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. Rising Sun
    There’s a real spark to Connery’s performance, but except for that Kaufman has produced a middling contradiction, a thriller too polite to hit its target.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    So I Married an Axe Murderer
    As an evening’s rental, it provides an embarrassment of silly riches. Travis is unstoppably charming, and well-integrated comic cameos by Alan Arkin, Phil Hartman, and Steven Wright keep things chugging.
  3. Poetic Justice
    With Poetic Justice, John Singleton has (at least temporarily) lost his way, but he may have found an actor [Shakur] who can help lead him back.
  4. Coneheads
    As a big-screen comedy, Coneheads isn’t all that funny either, yet it’s blithe and inventive and surprisingly light on its feet.
  5. Another Stakeout
    There’s one funny bit in Another Stakeout — a dysfunctional dinner party — but director John Badham puts more energy into high-tech chase sequences featuring the neighborhood pets than he does into refining the comic chemistry of his stars.
  6. Chantilly Lace
    Given a wealth of acting talent and the freedom to improvise its way past the cliches that hobble so many films by and about women, Chantilly Lace ends up a cliche anyway: a manipulative tearjerker.
  7. Free Willy
    It's an irony too significant to ignore that the movie, which proselytizes against penning up whales in order to make them do cute tricks for humans, spends much of its time making Willy do cute tricks for humans.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hocus Pocus
    It’s acceptable scary-silly kid fodder that adults will find only mildly insulting. Unless they’re Bette Midler fans. In which case it’s depressing as hell.
  9. In the Line of Fire
    With all of that going for it, it's hard to see how In the Line of Fire could be anything less than rock-solid entertainment-and, indeed, it is. Yet it's never more than that.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Weekend at Bernie's II
    The original 1989 dead-guy farce maybe had a few laughs if you caught it on cable at one in the morning. Blind drunk. Weekend At Bernie’s II not quite that good.
  11. Son in Law
    In ”Son-In-Law,” Pauly Shore is like MTV’s missing Marx Brother; call him Sleazo. For once, he makes being utterly shameless seem halfway likable.
  12. Much Ado About Nothing
    It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.
  13. The Firm
    No one is going to confuse The Firm with art, but its high- cholesterol virtues-a story that keeps you guessing, a dozen meaty character turns-are enough to send you home sated.
  14. Sleepless in Seattle
    The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.
  15. What's Love Got to Do with It
    The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dennis the Menace
    With ”Dennis,” Hughes takes har-de-har brutality to new depths — it’s a movie that seems made specifically to blunt the sensibilities.
  17. Last Action Hero
    Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hard Boiled
    All this would be overkill if it weren’t for the fact that Woo’s use of freeze frame and slow motion serves to make Hard Boiled even more of an art-house action movie than any of its predecessors.
  19. Jurassic Park
    As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.
  20. Orlando
    As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.
  21. Cliffhanger
    Despite the don't-look-down Olympian settings, Cliffhanger's spirit is brutal and earthbound.
  22. Like Water for Chocolate
    With its cowlike Cinderella heroine pining for forbidden love while she slaves over her bewitching recipes (and knits a shawl as long as a city block), Like Water for Chocolate offers old-fashioned romantic masochism-Harlequin pulp-dressed up in a magical-realist veneer. It makes being a happy homemaker seem wondrous again.
  23. Menace II Society
    Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.
  24. Sliver
    For all of Stone’s skill, there’s something naggingly remote about her. She has the beauty and confidence of Grace Kelly without the warmth that made Kelly’s sexiness seem at once playful and glamorous.
  25. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    Much of the time, the film itself veers perilously close to becoming the sort of high- body-count action spectacular it’s supposed to be parodying. When gags are tossed off in the midst of bomb blasts and deafening machine-gun fire, is it any wonder that audiences will tend to ignore the comedy and focus on the mayhem? If Hot Shots! Part Deux proves anything, it’s that making fun of big, raucous, sky-high explosions is a joke of rapidly diminishing returns.
  26. Posse
    Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish.
  27. Dave
    For all its modest charm, Dave is a true throwback to the Capra days, a political comedy just cockeyed enough to triumph over cynicism.
  28. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    If anything holds Dragon together, it’s Jason Scott Lee’s intensely likable performance.
  29. Blood In, Blood Out
    What the movie needed was the kind of dark explosion of star temperament that Sean Penn brought to 1983’s Bad Boys. Still, give Hackford this: He does a vivid job of taking you places you may not think you’d want to go.
  30. The Dark Half
    The most frightening thing about this movie is that King and Romero actually thought it was scary.
