Entertainment Weekly's Scores

For 4,810 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 3.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
4,810 movie reviews
  1. Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell.
  2. This gallantly imperfect indie pops with attitude.
  3. The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.
  4. Coppola's stranded royal suggests that at heart, Marie Antoinette was just a simple girl who wanted to have fun, and got her head handed to her.
  5. The Prestige isn't art, but it reaps a lot of fun out of the question, How did they do that?
  6. Hamilton, in her movie debut, is a find: the kinkstress next door.
  7. A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".
  8. Through it all, Natalie Maines' decision to shirk humility, to stick by her guns, to the point that the group returns to that London concert venue in 2006 and she utters the same joke again, becomes a feisty and inspiring act of something there is only one word for: patriotism.
  9. The movie IS a provocation, but not a glib or ideologically myopic one.
  10. Flushed Away lacks the action-contraption dottiness of a Wallace and Gromit adventure, but it hits its own sweet spot of demented delight.
  11. Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.
  12. Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.
  13. I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.
  14. Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.
  15. After a lifetime of flogging the demons of cosmic despair, Ingmar Bergman, at 88, comes off as lean and vigorous in this fascinating memoir-interview.
    • Metascore: 62
    • Critic Score 83
    Sucking at the top of many a can, and greedily slurping the sides of an overflowing bottle, Nolte gives a master class in how to drink a beer on screen. The rest of his work here is sad, understated, and worth seeking out.
  16. The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.
  17. It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.
  18. The soft-spoken, impressionistic documentary (with a hypnotic score built from the sounds of construction) climaxes with a six-minute helicopter-cam view of the colossal structure to which these somebodies have been dedicating their sweat, and sometimes their very lives.
  19. After teeny indies, this studio release retains the trademark love of warped American gothic that the Polishes share with David Lynch and the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. But the unexpected streak of yearning sunniness -- the Spielbergian touch of boyhood dreams propelling a grown man -- gives The Astronaut Farmer a warmth that's new for them.
  20. John Hurt is magnetic as a Catholic priest running a school where terrified Tutsi have taken refuge, while Hugh Dancy, as a naive teacher, represents white commitment to black Africa at its most impotent and unreliable.
  21. Pride doesn't have much surprise, but it's a formula picture of genuine feeling.
  22. When C-Diddy (a.k.a. David Jung), in his samurai superman suit, does his note-perfect, lip-twisting, belly-jiggling manic mime of Extreme's ''Play With Me,'' it's hard not to grin and admit that, yes, this is almost an art form.
  23. First Snow is essentially a short story with a metaphysical twist, but Pearce puts his fears more up front than any actor I can think of.
  24. Eight months of interrogation and torture in fetid Abu Ghraib followed before he was released, innocent. None of The Prisoner's showy flourishes -- animation, sound effects, fancy editing -- can match the power of Abbas' stillness as he describes one man's agony in one huge hell.
  25. Almodovar is positively mature, adapting a novel by Ruth Rendell so deftly that the plot now also describes the invigorating and sometimes disorienting effects of democracy after long years of repression under the Franco regime.
  26. The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes.
  27. In the very funny cop comedy Hot Fuzz, overachieving London police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) commits a very British sin: He's too good.
  28. Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.
  29. The generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott (and costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel) turn this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.
  30. The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.
  31. Excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks -- vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed.
  32. The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.
  33. Bug
    The enjoyably icky heart of Bug is still contained within the airless, increasingly ''bug-proofed'' room that becomes Agnes and Peter's whole world.
  34. Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.
  35. An animated family movie about penguins -- in the wake of "March of the Happy Feet," they're the Angelina Jolie of animals, both cute and admired everywhere. Plus, it's about surfing.
  36. Hurtling and impassioned, driven by some of the greatest popular music ever recorded, this wildly overripe and unkempt biopic is a true experience.
  37. An irresistibly vibrant concert-tour documentary.
  38. The Cuban escapade, designed to provoke, backfires when he loses focus by including Cuban firefighters in an homage to 9/11 first responders.
  39. Vitus, a fizzy domestic fairy tale from Switzerland, gives you a lift, as it revels in the oddball joy of genius as kid power.
