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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    • 28 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Surf Nazis Must Die
    The best thing about this B movie is always going to be its title, but there’s more than a catchy name to this DVD.
  2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
    The Voyage Home is pure, joyful cinema.
  3. The Name of the Rose
    The film’s packed with messages in invisible ink, secret staircases, and corpses in cauldrons of pig’s blood. And since ? Connery’s bald as a cue ball, that means no distracting Hanksian haircuts!
    • 16 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Shanghai Surprise
    Some bad films become kitschy-cool with age, but Shanghai Surprise continues to rot.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Manhunter
    The brilliance of Michael Mann's Manhunter is that it appreciates that the true nexus of humanity is our shared closeness.
  6. Stand by Me
    Rob Reiner’s film is all about the journey, not the destination. And all of his young actors are great — Wheaton as the sensitive narrator, Feldman as the slightly crazy wild card, and especially Phoenix as the tough-yet-tender doomed soul.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Big Trouble in Little China
    There are two kinds of people: the ones who have seen — and love — Big Trouble in Little China, a John Carpenter kung fu Western buddy Chinese ghost love story, and those poor saps who aren’t burdened with having to try and describe it to the uninitiated.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    The Great Mouse Detective‘s few tunes are unmemorable and all the action (aside from the inventive chase sequences) is snooze-worthy. Only the incomparable Vincent Price (as Ratigan) is worth the price.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  9. Under the Cherry Moon
    It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.
  10. Top Gun
    Top Gun has always been more than just an action flick about a cocky young fighter pilot who feels the need for speed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Salvador
    It serves as testimony to the ghosts that continue to haunt such men as ex-senator Bob Kerrey.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Room with a View
    A movie with exquisite period detail. [8 Apr 1994]
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Best of Times
    It’s hardly a great Williams performance, nor would it make the short list of really good football movies, but there’s something very sweet and innocent about it—especially Williams’ hopeless dreamer.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Brazil
    One of those rare gems that prove equally stunning on both aesthetic and cerebral levels.
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Clue
    This screwball comedy turned a rainy-day board game into inspiration — and attempted to answer the question of what Colonel Mustard has up his sleeve.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Twice in a Lifetime
    ”With her it’s sex?” a weepy Ellen Burstyn asks husband Gene Hackman in Twice in a Lifetime, a sensitive divorce drama that finds her wondering why Hackman’s steel-mill man is jilting her late in life for jezebel barmaid Ann-Margret. ”Of course it’s sex,” Hackman replies testily. ”It’s important.” Good scene, but it’s jarring, too, because it reminds you just how rarely this master actor has been asked to play a man in heat over the course of his long career.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Death Wish 3
    The preposterously Rambo-esque Death Wish 3 sends him to New York City’s bombed-out slums to mow down “creeps,” using machine guns and missile launchers.
  18. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    No Footloose. But its synthy soundtrack, heated dance-offs, and Day-Glo leg warmers are guilty-pleasure pay dirt. A mouthy 14-year-old Shannen Doherty doesn’t hurt either.
  19. The Sure Thing
    Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap follow-up is surprisingly deep for a flick that rests on the same shelf as Hardbodies and My Tutor. But as Gib would say, ”What the hell’s wrong with being stupid once in a while?
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Breakfast Club
    From the neon-sign opening titles to the derivative angst of the dialogue, it's a touchstone of '80s pop culture, and a schizophrenic one, too.
  21. Blood Simple
    All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 33 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Runaway
    Starts with savvy concepts (televised mind control and man’s reliance on robots, respectively) and quickly devolves into sour, overwritten diatribes.
  23. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Some of the effects remain nicely repulsive; Freddy himself comes across as a genuinely nasty piece of work, far removed from his later incarnation.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Terminator
    Kineticism and suspense, combined with strongly conceived characters....Made Cameron a talent to watch. [13 Jan 1995, p. 67]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  25. Purple Rain
    The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stranger Than Paradise
    Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist meditation on a trio of misfits who wander across the U.S. Shot in crisp black and white, the film is a series of 67 single takes punctuated by moments of black screen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Top Secret!
    The result is a monkeyshine that lumbers when it should swing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in America
    A brilliantly detailed Lower East Side Jewish version of The Godfather.
  29. Repo Man
    Unlike Cox’s sneering Sid and Nancy, it’s defined more by a tone of affectionate disaffection than antipathy, celebrating a friendlier species of anarchy.
  30. Tenebrae
    Directed by Dario Argento, a.k.a. the Italian Hitchcock, the remastered giallo Tenebre is crammed with artsy camera work, intricate Rube Goldbergian death scenes, and a gruesome final reel where blood flows like the Tiber.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Broadway Danny Rose
    Although the laughs are tempered with a seedy undercurrent and a lump-in-the-throat ending, Allen has rarely been funnier.
  32. BMX Bandits
    The film’s no great shakes; it’s a Down Under Goonies wannabe about three wisecracking kids shredding on their bikes as they’re chased by bungling bank robbers. But the baby-faced Kidman is easily the best thing in it.
