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. Executive Decision
    Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.
  2. Fargo
    Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.
  3. The Birdcage
    Enchantingly witty.
  4. If Lucy Fell
    Quick, get the bug repellent, it’s another infestation of clueless, chatty, goofily dressed Gen Xers flitting around the scary idea of love!
  5. Down Periscope
    Periscope is filled with such familiar faces as Bruce Dern and Rip Torn playing squabbling admirals, and Harry Dean Stanton in a tiny role as a grizzled engineer. None of them are used to good effect.
  6. Rumble in the Bronx
    Rumble in the Bronx never quite achieves the smack-you-around zest of Chan's Hong Kong pictures. Still, it's hard to dislike a movie with such a friendly sense of the preposterous.
  7. Mary Reilly
    The film's chief novelty turns out to be its drab ''literary'' approach to horror.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    The title refers to cheap fireworks that fizz before they flame out quietly, and that's what three Southwestern slackers do in this amiable heist movie-cum-road flick.
  9. Happy Gilmore
    Adam Sandler stars in a one-joke Caddyshack for the blitzed and jaded.
  10. Muppet Treasure Island
    Tim Curry makes a fine, flashy Long John Silver, and charming newcomer Kevin Bishop is a lively, toothy young Jim Hawkins, but it’s Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat who make Muppet Treasure Island, the Muppets musical adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson, novel a hoot.
  11. City Hall
    In the course of City Hall, Calhoun doesn’t just get to the bottom of a scandal. He grows up, and watching Cusack enact the transformation, I thought I glimpsed this gifted young actor growing into a star.
  12. Beautiful Girls
    Directed, with overfondness for the goofy ways of guys, by Ted Demme and written, with overfondness for the sound of guys pontificating about nothing, by Scott Rosenberg.
  13. 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.
  14. White Squall
    White Squall is lovely to look at, but frustrating to behold.
  15. Restoration
    Blinking his puppy-moist eyes and grappling with an English accent, Downey struggles so manfully in the role that one cuts him a lot of slack; working earnestly on her Irish brogue and mussing up her cupcake demeanor in the service of verisimilitude as a wise madwoman, Meg Ryan’s performance is, refreshingly, less precious than she’s been in a long while.
  16. From Dusk Till Dawn
    Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mr. Holland's Opus
    The film captures how the constant turnover of students keeps educators poised between loss and rebirth, fuddy-duddyism and eternal kiddishness. That balance is there, most pleasurably, in Dreyfuss’ performance. The wonders of makeup and hairpieces have taken 20 years off his age, and his acting feels 20 years younger, too. He has an edgy vigor here that recalls his ebullient star turns of the late ’70s.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Bio-Dome
    Even with the low expectations any reasonable viewer brings to a Shore flick, this rates only stupid-plus. The bongs-and-pajamas set, though, should be riveted.
  19. Dunston Checks In
    Director Ken Kwapis fills the movie with feeble references to Planet of the Apes and King Kong that don’t amuse adults and sail over the heads of tykes who snicker most at the raspberries Dunston blows at anyone he meets.
  20. Eye for an Eye
    It’s an exercise in mad-as-hell vigilantism. And to reinforce the absurdity of what fury can be unleashed in a woman when a killer smirks, Sally Field — the Not Without My Daughter star herself — plays the ponytailed mom with the itchy trigger finger.
  21. Two If by Sea
    If you had never encountered Bullock’s patented brand of appealingly unglamorous, warm-eyed gal before this dispiriting production, you might think the star of Speed and The Net was nothing more than a Marisa Tomei knockoff.
  22. Twelve Monkeys
    As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins.
  23. Dead Man Walking
    A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 86 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Richard III
    Watching the splendid Ian McKellen embody any Shakespeare character is always a pleasure, and his slithery portrayal here of the Bard’s most hissable villain is a treat.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cutthroat Island
    Who thought letting Harlin steer into Captain Blood territory was a sage idea? To a piece that’s intended as a comic, tongue-in-cheek romp, he brings the same brutal, slo-mo pyrotechnics that lit up both his hits (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) and his biggest previous miss (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). Somewhere, Errol Flynn is wincing.
  26. Shanghai Triad
    Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.
  27. Heat
    We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.