  40. Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.
  41. The flourishes don't answer the question most on Potterites' minds -- who lives, who dies? -- but they briefly stupefy.
  42. An unlikely comedy charmer.
  43. Another thinking-person's thriller from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, also co-pilots on "28 Days Later."
  44. Devious and inspired enough to juice you past any weak spots. Thou shalt be amused.
  45. The best thing about this long-awaited feature-length project, a classic Simpsonian interplay of family psychology, social commentary, and brainy visual and verbal jokes tossed off at rat-a-tat speed, is how relaxed it manages to be.
  46. There's an unconvincing last-act twist, but this is the movie "Little Children" wanted to be.
  47. The words belong to Mr. Shakespeare. All else in this Macbeth is the pleasurably fevered invention of brash Australian director Geoffrey Wright.
  48. There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.
  49. Its pulpy violent excess will tip over...into slightly more excessive excess. That's its silly, scuzzball joy.
  50. What makes The Hunting Party an original, gonzo treat is the way that Shepard plants the movie's tone somewhere between hair-trigger investigative danger and the from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire glee of a Hope/Crosby picture.
  51. It's as if the star (Douglas) finally gets to integrate all his onscreen personas, all at once.
  52. This is familiar psychological as well as stylistic territory for Anderson after "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums." But there's a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker's miniaturist instincts.
  53. Control goes past the clichés of punk rock-god gloom to offer a snapshot of alienation that's shockingly humane.
  54. The whole film is cracked, but in a stylish, downtown way.
  55. It's galvanizing to see it played out through the furious contradiction of Carter's personality. He is pious, stubborn, compassionate, testy, moral, unreasonable, and wise.
  56. The title Terror's Advocate is both a statement of fact and a worrisome understatement in a documentary as slippery as its subject.
  57. Captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury.
  58. Gentle study in human resilience and luck.
  59. As skewed, prismatic, and free of fluff as the man himself.
  60. Beowulf is a solemnly gorgeous, at times borderline stolid piece of Tolkien-with-a-joystick mythology.
  61. Enchanted is festooned with extravagant set pieces -- there's a great number in praise of romantic gestures, and a ballroom scene to make even grown-up girls swoon.
  62. There's a grim modern parable to be read into the dangerous effects of the gospel-preaching local crazy lady Mrs. Carmody (brilliantly played by a hellfire Marcia Gay Harden) on a congregation of the fearful.
  63. This beautiful and urgent eco-doc takes a bite out of the shark mythology made indelible by "Jaws."
  64. If all this sounds awfully classroom-bound, it isn't -- far from it. Each man's story as he tells it is riveting, truly stranger than fiction, and awesome, too, in the way of unfathomable humans.
  65. It's all about a likable scoundrel who discovers what it means to act out of conviction. The film's underlying twist, though, is tartly ironic.
  66. The movie is so finely minced a mixture of Sondheim's original melodrama and Burton's signature spicing that it's difficult to think of any other filmmaker so naturally suited for the job.
  67. Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.
  68. Rutina Wesley glowers with just the right touch of sweetness as a brainy student (and stellar after-school stepper).
  69. What the characters in The Witnesses -- and we, the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.
  70. A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.
  71. Paranoid Park has the slightly glum insularity of minimalist fiction, but it's the first of Van Sant's blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down.
  72. Lucy Walker's observant film Blindsight is about profound East-West differences in the importance of journey versus destination and comradeship versus competition.
  73. Chiara Mastroianni charms here just as her maman, Catherine Deneuve, did in Demy's 1964 classic.
  74. Marvelously inventive, often-ironic Israeli storyteller Etgar Keret and his life- and workmate, Shira Geffen, spin in Jellyfish a dreamy, arty, alluringly cockeyed tale involving three unrelated women in Tel Aviv.
  75. In Shine a Light, a crackling concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones are now so old that they seem new again.
  76. This audaciously issues-loaded indie drama works, improbably and entirely, on account of the marvelous, often familiar-looking, rarely starring character actor Richard Jenkins and his perfect performance as a stodgy, widowed economics professor.
