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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    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nashville
    One of the greatest American films of the ’70s, Nashville remains Altman’s crowning achievement.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bug
    Many strange events ensue — the bugs learn to spell out words with their bodies, people get barbecued and devoured — but none of these marvels is believable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    French Connection II
    French Connection II is not exactly a fun flick (there’s a harrowing sequence where the bad guys shoot Hackman full of heroin, for example), but in its own twisted way it’s something of an art film — perhaps the most profoundly absurdist and pessimistic detective film ever made.
  4. Death Race 2000
    Death Race 2000 isn’t the sharp satire Corman thinks it is, but it’s fun.
  5. Brannigan
    Still, with everything working against him, the Duke manages to be an old-school badass and stick it to those fancypants Brits.
  6. Shampoo
    There’s a self-awareness to Shampoo that gives the movie a cleansing sadness and, oddly, makes Beatty an affectingly amoral roue.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.
  8. A Woman Under the Influence
    Rowlands gives a harrowing performance as a housewife coming unhinged.
  9. Chinatown
    It’s one of those rare puzzle-box mysteries where, even if you can’t work it all out, you trust that it all makes sense. And when you do finally solve it — for me, around the fifth viewing — it fills you with the giddy sense of accomplishment you get from polishing off a stubborn New York Times Sunday crossword.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Three Musketeers
    The movie Musketeers most faithful to Dumas’ spirit didn’t arrive until director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) delivered The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Anchored by Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall’s romance and full of Altman’s typical aural flourishes (old-time radio shows serve as the soundtrack), Thieves Like Us proves that it takes both joy and melancholy to equal nostalgia.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Zardoz
    A silly, impenetrable movie starring Sean Connery (attired in the dumbest costume ever) as a ponytailed barbarian who obeys a giant stone head.
  13. The Exorcist
    Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]
  14. Enter the Dragon
    A sequestered island, a slinky score, a villain with a secret scheme and a deadly prosthesis — it’d be good, cheesy fun even without the centerpiece fight sequences.
  15. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    Mitchum looks like a doomed slab of granite and gives a dynamite performance. The tough-guy dialogue and working-class Boston locations are so realistic it almost feels like you’re watching a documentary.
  16. Soylent Green
    Richard Fleischer’s dystopian thriller set in an overpopulated, famine-stricken 2022 New York is a wonderfully silly slice of future schlock, featuring some of Heston’s zestiest overacting.
  17. The Poseidon Adventure
    Once the lady in question is overturned by a freak tidal wave the tone shifts from unintentionally comedic to undeniably exciting as renegade priest Gene Hackman leads a motley band of souls (including Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, and Roddy McDowall) on their upside down quest to escape from a watery grave.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Trafic
    There’s a balletic car crash, a faux-dead-dog gag, a joke involving a baby’s bare bum, and…oh, treat yourself and see it.
  19. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    It seems pompous and scattershot now -- a tweaking of privileged European smugness that unfolds with a playful daisy-chain logic but has the tone of a quaint, doddering lecture.
  20. Night of the Lepus
    Some may call Night of the Lepus plain ridiculous, but I say any movie that features mutant bunnies being shot, blowtorched, and electrocuted makes for a hopping good time.
  21. Deliverance
    With his Mephisto-phelean swagger and chewy, good ol’ boy drawl, Reynolds is a chest-beating revelation.
  22. Pink Flamingos
    In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pocket Money
    It’s just Paul and Lee hanging out, playing off each other beautifully, every exchange of dialogue a gloveless, effortless toss ‘n’ catch, sparkling under Laszlo Kovacs’ sun-kissed cinematography.
  24. Daughters of Darkness
    Loaded with atmosphere, bared flesh, and a haunting turn by the Dietrich-esque Delphine Seyrig as an ageless countess who hungers for a pair of newlyweds (and their necks).
  25. The French Connection
    To watch it now is to appreciate more than ever Gene Hackman’s uncompromising talent, Owen Roizman’s great, barely-color cinematography, and a time when the spectacle of a foulmouthed, racist, brutal cop could still outrage as many moviegoers as it excited.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    Compelling, unflattering performances by its stars rivet this grim romance between a cocky New York grifter (Al Pacino) and the mild-mannered Midwesterner (Kitty Winn) he corrupts.