  33. The Big Chill
    And there's that perfect soundtrack, jammed with hit after timeless hit. So integral is the music to the heat of Chill that even a now-hackneyed scene like ensemble-dancing-while-cleaning-the-kitchen (to the Temptations' ''Ain't Too Proud to Beg'') takes on a glow far lovelier than the chore warrants -- as does this ingratiating, fake movie.
  34. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    Best of all, a revisit with Jedi makes a viewer appreciate spectacle, presentation, mythology -- that, and the power of a bitchin' helmet to speak volumes in a language even an alien can understand. [Special Edition]
  35. The Meaning of Life
    It’s tough to find the meaning in much of the craziness on display here, let alone the meaning of all human existence as the title promises, but you will find a whole lot of exquisite nonsense.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tootsie
    Sometimes a movie’s turmoil isn’t a sign of impending doom so much as one of impending brilliance.
  37. The Verdict
    If you were presenting a case for Newman’s legacy of acting brilliance, this film would be exhibit A.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    My Favorite Year
    My Favorite Year, a slight but sweet backstage comedy, now provides three levels of nostalgia: for the era of swashbuckling stars like Errol Flynn; for the golden age of TV that supplanted it; and for the presence of Peter O’Toole.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tempest
    Though real-life couple Cassavetes and Rowlands bounce well off one another and Raul Julia does a wacky musical number with goats (set to the tune of ”New York, New York”), the magic’s spare.
  40. The Last American Virgin
    "Virgin" is also one of the few Reagan-era romps that could put a lump in your throat, as loser Gary (Lawrence Monoson) watches his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin) steal his dream girl. Thank-fully, the Cars keep things fizzy by shaking it up on the soundtrack.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Secret of NIMH
    Bluth and his animators, bless them, chose to revive an endangered art form — classically detailed animation. They drew their characters exquisitely and gave them individual personalities. The entire ensemble — artists, actors, animals, and musicians — created something unique: the world’s first enjoyable rat race.
  42. TRON
    Jeff Bridges seems to be the only one having fun, playing a videogame designer who gets sucked into a Day-Glo world of his own creation. It’s like Alice in Wonderland acted out on a kids’ Lite-Brite toy.
  43. Blade Runner
    This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.
  44. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    E.T. is ultimately a tale of love, and the film becomes a cathartic leap into pure feeling. [2002 re-release]
  45. Burden of Dreams
    Herzog’s death-defying endeavor (executed with the help of an indigenous Indian tribe, not special effects) is the basis for Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s lyric chronicle of the film’s four-year evolution.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    The vintage footage is seamlessly integrated into the action, and the end result is both very funny and very true to the conventions of the detective movie.
  47. Diva
    Diva is based on one novel in a series about Gorodish and Alba by the pseudonymous ”Delacorta,” but the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Eating Raoul
    Paul and Mary Bland stop at nothing to open a restaurant in Paul Bartel’s scabrous black comedy.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Death Wish II
    The shamelessly rehashed Death Wish II finds Kersey in L.A., methodically hunting down those responsible for his daughter’s death (just as she’s recovering from her assault in the first Death Wish).
  50. Das Boot
    Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Absence of Malice
    Overwrought.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    True Confessions
    While True Confessions boasts big themes (redemption, reconciliation) and big names, the plot and performances are painfully subtle. It proffers too many details and not enough payoff.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Prince of the City
    What remains is nearly three hours of disorientation and paranoia, accented by Method-y monologue outbursts that quickly disappear into a vacuum of overwhelming loneliness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    They All Laughed
    They All Laughed, Peter Bogdanovich’s quiet romantic comedy about two Manhattan detectives (Gazzara, Ritter) following, and falling for, their subjects (Hepburn, Stratten), was unfairly overshadowed when Stratten, in 1980 (after filming had wrapped), was murdered by her estranged husband.
  55. Blow Out
    Deliciously twisty and twisted.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Superman II
    It boasts a more consistent tone, better special effects (such as villains throwing buses around like paper planes), and even an affecting love story.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Polyester
    Long before Mel Brooks, trash aesthete John Waters was making movies dedicated to the proposition that life stinks.
  58. This Is Elvis
    Its ambition is so great that the production’s occasional melodramatic touches can not only be forgiven, but viewed as having been executed in the spirit of the man himself.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Mirror Crack'd
    An adaptation of an Agatha Christie Miss Marple mystery, with Angela Lansbury as the sweet little old sleuth, it has the vitality of a vicar, yet it’s enormously campy fun.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raging Bull
    Another harsh character study, with poignant echoes of "Taxi Driver."
  61. Alligator
    Clever, funny, and wonderfully bloody.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kagemusha
    An often breathtaking but slightly bloodless samurai epic.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Battle Beyond the Stars
    It’s hard not to admire a movie featuring a spaceship with D-cups and a title that has the nerve to one-up Star Wars — but if Lucas’ film is PlayStation 2, this one is hopscotch.