  28. Jumanji
    Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Sabrina
    The new Sabrina is both pokier and gauzier than the original.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sense and Sensibility
    Ang Lee's film of the Jane Austen novel slavishly follows the gospel according to Merchant Ivory, swooning over characters declaiming modestly while surrounded by topiary.
  32. Father of the Bride Part II
    Sure, Martin and Keaton squander their talents on this sentimental piffle, but it's hard to begrudge these two stars a couple of commercial hits. And oh, those adorable babies at the conclusion! The audience I saw Father of the Bride Part II with loved this big, corny, old-fashioned movie; as crowd-pleasers go, it's a shrewd one.
  33. Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
    Its greatest achievement is that there isn't a single convincing scene in it.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Wild Bill
    While Hill’s hallucinatory script — adapted from a novel and a play — is about the dangers of fostering your own myth, the movie fawns over its character’s legend rather than aiming for his murky reality.
  35. Toy Story
    The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.
  36. The American President
    In the end, the movie says that the President's private life matters, all right -- that Shepherd should get the girl and reestablish his leadership by giving in to the noble liberal he always was inside. Even for a modern Capra fable, that's a bit much to swallow.
  37. GoldenEye
    Still, just about everything in Goldeneye, from its rote nuclear-weapon-in-space plot to the recitation of lines that sound like they're being read off stone tablets (''Shaken, not stirred!''), has been served up with a thirdhand generic competence that's more wearying than it is exhilarating.
  38. It Takes Two
    It seems only fitting that the flavorless Guttenberg would land in this smooth tapioca concoction, but Alley deserves better.
  39. The Crossing Guard
    The Crossing Guard is a work of talent and, on occasion, raw passion, but it's also a willed exercise in purgative alienation (imagine "Death Wish" remade by Michelangelo Antonioni).
  40. 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.
  41. Home for the Holidays
    Foster, working from a patchy, meandering script by W.D. Richter, produces scene after scene of rudderless banter. The movie is all asides, all nattering; the actors seem lost in their busy, fractious shticks.
  42. Fair Game
    A thriller primarily about the movement of Cindy Crawford's breasts beneath a succession of ever-smaller T-shirts.
  43. Total Eclipse
    Total Eclipse is pretty unbearable: The movie is dour and patchy and stilted — it leaves you sitting glumly waiting for the next baroque bout of tormented misbehavior.
  44. Leaving Las Vegas
    Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.
  45. Copycat
    The movie is, in short, a trash conundrum. What nearly redeems the movie is its acting.
  46. Vampire in Brooklyn
    Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Doom Generation
    Good luck searching for meaning — you’ll find mostly blood and epithets.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Mallrats
    A hopelessly stupid movie that should appeal to baked couch potatoes everywhere.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blue in the Face
    The improvisations are a mixed bag -- Reed and Fox are surprisingly hilarious, while Roseanne is a shrieking horror show -- but the air of gentle play and a wistful sense that Brooklyn is some kind of lost Eden put this one up on the more structured "Smoke."
  50. Strange Days
    If anything, Strange Days belongs to the rotters hovering around its edges: Michael Wincott, a vision of Drano-throated malevolence; Tom Sizemore, who, as Lenny’s bikerish pal, suggests Judd Nelson if he’d let the corruption ooze a little further out of his pores; and the wonderfully weaselly Richard Edson as an underground software techie.
  51. Kicking and Screaming
    The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.
  52. 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.
  53. To Die For
    The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.
  54. Showgirls
    As Nomi, Elizabeth Berkley has exactly two emotions -- hot and bothered -- but her party-doll blowsiness works for the picture.
  55. Seven
    This homicide thriller has a tantalizingly morbid atmosphere of unease.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Empire Records
    The movie is too blatant a throwback to crass '80s teen fodder to really work.
  57. Hackers
    It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.
  58. Unstrung Heroes
    Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence.
  59. Clockers
    A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
    This latest installment — the best of the Stephen King-derived series — offers some unexpected plot developments and surprisingly chilling gore. But fear not, it’s unlikely Urban Harvest will cause nightmares, due to its hilariously inept climax.
  61. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
    If there’s any shock value left to seeing a couple of matinee idols dressed up in women’s clothing, the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar gets it out of the way fast.
  62. 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.
  63. The Prophecy
    The Prophecy is an occult freakshow so inert it seems to have been pasted together out of stock footage.
  64. Desperado
    The camera loves Banderas -- a velvet stud -- as much as it did the young Clint Eastwood.