  27. Walkabout
    Nicolas Roeg’s art-house adventure is lyrical and intoxicating.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    The film’s air of doom isn’t what some would call romantic, but as in The English Patient, it heightens the leads’ ardor.
  29. Gimme Shelter
    Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Scrooge
    [Finney] plays Scrooge less like a Dickens character and more like that crooked man who walked a crooked mile, of Mother Goose nursery rhyme fame. But it’s fun to see him cut a rug at Scrooge’s own funeral to the tune of Leslie Bricusse’s Thank You Very Much, the great show-stopping tune of this otherwise ho-ho-hum musical.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    The director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate is more at home with minute personal tensions than with the epic hysteria this project required, so file the film under botched masterpieces.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    As bad as Ebert’s screenplay is, Meyer’s direction is just as choppy. The film also looks ugly.
  33. Woodstock
    Describing Woodstock as a concert movie is a little like calling Notre Dame a house of worship. In its scope and grandeur, its feel for the paradoxical nature of an event in which half a million middle-class bohemians created their own scruffy, surging community — a metropolis of mud — Woodstock remains the one true rock-concert spectacle, a counterculture Triumph of the Will. [1994]
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Boys in the Band
    This heavy-handed relic of a self-loathing time proves surprisingly relevant — not to mention funny, disturbing, and deeply moving.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Patton
    George C. Scott's Oscar-winning portrait of the megalomaniacal warrior general is still the glue holding together this blunt study of war as the ultimate human (and dehumanizing) game.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Topaz
    Though one of his later films, Topaz suffers from unusual pacing that drags for long stretches, but it also features exemplary Hitchcock suspense sequences, including a brisk escape set piece in Copenhagen and an impossibly tense scene in Harlem.
  37. Z
    A pulse-pounding procedural that pieces together the murder of a left-wing youth leader (Yves Montand). A baroque government cover-up is foiled by a tenacious inspector (Jean-?Louis Trintignant) whose rat-a-tat interrogations are like machine-gun fire. This is an amazing film.
  38. Downhill Racer
    One of the great unheralded films of the late ’60s.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Easy Rider
    Biker classic, with memorable counterculture monologues.
  40. Midnight Cowboy
    Even as a kid, I could see that Midnight Cowboy’s true subject isn’t decadence but loneliness...Midnight Cowboy’s peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Yellow Submarine
    Sure, some of the puns and in-jokes sound a little dated, but any movie that strings together lines from Shakespeare merely as a throwaway comic riff is, in my book, a film for the ages.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    The whole thing sinks on the shoulders of its pretty teen stars (Hussey and Whiting), who exhibit all the raw talent and sensuality of bit players in some bad Spanish soap.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Charly
    The premise is certainly alluring. But director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant make a multitude of jaw-dropping choices.
  45. Rosemary's Baby
    Using New York’s famed apartment house the Dakota for all its cavernous shadowiness, and exploiting the 23-year-old Farrow’s tremulous space-child vulnerability to underscore her terror and solitude, Polanski worked with an elegant restraint that less talented filmmakers have been trying to mimic ever since.
  46. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    A black comedy about a rural family that’s devolved into cannibalism, Spider Baby probably struck the few people who saw it as disturbing, but post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s more Gidget than gore, interesting mostly for its cast (Lon Chaney is surprisingly affecting) and black-and-white, early-’60s ambiance.
  48. Navajo Joe
    A dubbed Italian botch starring a lithe Burt Reynolds as a Native American.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Reflections in a Golden Eye
    John Huston’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ gothic novella of sexual repression, set in a Southern Army post, gave Taylor one of her most unusual roles. It’s a restrained, sensual performance with moments of high, if warped, comedy: an example of what a director with an original vision could elicit from her.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Point Blank
    The lead character has been aptly renamed Walker, and, as played by Marvin in what may be the actor’s most emblematic performance, he strides through Los Angeles like a gangland golem: watchful, unstoppable, frighteningly silent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Bonnie and Clyde
    Penn's film oozes an intellectual's fashionable contempt for the characters.
