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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Glengarry Glen Ross
    Alec Baldwin is on camera for barely eight minutes in Glengarry Glen Ross, the tightly wound — and actually very fine — film adaptation of David Mamet’s play. But his big speech, whipping up the assembled real estate salesmen with reptilian gung ho, could stand as a compressed version of what makes Baldwin, when bad, so good.
  2. The Last of the Mohicans
    The first hour of The Last of the Mohicans plays like a convoluted history lesson. I appreciate that Mann has enough respect for the audience's intelligence to sketch in this briar patch of conflicting loyalties. But he outlines the interlocking factions without really making it clear, in dramatic terms, what each one stands for.
  3. Innocent Blood
    Inocent Blood is an unbelievably lethargic horror comedy directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London). Anne Parillaud, the French star of La Femme Nikita, is less sexy than morose in the role of a modern-day vampire who preys on mafiosi. Why mafiosi? For no good reason other than that it allows Landis to stage a lot of scenes in which cut-rate Italian hoodlums stand around yelling at each other.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    School Ties
    In illuminating how upper-class bigotry can encompass both the actively fascist and the politely passive, School Ties is actually one of the more realistic — and least insufferable — entries in the recent prep-school genre.
  5. South Central
    Whatever its melodramatic shortcomings, South Central offers a wrenching view of modern youth-gang violence by demonstrating, with desperate candor, that the civilized alternatives are fast disappearing.
  6. Singles
    But here they’re all still young and flannel-y and full of hope—and nobody needs an app for that.
  7. Husbands and Wives
    Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera.
  8. Wind
    Wind sometimes dawdles, but it’s a sports movie with soul.
  9. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
    Mostly about the prospect of getting your skin ripped by fishhooks.
  10. Sneakers
    Sneakers is an agreeably lightweight caper thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Reeboks or basketball.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where the Day Takes You
    In Where the Day Takes You, a prettified look at teen homelessness in Hollywood, even a junkie’s vomit looks designer.
  12. Bob Roberts
    This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.
  13. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Honeymoon in Vegas
    Way oversold in movie theaters, this pleasantly small shaggy-dog comedy seems more at home on the small screen — even if you do forget why it is you’re smiling by the time the tape finishes rewinding.
  15. A Brief History of Time
    Directed by the ingenious documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), A Brief History of Time held out the promise of being an audacious, brain-bending experience. Instead, it's plodding and disappointingly conventional.
  16. Single White Female
    A clever, by-the-numbers gothic thriller. Single White Female is entertaining claptrap.
  17. Unforgiven
    As enjoyable as most of Unforgiven is, Eastwood's shades-of-gray moralism feels like a whitewash.
  18. Raising Cain
    In the lurid and gonzo Raising Cain, writer-director Brian De Palma doesn’t just rip off Alfred Hitchcock. He rips off himself ripping off Hitchcock: He rides over the top of self-parody into a kind of loony-tunes reflexivity.
  19. Death Becomes Her
    The trouble with Death Becomes Her isn’t that its comic vision is too dark but that it has no shadings, no acerbic glee. Zemeckis gives nastiness such a hard sell he forgets to take any delight in it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Enchanted April
    By the end of Enchanted April, there isn’t a single character—not even the spiky flapper—who retains much of an edge. That’s what’s appealing about the movie (everyone walks away happy) and also forgettable (everyone walks away mush).
    • 50 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
    Honey has enough charm, good humor, and wry gut laughs to smooth over the dull patches and flaws in logic.
  22. Cool World
    Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.
  23. Universal Soldier
    Viewers primed for a postapocalyptic blowout will be disappointed to learn that Universal Soldier is set in the boring old present day, and that until the climactic clash the film is slow-moving and short on firepower.
  24. Gas Food Lodging
    Gas Food Lodging is really about the same thing Thelma & Louise was about: It’s a portrait of working-class women betrayed and abandoned by men. Yet I vastly preferred this movie’s generous and buoyant tone.
  25. The Best Intentions
    The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.
  26. Prelude to a Kiss
    Prelude to a Kiss is squishy yet blah. It teaches the characters a lesson they don’t need to learn.
  27. A League of Their Own
    From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.
  28. Unlawful Entry
    An efficient, intense formula thriller.
  29. Batman Returns
    Batman Returns offers many jolts of pleasure, yet it’s also a mess — a gilded sketchbook of a movie that keeps falling open to random pages.
  30. HouseSitter
    Every time Housesitter seems about to turn wild, it gets waterlogged with heart.
  31. Sister Act
    The movie is a Disneyfied contradiction: a lapsed-Catholic comedy without a whiff of true blasphemy. Still, on its own fluffy terms, it’s pleasant nunsense.
  32. Far and Away
    Far and Away looks like an epic, but it lacks flavor and texture. It's so predigested there's nothing left to chew on.
