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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  1. The Taste of Others
    Jaoui handles her crowd of vivid characters so naturally, and shoots her scenes so unobtrusively, that the diagrammatic cleverness of the plot never overwhelms the intelligence of the observations.
  2. I'm Going Home
    The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.
  3. Gangs of New York
    Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.
  4. Shrek 2
    Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.
  5. Primer
    Consider Primer a successful lab experiment with, as they might say in techie chat rooms, significant indie-cred applications, IMHO. Oh, and :-).
  6. Dogville
    This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.
  7. Infernal Affairs
    Dazzling psychological cat-and-mouse drama.
  8. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.
  9. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Mitchell directs and stars in the riotous, loving, and only occasionally pathos-milking film adaptation of his own acclaimed Off Broadway play, with great up-your-ante music and lyrics by Stephen Trask.
  10. Baadasssss!
    The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.
  11. Coffee and Cigarettes
    Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.
  12. Ghost World
    A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.
  13. In the Realms of the Unreal
    A singular and haunting experience.
  14. Kinsey
    Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking.
  15. Ray
    As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.
  16. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.
  17. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.
  18. A Very Long Engagement
    This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.
  19. Young Adam
    The clammy power of Young Adam lies as much in the frank, emotional nakedness the actors bring to their roles under Mackenzie's care as in the baroque hopelessness of the plot.
  20. The Twilight Samurai
    It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.
  21. Riding Giants
    Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga.
  22. 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.''
  23. 13 Going on 30
    The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.
  24. 8 Mile
    Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.
  25. Bad Education
    It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.
  26. Black Cat, White Cat
    A warm embrace of tradition and boisterous, ethnographically rich local culture.
  27. The Birdcage
    Enchantingly witty.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tin Cup
    Has a genial, funky charm.
  29. Afterglow
    Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.
  30. Breakdown
    Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise.
  31. Eve's Bayou
    But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.
  32. Oscar and Lucinda
    It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength.
  33. Welcome to Sarajevo
    The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism
  34. Crimson Tide
    Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.
  35. Welcome to the Dollhouse
    But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.)
  36. In the Name of the Father
    Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.
  37. That Thing You Do!
    That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).
  38. Don Juan DeMarco
    There's no great romantic climax to Don Juan DeMarco (and that may be a drawback for Depp lovers looking to swoon), but there is an airy delicacy to this tall tale that fits in perfectly with the weather these days, the hormones, the whole seasonal gestalt.
  39. Death and the Maiden
    Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.
  40. 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.
    • 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.
  42. Henry Fool
    Resonant examination of friendship, fame, cultural trends, and the creative process.
  43. JFK
    [Stone's] filmmaking is so supple and alive, his obsession with the visual aspect of history so electrifying, that JFK practically roots itself in your imagination.
  44. 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 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Easy Rider
    Biker classic, with memorable counterculture monologues.
  46. Metroland
    It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."
  47. I Love You Phillip Morris
    It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Obi-Wan Kenobi McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop.
  48. Morning Sun
    Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.
  49. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year.
  50. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.
  51. Heading South
    A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.
  52. So Much So Fast
    So Much So Fast (spanning five years) elegantly presents both a critique and a celebration of American optimism.
  53. 51 Birch Street
    A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.
  54. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Horton's attempt to authenticate the painting in the face of a hostile art establishment becomes a study in forensics, taste, money, and class warfare.
  55. Our Daily Bread
    What the activist drama "Fast Food Nation" does with talk and the aid of movie stars, Our Daily Bread, a riveting documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does even better, with no voice-over and barely a word spoken by the unidentified workers involved in matter-of-fact killing and harvesting.
  56. Stephanie Daley
    The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance.
  57. Great World of Sound
    A terrific, small, funny, sad movie.
  58. The Last Mistress
    Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power.
  59. American Teen
    The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.
  60. The Pool
    Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India's western Goa region -- and works in Hindi, primarily with novice actors. The result is a story both authentically specific and profoundly global.
  61. Big Fan
    The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.