  64. The Big Red One
    Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.
  65. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition]
  66. Foxes
    It’s really one of the very first, very early Gen-X movies (the true first one, to me, is 1978’s terrific Over the Edge), and I was struck all over again by the freshness of what it captured: these four prematurely jaded adolescent girls, led by Jodie Foster as the sensible one, living like baby adults, cut off from their parents and the past, bonded only by attitude, consumerism, and the pop-culture decadence they share.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Human Factor
    The Human Factor, a spy saga and Preminger’s final film, is an overlooked gem.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Jerk
    The Jerk‘s threadbare plot follows the brilliantly convoluted story.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
    The fun is in watching hacky Gil Gerard, a.k.a. Lucky Buck, smirk his way from cleavage-baring space pilots to midriff-revealing aliens to distressed damsels in every corner of the galaxy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Yanks
    The sketchy story simply isn’t strong enough, nor the characters sufficiently involving, to sustain interest for nearly 2 1/2 hours.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    More American Graffiti
    A coming-of-age picture that never arrives.
  72. The Lady in Red
    Lady is a surprisingly powerful gangster flick about a mystery woman whose public-enemy path briefly overlapped with John Dillinger’s in the ’30s. It’s just one of many Bonnie and Clyde knockoffs Corman cranked out at the time, but there’s real artistry alongside the violence and nudity in this one.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Meatballs
    More Murray-centric scenes were shot after a test screening showed that little without him worked.
  74. Alien
    Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly.
  75. La Cage aux Folles
    Like many of the best farces, from The Importance of Being Earnest to Cactus Flower, it draws its humor from characters pretending to be something they’re not.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Love at First Bite
    Every now and then things get so convoluted that some sort of humor is achieved, but waiting through setup, setup, explanation of hoary joke, and delivery of hoary joke gets old fast, especially when the jokes are racist.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Magic
    From the start, Hopkins forgoes the subtle route and heads straight over the top, squeezing what fun there is out of William Goldman’s humorless script.
  78. Halloween
    Carpenter's brutally efficient exercise in tension and release.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    The Wiz
    Whatever fun this funked-up Wizard of Oz had on Broadway is erased by miscasting and a hideous design (Oz as a New York slum).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    An Unmarried Woman
    In An Unmarried Woman, Paul Mazursky’s realist look at the dissolution of a marriage, Jill Clayburgh brought its effects to near-harrowing life.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Saturday Night Fever
    Travolta molds what could have been an equally obvious character into a substantial, tragic figure.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Eaten Alive
    Blackly comic elements do little to blunt the unsettling aura created by the garish lighting and intense dentist-drill ”score.”
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Airport '77
    Silly as it is (c’mon, helium balloons?), Airport ’77 is the most suspenseful of the series, with death looming over a planeload of Oscar winners, each trying to out-ham the others before their oxygen runs out.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pumping Iron
    Arnold conquers all comers, your heart, and the world!
  85. The Shaggy D.A.
    The only thing that could possibly be any better is a field-goal-kicking mule.
  86. Carrie
    One of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be.
  87. Network
    Timeless and essential.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
    A stricken teen trapped in a polyurethane isolation tent. That’s a potent metaphor for adolescence, which may be why this made-for-TV movie was a rite of passage for an awful lot of us.
  89. Deep Red
    A Freudian honey trap of murder and women straight out of Italian Vogue.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Missouri Breaks
    It’s quite good.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment, Part II
    The original song-and-dance formula is diluted, however, by a dozen or more comedy scenes (with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Hepburn and Tracy, Abbott and Costello, and others). But they are so wisely chosen, sharply edited, and outright funny that the overall entertainment level remains high.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All the President's Men
    A riveting, superbly acted political thriller.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Robin and Marian
    The social satire gets precious at times, but Connery (sans hairpiece!) and Hepburn (swathed for the first hour in a nun’s wimple) bring a fervid depth of feeling to their characters’ rekindled courtship.
  94. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    Gazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people.
  95. Barry Lyndon
    To watch Ryan O’Neal’s performance as the upwardly mobile Barry, part victim and part cad, is to see Kubrick’s perverse genius with actors. He cast a dullard only to jolt us, by the end, with the revelation of the bastard within.
  96. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    Nicholson’s live-wire performance turns what could have been a standard movie malcontent into a martyr.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Boy and His Dog
    Jones directed and scripted this mordant sci-fi comedy from a novella by Harlan Ellison; the satire gets a trifle woozy in the picture’s last third, but the film is redeemed by one of the great bad-taste endings of recent cinema.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Grey Gardens
    It’s almost impossible to look away.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    For a movie that's mostly a plotless mix of old sci-fi flicks and Bowie-esque gender-bending, Rocky Horror continues to charm. That's due in part to the honest delight we take in the freedoms this movie so cheerfully flaunts.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jaws
    Steven Spielberg overcame the lumpy plotting of Peter Benchley's novel to create an efficient, graceful fright machine in Jaws.
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