  33. Alien 3
    Alien3 is a grimly seductive end-of-the-world thriller, with pop-tragic overtones that build in resonance as the movie goes on.
  34. Encino Man
    Pauly Shore, the reptilian imp from MTV. Reeling off Valley Dude slang in a slurry monotone, as if he could barely be bothered to make his lips form words, he’s a fey sleazebag in hippie duds — a cross between Jim Morrison and Richard Simmons. The most interesting thing about watching Pauly Shore is wondering how long it will be before he has to take a day job.
  35. Lethal Weapon 3
    The movie zips around without any true forward momentum. The stars carry you along, though.
  36. One False Move
    Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Poison Ivy
    Drew Barrymore is terrific as a jailbait fatale who manipulates the members of a dysfunctional well-to-do family in this gothic sexploitation item. But while Poison Ivy tries hard to work up a sweat, it ends up so over the top that it can’t help but go splat.
  38. White Sands
    White Sands, on the other hand, is a dud, the sort of movie that swathes its emptiness in layers of chic, swirling ”visuals.”
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Boris and Natasha
    The slapstick might appeal to some kids, although it’s extremely dumb and, even worse, just not funny.
  40. Deep Cover
    Duke is out to blend the commercial, gut-wrenching pleasures of an inner- city shoot-’em-up with the complex moral rage that marked such black-cinema touchstones as Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971).
  41. Newsies
    It has been put together with just enough efficiency to qualify as an oddball labor of love.
  42. The Player
    The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thunderheart
    The movie boasts a number of shoot-outs and a car chase leading to the final showdown, but it’s more than just an updated cowboys-and-Indians picture, due in no small part to Apted’s grasp of the situation’s complexity.
  44. White Men Can't Jump
    Perhaps the first sports movie ever made in which the characters talked as good a game as they played.
  45. The Power of One
    The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer.
  46. Basic Instinct
    Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.
  47. My Cousin Vinny
    My Cousin Vinny is the definition of obvious, and it’s way too long (do films like this really need an hour’s worth of setup?). But Pesci and Tomei make a first-rate team — they’re Punch and Judy gone Brooklyn.
  48. Gladiator
    The fight scenes are vicious, demagogic, and thoroughly exciting.
  49. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
    There’s every indication that director John Carpenter (Halloween) was trying for more than another rinky-dink Chevy Chase comedy. Except for the effects, though, Memoirs of an Invisible Man comes disappointingly close to being just that.
  50. Wayne's World
    As a movie, Wayne's World isn't much more than an amiable goof, yet it's carried along by the flaked-out exuberance of its two stars.
  51. Medicine Man
    In the end, there’s something opportunistic and glib about the way that Medicine Man yokes together medical wish fulfillment and save-the-rain-forest agitprop into a neat, messagey package. Nothing takes the fun out of romance quite like liberal earnestness.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Final Analysis
    Insanely ridiculous.
  53. Mississippi Masala
    As long as Nair follows the two characters’ romantic moves or details the lives of their families (whose contrasting status on the ethnic-minority ladder marks them as both rivals and uneasy comrades), the movie is funny, observant, and deeply humane.
  54. Fried Green Tomatoes
    An extended framing device set in the present day, with Kathy Bates as a put-upon housewife who becomes the fierce, confident, new-and-improved ”Tawanda,” is the sort of ghastly idea that gives feminism a bad name. The movie left me wishing its sterling cast — including a radiant Jessica Tandy — had been better served.
  55. Juice
    The film is an inflammatory morality play shot through with rage and despair.
  56. Rush
    Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the Oscar-winning coproducer of Driving Miss Daisy (it’s her first time behind the camera), Rush has a raw surface authenticity. But that’s about all it has.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Freejack
    Directed by Geoff Murphy, Freejack is rife with run-of-the-mill action sequences and glaring inconsistencies.
  58. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    There’s no denying the movie gets a rise out of us, but it does so by mining the fears within our hokiest prejudices.
  59. Light Sleeper
    Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.
  60. The Prince of Tides
    The difference between The Prince of Tides and a movie like Ordinary People is that Streisand isn’t content with exploring human pain. She had to make it glamorous, too.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    Wenders’ weird and wired view of the near future tempts replay as often as the sensational soundtrack (U2, Talking Heads, Patti Smith).
  62. JFK
    [Stone's] filmmaking is so supple and alive, his obsession with the visual aspect of history so electrifying, that JFK practically roots itself in your imagination.
  63. Bugsy
    What’s finally missing from Bugsy is the dirty, low-down kick of the crime genre — the quality that marked last year’s The Grifters, and that was there in The Godfather, too. Levinson would like to be bad, but his approach is reverent, ironic, tasteful. He’s made a gangster movie that, for all its lithe pleasures, enunciates too well.
  64. The Last Boy Scout
    The Last Boy Scout is a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I’ve seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren’t this much fun.
