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 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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reservoir Dogs
    You may not like the terms Tarantino sets, but you have to admit he succeeds on them.
  2. The Eel
    In the creature’s mating habits and its wriggling life, Imamura creates a parallel to the upstream battle of these fragile outsiders, and he makes his points with abundant, tender humor.
  3. Skyfall
    The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.
  4. Of Time and the City
    ''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.
  5. A Fantastic Woman
    It’s heartbreaking, illuminating, and yes, fantastic, just to watch her (Marina) live.
  6. Melancholia
    A movie masterpiece...is Lars von Trier's ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end.
  7. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    The film is maddeningly uneven. Just as it starts to settle into an inspired groove, it uncorks a couple of gags that fall lethally flat, making for half of a great comedy.
  8. Ballets Russes
    The archival footage is so breathtaking, the reminiscences so piquant, that even a stranger to dance can't help but be swept up by this peek into such exquisite, now vanished glamour.
  9. The General
    The General, for all its panache, is ultimately an unsatisfying movie. The reason, I think, is that Boorman’s slightly puerile romanticization of Cahill keeps getting in the way of the reality he’s showing us.
  10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn't see him.
  11. Paprika
    Fantasy leaks into reality.
  12. The Hate U Give
    If Tillman ties it all together a little neatly, he’s already served up a message that feels too fresh and important to dismiss — not of hate but of hope, and faith that even if sharing these stories can’t magically fix what’s broken, telling them still matters.
  13. Hairspray
    A fizzy and delirious high-camp message-movie musical that may just turn out to be the happiest movie of the summer.
  14. King Kong
    One of the wonders of the holiday season.
  15. Chicago
    Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment! III
    The biggest innovation is in making TE! III much more than a compilation of familiar scenes. This time producers Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan have ferreted out previously unseen sequences and outtakes featuring the likes of Astaire, Horne, Frank Sinatra, Charisse, Reynolds, and Judy Garland.
  17. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy, a brilliantly sinister horror film in the recent art-house mold of "The Babadook" and "It Follows," has a premise that cracks like the whip of a devil’s tail.
  18. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    Glass Onion doesn't feel like a movie that's meant, really, to be peeled. It's here strictly to dazzle you with money and murder and famous-people pandemonium, then sharpen its knives for the next installment.
  19. Two Step
    Writer-director Alex R. Johnson’s feature debut uses Southern Gothic simmer to heat up what is otherwise a typical gun-and-bag-of-money crime tale, though Hébert’s terrifyingly electric performance keeps the heat turned up enough to make the bloody climax feel like relief.
  20. Starred Up
    Like Eric Bana's menacingly raw breakout in 2000's "Chopper" or Tom Hardy's in 2008's "Bronson," O'Connell bristles with terrifying hair-trigger unpredictability. Watching him, you feel like you're witnessing the arrival of a new movie star.
  21. Midnight in Paris
    Allen has fun in his imaginary French capital, turning his star-studded cast loose to interpret their characters as they wish.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    The fact that McQuarrie and Cruise routinely set and then raise the bar for the gold standard of action movies is the lure of the franchise — but it's the characters, their foibles, their wit, and their deep humanity that are Mission: Impossible's secret weapon.
  23. Love and Death on Long Island
    A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.
  24. A War
    Once again, the shaky handheld camerawork in the battle scenes don’t portray chaos so much as a sense that the cinematographer was being attacked by desert bees
  25. She Dies Tomorrow
    Wildly unsettling and original.
  26. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry.
  27. The World's End
    As in their previous comedies, Pegg and Frost play men who refuse to stop acting like boys. But these pint-swilling Peter Pans also know how to work the heart and the brain for belly laughs.
  28. Menashe
    The film (shot mostly in Yiddish) has an unpolished intimacy, peeling back the surface exoticism of a cloistered faith to reveal the poignantly ordinary struggle of being an imperfect person in the world.
  29. District 9
    Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9.