  77. Nakedness has rarely looked so...naked. And innately, universally comic.
  78. A sly catalog of deceits and a gentle commentary on slippery creativity and desire.
  79. Even at his coolest, Downey's Iron Man remains a ghostly, neurotic crusader -- one whose life, in the Marvel tradition, has become a grand spectacle of overcompensation.
  80. Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna blend well with Mamet newbie Tim Allen, a treat as a spoiled-rotten aging Hollywood action star.
  81. A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.
  82. The unexpected star is Hathaway, looking cool as a runway model in the role originated by Barbara Feldon, lithe as a (pink) panther, and displaying great comic timing.
  83. The Golden Army dazzles like something out of "Jason and the Argonauts." To make a comic-book fantasy this derivative yet this dazzling requires more than technique. It takes a director in touch with his inner hellboy.
  84. Quite grand, quite exotic, David Lean-style epic.
  85. Their love story was inevitably complicated. And so is the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story -- not simply a love letter to love -- by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara.
  86. A smart, playful, informative pleasure.
  87. That's Trumbo's message -- that the true victim was America.
    • Metascore: 54
    • Critic Score 83
    The result is fairly silly slapstick, but Alda, hair disheveled and brow knit with stubborn intent, is both fierce and quietly heartbreaking.
    • Metascore: 63
    • Critic Score 83
    Even cynics might concede that, again, four capable actresses have pulled off a relatively rare thing: They've convinced us they're an honest-to-God movie sisterhood.
  88. As a movie, Hamlet 2 is lively, energetically daft, and very, very scrappy -- a broader, more loony-tunes knockoff of "Waiting for Guffman."
  89. Sagnier is yummy.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Critic Score 83
    Quarantine director John Erick Dowdle and co-writing brother Drew wisely stick close to the told-from-the-cameraman's point-of-view template of the terrific original, though they add a few fine flourishes.
    • Metascore: 45
    • Critic Score 83
    Edward Norton is in top form as Ray, a burned-out detective whose investigation into the deaths of four cops leads him to suspect his brother-in-law, Officer Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell, also terrific).
  90. The filmmaker of August Evening creates a succession of quiet, elliptical scenes that accrue into an affecting big picture of family ties and immigrant experience.
  91. A spare, controlled study in communication gaps and a piercing sketch of suburban American loneliness.
  92. It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.
  93. Ritchie concocts a crime-jungle demimonde that's organically linked to the real world, and it's a damn fun one to visit.
  94. The fun of Role Models is that it's a high-concept movie executed with speed and finesse and the kind of brusquely tossed-off obscene banter that can get you laughing before you know what hit you.
  95. If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.
  96. For the love of all things sensual and mysterious, see this one on a big screen.
  97. This is no real-life comedy à la "Election" -- more like a valuable, teen-scaled version of the presidential election that currently obsesses us.
  98. A nifty horror movie that doesn't claim to be anything other than a zippy exercise in creature-feature entertainment.
  99. Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.
  100. This charm-filled documentary about passionate Harry Potter fans (and one foe) leaps all over the place.
  101. It's an enjoyable ramble, with a feel for what made the early days of rock as wild as any that followed.
  102. A tough, authentic street drama born, bred, and shot in the no-spin zone of working-class South Boston.
  103. Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish.
  104. The best thing about Revolutionary Road, a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple, is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there.
  105. Lurie hits closer to the bone here than he did in his ham-handed "The Contender" (2000).
  106. Notorious makes the death of Biggie Smalls look like a tragic mistake, instead of the outgrowth of a culture devoted to selling the fantasy of who's the biggest man.
  107. Did granny intend this stuff for strangers? We'll never know. File this ''therapeutic'' movie, well made and creepy, on the dysfunction-as-art shelf next to "Capturing the Friedmans."
  108. It offers an attractive getaway route from self-importance, snark, and chatty comedies about male bonding. Here, stick shifts do the talking.
  109. Fados connects today's leading interpreters with legendary fadistas of the past. And it's the last title to be released under the banner of the venerable New Yorker Films.