  65. Night on Earth
    Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton.
  66. Hook
    Hook is jam-packed with ''entertainment value,'' enough to give you your money's worth, and to guarantee (in all probability) that Spielberg earns his. Yet something has clouded this director's vision... The problem isn't that Spielberg has lost his gift for fantasy. It's that he no longer seems to know (or care) about anything else.
  67. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    Star Trek VI is just pleasantly diverting, business-as-usual hokum.
  68. My Girl
    My Girl has some sweet, funny moments (the cast is uniformly appealing), yet it unfolds in a landscape of paralyzing, pop-psych banality.
  69. Beauty and the Beast
    Splendidly crafted as it is, the new Disney is a luscious impasto of visual invention that never quite finds its heart.
  70. The Addams Family
    It might have helped had the film included a few more representatives of the straight world. As it is, there’s almost nothing for the family to play off. We’re shut up in that mansion right along with them, and the kookiness grows fatally quaint.
  71. Kafka
    The movie is MTV Kafka: Instead of dialogue, character, behavior, it has a look and a mood. And that's all it has.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    A hypnotically engrossing thriller that spins along on the dreams and anxieties of its characters.
  73. Little Man Tate
    Little Man Tate keeps introducing characters and narrative lines that seem promising, but it doesn’t sustain them. The movie feels like three Afterschool Specials welded together.
  74. The People Under the Stairs
    If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.
  75. Life Is Sweet
    Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Own Private Idaho
    But Van Sant, whose vision is otherwise sharp, pushes the connection to Shakespeare's Henry IV too far, having Reeves at one point declaim in rhyming couplets, which severely tests even the most forgiving viewer.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  77. Frankie and Johnny
    Frankie & Johnny does what any true romantic movie should: It makes the mysterious, push-and-pull alchemy of love seem, once again, worth the effort.
  78. Homicide
    Homicide is engrossing, at least for a while, but the truly personal movie it wants to be remains locked up in Mamet’s head.
  79. Dogfight
    For all the pitfalls it scrupulously avoids, Dogfight isn’t finally very interesting. It’s not just the movie’s plot that’s diminutive. The emotions seem small too.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    Chow-Yun Fat’s sleek underworld charisma and intense emotion still come through. As for the action scenes, the dubbing affects them not a whit: They’re as dizzying as any Woo has concocted, and the climactic gun battle has to be one of the most ridiculously exhilarating — or exhilaratingly ridiculous — sequences of its kind.
  81. The Indian Runner
    Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step.
  82. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
    It’s disappointingly ho-hum, without the spectacular — and often very funny — special effects that have become the hallmark of this series.
  83. The Commitments
    As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.
  84. Child's Play 3
    Chucky the plastic slasher proves that his novelty value has long worn off.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dead Again
    With its stylized black-and-white sequences and fast-paced melodramatic plot, this homage to film noir is both intense and purposely self-conscious.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    All the virile violence in this buddy picture is lackluster — we’ve seen these fights, chases, and shoot-outs before.
  87. Barton Fink
    Barton Fink has an atmosphere of languid comic anxiety (it's like a cross between "Eraserhead" and "Angel Heart"), and it's fun to watch, if only because you have no idea what's coming next.
  88. Pure Luck
    Just about unwatchable — a numbingly repetitive farce in which the cursed Short trips, walks into walls, trips, spills an entire saltshaker onto his breakfast, trips, sets people on fire, trips…
  89. Double Impact
    What makes Double Impact, for all its dull-witted theatrics, an energizing experience is the picture’s astonishing level of ballistic mayhem.
  90. Paris Is Burning
    Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.
  91. Trust
    Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.
  92. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    If any character steals Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, it's the Grim Reaper, who, as played by William Sadler, keeps smirking with pleasure at the chance to loosen up.
  93. Point Break
    Director Kathryn Bigelow is one of the new-style action wizards who’ve never quite mastered the nuts and bolts of telling a story.
  94. Regarding Henry
    The movie has a few jokes, but it could have used some of the canny, real-world logic that made Rain Man so convincing (and funny).
  95. Slacker
    The movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.
  96. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    The movie is a great big feast of wreckage. But that’s also what makes it a bit numbing.
  97. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    it’s consistently funny and inventive.
  98. The Rocketeer
    The Rocketeer is mostly an example of pop moviemaking at its most derivative.
  99. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    As a piece of escapism, this deluxe, action-heavy, 2-hour-and-21-minute Robin Hood gets the job done. You’re carried along by plot, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero. Costner doesn’t disgrace himself — he has the star presence the role demands. What he’s not is an impassioned Robin Hood. And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge.
  100. City Slickers
    Crystal’s ordinariness — his utter lack of glamour — really works for him here. He’s far more pleasureful to watch in this sort of dramatic-comedy role than, say, Robin Williams, because his comfy, urban-shlemiel personality helps ground the jokes.
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