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. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead
    On Married With Children, the baby-faced Applegate has a slutty spark. Here, the role is too straight, and she’s blah — an apple pie that’s neither sweet nor tart enough.
  2. Jungle Fever
    What’s missing from Jungle Fever, I think, is a vision of the positive. By that, I don’t mean some shallow ”optimistic” message but, rather, an organic and casual sense of pleasure as one of the sustaining currents of everyday life — even in a country as mired in racism as this one.
  3. Soapdish
    Soapdish makes the tackiness of soap operas seem far more desperate than funny.
  4. Backdraft
    Fire, as this movie makes clear, is nothing if not photogenic, and Howard has done a beautiful job of conjuring both its danger and its deceptive, primal beauty.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Thelma & Louise
    Never quite connects with us emotionally, yet the more it shades off into the gonzo-poetic, the more fun it becomes.
  6. Hudson Hawk
    This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.
  7. Drop Dead Fred
    As the naughty ghost pal of Phoebe Cates, an obnoxious British actor named Rik Mayall is like Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice without the juice. In Drop Dead Fred, all he does is smash and spill things and say many, many potty words.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Only the Lonely
    Only the Lonely is for only the desperate.
  9. What About Bob?
    What About Bob? is just funny enough to make you wish it had been wilder and less predictable.
  10. Stone Cold
    The routinely scripted but kinetic Stone Cold is a throwback to Roger Corman’s Hell’s Angels flicks, in which beer-swilling denim-and-leather-clad freedom riders straddled their Harleys to terrorize the American heartland.
  11. F/X2
    The movie itself is convoluted and almost unbelievably lackluster.
  12. Switch
    Switch leaves one feeling that Blake Edwards is more than a little confused.
  13. Europa Europa
    Europa, Europa isn’t the wrenching emotional saga it might have been.
  14. Toy Soldiers
    It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.
  15. A Kiss Before Dying
    With its waxy color scheme and nonexistent pace, the movie is like an homage to Hitchcock’s worst period.
  16. Oscar
    Every chuckle feels engineered. Stallone is reduced to playing straight man to a gaggle of stock Damon Runyon hoods, though Tim Curry, looking like a stuffed cod, brings a prissy, nerdish glee to the role of a madly obsequious linguistics professor.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mortal Thoughts
    Directed by Alan Rudolph (Choose Me), this tedious film, rife with flashbacks and slow-motion sequences that underscore the already overbearing plot and exaggerated characters, fails both as a mystery and as a statement on marital violence.
  18. The Object of Beauty
    A mild but charmingly off-kilter romantic comedy that gently satirizes love in an era of buy-now-pay-later brinkmanship.
  19. Out for Justice
    What’s numbing about this sub-Eastwood potboiler isn’t just the grisliness of the violence but the absence of any possibility that Seagal will stumble, or show doubt or pain, or have to challenge himself in order to defeat his enemies.
  20. Poison
    Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.
  21. Defending Your Life
    A lackluster affair — smooth and mildly pleasant, with some honest chuckles but without Brooks’ special, prosaic madness.
  22. The Comfort of Strangers
    The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.
  23. Career Opportunities
    In a sense, John Hughes doesn’t produce movies anymore. He produces entertainment machines, and Career Opportunities has been shamelessly patched together — like Frankenstein’s monster — from bits and pieces of Home Alone and The Breakfast Club.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    Neither as fun nor as faithful to the spirit of the original comics. It’s a bigger, slicker movie, but not a better one.
  25. Guilty by Suspicion
    The scandal of McCarthyism is too daunting to shake off. But Guilty By Suspicion leaves you wishing that someone would finally make a decent movie about it.
  26. The Perfect Weapon
    During the fight scenes, it sounds as if a hundred watermelons were being clobbered at once. Other than that, it’s business as usual, with the all-American Speakman proving the most generic vigilante this genre has spawned yet.
  27. True Colors
    The film, which has an overly complicated script (by Kevin Wade), is like Wall Street minus Gordon Gekko. It takes the fun out of back-room political sleaziness — and out of political integrity, too.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Dark Backward
    Somewhere here, an ironic show-biz parable is trying to take shape. But director Adam Rifkin generally ignores it, preferring to flaunt the chops he has borrowed from David Lynch and John Waters.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    La Femme Nikita
    It's like "The Terminator" as reimagined by the editors of French Vogue.
  30. New Jack City
    It’s got some talented actors and a certain jagged inner-city atmosphere, yet this first feature directed by Mario Van Peebles (son of the veteran black director Melvin Van Peebles) is little more than a sketchy exploitation melodrama.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bride of Re-Animator
    The original Re-Animator was made by an artist working on a wicked, energetic high. Bride of Re-Animator is a smart piece of hack work. In the end, it’s best left standing at the altar.
