Entertainment Weekly's Scores

For 7,798 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 2.1 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:
7798 movie reviews
  1. On paper, writer-director Oren Moverman’s The Dinner has all the ingredients for what should be a four-star feast. But from the opening course, it’s clear that something has gone wrong in the kitchen. Moverman, the chef, has tried to make his creation too clever and complicated.
  2. Some, no doubt, will find Lowery’s playfully surreal experiment (a ghost story told from the POV of the ghost) haunting, lyrical, and moving. Others (ahem, guilty as charged) will just find it maddening, inscrutable, and alienating. Check it out, then take your side in the debate.
  3. There’s a seed of an interesting, Twilight Zone premise here — what would you do if you were the last two people on earth? But Bokeh doesn’t seem to know what to do with it besides have its photogenic Adam-and-Eve leads take long nature walks, play board games, and upgrade their living conditions.
  4. The title isn’t the only thing about the film that has an exclamation point; every scene comes with one – and also seems to be in blaring, buzzing neon. The movie doesn’t know when to stop.
  5. As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.
  6. Neat as Joe looks, you do wish that someone had bothered to give him a personality.
  7. Now a miscast Claire Foy adopts the hacker vigilante’s black leather and badass avenging-angel attitude for The Girl in the Spider’s Web — a disappointingly safe, by-the-numbers action-thriller.
  8. The whole thing feels like the pilot episode of a third-rate comic-book vigilante TV show.
  9. The film’s main conflict is with its source material, twisting and wringing Milne’s life for everything it’s worth and hoping enough is squeezed out to qualify as a film.
  10. If Marwencol made your heart go out to Mark, Welcome to Marwen does something quite different. It makes you want to back away from him slowly.
  11. While the fish-out-of-water caper is stuffed with whiplash turns and colorfully eccentric lowlife characters, it never adds up to much. It’s so busy you might think there’s more to it than they’re really is.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A tame, vanilla whimper of a period drama begging for a better treatment in more assured hands.
  12. Eli Roth’s Death Wish isn’t a bad movie as far as super-violent exploitation flicks go. But it is a deeply problematic one. And that problem boils down to this: It’s the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time.
  13. Look for bloody axes, grotesquely disfigured zombies, and creepy visions — much of it bloatedly self-indulgent and a small part wicked funny about the influence of guys like Stephen King/Sutter Cane who write words read by people who don’t read anything else, or maybe don’t read at all but only go to movies like this one.
  14. The difference between The Prince of Tides and a movie like Ordinary People is that Streisand isn’t content with exploring human pain. She had to make it glamorous, too.
  15. I.Q. is easy enough to sit through, but it’s all surface come-on-the romantic-comedy equivalent of a shallow young Hollywood star who puts on fake glasses so that it will look like he, too, has brains.
  16. It feels too long, and it’s only 90 minutes. Jigsaw’s lifecoach-gone-mad ruminations have never sounded less threatening: He is become mansplainer, destroyer of drama. But there are lasers. I liked the lasers.
  17. The rare quiet moments in Nutcracker suggest Foy might be a real movie star. Let’s give her a real movie and find out.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The result is a monkeyshine that lumbers when it should swing.
  18. The problem with the film’s buckshot “this-happened-and-then-that-happened” storyline is that Connolly keeps hurtling ahead from scene to scene trying to touch every base in Gotti’s life of crime without every letting any one moment breathe long enough for it to resonate.
  19. Isn’t aggressively terrible or outrageously offensive. It’s just harmless, pointless, and meh. You’d think with 17 years at their disposal these guys would be able to come up with some jokes that weren’t so half-baked and dumb. Alas, this is low-hanging fruit all the way.
  20. As for the new Papillon, it wisely doubles down on high adventure, but it’s still as lifeless as its predecessor. Just in different ways.
  21. Just when you thought you’d erased the memory of Adam Sandler in Billy Madison playing a slobbo idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business, along comes Chris Farley playing a slobbo ; idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business. Yet this movie, unlike Sandler’s fiasco, does at least have a few scuzzy laughs.
  22. Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.
  23. In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis. But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.
  24. What’s depressing about the current Hollywood mania to literalize old cartoon series isn’t that a show like Casper is such bad source material. It’s that the movie version is like the cartoon without innocence — a fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.
  25. The best thing I can say is: This is a mess that makes no sense, so it’s a cure for the common overly architected superhero film.
  26. This manga adaptation is a tired science-fiction odyssey, with bland digital effects piled onto a sappy non-story that feels like a two-hour elevator pitch for a 70-film franchise.
  27. It doesn’t help that the special effects are second-rate; the squishy primal horror of Alien has been replaced by a kind of mechanized yuckiness. The team of B-movie scientists tracking the monster includes Ben Kingsley doing his over-deliberate American accent, Alfred Molina sporting a haircut that’s scarier than the creature, and Forest Whitaker as an empath so sensitive he can’t let anyone sneeze without making a dewy-eyed psychic pronouncement.
  28. Permanent Midnight never shows us who Jerry Stahl was before he began shooting junk, and so we have no real stake in what the drugs did to him. He’s a case study in search of a movie.

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