturday-matinee fare -- good for opiating the kids for a few hours -- but let's just say it's no Big Bully.
  44. A Very Brady Sequel
    The most impressive thing about A Very Brady Sequel is the shrewd care that has once again been taken to evoke the look and tone of the endlessly repeated, ultimate ’70s family sitcom.
  45. She's the One
    In the end, we never know why anyone is the one for anyone. And this qualifies as a filmmaking problem, at least for us here on Earth.
  46. The Island of Dr. Moreau
    He’s become such an obvious parody of himself that Frankenheimer has permitted Kilmer to do a wicked mid-movie impersonation of Brando’s character; it’s funny, but it also gives The Island of Dr. Moreau an extra layer of camp it certainly didn’t need.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tin Cup
    Has a genial, funky charm.
  48. The Fan
    There's no denying that Scott is a wizard of the narcotic-flash school. In The Fan, he uses his chromium-edged technique to evoke a dread-saturated consumerist America in which the most beloved institutions have grown mercenary and hard.
  49. Kansas City
    So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.
  50. Basquiat
    Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.
  51. 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."
  52. Escape from L.A.
    Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide.
  53. Emma
    Perhaps the highest praise that can be given Paltrow is that there are no appreciable performance gaps between her green talents and the rest of the truly top-drawer cast.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Matilda
    Clearly, a lot of grown-up types are going to despise Matilda: gym teachers, school psychologists, used-car salesmen, critics who like their family fare immobilized by homiletic virtue. But kids will understand.
  55. Chain Reaction
    Chain Reaction, while crisply shot, unfolds in an action-suspense-thriller void. The movie’s emblem might be the terse, bureaucratically impersonal performance of Morgan Freeman, who, as the energy project’s chief government liaison, manages to play the film’s most ambiguous character without raising its dramatic temperature one degree.
  56. 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.
  57. Trainspotting
    It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.
  58. The Frighteners
    The Frighteners is also that rare horror film that actually gets better as it proceeds; this scare machine has a heart and a brain.
  59. Walking and Talking
    Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.
  60. Multiplicity
    Ramis’ talented, underused SCTV colleague Eugene Levy makes a brief, welcome appearance as a nuttily dim cement contractor, but he’s a zany interlude in an otherwise muted, unzany tale.
  61. Independence Day
    It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.
  62. Phenomenon
    Phenomenon (directed by Jon Turteltaub, the guy who sedated us with "While You Were Sleeping") would be pretty unbearable were Travolta not so consistently charming.
  63. The Nutty Professor
    More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.
  64. Striptease
    Striptease lets down its own performers right along with the audience. It’s a Christmas tree someone forgot to string with ornaments.
  65. Lone Star
    The biggest problem with Lone Star is that colorful Charley Wade isn't the center of the movie -- it's bland Sam Deeds. Cooper isn't a compelling enough movie star to carry us along some of the film's more languid twists and turns.
  66. Eraser
    And the guy is really good at his job: He knows how to combine impossibly macho action plus attractive self-amusement into a reliable rhythm of ooof! and wink-wink.
  67. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful and transporting experience — the best, I think, of Disney’s serious animated features in the multiplex era.
  68. Stealing Beauty
    Can Tyler act? Impossible to say. Bertolucci's neatest trick is to have constructed the movie around Tyler's gawky unself-consciousness.
  69. The Cable Guy
    The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose.
  70. The Rock
    Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage inject tasty bits of personality into their roles.
    • 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.
  72. Heavy
    Mangold, who also wrote the script, has made a modern-day "Marty", a kitchen-sink drama that doesn't condescend to its characters.
  73. The Arrival
    The Arrival looks and feels awfully small and cheap. In that way, the movie does feel like those science-fiction classics of the ’50s. But back then, sweaty heroes didn’t utter lines of ’90s dialogue like ”I look like a can of smashed a–holes.”
  74. DragonHeart
    Instead of being drawn into Dragonheart‘s tale of swords and sorcery, I frequently sat there thinking things like Gee, I wonder how much time it took Connery to record his lines. It’s too bad, because in other respects Dragonheart is a corker.
  75. Spy Hard
    I'm happy to report, though, that even a dud like Spy Hard can't completely douse the stumbling Zen charm of Leslie Nielsen, whose genius is that he never quite sheds the illusion that he isn't in on the joke.
  76. Mission: Impossible
    It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.
  77. Flipper
    One reason the Flipper flick is worse than the TV show: Bland, mannered Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan plays Sandy’s uncle, Porter Ricks, instead of television’s wonderfully grumpy Brian Keith.
  78. Twister
    And for a movie that stars acts of God, this work of mortals provides surprisingly little liftoff. The stuff that whips through the angry skies in Twister is the most exciting part of the spectacle. Essentially, we're turned on by debris.
  79. Dead Man
    The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.
  80. Cold Comfort Farm
    Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem.
  81. 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.
  82. The Craft
    The Craft should please teenage girls at malls everywhere. But the film ends up descending into moralizing blahness. Most of the special effects are routine (the girls levitate like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice), though there is one memorable bit: a nightmare featuring enough snakes, bugs, and slithery maggots to make Indiana Jones go gulp.
  83. I Shot Andy Warhol
    As riveting as its title.
  84. Kingpin
    Lowest-common-denominator humor.
  85. The Truth About Cats & Dogs
    The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.
  86. Mulholland Falls
    This is Chinatown for chowderheads.
  87. Mrs. Winterbourne
    Lake and Fraser never come close to believability as a romantic couple. There's more chemistry going on in a grain of salt.
  88. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    You still feel that every delirious allusion, every snidely on-the-mark observational quip, is tickling a different part of your cerebral cortex. Yet the movie lacks the manic highs of the show’s best episodes; it’s a bit too rote and becalmed.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    The first movie from the cult television comedy troupe doesn’t have a single good laugh.
  90. Kazaam
    It takes the movie all of 15 minutes to descend into sub-Spielbergian banalities about poor Max's search for his absentee dad.
  91. Courage Under Fire
    A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.
  92. James and the Giant Peach
    If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.
  93. Primal Fear
    Gere taps into his charismatic-weasel mode, but director Gregory Hoblit fills the big screen with excellent TV actors (Andre Braugher, John Mahoney, Maura Tierney) and then gives them nothing interesting to do.
  94. A Family Thing
    Any other writers handed this premise would probably play it for cheap laughs, but Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson have made an earnest drama out of it, one lightened by a few affectionate laughs and much heartfelt sentimentality.
  95. Sgt. Bilko
    Bilko is a weightless comic creation, and Steve Martin, perhaps sensing this, drifts through the movie with a misplaced balletic goofiness.
  96. Flirting with Disaster
    Flirting is a little too weighed down with stage business to soar. But episode for episode, it's one of the ha-ha-funniest movies currently around.
  97. Welcome to the Dollhouse
    But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.)
  98. Girl 6
    Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone.
  99. Dekalog (1988)
    The stories are shocking, tender, sometimes funny, with a soap-opera abundance of plot. Always, the camera stares, respectfully neutral about ordinary people grappling — inconsistently, as men and women do — with the ordinary mysteries of being human. You’ll stare back, amazed it’s taken more than a decade to spread the word.
  100. Ed
    Some things are funnier than a barrel of monkeys. Most things, frankly. And anything is funnier than Ed.
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