  32. Nothing But Trouble
    Most of the jokes are so lame that Chevy Chase can’t even be bothered to look nonchalant. A sadder excuse for a movie would be hard to imagine.
  33. L.A. Story
    The trouble is, nothing about this couple is particularly rooted in Los Angeles. The love affair has a bland, generic feel. What's more, the picture lacks verve.
  34. Sleeping with the Enemy
    As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.
  35. Popcorn
    Though it isn’t even trying to scare you, this is a very nifty black-comic horror movie, one of the rare entries in the genre with some genuine wit and affection.
  36. White Fang
    Despite some splendid snowcapped vistas and one rather frightening grizzly-bear attack, White Fang, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel is dramatically inert. Nothing in the picture really takes hold — certainly not the relationship between young Jack (Ethan Hawke) and White Fang, who seem like near-strangers even at the final clinch.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 58 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lionheart
    By never fessing up to its own bloodlust, Lionheart is, at bottom, chickenhearted.
  38. Not Without My Daughter
    It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.
  39. Warlock
    Warlock is an occult schlock-o-rama, with special effects so low-budget they might have come out of a joke shop.
  40. The Godfather: Part III
    In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.
  41. Alice
    Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin.
  42. Kindergarten Cop
    The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.
  43. The Long Walk Home
    Both actresses are quite fine. The role of Odessa is somewhat underwritten, but Goldberg, playing her as a modest, God-fearing woman, acts with a deep-buried determination. If she’d been allowed to show some of her humor, the character might have soared. Spacek gives a beautifully modulated performance. 
  44. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    One of the most indecently bad movies of the year.
  45. The Russia House
    It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.
  46. Awakenings
    And so even if you're held (as I was) by the acting, you may find yourself fighting the film's design. It reflects a certain lack of faith in your audience to take a performance as authentic as De Niro's and reduce it to the level of a glorified reach-out-and-touch-someone commercial.
  47. Mermaids
    In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Edward Scissorhands
    Simple, funny, gorgeous, sad, and sweet, perfect for playing over and over.
  49. The Rookie
    The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.
  50. The Grifters
    The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.
  51. Cyrano de Bergerac
    Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau makes the mistake of treating Cyrano de Bergerac as though it were some lost Shakespearean tragedy instead of the wonderfully gimmicky (and familiar) tearjerker it is.
  52. Misery
    The movie has a real kick to it. As Paul and Annie attempt to outsmart each other, Misery gets nastier and nastier. It turns into a psychotic cat-and-mouse game, and there are some genuine shocks.
  53. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is watchable but also stiff and remote.
  54. Predator 2
    The whole noisy movie is really just a setup for the climactic duel between renegade cop Danny Glover and the monster. By that point, you’re pathetically grateful for a few stomach-churning special effects.
  55. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    A far funnier movie than its predecessor.
  56. Rocky V
    This sweetly downtrodden, punch-drunk Rocky is often appealing to watch. Yet as a character, he doesn’t have much drive — and neither, I’m afraid, does the movie.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Rescuers Down Under
    The Rescuers Down Under, directed by Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel, carries its ambitions with an easy grace, expanding the art of animation to fresh ground without losing sight of the silly fun we love cartoons for.
  58. Dances with Wolves
    The movie is so busy turning the Sioux characters into photogenic saints that it never quite allows them the complications of human beings.
  59. The Krays
    We never get any sense of how the brothers build their empire, or of how the various supporting characters fit into their lives. Telling this story in a more straightforward fashion would have been far more satisfying. Still, the Kemps are something to see.
  60. Jacob's Ladder
    The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.
  61. Vincent & Theo
    Vincent & Theo looks and feels like a half-baked PBS drama, and at two hours and 20 minutes the movie is hopelessly plodding. Still, see it for Roth, whose warts-and-all portrait of Van Gogh is an offbeat triumph.
  62. Graffiti Bridge
    Graffiti Bridge is a sad fiasco — and except for Shake! the music (at least to my ears) is Prince at his most joyless, a collection of glorified rhythm tracks. For the first time, the revolutionary funkster seems to be preaching to a world that has left him behind.
  63. Night of the Living Dead
    In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.
  64. White Palace
    Spader and Sarandon make White Palace worth seeing, but too often they’re fighting the movie’s smugness.
  65. Quigley Down Under
    Vapid, cutesy, knockabout Western.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Avalon
    The movie is the visual equivalent of a stranger picking out highlights from his family album and providing brief descriptions of them. Everything that happens in Avalon, be it happiness or trauma, is infused with the same tone. The result is test-pattern emotion; everything’s on the same level. There’s no discrimination and, hence, no drama.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Reversal of Fortune
    Funny and scary, Reversal is a tour de force for Schroeder, who examines the idle rich, the intricacies of the legal system, and the imperatives of morality concisely but with unmatched brio.
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hot Spot
    It's also supposed to be atmospheric, noirish, and touched with nihilism. But the director, Hollywood bad boy Dennis Hopper, lays it all on so thick that the film verges on self-parody.