  110. The result is a playful, elusive movie that isn't so much heartwarming as soul-cleansing.
  111. The characters in Alien Trespass (directed by X-Files producing alum R.W. Goodwin) are specimens of Sputnik-era determination, led by a gung-ho Eric McCormack.
  112. The film's style is so ''objective'' it's a bit subdued, yet this is a sports drama of total originality, as well as the most authentic inside view of the immigrant experience the movies have given us in quite a while.
  113. An artlessly powerful performance by newcomer Nicole Behaire anchors American Violet.
  114. The intimate movie hums with a back-in-the-hood vibe that gets the two stars playing contentedly, and delightfully, for the love of local filmmaking.
  115. Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.
  116. The story is timeless; this could have taken place when Doyle graduated in '76 -- or any year, really, since the effects of high school linger throughout adult life and nerds are forever.
  117. Battle of the Smithsonian has plenty of life. But it's Adams who gives it zing.
  118. It hooks you up, happily, to your inner top chef.
  119. Scott gets into the zip and rush of urban energy with an enthusiasm bordering on hilarity.
  120. 9
    Storyboarded with precision, and enhanced with a resonant score by Deborah Lurie, Acker’s handsome, feature-length 9 is, for all its visual flights of fancy, grounded in an apocalypse-proof message graspable by any schoolchild.
  121. The chemical energy between Bullock and Reynolds is fresh and irresistible.
  122. Spells out the problem in clear, urgent, prosaic terms.
  123. Pfeiffer transcends any hint of cliché ''cougar'' voraciousness.
  124. A grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple "Rashomon."
  125. Larrain's (literally) dark, edgy movie is a precise artistic commentary on Augusto Pinochet's miserable regime.
  126. At the bone, Zombieland is a polished, very funny road picture shaped by wisenheimer cable-TV sensibilities and starring four likable actors, each with an influential following.
  127. The movie's hide-and-seek attitude toward truth mirrors the intricacies of one lover getting to know another -- an arresting notion of the heart that's much more than paper-deep.
  128. The Cove is the rare documentary specifically designed as a thriller.
  129. Williams hasn't been this sympathetic in years.
  130. Fan-ready and saga-solid.
  131. The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.
  132. It's a David-and-Goliath tale, full of anger and disturbing accusation, but it's also inspiring.
  133. It's the die-hard camaraderie that undergirded this squad and lifted it to the top.
  134. The film is consistently fun, and Tucker's comeuppance ? will leave you gasping (if not gagging) with laughter.
    • Metascore: 62
    • Critic Score 83
    A tragic, enraging, and uplifting tale.
  135. Campos (who was 24 when he made this jolting pic) captures the numbing psychic scramble that just might cause the YouTube generation to go morally haywire. Or become filmmakers.
  136. Turns into a lyrical and stirring meditation on the mystery of autism.
  137. What's lost in translation is recovered easily enough in Michael Sheen's astonishing performance as Clough.
  138. Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power.
  139. There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era.
  140. There's nothing drab about the tormented place these men take each other to. You'll want to go along.
  141. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins are so interesting that it's easy to put up with the decision-making dithering that goes along with the title.
  142. His pluck and chutzpah shine through.
  143. How is Invictus as a sports movie? Let's just say that its lump-in-the-throat climax is predictable, but that doesn't mean it's less than earned.
  144. The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.
  145. A grandly entertaining historical drama.
  146. Bridges' guileless performance makes this piquant little indie tale of country music, redemption, and the love of a pretty younger woman such a sad-song charmer.
  147. The Young Victoria has a subtler flow than you might expect, and at times it's calmer than you may like. Director Jean-Marc Vallée's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded? princess fantasy.
  148. Satisfying, melancholy political suspense story.
  149. It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself.
  150. Gray has an artful, understated way of conveying what's going ?on inside, often simply by focusing his camera on Kazan.
  151. Does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.
  152. Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife.
  153. What holds The Eclipse together is Hinds' sorrowful and moving performance as a man haunted in more ways than one.
  154. The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary.
  155. The movie bubbles with intellectual curiosity and narrative ambition.
  156. An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.
  157. When You're Strange, a documentary history of the Doors directed by Tom DiCillo, is for people like me who can stumble onto the scrappiest Doors video on VH1 at 3 a.m. and sit there, mesmerized.