  52. Chimes at Midnight
    It’s a feast for the ears, eyes, and soul.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    References to vibrators and cattle prods mark the emergence of a hipper style of comedy, and, for the kids, there are gratuitous numbers by the Lovin’ Spoonful.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seconds
    The technical dazzle can’t make up for the boring, unsympathetic characters. With no one to root for, this arty, humorless film ends up pretentiously empty.
  55. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    It features the best real-life husband-wife pairing onscreen ever.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming
    Still, the picture remains the only ”feel good” movie of the entire Cold War corpus.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Hill
    Rebel-with-a-cause clichés are mostly averted by sturdy acting, Oswald Morris’ vivid black-and-white cinematography, and a satisfyingly bleak conclusion.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Help!
    The music (including Ticket to Ride) is wonderful and the European scenery an eyeful, but this is ultimately a movie starring the Beatles rather than a Beatles movie, and there’s a big difference.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Train
    One of director John Frankenheimer’s best nail-biters of the ’60s, a gritty, realistic war flick in which Burt Lancaster and a host of terrific French character actors try to keep an obsessed Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) from shipping a bunch of plundered masterpieces to Germany.
  60. A Hard Day's Night
    They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Black Sabbath
    Three tales of expertly building suspense. [10 Jul 2013, Issue#1268]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  62. Charade
    Hepburn doesn’t know whom to trust and neither does the audience, which is what makes this Hitchcock-lite thriller so much fun. The chemistry between the two leads — something surprisingly missing between Depp and Jolie — is electric.
  63. The Incredible Journey
    Assuming you love animals — hell, even if you don’t — this is one of the best buddy movies ever made.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tom Jones
    Screenwriter John Osborne and Richardson (both received Oscars as well) came up with a smart solution to the problem of adapting an 18th-century literary classic: Turn it into bawdy slapstick with generous helpings of then- daring sex and violence.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    8½
    Fellini weaves the director’s memories and fantasies into a brilliant blend as Guido comes to realize that lives, like movies, need direction.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    How the West Was Won
    Despite wooden performances, the final feature filmed in true Cinerama is great fun and holds a wiiiiiide spot in cineasts’ hearts.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Manchurian Candidate
    This gonzo satiric thriller is a riveting portrait of early-60's paranoia. [15 Nov 1996, p.82]
    • Entertainment Weekly
    • tbd Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Brain That Wouldn't Die
    The Brain That Wouldn’t Die has an equally familiar basic plot (mad scientist tampering in God’s domain), but it’s grimmer (a fair amount of gore), sleazier (B-girl catfights), and cruel to its leading lady, an attractive actress who spends most of the picture shot from the neck up, with her seemingly disembodied head sitting in a laboratory pan.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lolita
    Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s wicked, witty hymn to forbidden love loses some bite in the journey from novel to the screen, but it’s got its plummy pleasures, including a wonderfully subtle James Mason as Humbert Humbert, obsessed with the delicious Sue Lyon as the 14-year-old Lolita (bumped up from 12 in the book), and a marvelously blowzy Shelley Winters, hilarious as Lolita’s sexually voracious mom.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    Seminal Truffaut.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Victim
    While some may be put off by talk of ”abnormalities,” the inner struggle depicted so poignantly in Victim has not dated at all.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    El Cid
    El Cid remains a visually sumptuous film graced with a passionate score by Miklos Rozsa.
  73. Splendor in the Grass
    With his ripe lips, flirty eyes, and pre-Calvin Klein-era androgynous appeal, the 24-year-old Warren is utterly believable as a boy who drives Natalie Wood plumb insane with sexual frustration in William Inge’s overheated melodrama.
  74. The Hustler
    Paul Newman won his Best Actor Oscar for its 1986 sequel, The Color of Money, but he executed an equally award-worthy turn in Robert Rossen’s jazzy, boozy pool-hall morality play.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    BUtterfield 8
    Taylor’s work is several notches above the botched material, adapted from the John O’Hara novel.