  69. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
    An offbeat pic pointlessly oversaturated with grating characters who look like they got lost on their way to a John Waters fan club convention.
  70. Memphis Belle
    The characters in Memphis Belle may have ethnic names, but in spirit the actors are all playing WASPs — fresh-faced, pretty-boy WASPs, the kind that make the little girls swoon. It’s Dead Poets Society Goes to War.
  71. Mr. Destiny
    This high-concept update of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Destiny, is pure formula treacle, but James Belushi, playing a schlub who learns what life would have been like had he become a big executive, is at his most immediate and appealing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Miller's Crossing
    If, however, you're looking for compelling characters, all the lights are blazing here but nobody's at home.
  73. Henry & June
    In Henry & June, Kaufman, trying to deepen the erotic explorations of Unbearable Lightness, ends up with a triangle movie that’s watchable but also arty and rather stilted.
  74. Desperate Hours
    The most desperate thing about Desperate Hours is Michael Cimino’s attempt to direct it coherently. In Cimino’s paws, the story of a merciless crook (Mickey Rourke) terrorizing a suburban family descends into lurid gibberish.
  75. An Angel at My Table
    Told in Campion’s fancifully fractured style, An Angel at My Table is very accomplished, but it’s also an epic act of perversity: a 2-hour-and-38-minute movie about a wallflower.
  76. King of New York
    Director Abel Ferrara stages the violence in electrifying spasms, and Walken, with his undead complexion, his jittery line readings, and his stare of cold rage, mesmerizes the camera.
  77. Pacific Heights
    You can’t make a good thriller when the most pressing issue is whether the protagonists will have to default on their mortgage payments.
  78. Texasville
    The Last Picture Show was a mood piece drenched in acrid despair. Texasville is two hours of flat, Southern Gothic whimsy. The movie has the form of a soaper without the juicy content.
  79. Narrow Margin
    Narrow Margin, despite a sturdy turn by Gene Hackman as a cynical assistant DA, is a thinly scripted procession of train-movie clichés.
  80. State of Grace
    The movie has been shot with a pleasingly overripe visual flair, and on its own terms it’s fairly entertaining. Yet it isn’t about anything so much as its own explosiveness.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    White Hunter Black Heart
    White Hunter, Black Heart wants to show us a specific heart of darkness — a man who, by striving to kill one of nature’s grandest creatures, hoped to annihilate part of himself — but the theme gets lost in shades of gray.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Repossessed
    For a movie seemingly written and directed by sophomore-year film students, Repossessed offers a number of laughs. Five. But it mainly demonstrates that Nielsen is at his best when leaving production duties to professionals.
  83. Hardware
    Had the killer droid been conceived as a charismatic demon, Hardware might have delivered some B-movie kicks. As it is, there’s nothing particularly scary or awesome about this low-tech walking junk pile. It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set.
  84. Postcards from the Edge
    There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.
  85. Darkman
    Darkman is a thrillingly demented pop spectacular: a grade-B movie made by a grade-A lunatic.
  86. After Dark, My Sweet
    After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.
  87. Men at Work
    Bottom-of-the-garbage-barrel comedy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Witches
    From scene to scream, The Witches is good mean fun for the whole family.
  89. My Blue Heaven
    The movie itself, with the exception of a few scenes, doesn't really have the wit it's aiming for, and among Steve Martin vehicles it's middle-drawer, at best. Yet that mood of silly exuberance reigns through most of the picture.
  90. The Exorcist III
    The Exorcist III has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk.
  91. Taking Care of Business
    The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.
  92. Wild at Heart
    A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work.
  93. Air America
    The movie has no script, and even the better gags - like one in which a couple of the pilots scribble away at coloring books in the backseat of a plane - could have been staged more vividly.
  94. The Two Jakes
    The Two Jakes is competent and watchable.
  95. Flatliners
    You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.
  96. Metropolitan
    Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.
  97. Mo' Better Blues
    Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama.
  98. Young Guns II
    Whenever a few of the Young Guns get together and have to behave like soulful cowboys, the movie stops dead in its tracks. The trouble with so many of today’s young actors is that there’s no deep-seated yearning or fury in their performances. They just seem like well-adjusted California kids putting on a show for a few hours.
  99. Problem Child
    With jokes this lame you won't have to worry as much about your children getting any bad ideas.
  100. Presumed Innocent
    The convolutions of Turow’s plot remain absorbing, and Presumed Innocent is certainly as watchable as a lot of other courtoom-investigative thrillers. Yet almost everything in the picture feels sterile and posed. Pakula is good at laying out an intricate, almost mathematical series of events (his best film remains All the President’s Men), but he’s not big on atmosphere. The movie could have used some of the bowels-of-the-city grit Sidney Lumet brought to Q & A.
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