  158. Stronger on beautiful imagery than on narrative flow.
  159. Reveling in mess and homegrown multiracial mayhem, Death at a Funeral finds a new lease on life.
  160. Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.
  161. Unlike its obvious influence, the 1999 Japanese shocker "Audition," The Human Centipede has no real-world echoes. It's an only-in-the-movies sick goof.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 83
    Some of the effects remain nicely repulsive; Freddy himself comes across as a genuinely nasty piece of work, far removed from his later incarnation.
  162. Redgrave shimmers like one of Tuscany's magnificent cypress trees as an Englishwoman searching for Lorenzo (Nero).
  163. The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.
  164. A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight.
  165. Jeunet maintains a firm control of his dreamscape creation, drawing on influences as varied as "Toy Story," "Children of Paradise," and TV's "Mission: Impossible."
  166. Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.
  167. Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.
  168. Wild Grass is itself odd stuff: Sometimes it's as playful as Marguerite's crayon-red corona of frizzy hair, and other times as autumnal as the sight of Georges alone in his study, feeling stuck.
  169. The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.
  170. As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.
  171. When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.
  172. In a staring contest with his audience, Solondz never blinks. He picks and picks at the themes that consume him, and he doesn't care who stays and who leaves. Me, I'm rapt.
  173. I found The Girl Who Played With Fire more gripping than "Dragon Tattoo," because this one doesn't just play with thriller conventions -- it puts them to work.
  174. The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.
  175. The film offers evidence that Vicious spent the entire night out cold on barbiturates. It plants resonant doubts.
  176. Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.
  177. Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.
    • Metascore: 55
    • Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
      83
    For a movie that's mostly a plotless mix of old sci-fi flicks and Bowie-esque gender-bending, Rocky Horror continues to charm. That's due in part to the honest delight we take in the freedoms this movie so cheerfully flaunts.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Critic Score 83
    Director Zack Snyder (300) has crafted the rare 3-D eyegasm that's worth the premium ticket price.
  178. The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous.
  179. It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.
  180. The ever-magnetic Sam Rockwell is Kenny, Minnie Driver is full of beans as Betty Anne's best friend, Melissa Leo is wicked good as an ornery cop, and, in her two chewy scenes, Juliette Lewis reminds fans why we want her to run free forever.
  181. A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.
  182. Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.
  183. Even when nothing is happening, the often dead-silent shots tend to grow scarier the more you look at them.
  184. Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.
  185. Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's intellectually ambitious debut drama Night Catches Us is all the more notable for setting well-drawn fictional characters in a fraught, real moment in civil rights history.
  186. Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.
  187. Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.
  188. These guys are not charming; they're horrifying in their ignorance, and they cause real damage. But there's a weird relief to be found in the opportunity to laugh ourselves sick at their expense, if only for an instant.
  189. Damon's how-to-break-the-law lesson - as ludicrous as anything else in this enjoyably zigzaggy exercise in accumulating peril - grants Neeson the fun of experimenting with an American ex-con accent for his one scene.
  190. Terry Gilliam-ish territory here, spiked with imagery from Holocaust nightmares and drug trips. Attention, university film clubs: Here's your cult-ready midnight-movie programming.
  191. Lest the audience miss a cue, Hooper and soundtrack composer Alexandre Desplat count on the ringing grandeur of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - the famous second movement, no less - to amp the emotions.
  192. Monsters is really a road-movie romance that tracks the burgeoning relationship between two strangers as they travel through the "infected" zone.
  193. 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.
  194. Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.
  195. The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.
  196. Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.
  197. If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.
  198. The story and setting may be ancient, but under the direction of Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and with a nicely textured screenplay by Macdonald's Scotland coscreenwriter Jeremy Brock, the vigor is fully modern.
  199. In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.
  200. Graeme and Clive, representatives of a nation of nonbelievers in UFOs and big dinner portions, come to the psychic capital of a country that wants to believe, and they're transformed. In Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do likewise, in celebration of what the Spielbergian cosmos is all about.
  201. Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.