  30. The World
    A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.
  31. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.
  32. The Nest
    Durkin captures it all with a sort of menacing restraint, building a deeply disquieting mood from long, almost voyeuristic shots and loaded gazes.
  33. For They Know Not What They Do
    Director Daniel Karslake (For the Bible Tells Me So) does that by homing in on singular tales — and letting them unfold largely without judgment or editorializing.
  34. Ford v Ferrari
    It’s a movie so well put together as a hero’s tale that it moves along almost too smoothly; the script by brothers Jez and John Henry Butterworth hits its marks of tragedy and triumph with a kind of shiny, measured inevitability.
  35. Bad Education
    It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.
  36. Silver Linings Playbook
    Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.
  37. Buena Vista Social Club
    What the film leaves unexplained is how this joyous musical outpouring, which predated the revolution, could fare under a system with a pathological distrust of beauty.
  38. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    In Shoot Me, she wears her spiked cynicism like a cutting form of grace, and everyone around her (including audiences) gets healed by it.
  39. Waiting for 'Superman'
    Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.
  40. Encounters at the End of the World
    The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.
  41. Waves
    In the sometimes overstuffed script there’s more than a touch, too, of the TV projects two of its stars are best known for: This Is Us (Brown) and Euphoria (Demie). If the pairing of those two wildly different shows sounds counterintuitive, it speaks, maybe, to how much Shults seems to want to fit into Waves both dramatically and style-wise. In end though, substance — or at least his sincere approximation of it — wins.
  42. The Martian
    Scott’s sci-fi adventure is the kind of film you leave the theater itching to tell your friends to see. Like Apollo 13 and Gravity, it turns science and problem solving into an edge-of-your-seat experience.
  43. Ridicule
    Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.
  44. Wendy and Lucy
    Wendy and Lucy is like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Antonioni. What's piercing about it, and also disturbing, is that Reichardt views the renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity -- as a lefty romantic dream.
  45. X
    For its whole running time, X has ideas on its mind. Like the doubled-edged title itself, both an evocation of the grungy rating this movie might have received in 1979 and something more suggestive ("You've got that X factor," Wayne says of Maxine's allure), it indicates a film that feels unpinned, ominous, and potentially unforgettable.
  46. The Wrestler
    The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.
  47. The Hours
    While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.
  48. Knock Down the House
    Officially, Knock follows four progressive female candidates, though the one who inevitably dominates is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-bred waitress–turned–congressional unicorn. It’s a lot of fun to ride along on her wildly improbable rise, from slinging margaritas and scooping out ice buckets to taking down one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.
    • 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.
  50. Junebug
    Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.
  51. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    At just under 90 minutes, the movie is as short and sweet as its stamp-size muse, but an uncommon loveliness lingers; Marcel might just be the most purely joyful, stealthily profound movie experience of the year.
  52. Promises
    Superb, Oscar-nominated documentary.
  53. The Secret in Their Eyes
    The performances are tender, the script elegant, the cinematography (especially during a virtuoso chase scene in a soccer stadium) artful.
  54. Good Time
    The wild night eventually turns downright rabid, but ­Pattinson anchors Good Time, completely selling Connie from the moment he bursts into the frame and delivering the best performance of his career.
  55. Food, Inc.
    Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.
  56. Tony Takitani
    It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.
  57. Everlasting Moments
    All staged as a harsh poem of survival, with no great psychological interest, yet the ending carries a surprise feminist tug that’s worth the wait.
  58. The Secret World of Arrietty
    The lyrical animation, with its meditative attention to nature, bears the unique stamp of Japan's Studio Ghibli, cofounded by the great ­"Spirited Away" animator Hayao Miyazaki.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    The repartee is sharp, the plot is delightfully ridiculous, and the numbers — like ”Night and Day” and the epic Oscar winner ”The Continental” — are knockouts.
  62. Central Station
    A richly tender and moving experience.
