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. The Freshman
    The Freshman has its moments — I enjoyed Paul Benedict’s performance as a pompously self-infatuated film professor — but mostly it plods along like that lizard. Still, whenever Brando shows up the screen just about twinkles.
  2. Navy Seals
    Navy SEALs isn’t just the most stupidly didactic action movie since The Green Berets. It’s the dullest action movie since The Green Berets.
  3. Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge. 
  4. Quick Change
    Quick Change starts out fast and loose — it gets the audience primed for a ripsnorting caper comedy. Yet almost nothing that follows is as clever, as surprising, or as casually anarchic as that nifty opening sequence. Murray himself served as codirector, and though he doesn't do anything terribly wrong, the movie lacks comic zest.
  5. Jetsons: The Movie
    In an age of Simpson-mania, George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy seem blander than ever.
  6. Die Hard 2
    A number of scenes have been staged with satisfying kinetic flair, and Willis once again makes an appealing superhero. Yet without that great big booby-trapped skyscraper to hold the action together, the suspense dissipates.
  7. Days of Thunder
    The film, though sleek and easy to sit through, replaces genuine dramatic involvement with a superficial, rock & roll empathy-it's as though we were watching Cruise's character and playing air guitar to his emotions. There are plenty of soulless movies around. What's special about Days of Thunder is that it works overtime trying to convince you it's not one of them.
  8. Betsy's Wedding
    The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.
  9. Dick Tracy
    Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip.
  10. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2 is a limited achievement — it’s nothing but the sum of its own whirring pop-culture mechanics. But that’s more than enough to keep you occupied, and occasionally exhilarated.
  11. Total Recall
    Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.
  12. Back to the Future Part III
    Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.
  13. Fire Birds
    A third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder.
  14. Cadillac Man
    Cadillac Man, like the recent I Love You to Death, starts out as comedy on a human scale and turns into canned farce. For an actor like Robin Williams, that’s the movie equivalent of being muzzled.
  15. Bird on a Wire
    Bird on a Wire is far from inept-every one of those car chases is masterfully staged. Still, for most of two hours you’re pummeled with formula; it would be hard to name another movie at once so proficient and so dull. When a director as talented as Badham reaches this state of empty craftsmanship, who can say whether he’s working out of boredom or cynicism? At this point, there may be very little difference.
  16. Class of 1999
    A trashy teen derivative of The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and every other retro-future fantasy that director Mark L. Lester could cram into the compactor.
  17. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.
  18. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Its title aside, this slow, clunky omnibus film feels more like a TV show than a movie. It’s not very scary, and there isn’t much contrast among the episodes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Aficionados of fine acting will find Last Exit to Brooklyn worth renting for the complex performances of Lang and Leigh. But, with its vague and unresolved story and themes, the movie remains a blur.
  20. Wild Orchid
    In the ludicrous soft-core fantasia Wild Orchid, Mickey Rourke is so tan he looks as though he’d spent a week with his head in a microwave.
  21. Q & A
    Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.
  22. Spaced Invaders
    Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.
  23. Miami Blues
    What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.
  24. Crazy People
    The movie wants you to giggle and say, ”Yup, we sure are saps, aren’t we?”
  25. The Gods Must Be Crazy II
    It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.
  26. I Love You to Death
    I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.
  27. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    The Cook, The Thief is so full of loathing it just about gags on its own bile.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ernest Goes to Jail
    The script tries to work up sympathy for a character who’s not much more than the bastard trailer-park spawn of Jerry Lewis. Sadly, this is everything you ever thought an Ernest movie would be.
  29. The First Power
    Yet another low-grade spectacular about an evil force that leaps from body to body.
  30. Cry-Baby
    There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.
  31. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.
  32. Pretty Woman
    Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.
  33. The Fourth War
    The Fourth War is an old-soldiers-never-die movie — an ironic elegy — and though much of the story is contrived and second-rate, Scheider gives a richly felt performance.
  34. A Shock to the System
    The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.
