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. Little Odessa
    Roth, a great actor, is reduced to a walking sneer, and the picture creeps along in a series of handsome but painfully languorous hazy-shade-of-winter tableaux.
  2. Crimson Tide
    Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.
  3. Crumb
    Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.
  4. The Underneath
    Soderbergh is able to execute his games without pigeonholing his characters. He has made that rare thing, a modern-day noir with feeling.
  5. Village of the Damned
    When the children in Carpenter’s Village flash their glowing eyes, hypnotizing the hapless grown-ups into committing a series of increasingly lurid suicides, the kids don’t seem much more bizarre — or frightening — than your average 10-year-old Nintendo freak.
  6. While You Were Sleeping
    Only when you look closer do you realize that While You Were Sleeping exhibits precious few genuine feelings. It's a movie cranked out by machine, about supposedly delightfully idiosyncratic characters who only do what they do because the highly structured plot requires it.
  7. The Basketball Diaries
    It's an energetic, watchable mess.
  8. Swimming with Sharks
    Swimming With Sharks swipes its basic design from Robert Altman’s The Player: It’s yet another black satirical morality play about a yuppie climber who learns to be a killer. But since Guy, for all his ass-kissing resentment, isn’t really filled in as a character, our attention — and, in a curious way, our sympathy — shifts to the monster himself. When Spacey goes ballistic, only to freeze the nitroglycerine in his veins a moment later, you don’t want to look anywhere else.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kiss of Death
    The movie’s streetwise screenwriter, Richard Price, knows characters like this do exist — but only an actor like Cage can bring them off.
  10. Stuart Saves His Family
    Stuart Saves His Family is a hit-or-miss satire in which Stuart, for too many scenes, comes off simply as a goofy neurotic butterball.
  11. Bad Boys
    It's like a series of cliches exploding in your face.
  12. Don Juan DeMarco
    There's no great romantic climax to Don Juan DeMarco (and that may be a drawback for Depp lovers looking to swoon), but there is an airy delicacy to this tall tale that fits in perfectly with the weather these days, the hormones, the whole seasonal gestalt.
  13. Rob Roy
    A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Goofy Movie
    For parents, the burning issue ignited by A Goofy Movie is ”Will it buy us 78 minutes of peace and quiet?” Provided the kids are old enough to follow a wandering story line that centers on single father Goofy’s adolescent son Max and his quest for peer acceptance as well as he love of a pert humanoid bitch (in the doggy sense), the answer is yes.
  15. Jefferson in Paris
    Bereft of any flesh-and-blood honesty, the last half of the movie plays like a ludicrous PBS version of "Mandingo."
  16. Tommy Boy
    Just when you thought you’d erased the memory of Adam Sandler in Billy Madison playing a slobbo idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business, along comes Chris Farley playing a slobbo ; idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business. Yet this movie, unlike Sandler’s fiasco, does at least have a few scuzzy laughs.
  17. Tank Girl
    Petty, though, is the only reason to see this coy and scrappy comic-book adventure-a trash bin of sci-fi detritus.
  18. Dolores Claiborne
    Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.
  19. Major Payne
    It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious.
  20. Exotica
    Like Christina’s dance, the movie is a gorgeous tease, an artful promise of something that never quite arrives.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh
    Since Barker’s baroque prose visions are too complex for the gore-hound market, they’re bound to be watered down into this kind of bilge.
  22. Circle of Friends
    As Benny, a small- town Irish teenager in the '50s who goes off to university in Dublin, Minnie Driver has a touchingly awkward prettiness. Her jaw may be as square as a picture frame, but her smile lights her up from within.
  23. Muriel's Wedding
    The trouble with the movie is that there's nothing to Muriel but her false dreams: We never quite glimpse the woman they're hiding.
  24. Outbreak
    For today’s filmmakers, the addiction to kinetic overkill has become a disease in itself.
  25. Once Were Warriors
    You can feel director Lee Tamahori doing his best to get a rise out of you. Yet his work has fire and substance, too.
  26. The Brady Bunch Movie
    The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.
  27. Just Cause
    For a story with so much going for it — including an interesting cast — Just Cause is just not taut and thrilling enough.
  28. Billy Madison
    By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.
  29. 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.
  30. Shallow Grave
    Danny Boyle's glittering, deadpan, nihilistic little thriller.
  31. Boys on the Side
    Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.