  65. The Brothers McMullen
    The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
  66. Mortal Kombat
    And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.
  67. The Usual Suspects
    Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.
  68. Dangerous Minds
    Yet despite its promising pedigree, Dangerous Minds has a slick, syrupy fraudulence -- it's like an Afterschool Special made for MTV.
  69. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    A Kid in King Arthur's Court
    Watered-down versions of once-winning formulas, with recycled charms best suited to snowbound preteens.
  71. Babe
    A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture.
  72. Virtuosity
    Washington is wasted here. Kelly Lynch is wooden. Crowe has a ball going over the top, but how much taunting and eyeball popping can a performer do?
  73. 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.
  74. Waterworld
    Costner's surfer-bum affectlessness works here; he turns the Mariner into the world's most jaded lifeguard.
  75. The Net
    The Net is an efficient, workmanlike thriller that, at its best, does a canny job of exploiting the more fanciful edges of computer-age dread.
  76. 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.
  77. Living in Oblivion
    Living in Oblivion celebrates the very act of filmmaking as grand folly, a triumph of absurdist heroism.
  78. Clueless
    There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.
  79. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
    A solidly enjoyable formula thriller.
  80. Nine Months
    If there were a scale for measuring how much of a movie’s substance was pure plastic, Nine Months, the new maternity comedy directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), would surely register dangerously high polymer levels.
  81. Species
    It doesn’t help that the special effects are second-rate; the squishy primal horror of Alien has been replaced by a kind of mechanized yuckiness. The team of B-movie scientists tracking the monster includes Ben Kingsley doing his over-deliberate American accent, Alfred Molina sporting a haircut that’s scarier than the creature, and Forest Whitaker as an empath so sensitive he can’t let anyone sneeze without making a dewy-eyed psychic pronouncement.
  82. First Knight
    Zucker gives the Camelot legend a makeover and rediscovers its humanizing fire. He has made a true adult fairy tale, only with a heart of glass.
  83. Apollo 13
    Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.
  84. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
    Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is an utterly depersonalized thrill machine, yet it’s exactly the film’s go-go relentlessness that is likely to make boys and girls eat it up.
  85. 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.
  86. Safe
    Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon.
  87. Batman Forever
    Although the film's frenetic rhythm is reminiscent of an "Indiana Jones" picture, visually Schumacher directs it like a musical, turning each image into eye candy, weaving one lush set piece into the next, as if he were the Vincente Minnelli of blockbusters.
  88. Smoke
    The best vignette, at the very end of the film, is the story Auster originally wrote for a newspaper as a Christmas piece, the one that inspired Wang to make Smoke in the first place. It's the one you'll want to inhale.
  89. Congo
    All I know is that something has gone terribly, drum-beatingly wrong in Congo (Paramount, PG-13), and you can sense Jungle Trouble brewing from the git-go.
  90. Party Girl
    The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.
  91. The Bridges of Madison County
    To say that Eastwood, who directed, has done a first-rate job of adaptation fails to do him justice. What he's brought off is closer to alchemy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Fluke
    Although Fluke‘s theme is a bit too mature for young children and too juvenile for many adults, most renters will get their Kleenex’s worth somewhere, whether in Fluke’s triumph over the insupportable horrors of animal testing or in the humans’ tidy tale of loves lost and won.
  93. Casper
    What’s depressing about the current Hollywood mania to literalize old cartoon series isn’t that a show like Casper is such bad source material. It’s that the movie version is like the cartoon without innocence — a fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.
  94. Johnny Mnemonic
    Offhand, I can’t think of an actor who could use a brain implant more. The trouble isn’t that Reeves talks like a surfer dude; it’s that he tries so hard not to talk like a surfer dude.
  95. Braveheart
    Braveheart features some of the most enthralling combat sequences in years, and the excessive ferocity of the violence is part of the thrill.
  96. A Little Princess
    There are moments in A Little Princess--particularly Cuaron's Indian play-within-the-play, which is nearly avant-garde in its conception--when you may just want to clap from pleasure. My advice to you is: Go ahead, you're a grown-up. [26 May 26 1995]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  97. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
    In Die Hard With a Vengeance, McTiernan stages individual sequences with great finesse (there's a terrific bit with Willis and five thugs in an elevator), yet they don't add up to a taut, dread-ridden whole.
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