  35. Blue Steel
    Blue Steel lacks sustained storytelling craftsmanship, and it never approaches the saturnine intensity of the film it sometimes recalls, Michael Mann’s Manhunter (the greatest thriller of the past decade). But it makes you eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script.
  36. Lord of the Flies
    As a novel, Lord of the Flies never was much more than a Brat Pack Heart of Darkness. It’s doubtful a screen version could be any better than this one.
  37. Blind Fury
    The Zatoichi films are amusing comic-strip spectaculars — the blood spurts like something out of a Hawaiian Punch commercial. The action in Blind Fury, on the other hand, is resolutely earthbound and heavy-duty. The fact that Hauer kicks, slashes, and punches without the benefit of sight just makes you acutely aware of how ludicrous this stuff always is.
  38. House Party
    The movie is slick and cartoonish but also extremely clever, and its unabashed conventionality is exactly what’s fun about it.
  39. Joe Versus the Volcano
    There’s something weirdly innocent about Shanley’s ineptitude: He seems to be inventing the oldest cliches for the very first time. The movie doesn’t really hit bottom, though, until he has Ryan deliver an ickily earnest monologue about how her character is ”soul-sick.” I think she means, ”Pass the Pepto-Bismol.
  40. Bad Influence
    The movie is consistently entertaining; it sucks you in. James Spader is a little too recessive, yet he lends the action a core of wormy anxiety.
  41. The Handmaid's Tale
    The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock — just like the book.
  42. The Hunt for Red October
    Colorful and exciting, yet unless you're a young moviegoer, nothing in it takes you by complete surprise. (It's less a nail-biter than a chin-stroker.)
  43. Nightbreed
    Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.
  44. Revenge
    The trouble with Scott’s movies is that they’re not just star vehicles. They’re about the aesthetics of celebrity, about the narcissism that’s going on offscreen. If Revenge ends up knocking Costner down a peg, it’ll be just what he needs — and deserves.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Madhouse
    The tacky New Jersey cousin with the nauseous cat, the gold-digging sister, the drug-running nephew — these are cruel cartoons, as grating to the viewer as they are to their hosts. Tucked between the pratfalls, though, is some surprisingly deft comedy.
  46. Hard to Kill
    At this point, revenge thrillers have become so standardized that these films are really all the same film — a Mixmaster blend of Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon, and Rambo. A star with a personality would only gum up the works.
  47. Stella
    Stella is never dull, but by the time it replays the famous Barbara Stanwyck-in-the-rain scene, it’s jerking camp laughter instead of tears.
  48. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is undeniably disturbing, especially that video scene and when it shows us (however discreetly) a body being hacked up in a bathtub. Yet the critics who’ve hailed it as a landmark are going overboard. Henry is just a superior B-movie with an artsy-clinical title.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Driving Miss Daisy
    Director Bruce Beresford's tightly focused adaptation retains all the impact of its Pulitzer Prize-winning stage original. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give exceptional performances as the aging widow and the sage black chauffeur who enlightens her in the segregated South.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    We're No Angels
    What are two of America’s top dramatic actors, a serious playwright, and a hard-boiled British director doing in We’re No Angels, a meaningless stab at film comedy? Failing badly, that’s what.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Family Business
    Family Business is one of Lumet’s very worst movies, but the actors are stellar.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The War of the Roses
    DeVito doesn't hesitate to send the camera anywhere to goose the humor.
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 57 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Back to the Future Part II
    All in all, Future II is another fantastic voyage in a thoroughly entertaining contraption.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Fat Man and Little Boy
    There is scarcely a performance in Fat Man and Little Boy that is less than commendable. Almost every scene is thoughtfully and tastefully (though not imaginatively) devised. But the characters and shots do not work together to tell a story. Instead, we get a bunch of inconclusive vignettes.
  55. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    Nearly every scene is a jazz-tinged, virtuoso actors’ duet.
