Entertainment Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    The pace is daringly languid — at times it seems more like a daydream on a sunny park bench than a movie — but you’ll emerge from this wonderland as if from vacation, and you’ll never look at the intersection between life and storytelling in quite the same way.
  2. Dekalog (1988)
    The stories are shocking, tender, sometimes funny, with a soap-opera abundance of plot. Always, the camera stares, respectfully neutral about ordinary people grappling — inconsistently, as men and women do — with the ordinary mysteries of being human. You’ll stare back, amazed it’s taken more than a decade to spread the word.
  3. Citizen Kane
    What’s magical about Kane — the sheer transformative thrill of invention — is there in every shot, every performance, every narrative surge.
  4. Rear Window
    Masterpiece of voyeurism.
  5. Boyhood
    Like Michael Apted in his "Seven Up!" documentary series, Linklater makes you feel as if you're watching a photograph as it develops in the darkroom.
  6. 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.
  7. Army of Shadows
    The picture was made in 1969 and is only now being released in the U.S., in a beautiful restoration supervised by original cinematographer Pierre Lhomme.
  8. Moonlight
    Easily one of the most personal and most powerful films of the year.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pinocchio
    Among all of Disney’s endangered-tot stories, including Cinderella and 101 Dalmatians, only Pinocchio plucks the heartstrings with such incomparable resonance. Why? One reason is that this movie consistently sprinkles adorable comedy relief (has there ever been a more endearing sidekick than guardian Jiminy Cricket?) over scenes of malice, dismay, and outright horror.
  10. Pan's Labyrinth
    Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss.
  11. Hoop Dreams
    Hoop Dreams is an astonishing emotional experience — it has highs, lows, and everything in between.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    Seminal Truffaut.
  13. Gone with the Wind
    To see Gone With the Wind on a big screen again is to weep for the fearlessness with which Hollywood once believed the sublime was possible.
  14. Rififi (re-release)
    It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.
  15. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007.
  16. Parasite
    A serrating, brilliantly stylized portrait of class and fate and family in modern-day Korea.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Battleship Potemkin
    It’s required viewing in virtually every Film 101 class. Look at any MTV video or any slick million- dollar minute of advertising, and you’ll see its origins in that assemblage of shots in Potemkin.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Maltese Falcon
    Boldly manipulating light and shadow, utilizing drastic camera angles, and introducing Bogart’s Sam Spade, the first-time director’s detective classic defines film noir.
  19. Roma
    Experiencing the lovely and lyrical Roma, you get the impression that at age 56, Cuarón not only wanted to get these still-vivid memories down on film, but that he also needed to. You’ll be glad he did. Because movies with this much empathy and humanity don’t come along very often.
  20. Spirited Away
    A triumph of psychological depth and artistic brilliance offered as the magical adventures of one skinny little girl.
  21. Toy Story
    The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.
  22. Killer of Sheep
    Way ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive.
  23. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Shop Around the Corner
    What makes Shop timeless, ironically, is the specificity of its setting: a small department store in Budapest at the end of the global Depression.
  25. 12 Years a Slave
    It's Ejiofor's extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together.
  26. Manchester by the Sea
    Affleck has never had a role that matches his minimal, anti-charisma style like this one. His tendency to be mumbly and awkward and withholding fits his character perfectly. And Hedges, as a temperamental teenager working through loss in his own authentically teenage way, is a real discovery. Michelle Williams, as Lee’s ex-wife, doesn’t get many scenes, but she cracks your heart open in the ones she has.
  27. The Battle of Algiers
    Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack.
  28. 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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nashville
    One of the greatest American films of the ’70s, Nashville remains Altman’s crowning achievement.
  30. 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.
  31. Ratatouille
    Ratatouille is a blithe concoction, as well as a miraculously textured piece of animated design.
  32. Gravity
    The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places the audience right up there in space along with them.
  33. Beauty and the Beast
    Splendidly crafted as it is, the new Disney is a luscious impasto of visual invention that never quite finds its heart.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    The gloriously baroque Bride of Frankenstein is in every way a richer, more imaginative experience than its straight-arrow predecessor.
  35. The Social Network
    The power of The Social Network is that Zuckerberg is a weasel with a mission that can never be dismissed. The movie suggests that he may have built his ambivalence about human connection into Facebook's very DNA. That's what makes him a jerk-hero for our time.
  36. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    There’s almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn’t be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. That’s how visually ravishing it is to experience writer-director Céline Sciamma’s arthouse swoon of movie — winner of both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
  37. I Am Not Your Negro
    If there’s a flaw with the film (and it’s a minor one), it’s Peck’s impulse to cram it with clips from lily-white Doris Day movies and John Wayne Westerns that are a bit too on the nose.
  38. 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]
  39. Aftersun
    Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment.
  40. Amour
    In Amour, these two actors show us what love is, what it really looks like, and what it may, at its most secret moments, demand.
  41. The Hurt Locker
    The result is an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground.
  42. Anatomy of a Murder
    It’s a daring, cynical gem.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pulp Fiction
    [Tarantino's] ability to take what seem like minor conversational themes and dovetail them onto later exchanges for maximum comic effect is close to genius. And the action can be literally heart-stopping.
  44. Zero Dark Thirty
    Once in a long while, a fresh-from-the-headlines movie - like "All the President's Men" or "United 93" - fuses journalism, procedural high drama, and the oxygenated atmosphere of a thriller into a new version of history written with lightning. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's meticulous and electrifying re-creation of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is that kind of movie.
  45. A Separation
    Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Barbara Stanwyck cracks wise too, while dripping pheromones.
  47. Schindler's List
    Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.
  48. WALL-E
    It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.
