Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Water Lilies
    The painfully spot-on essence of teen angst meets the spirit of Esther Williams in Water Lilies. First film by gifted scripter-helmer Celine Sciamma nails the aching doubts and offhanded cruelty of 15- and 16-year-old girls.
  2. Tuya's Marriage
    Mainland helmer Wang Quanan and his regular lead actress, Yu Nan, tread on largely familiar ground in Tuya's Marriage.
  3. Flawless
    As neatly tailored, clean-cut, and visually appealing as a Savile Row suit. But audiences accustomed to more knowing fare are likely to find its twists and turns outdated while yearning for a little of the rebellious fun that made the genre gleam in the first place.
  4. Run, Fatboy, Run
    David Schwimmer's first bigscreen directing effort reveals something very different: a thoroughly competent mainstream craftsman who imposes no individual character on formulaic material.
  5. 21
    Picture shrewdly shuffles together attractive young leads, cagey screen vets and a fantasy-fulfillment scenario in a slickly polished package that should appeal to anyone who's ever dreamed of beating the odds.
  6. Chapter 27
    Jared Leto gained some 70 pounds. Seemingly following his lead, the pic itself is heavy, lethargic, and exasperating.
  7. The Cool School
    What The Cool School does so well, through its color accents and black-and-white photography, through the kinetic music that propels Jeff Bridges' narration by and the unorthodox attitude that reflects the artists themselves, is impart a sense of discovery.
  8. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Scripted by "The Best of Youth" duo who brought the post-WWII years into stark and moving light, pic offers a warm humor that illuminates the defiant vista of hope even when the proceedings turn tragic.
  9. Priceless
    Co-scripter/helmer Pierre Salvadori serves up an enjoyable riff on genuine romance versus the pay-as-you-go variety, in crowd-pleasing, exportable picture.
  10. Stop-Loss
    A wildly uneven drama, by turns sincere and synthetic.
  11. Superhero Movie
    Given the abysmal quality of recent spoof pics, it's saying something that Superhero Movie provides a fairly steady stream of midsized laughs -- and even the 40% or so of gags that just lie there aren't actively painful.
  12. Backseat
    Culturally falling somewhere between "Sideways" and "Dumb and Dumber," this low-rent road movie similarly rides on principles of audience identification, largely minus competent helming, thesping or scripting.
  13. Hats Off
    Despite intimate, prolonged access to her subject, director Jyll Johnstone seems to have missed the most interesting wrinkles of Weddell's story in favor of fuzzy life's-a-stage affirmations.
  14. Alexandra
    Though he's sure to deny it, Alexandra is Alexander Sokurov's most directly political work for years. Featuring a performance of monumental depth by opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya, pic presents war for what it is: brutal, crushing, and ugly, and yet Sokurov doesn't lens any battles.
  15. Shotgun Stories
    Thesping is pitch-perfect across the board.
  16. Drillbit Taylor
    A junior-league "Superbad" with an aftertaste of "The Pacifier," Drillbit Taylor is a just passable pubescent comedy with a modest laugh count by Apatow factory standards.
  17. The Grand
    Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.
  18. The Hammer
    This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.
  19. Shelter
    A pleasant romantic drama that works best when focused on the romance -- or on the waves, since the principal characters spend a lot of time surfing.
  20. Meet the Browns
    Often plays more like "Tyler Perry's Greatest Hits" as it recycles various elements from the writer-director's earlier works.
  21. Shutter
    A blandly cast and crafted remake of the same-titled 2004 Thai pic that itself emulated J-horror norms, which seemed a lot fresher back then.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Boarding Gate
    Thrills and drama are left standing on the tarmac in Boarding Gate a limp, sleazy inanity by renowned French critic cum erratic helmer Olivier Assayas.
  23. Love Songs
    Likeable film doesn't measure up to helmer Christophe Honore's previous "Inside Paris," stumbling a bit in capturing the genuine grief that sits at its heart, though once again his feel for family is unerring and some of pic's greatest charms come from the warmth they inspire.
  24. Planet B-Boy
    Often exhilarating docu charts several breakdancing crews' path to the Battle of the Year, which hosts national winners from 18 countries -- not excluding Israel, Belgium or Latvia -- in dazzling competitive displays.
  25. Irina Palm
    Astonishingly, pic reaped hearty guffaws at Berlinale press show, suggesting this might play best in Europe, but Anglophone auds are more likely to give Palm the thumbs down.
  26. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    Wrapping the political hot potato of illegal immigration in the sentimental balm of a mother-son reunion drama, this stirring tale will be embraced most enthusiastically by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border.
  27. Doomsday
    Neil Marshall's flair for visceral action more than compensates for his script's lack of conceptual novelty in Doomsday. Principally South Africa-shot tale of a post-apocalyptic Great Britain cobbles together large chunks of "Escape From New York," "The Road Warrior," "28 Days Later" and "Resident Evil," but those with a taste for revved-up, splattery fantasy thrills won't be complaining.
  28. Horton Hears a Who!
    The real stars of the movie are the animators, who imbue even the overgrowth in Horton's jungle with a certain floppy Seuss-ishness.
  29. Never Back Down
    Best part, though, is the cast: Everyone's a model, everyone beats each other half to death, and no one looks as if they've ever suffered so much as a coldsore.