  32. In the Mouth of Madness
    Look for bloody axes, grotesquely disfigured zombies, and creepy visions — much of it bloatedly self-indulgent and a small part wicked funny about the influence of guys like Stephen King/Sutter Cane who write words read by people who don’t read anything else, or maybe don’t read at all but only go to movies like this one.
  33. Before Sunrise
    If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe.
  34. Legends of the Fall
    This puffed-up Western set in Big Sky country becomes a small-screen horse opera.
  35. Nobody's Fool
    Nobody’s Fool shines with intelligence and grace and the natural light of fine moviemaking. Like a shot of superior whiskey, it’s a sharp comfort in the grayness of winter
  36. Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
    To call Demon Knight a popcorn movie is to give it too much credit — I doubt it would raise the pulse of Orville Redenbacher.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ladybird Ladybird
    Although based on a true story, Ladybird Ladybird is also a parable of how government’s giant cogs sometimes crush individuals and never miss a turn. Loach puts us where we can hear the people crying.
  38. 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.
  39. The Madness of King George
    The humor built into this sharp-witted human comedy is enhanced in the translation. Meanwhile, the arrestingly stylized imagery of the original Madness has not been lost.
  40. Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)
    Ready to Wear is messy and vaguely nasty -- a blur with attitude.
  41. I.Q.
    I.Q. is easy enough to sit through, but it’s all surface come-on-the romantic-comedy equivalent of a shallow young Hollywood star who puts on fake glasses so that it will look like he, too, has brains.
  42. The Jungle Book
    The animals are dignified cuties and the humans are boisterous archetypes, and if you want the heart to have more darkness, you’re barking up the wrong vine.
  43. Death and the Maiden
    Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.
  44. Nell
    By the end, the pieties of Nell fall into place all too neatly.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Street Fighter
    As the mercenary in charge of liberating hostages from the megalomaniacal General Bison (Julia), Jean-Claude Van Damme finds a showcase for his comic skills in Street Fighter.
  46. Mixed Nuts
    Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  47. Little Women
    A graceful, unsentimental, well-made movie.
  48. Dumb and Dumber
    There are limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the sight of two grown men acting like complete cretins.
  49. Disclosure
    The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.
  50. Cobb
    In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.
  51. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.
  52. Junior
    Schwarzenegger’s willingness to flirt with femininity, to become truly radiant, is the most engaging aspect of Junior. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t portray his transformation to starry-eyed pregnant bliss with much comic ingenuity.
  53. The Professional
    Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating.
  54. Star Trek: Generations
    The pleasure of any Star Trek movie lies in experiencing the familiar mixed with the inventive.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Swan Princess
    With its modern sensibility and a visual look beautifully steeped in tradition, The Swan Princess takes a well-deserved place in the circle of animation.
  56. Heavenly Creatures
    If the pleaures of Heavenly Creatures remain defiantly on the surface, on that level the movie is a dazzler.
  57. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
    Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.
  58. 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.
  59. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    Branagh, for all his craftsmanship, hasn’t succeeded in tapping the morbid core of the material, the feeling that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in creating ”life” is really a mask for his obsession with death (indeed, he can no longer tell the difference).
    • 40 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Double Dragon
    This irrepressibly action-packed adventure may be based on a computer program, but it gets its real kick from martial- arts acrobatics, comic-book-vivid art direction, and a future-shock vision inspired by The Road Warrior, Robocop, and Escape From New York. What 12-year-old could resist?
  61. Stargate
    The film has flashes of psychedelic visual energy, but its story is limp.
  62. Love Affair
    If An Affair to Remember worked for you, Love Affair may do the same. It resurrects the earlier film’s sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity, right down to the awful final scene, which always felt — and still feels — as if another 20 minutes of movie were yet to come. Then again, what moved viewers in the ’50s seems almost luridly manipulative and unconvincing now.
  63. Clerks
    The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pulp Fiction
    [Tarantino's] ability to take what seem like minor conversational themes and dovetail them onto later exchanges for maximum comic effect is close to genius. And the action can be literally heart-stopping.
  65. Hoop Dreams
    Hoop Dreams is an astonishing emotional experience — it has highs, lows, and everything in between.
  66. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    Wes Craven’s New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors.
  67. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
    The movie recapitulates the absurdist tabloid-redneck comedy of the great, original Chainsaw without a hint of its primal terror.
  68. The River Wild
    Most of The River Wild moves at an annoyingly maladroit, stop-and-go tempo — it feels too much like a camping trip — and almost nothing that happens is very believable.