  49. Carol
    Like "Far From Heaven," Carol mines society’s narrow-mindedness and the dangers of living a double life. But what was true more than a half century ago remains true now: The heart wants what it wants, society and propriety be damned.
  50. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them.
  51. Dunkirk
    This is visceral, big-budget filmmaking that can be called Art. It’s also, hands down, the best motion picture of the year so far.
  52. 45 Years
    Courtenay is a gruff and gratifyingly knotty presence, but in the end it’s Rampling’s movie. In a quiet, beautifully calibrated performance completely stripped of actressy tricks, she’s a revelation.
  53. Yi Yi
    These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.
    • 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
  55. Mr. Turner
    J.M.W. Turner was a master of light and image, but what stands out most about him in Mike Leigh's captivating biographical film is a sound. Playing the renowned Victorian-era English painter, Timothy Spall grunts and expectorates his way through his scenes, chugging along with the phlegmy belch of an old jalopy or, as the film suggests more than once, a snuffling pig.
  56. The Irishman
    It all becomes a sort of muddle for a while midway, one that’s not nearly as compelling as the acting itself, which is largely phenomenal, frequently surprising, and often more than a little bit heartbreaking.
    • 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.
  58. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Soaring and romantic, wild and serene, feminist and gutsy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies of the year.
  59. Inside Out
    There’s enough slapstick and silliness to keep kids entertained.... But the film also has a bittersweet streak about the loss of innocence and the fleetingness of childhood.
  60. Sideways
    It's an intoxicating feeling when a movie excites and enlivens us like this -- and there's a particular giddiness to be had in thinking about what movies can (but don't often) do for one's soul after imbibing such a fine vintage.
  61. Sunset Boulevard
    There's a long tradition of filmmakers poking fun at the movie business. But no one bit the hand that fed him more viciously or with sharper fangs than Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard.
    • 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.
  63. The Gunfighter
    A ruthlessly heartbreaking tale of a famous gunslinger (Gregory Peck in a black mustache and a little black hat) grown weary of facing down an increasingly young bunch of challengers to his quick-draw supremacy.
  64. Chimes at Midnight
    It’s a feast for the ears, eyes, and soul.
  65. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    The conclusion of Peter Jackson's masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it's conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious.
  66. Call Me by Your Name
    It’s real life, heartbreaking and sublime.
  67. Carlos
    A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.
  68. Marriage Story
    Though it may not be an easy movie to watch, or even a particularly original one — there’s still Kramer vs. Kramer, after all — Marriage still feels like something special on the screen: a movie that somehow makes its intimacy seem like a radical act, one messy, heart-wrecking moment at a time.
  69. 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.
  70. La La Land
    It’s stunningly ambitious and thrillingly alive the way the best movies are.
  71. Petite Maman
    Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.
  72. Lady Bird
    Gerwig doesn’t trap her protagonist in the oblivious underage bubble that most coming-of-age dramedies inhabit; Lady Bird’s parents, played by Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, are fully formed humans with their own deep flaws and vulnerabilities.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Reversal of Fortune
    Funny and scary, Reversal is a tour de force for Schroeder, who examines the idle rich, the intricacies of the legal system, and the imperatives of morality concisely but with unmatched brio.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  74. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    Lee's hand in all this seems to be a light one; aside from his intimate but unobtrusive camerawork, the show appears essentially unaltered from the live performance.
  75. Shoplifters
    Kore-eda is working up to something else, steering the story he’s built so carefully toward an utterly unexpected detour. As much of what we think we know unravels, the film becomes not just an enjoyable, intermittently poignant portrait of imperfect people but a profound meditation on the meaning of family.
  76. 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.
  77. Uncut Gems
    A vibrantly madcap dark comedy.
    • 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.
  79. Inside Llewyn Davis
    With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.
  80. Stagecoach
    Action-packed and jaw-droppingly epic (it was the first time director John Ford ever shot in Monument Valley), Stagecoach is the perfect Western to show to people who don’t like Westerns.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Controversy aside, ”Blimp” splendidly marries a sprawling narrative to stunningly imaginative filmmaking.
  82. TÁR
    The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession.
  83. There Will Be Blood
    For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    Top Hat is tops with two of the duo’s most sublime numbers (The Piccolino, Cheek to Cheek), plus Fred’s rat-a-tat solo, a funnier-than-you-remember script (Erik Rhodes’ English-mangling designer exclaiming: ”Never again will I allow women to wear my dresses!”), and the hummable Irving Berlin score.
  85. Crumb
    Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.
    • 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.
  87. Spotlight
    Tautly directed by Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), the film hums as a tense shoe-leather procedural and a heartbreaking morality play that handles personal stories respectfully without losing sight of the bigger, more damning picture.
  88. The Wizard of Oz
    The Wizard of Oz remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's-really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood.
  89. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The most beautiful movie ever made about a man who could only move one eyelid -- almost dangerously beautiful.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    An extremely tight, beautifully made film.
  91. The Class
    In a class by itself.
  92. No Country for Old Men
    The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success.
  93. 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    King Kong
    Granddaddy of beast-on-the-loose movies.
  95. Secrets & Lies
    A crowd-pleaser, all right, but, for all its appeal, a naggingly sanctimonious one.
  96. The Florida Project
    The story begins to feel more like a series of strung-together anecdotes: an intriguing project, incomplete.
  97. Timbuktu
    Visually dazzling and morally devastating.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Brief Encounter
    Director David Lean’s magnificent rendering of the short, passionate, and unconsummated affair between two middle-class, middle-aged Brits remains the most memorable treatment of extramarital romance in movie history.
  99. 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]
  100. Apocalypse Now Redux
    I don’t think Apocalypse Now Redux is superior to the 1979 version. Quite the contrary, it’s draggier and more portentous, more inflated with its own importance.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »