Entertainment Weekly's Scores

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 2.1 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:
7797 movie reviews
  1. It’s a fun, pulpy premise, but sadly, the film takes a route that’s too silly to be taken seriously and too tame to be any fun.
  2. With Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce now in the roles once occupied by Johnny Depp and the late Jean Rochefort, Don Quixote turns out to be a pretty typical Gilliam film: whimsically daffy, frantically overstuffed, and art-directed to within in an inch of its life. It’s often transporting, but even more often exhausting.
  3. By the time the climactic act of violence finally arrives, there’s barely enough patience left in the viewer to feel any real sense of catharsis or liberation. Just exhaustion.
  4. A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.
  5. It feels like Smigel and Sandler just shot the first draft of their script without fine-tuning or polishing any of the jokes.
  6. It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.
  7. It wants to be trashy, pulpy fun that toys with your mind and your expectations. Sadly, it just ends up insulting both.
  8. Talented actors stumbling through clichéd plot twists (Shirley’s nemeses actually envy her), flat one-liners (”Marriage is like the Middle East — there’s no solution”), and pithy self-affirmations (”I’ve fallen in love with the idea of living”) that undermine any genuine feminist sentiments.
  9. Whatever the case, you’re better off rewatching the fake Linda Blair movie.
  10. Excellent performers are wasted, especially the criminally underutilized Mandy Patinkin and Annette Bening, both of whom appear in just bit parts. With far too much confidence but nothing to say, Life Itself lives up to the college-freshman affectedness of its own title.
  11. At least Dark Fate is frequently bad in a funny way, without the dutiful dullness of the last couple sequels.
  12. But for most of the film, Parker’s Vivienne is bland and forgettable. A scene where she sleeps with the drummer in her backup band is supposed to be titillating but instead feels perfunctory.
  13. Zoe
    An unimaginative waste of science-fiction potential.
  14. The film tries to replicate the formula that made "Bridesmaids" sing, pairing a heartfelt story exploring the complexities of female friendship with bawdy, over-the-top comedy. But the first half of the equation only partly succeeds, and the latter falls totally flat.
  15. The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.
  16. There are a few legitimately great throwaway lines, and a few vaguely offensive ones. But the movie feels so fast and cheap that it’s hard not to wonder why they’ve made it at all, other than to jump on a small and so-far underwhelming trend in gender-swapping ‘80s remakes (see also: Ghostbusters, Overboard).
  17. The Muppets were once devilish and sly, but this ploddingly whimsical musical caper, which uses too many ’70s soul songs to signify its rainbow-demographic cred, is enough to make you want to see them get slapped around by the Teletubbies (at this point, a far funkier crew).
  18. The movie is a true throwaway: By the end, it seems to have disposed of itself.
  19. One reason the Flipper flick is worse than the TV show: Bland, mannered Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan plays Sandy’s uncle, Porter Ricks, instead of television’s wonderfully grumpy Brian Keith.
  20. If An Affair to Remember worked for you, Love Affair may do the same. It resurrects the earlier film’s sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity, right down to the awful final scene, which always felt — and still feels — as if another 20 minutes of movie were yet to come. Then again, what moved viewers in the ’50s seems almost luridly manipulative and unconvincing now.
  21. Corbet doesn’t seem as interested in the answers to the provocatively glib questions he raises as he is in creating a cynical riddle cloaked in style. No doubt some will find all of this to be a deep meditation on the pop-industrial complex, but from where I was sitting, it just felt like empty camp.
  22. Whenever a few of the Young Guns get together and have to behave like soulful cowboys, the movie stops dead in its tracks. The trouble with so many of today’s young actors is that there’s no deep-seated yearning or fury in their performances. They just seem like well-adjusted California kids putting on a show for a few hours.
  23. Serial Mom has traces of Waters’ acid wit, but most of the movie is tame and overly conscious of its naughty felicities.
  24. It’s little more than a handsome snooze that even the Masterpiece Theatre crowd may find a bit too snoozy.
  25. Look, no one is expecting much from a movie called Happy Death Day 2U. Certainly not air-tight logic. But this chapter feels phoned in. And unless you’re really, really desperate for a new horror movie to check out, you might want to think twice about accepting the charges.
  26. As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.
  27. It’s mostly left to Rodriguez to carry the absurdity on her shoulders, and the fact that she makes it so watchable is a real testament to her abilities. Next time, may the material rise at least halfway to meet her.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective‘s few tunes are unmemorable and all the action (aside from the inventive chase sequences) is snooze-worthy. Only the incomparable Vincent Price (as Ratigan) is worth the price.
    • Entertainment Weekly
  28. The whole thing would be more fun, you start to feel, if Intruder just committed fully to the schlocky midnight-movie glory of it all; let Quaid’s lawn-mowing wingnut swing that ax not just for soft vulnerable body parts, but the stars.
  29. The leads are both charming, but they can’t override the tooth-aching sincerity of the script, or the cardboard conflicts that propel it.

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