  63. The Queen of Versailles
    A succulently entertaining movie that invites you to splash around in the dreams and follies of folks so rich they're the 1 percent of the 1 percent. It's like a champagne bath laced with arsenic.
  64. Theeb
    The narrative sparseness of Theeb does not also apply to its cinematic virtues, which offer plenty for audiences to chew on, whether they’re looking for a non-traditional western adventure or trying to win their office Oscar pool.
  65. Incendies
    The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.
  66. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance.
  67. The Color of Paradise
    While never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer.
  68. Nine Queens
    As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick.
  69. Incredibles 2
    Bird’s made the weirdest Pixar movie ever, revolutionary and retro, an anti-authoritarian ode to good parenting.
  70. Totally Under Control
    The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.
  71. Gleason
    The result is a candid testament to not only Gleason himself but the many people who love him.
  72. Casino Royale
    Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.
  73. Much Ado About Nothing
    It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.
  74. Big Night
    The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive.
  75. Saraband
    Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.
  76. Ad Astra
    The result is a genuine space epic which also succeeds in being a very personal film, thanks in large part to Pitt’s performance.
  77. Nine Lives
    What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors.
  78. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon.
  79. In the Company of Men
    Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.
  80. A Bronx Tale
    Set in the 1960s, Robert De Niro's directorial debut is a work of vitality and flair. [22 Oct 1993, p.58]
    • Entertainment Weekly
  81. Taste of Cherry
    This outstanding work — so meditative — is clearly an affirmation of life (and never more provocatively than in the film’s unusual coda, in which moviemaking itself becomes part of the discussion). It’s also so grounded in the real emotional scope of ordinary people that the magnitude of the subject is answered in the most mysteriously matter-of-fact way.
  82. 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.
  83. American Honey
    For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.
  84. Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
    A global celebrity during America's earliest conversations about civil rights, Armstrong preferred to keep his dissatisfactions to himself, becoming a symbol of change rather than a spokesperson of it. That tension comes to vivid life in Jenkins's worthy account, sure to be appreciated by those who come in on solid footing
  85. Monrovia, Indiana
    Few filmmakers can turn a mundane town council meeting about a library bench into a meditation on patriotism and civic responsibility the way Wiseman can. Let’s hope his camera continues to roll for years to come.
  86. True Grit
    Truer than the John Wayne showpiece and less gritty than the book, this True Grit is just tasty enough to leave movie lovers hungry for a missing spice.
  87. A Hidden Life
    A Hidden Life’s cinematographer is Jörg Widmer, Malick’s longtime camera operator. His work is handsome and a tad too dutiful. There are so many gorgeous shots of Franz scything through farmland, and I kept wishing someone had scythed a half-hour off the running time.
  88. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    It’s smart, relatable, laughter-through-psychic pain entertainment that happens to be elevated by a handful of wonderful performances even if it, at times, feels like a lesser version of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
  89. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it.
  90. The Blair Witch Project
    As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.
  91. Iris
    Although the film does hint at Apfel’s creeping sense of mortality as she donates her clothes for posterity, it never gets deep enough under her skin.
  92. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    The ending he’s come up with for The Force Awakens feels so perfect it’s hard to imagine it any other way. In an age when we’ve all become binge watchers, we feel as if it’s become our right to immediately roll right into the next episode, the next sequel. And when The Force Awakens ends, it’s bittersweet because you so badly want to head right into the next chapter.
  93. 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.
  94. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi.
  95. Spellbound
    Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language.
  96. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    If Going Clear were a Hollywood thriller, I’d complain that it’s too over-the-top. But this is real life, which is hard to believe. And it’s disturbingly good.
  97. The Century of the Self
    Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    In William Wellman’s The Public Enemy, Cagney’s tommy-gun delivery and dancer’s grace make underworld life seductively enthralling.
  99. Whale Rider
    An inviting international audience-pleaser.
  100. Lean on Pete
    Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.
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