  56. Shirley Valentine
    Talented actors stumbling through clichéd plot twists (Shirley’s nemeses actually envy her), flat one-liners (”Marriage is like the Middle East — there’s no solution”), and pithy self-affirmations (”I’ve fallen in love with the idea of living”) that undermine any genuine feminist sentiments.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Millennium
    It offers neither the tension of a good plane-disaster movie nor the ingenuity of a smart time-travel tale.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 42 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Milo and Otis
    Milo and Otis is an okay babysitter for the very, very young, but for anyone who truly loves animals it seems pretty fishy.
  59. Casualties of War
    As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Abyss
    The Abyss ends with a whimper. But it starts out with a bang that lasts for an exciting hour and a half. And that's enough to make it worth taking the plunge.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    sex, lies, and videotape
    Compulsively watchable.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    The film is so deeply sorrowful that it’s sometimes hard to watch, yet so filled with painterly beauty that you cannot look away.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Great Balls of Fire!
    Winona Ryder is wonderful as the naive child bride. Dennis Quaid, as Lewis, mugs and struts in a colorfully unreal caricature, miming to new Jerry Lee renditions of classic tunes.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Vampire's Kiss
    Playing a sleazeball who has stumbled upon an excellent excuse for his bent, Cage holds the movie together as best he can. More important, he nails down his unique approach to acting, managing to be simultaneously stylized and naturalistic. [7 June 1996, p.66]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  65. For All Mankind
    For All Mankind certainly succeeds at evoking the ironically serene aesthetics of space travel. What it never quite captures is the accompanying human drama. In all likelihood, the film will be shown in classrooms for years to come, but it’s just possible kids will watch it and wonder what all the fuss was about.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Going Overboard
    At least the movie has archival value: an early appearance by Chicago Hope‘s Peter Berg, along with Billy Zane embarrassing himself as a favor to his wife, Liza Collins Zane, who costars in the film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    Robinson takes on a few too many satirical targets, but star Richard E. Grant gives a great over-the-top performance. It’s hard to dislike a film where a giant zit gets all the best lines.
  68. Let's Get Lost
    Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Say Anything...
    It all comes down to one scene: John Cusack, standing at dusk, boom box aloft, blaring Peter Gabriel's ''In Your Eyes'' outside Ione Skye's window. This, friends, is what rapturous, heartrending, soul-spinning love is all about.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Delightfull time-travel comedy.
  71. Working Girl
    The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
  72. Dangerous Liaisons
    Pfeiffer reveals an emotional nakedness that's almost shocking. Never has she exposed so much and done it so simply. Who knew she could be this good?
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dead Ringers
    A masterpiece.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Brain Damage
    Writer-director Frank Henenlotter’s disturbing antidrug parable has more gross-out scenes than it probably needs, but it also has the funniest and most literate dialogue ever to grace a no-budget monster movie.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Colors
    Sean Penn and Robert Duvall basically played the Two Faces of Dennis: hyper young firebrand and cautious older lion.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  76. Sign 'o' the Times
    The cutting and camera work in Sign ‘O’ the Times are too intrusive, and the somewhat discordant songs worked better as a magnificent hodgepodge on the album. Still, this concert movie (which barely made it to theaters) is a feisty, engaging show.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Hidden
    The Hidden is hands down the best movie ever made about a homicidal alien slug that oozes from human host to human host.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Princess Bride
    Reiner's penchant for hip little riffs -- Billy Crystal as a yiddish wizard, etc. -- dilutes primal power in favor of genial fun.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hamburger Hill
    Kudos to Vietnam vet Jim Carabatsos for writing Hamburger Hill, the only ’80s Nam film that truly showcases American heroism, but this dramatization of the charge up hellish Hill 937 lacks context and bitterly scapegoats peace activists and the media.
  80. The Monster Squad
    Fred Dekker’s 1987 horror comedy is, like totally, the ultimate ’80s movie. An agreeably goofy, Little Rascals-meets-The Goonies time passer, the movie is proudly anti-CGI.
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