  31. Benny & Joon
    Benny & Joon turns out to be a whimsical (and not very well paced) heart tugger in which two nice couples spend 98 ever-so-slightly flaky minutes figuring out that they’re perfect for each other.
  32. This Boy's Life
    For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.
  33. Indecent Proposal
    Indecent Proposal starts out kinky and turns into a languid-and shockingly banal- domestic soap opera.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Sandlot
    This rosy film is clearly not for the Peter Pan set: Even today’s younger viewers who aren’t eggheads may never have heard of a sandlot-much less the Sultan of Swat. The only thing they’ll revel in is replaying the slobbery-canine-confronting climax again and again.
  35. Point of No Return
    If Point of No Return is trash, it’s slick, diverting trash.
  36. CB4
    CB4 would like to be a savage hip-hop lampoon, but, in fact, the film strikes a cautious balance between satire and homage. It can’t decide whether it wants to ridicule CB4 or hold the group up as role models. What we’re left with is a soggy catalog of rap cliches.
  37. Fire in the Sky
    A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.
  38. Mad Dog and Glory
    Mad Dog and Glory turns out to be a light-spirited urban fairy tale. Despite occasional flashes of violence, its atmosphere is one of moonstruck romanticism.
  39. Swing Kids
    The movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.
  40. Amos & Andrew
    Samuel L. Jackson, call your agent — and fire him.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    El mariachi
    Rodriguez makes the same mistake as other first-time auteurs: The world of this movie exists only in relation to other movies, particularly the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns of the early '60s.
  42. Falling Down
    Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.
  43. Army of Darkness
    By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts," featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle.
  44. Groundhog Day
    The funniest moments in Groundhog Day come when Phil takes sneaky advantage of his predicament-by, say, pumping a sexy woman in the local coffee shop for facts about her past and then, ''the next day,'' using the information to lure her into bed. What the movie lacks is the ingenious, lapidary comic structure that could have made these moments fuse into something tricky and wild.
  45. Dead Alive
    A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.
  46. Strictly Ballroom
    The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.
  47. Untamed Heart
    If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.
  48. The Vanishing
    [Sluizer's] original, pitch-black ending would have sent people out of the theater giddy with shock; it’s doubtful anyone will remember his new one long enough to tell their friends.
  49. Loaded Weapon 1
    But the Lethal Weapon films, with their hyperbolic explosiveness, lurid repartee, and quasi-loco Mel Gibson hero, are already winking at the audience. (Last year’s spoofy, ragtag Lethal Weapon 3 practically turned its own slovenliness into a running gag.) The only way to make light of them is to exaggerate the cartoon funkiness that’s already at the center of their appeal. It’s no wonder this Weapon ends up shooting blanks.
  50. Sommersby
    If Sommersby is finally more pleasant than exciting, that may be because its post-Civil War setting robs the story of much of its exoticism.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Aspen Extreme
    This overlong film, written and directed by Patrick Hasburgh, keeps changing tone unobtrusively. But the skiing footage — even when squeezed into the boot of a small screen — is extraordinary.
  52. Damage
    Whether you respond to this movie may come down to the question of how far you think people are willing to go to realize their desires. Damage says that they’ll go all the way — past honor, past rationality, past sin. The movie may not always convince, but when it does it’s a cataclysmic peek into the erotic abyss.
  53. Body of Evidence
    A preposterous erotic thriller from the Basic Instinct fingernails-ripped-my-flesh school, Body of Evidence is shamelessly — and, on occasion, amusingly — unadulterated trash.
  54. Alive
    Alive is an unsettling contradiction: a well-intentioned gross-out movie. It may be the first film in history to say that cannibalism is good for you.
  55. Nowhere to Run
    The producers of Nowhere to Run simply toss out the mousetrap. They make the dismal mistake of turning Van Damme into a softy, a sensitive lunk who puts up his dukes only because he wants to help his new family. The former kickboxer would do well to remember that the most heartfelt performance he was put on this earth to give revolves around the tender sound of snapping limbs.
  56. Lorenzo's Oil
    Lorenzo’s Oil is at once harrowing and riveting. In the age of AIDS, it has telling observations to make about how the institutionalized complacency of the medical establishment actually works. As remarkable a job as Miller and the actors have done, though, the film begins to wear you down. At 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s far too long, and (more crucially) it has a flat, repetitive structure.
  57. Hoffa
    The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.
  58. Trespass
    Hill knows how to zing the audience, and his ”existential” approach to action remains edgy and enjoyable. But it also seems guided, more than ever, by a blockbuster imperative: Whatever happens, don’t let that roller coaster stop.