  69. Ed Wood
    A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    My Summer Story
    Imagine Garrison Keillor narrating a series of Norman Rockwell paintings and you’ll have a very good idea of what My Summer Story is all about. Nostalgic and gently humorous, this sequel to 1983’s A Christmas Story continues the adventures of Ralph Parker in the prepubescent universe of bullies, parents, best friends, and no girls.
  71. Timecop
    The plot is more confusing than clever, and the only actor who seems to be having any fun is Silver, who's at his best throwing masochistic hissy fits at his younger, not-quite-so-evil self.
  72. The New Age
    A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.
  73. Quiz Show
    Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.
  74. The Next Karate Kid
    Clearly, three sequels haven’t improved Miyagi’s English, but there is something bitchin’ about seeing a babe give a bully a good thwack. Not that girls will go see this or boys will care.
  75. A Good Man in Africa
    Disappointingly tired, unfunny, and disengaged.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    What Happened Was...
    It’s hard to believe that these two people, so dissimilar in every way, would be attracted to each other in the first place. It’s even harder to listen to the drone of the numbingly unsympathetic Michael (Noonan, also the movie’s writer and director). When there are only two characters on screen, you’d better rouse concern for both so your viewer is not fatally tempted by the stop button.
  77. Fresh
    After a rich, anecdotal first half, Fresh, inspired by the lessons of his derelict-chess-whiz father (Samuel L. Jackson), ends up setting his own human chess game in motion. You may not believe a minute of it, though you won’t forget Nelson’s face.
  78. The Shawshank Redemption
    Shouldering a laconic-good-guy, neo- Gary Cooper role, Robbins never quite makes emotional contact with the audience.
  79. Killing Zoe
    The idiocy of the plot is the tip-off that writer-director Roger Avary is really just interested in random displays of nihilistic decadence (e.g., heroin-shooting, prostitute-bashing, lotsa blood).
  80. Natural Born Killers
    Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    It's Pat: The Movie
    It's Pat is not only one of the most ill-conceived premises to get the big-screen treatment, it's also genuinely unpleasant to watch.
  82. Color of Night
    A deliriously brain-dead erotic thriller...The patients (played by, among others, Lesley Ann Warren and Brad Dourif) are all nutjob cliches.
  83. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
    The generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott (and costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel) turn this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.
  84. Airheads
    The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.
  85. Clear and Present Danger
    As a thriller, this 21 2-hour production takes a slow route between short bursts of excitement.
  86. Eat Drink Man Woman
    The personalities in this well-drawn family combine to produce subtle new flavors — and in the end, no one is spiced as you’d imagined they’d be.
  87. The Mask
    The Mask, a rattletrap Jekyll-and-Hyde farce, surrounds Carrey with a nothing plot and a cast of ciphers. Still, his scenes as the Mask are rowdy and enjoyable.
  88. It Could Happen to You
    It Could Happen to You is a syrupy-sweet package undiluted by wit, tartness, observation. It would be easier to enjoy the stars in Charlie and Yvonne’s eyes if the movie didn’t keep patting them on the back.
  89. North
    North is structured like a black-comic Wizard of Oz, but by the time North awakens from his dream, even home doesn’t seem like a place worth visiting.
  90. The Client
    The movie keeps you occupied, but in a processed, unexciting way.
  91. True Lies
    True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.
  92. Spanking the Monkey
    Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Angels in the Outfield
    At Angels‘ end, Al tells Roger, ”We’re always watching.” That’s more than audiences will say about this disappointing movie.
  94. 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.
  95. The Shadow
    The Shadow, like 1991’s The Rocketeer, tries to pass off its retro thinness as a quasi joke, but it’s a desperate strategy. The filmmakers seem to be kidding everyone — the audience and themselves — and that just leaves us waiting for this particular flashback to fizzle away.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment! III
    The biggest innovation is in making TE! III much more than a compilation of familiar scenes. This time producers Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan have ferreted out previously unseen sequences and outtakes featuring the likes of Astaire, Horne, Frank Sinatra, Charisse, Reynolds, and Judy Garland.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Little Big League
    Filled with baseball lore, trivia, and cameos by major-league players, this fable covers its bases with sincerity and humor.
  98. Wyatt Earp
    This strenuously dark biographical Western plays more like a choppy, self-important miniseries.
  99. Getting Even with Dad
    A movie not funny enough for a comedy, not touching enough for a heart-warmer, and not energetic enough for a story about a robbery of rare coins — Danson and Culkin end up exposing all their weaknesses.
  100. The Lion King
    Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie.
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