  76. Spartacus
    The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Time Machine
    Wells purists may balk, and Pal’s then state-of-the-art effects do look cheesy by today’s Industrial Light & Magic standards, but The Time Machine retains an appealing Victorian charm. Taylor, the Mel Gibson of the ’60s, is a pleasure to watch.
  78. The Bellboy
    This is where the brilliant second act of Lewis' career begins.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    13 Ghosts
    The unconvincing wraiths appear whether you like it or not in this good-for-a-few-laughs feature.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Apartment
    Wilder’s movie manages to be a scathing social satire and cautionary tale (the corporate lingo is prescient: ”preliminarywise,” ”manpowerwise”); a brilliant physical comedy (Lemmon’s tennis-racket-spaghetti-straining skills are superb); and a devastating romance between Baxter and Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). All of which makes Wilder’s masterpiece tough to take if you’re looking for a laugh riot.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Suddenly, Last Summer
    A deliciously bad film.
  82. Pillow Talk
    Nominated for five Oscars, Pillow Talk led to two more Day/Hudson collaborations, but this is by far the best.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Plan 9 from Outer Space
    Shockingly nonlinear, boasting a cast of the once great (Lugosi), the never-even-good (Lyle Talbot, Tor Johnson), and the unbelievably motley (”psychic” Criswell, cinch-waisted Vampira), its 79 minutes are jam-packed with insanity, and those tin plates on strings that Wood tries to pass off as flying saucers are the least of its delights.
  84. Anatomy of a Murder
    It’s a daring, cynical gem.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Strawberries
    A film that goes where many others have gone (yes, this is Scrooge for Ph.D.s) but with a subtlety few have dreamed of?
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    A prime example of a brilliant director’s stealthy use of a denigrated genre to slip in subtle social comment and genuine pathos.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sleeping Beauty
    Barbie-doll-slim Princess Aurora, cursed to enter suspended animation at 16, and her Abercrombie & Fitch-worthy savior Prince Phillip, who literally rides a white horse — aren’t as much fun as the three fussy-old-lady fairies who become their protectors. This movie is all about the lure of supporting ornamentation.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Old Man and the Sea
    Essentially, it’s a slow-moving, low-rent Moby Dick with portentous voice-overs and unconvincing process shots of Spencer Tracy in a studio tank. In fact, why director John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) bothered to make it remains a mystery.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Big Country
    William Wyler’s sprawling Western about iron-willed ranchers squabbling over desirable land, The Big Country, is one of the prime wide-screen epics of the late ’50s, but today it’s remembered mostly for composer Jerome Moross’ magnificent Big Sky score.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    The manipulative Maggie, irritated by the heat and by Gooper and Sister Woman’s ”no-neck monsters,” is among Taylor’s most accomplished creations and earned her a second Oscar nod; the performance has an inner coil in it, as if something were ready to spring at any second.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Fly
    The original The Fly scared baby boomers something fierce in its day, but time hasn’t been kind to it; in fact, its big scare moments seem almost ludicrously chaste.
  92. Touch of Evil
    A film noir great... Just to see and hear the extraordinary 3 minute and 20 second opening sequence — a fluid tour de force tracking shot — without impediment of opening credits and street-sound-masking movie score is accomplishment enough.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    The Bridge on the River Kwai is that rare film about something as seemingly black-and-white as World War II that is colored entirely in shades of gray, and the better for it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    If you’re looking for cool, here’s Elvis Presley at his absolutely arctic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Three Faces of Eve
    What seemed steamy in 1957 — a reasonably frank look at mental disorder and repressed sexuality — is today the stuff of Oprah.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Incredible Shrinking Man
    The most unpretentious and poignant sci-fi film of them all.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Written on the Wind
    Boiling over with heated acting and schmaltzy scores, Douglas Sirk’s ’50s melodramas tap neatly into our collective trash psyche. Penetrate the surface, however, and they’re as serious and heartfelt as their director was.
  98. The Killing
    The kind of Swiss-watch precision and attention to detail that would eventually get Kubrick labeled Hollywood's most notorious perfectionist.
  99. Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
    Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Forbidden Planet
    It’s quintessential ’50s male chauvinism, and Nielsen plays it with a man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do stiffness.
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