  59. Scent of a Woman
    In the end, Scent of a Woman offers little more than lumbering simulation of Rain Man's nimble magic. But Pacino's performance-scabrous, tender, ripely theatrical-is a master showman's trick.
  60. Toys
    The film is a jokey, nattering fiasco, as awful as Hudson Hawk. And yet, like that famous disaster, it never loses its aura of precocious self-satisfaction.
  61. A Few Good Men
    Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity.
  62. The Distinguished Gentleman
    All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.
  63. The Crying Game
    By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.
  64. The Bodyguard
    The Bodyguard is an outrageous piece of saccharine kitsch — or, at least, it might have been had the movie seemed fully awake. Instead, it’s glossy yet slack; it’s like Flashdance without the hyperkinetic musical numbers and with the romance padded out to a disastrously languid 2 hours and 10 minutes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Aladdin
    Despite a similar setting-the never-never land of the Arabian Nights — the new movie is hipper, faster, more topical.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bad Lieutenant
    For all its scenes of degradation (five minutes of which have been shorn for an R-rated cut; we recommend the original NC-17 version), Bad Lieutenant is a deeply moral movie. It's not pretty-it's not even very realistic-but it does matter.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
    Here, the signs of Culkin’s limitations begin to emerge.
  68. Malcolm X
    With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.
  69. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 47 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Love Potion #9
    It’s the height of silliness: An elixir makes two wallflowers (Tate Donovan and Sandra Bullock) irresistible. But the blithe comedy Love Potion #9 is both playful and sweet — and its modest intentions fit the small screen snugly.
  71. Passenger 57
    In a few of the action sequences, director Kevin Hooks evokes the entertaining preposterousness of the James Bond series. Still, as high-wire action melodrama Passenger 57 is almost laughably implausible.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jennifer 8
    A lukewarm thriller.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Intervista
    Sublime moments encounter clunkiness and bad overdubbing until it’s hard to know what’s on purpose, but you certainly envy the Fellini family/crew their experiences in service of a man who so appreciated his life’s pursuit (or what he called ”this alibi”).
  74. The Lover
    Of course, the hollow drama of The Lover might not matter so much if these two actually did something interesting in bed. As it is, they barely get out of the missionary position. With far more explicit (and inventive) erotic films available at almost any video store, one has to wonder: How much point is there to portraying sexual passion as serious and ”adult” if you only end up taking all the fun out of it?
  75. Night and the City
    For all its promising elements, Night and the City confronts us, yet again, with one of the most dismaying paradoxes in contemporary movies: that the actor who once seemed the heir to Brando, Clift, and, yes, Widmark — the actor who once got so far inside his roles that he just about detonated the screen — now plays characters who don’t seem to have any inner life at all.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 16 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dr. Giggles
    At this late date, the rules of the adolescent slice-‘n’-dice genre have codified into ritual (teens + sex = death), suggesting that those who rent this may have bigger problems than just bad taste.
  77. Consenting Adults
    This is the sort of cloddish thriller in which characters keep putting themselves in dangerous situations because…the movie requires them to be in dangerous situations. The one true surprise has nothing at all to do with the plot: It’s Kevin Spacey’s hair. Dyed a glittering blond, it sets off his smirky, come-hither mug with maximum perversity.
  78. Under Siege
    In the brutally efficient Under Siege, Seagal, with his soft-spoken nihilist charm, attempts to move beyond limb-snapping exploitation and into epically scaled mainstream thrillers. He succeeds — but only because this sort of slick action bash doesn’t require a star with much personality. At this point, personality might only get in the way.
  79. 1492: Conquest of Paradise
    At 2.5 hours, 1492 is even harder to sit through than last month’s schlock extravaganza Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. In each case the filmmakers have fallen into a similar trap. Out of some vague mixture of historical ”duty” and commercial myopia, they’ve presented Columbus as the same cardboard visionary we learned about in school.
  80. Romper Stomper
    As an expose of the new wave of racist youth-gang violence, Romper Stomper lacks depth, psychology, a sense of social background. Yet Wright’s flagrant attempt to humanize his skinheads-to turn them into bona fide movie characters-is, in its way, dramatic and vaguely honorable.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Mighty Ducks
    The film spends most of its time tracing Bombay’s predictable transformation from supercompetitive to supercompassionate coach, a metamorphosis that will most likely bore young audiences who don’t yet know what a mid-life crisis is, let alone identify with one.
  82. Of Mice and Men
    Lyrical, stirring, and beautifully acted — a seamless adaptation of a novel many will recall with almost too much familiarity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reservoir Dogs
    You may not like the terms Tarantino sets, but you have to admit he succeeds on them.
  84. Glengarry Glen Ross
    The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.
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