  62. The Maid
    Raquel's devotion to her employer is barbed with hatred, need, and an insecurity she manifests through constant tiny acts of sabotage that would be funny if they weren't also so chilling -- bordering on psychotic.
  63. Collapse
    You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.
  64. Vincere
    Mezzogiorno (Love in the Time of Cholera) plays Dalser with the kind of fervent intensity once seen in silent films.
  65. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    Director Bahman Ghobadi (Turtles Can Fly) shot his faux documentary in secret, and the close-to-the-ground style compensates for the tenuous narrative structure by capturing the energy and variety of Tehran's music scene in all its bravery.
  66. Oceans
    There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology.
  67. Please Give
    In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.
  68. Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.
  69. Solitary Man
    With an outstanding screenplay by Brian Koppelman and disciplined direction by Koppelman and David Levien, a story that could have been generic (or worse, scented with flowery bulls---) turns into a precise, honest, and affecting drama.
  70. Cyrus
    Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick
  71. Stonewall Uprising
    Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.
  72. Despicable Me
    Another 3-D animated kid movie demonstrates that cartoon storytelling pitched to young people is the last, best refuge of sprightly filmmaking this hard, hot summer.
  73. Kisses
    A superior lyrical ragamuffin Irish drama.
  74. The Other Guys
    It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.
  75. Countdown to Zero
    Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.
  76. The Concert
    The crowd-pleasing comic Euro-drama The Concert is, at its musical center, as full of ripe emotion as Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. It's also as darkly funny as a Slavic farce, a composition of sweet cacophony.
  77. Animal Kingdom
    Don't be fooled: In this unpeaceable kingdom, the den mama is also ready to eat her young.
  78. Down Terrace
    A dark and hilarious thwomping of the whole miserablist British gangster genre.
  79. The Town
    A rich, dark, pulpy mess of entanglements that fulfills all the requirements of the genre, and is told with an ease and gusto that make the pulp tasty.
  80. Nowhere Boy
    By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.
  81. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 also bravely faces the future, slipping with expert ease among the thrilling mass of complications (and complicated set pieces) that Rowling throws fans in the final sprint, then guiding the faithful to the fate that awaits everyone in this world, the moment called The End.
  82. I'm Still Here
    An artful piece of exploitation vérité.
  83. Waiting for 'Superman'
    Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.
  84. Marwencol
    This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping.
  85. White Material
    French mood-and-feeling master filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her youth for an intense, mysterious drama exploring revolution and loss.
  86. The Fighter
    This one, as thoughtful as it is rousing, scores a TKO.
  87. The Illusionist
    The many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.
  88. Outside the Law
    Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.
  89. Applause
    In his debut feature, the director is wise enough to move his hand-held camera wherever Steen wants to go.
  90. Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    At once an unsentimental portrait of the ambitious singer who thought himself bound for glory, and an affecting elegy for a time when song was a form of revolution.
  91. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    Writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu sustains a fresh voice influenced by the Coen brothers and the infernal snow of "Fargo."
  92. Jumping the Broom
    You'll laugh - a lot - but you'll also shed tears of recognition at this funny, salty, strife-torn look at the agony and ecstasy of family.
  93. Thor
    It's not art, but it's mighty fun.
  94. Insidious
    A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.
  95. Cedar Rapids
    Sweetness makes the raunch in this honestly funny movie even funnier.
  96. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    The thrilling conclusion to a phenomenal cinematic story 10 years in the telling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is proof that authentic movie excitement is its own form of magic.
  97. The Help
    The Help has a saucy, humorous side.
  98. The Amazing Spider-Man
    What's most amazing in The Amazing Spider-Man turns out to be not the shared sensations of blockbuster wow! the picture elicits, but rather the shared satisfactions of intimate awww.
  99. The Hunger Games
    A muscular, honorable, unflinching translation of Collins' vision. It's brutal where it needs to be, particularly when children fight and bleed.
  100. Mars Needs Moms
    The movie is also visually magnificent - modestly so. Plus, it's half the length of "Avatar."
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