  30. Sleepwalking
    The overly simplistic script by Zac Stanford (“The Chumscrubber”) hits nothing but high notes, making the whole dramatically less than the sum of its parts.
  31. Heartbeat Detector
    Both pertinent and discomfiting, this sober, well-cast drama remains quietly riveting, despite its 140-minute running time.
  32. City with No Mercy
    Plainly disappointing as a well-sustained kick-butt thriller, and politically toxic.
  33. Funny Games (2008)
    As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and -- some may reckon -- even more pointless.
  34. Sputnik Mania
    A seemingly esoteric subject -- the launch of Russia's Sputnik satellite -- is exhumed and made exciting in this important slice of you-are-there documaking.
  35. Hacia la oscuridad
    A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.
  36. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Overlapping with other recent documentaries, picture nonetheless presents a stimulating argument.
  37. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    Pays fitting tribute to Wetlands' unique rebirth of '60s idealism within a '90s urban setting.
  38. Blind Mountain
    Low on drama and originality, and high on deja vu, sophomore outing by writer-director Li Yang ("Blind Shaft," 2003).
  39. Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise
    Helmer Bruce David Klein's near-reverential treatment is a nice contrast to the rough-and-tumble of tour life.
  40. 10,000 BC
    Conventional where it should be bold and mild where it should be wild, 10,000 BC reps a missed opportunity to present an imaginative vision of a prehistoric moment.
  41. The Bank Job
    An engrossing if underwhelming period thriller.
  42. College Road Trip
    This overplayed, underachieving laffer feels thoroughly manufactured to Disney specifications.
  43. Married Life
    The tone, casting and material form a less-than-perfect match in Married Life, a period domestic drama that never quite decides if it wants to be a credible marital study, a noirish meller or a sly comedy.
  44. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    McDormand's performance slowly builds a solid integrity, and contrasts well with Adams' more flamboyant turn.
  45. Paranoid Park
    Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.
  46. Snow Angels
    Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls."
  47. CJ7
    "E.T."-inspired comic fantasy about a poor boy adopting a cute alien catches the eye but not fully the heart with its undernourished father-son dynamics, critter hijinks and smattering of social commentary.
  48. Fighting for Life
    The only people who seem immune to the politics of the Iraq War are also at its epicenter: the doctors and nurses who mend and tend to the wounded, and who provide the heart and soul of Terry Sanders' Fighting for Life.
  49. Girls Rock!
    Aggressively upbeat docu, helmed by two males ill-equipped to bring any distance to the camp's pervasive feel-good feminism, tends to relentlessly reiterate points better served by example.
  50. Blindsight
    The deceptively complex picture gradually grows sharp edges and snowballs into a compelling study in culture clash, with spectacular scenery to boot.
  51. City of Men
    Despite its sudsy storyline, this second tour through the punk-infested Rio slums could attract more mature arthouse auds, drawn by character rather than the minutiae of guns 'n' drugs, though it's unlikely to match "God's" muscular $7.5 million U.S. take.
  52. Vivere
    Piles heavy emotional baggage on a slender story frame. Pic looks ravishing, featuring a nocturnal road trip through a cool kaleidoscopic landscape of shifting colors peopled by three commanding thesps of different generations whose interlocking stories form a cohesive whole.
  53. Bonneville
    A bland road movie running on empty. It's depressing to see a deluxe cast wasted on such by-the-numbers material -- from predictable plot to fabricated Hallmark sentiment to strenuous milking of warm-and-fuzzy laughs from the irrepressible spirit of three women whose youth is behind them.
  54. Chicago 10
    A vibrantly crafted evocation of a convulsive moment in 20th century American history, Chicago 10 is far less interested in offering a fresh, probing look at what took place on the streets during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the circus trial that followed than it is in celebrating the stars of the anti-war movement and rallying the current generation to follow their examples.
  55. The Other Boleyn Girl
    A sexy, good-looking political bodice-ripper with an almost flawless cast at the top of its game.
  56. Penelope
    The whimsical ugly-duckling fable becomes more uneven as it proceeds, straining too hard to manufacture its quirky charms.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Romulus, My Father
    Warmly felt but haltingly told meller Romulus, My Father holds the attention with fine perfs and exquisite lensing, but never really grips the imagination.
  58. Semi-Pro
    Very much in the tradition of "Slap Shot," George Roy Hill's raucously funny and foul-mouthed 1977 laffer about the misadventures of a minor-league hockey team, Semi-Pro scores big laughs with the rowdy play-by-play of hard-luck hoopsters struggling for professional survival.
  59. The Unforeseen
    Observing locally and thinking globally, Laura Dunn's astonishing debut doc feature The Unforeseen is the kind of transformative viewing experience that has made the current period a golden age for nonfiction film.
  60. Jar City
    A taut police procedural that craftily blends ripped-from-the-headlines genetic issues with foreboding Icelandic stoicism, Jar City reps a supremely confident stride into mass-appeal genre fare for Icelandic hyphenate Baltasar Kormakur.
  61. Chop Shop
    Ultimately, the pic will be noted and remembered not for any inherent drama or analysis but for its simply having so thoroughly documented a strange place most people have never seen and never knew existed.
  62. Charlie Bartlett
    Rollicking story of a rich kid whose wildly successful bid for popularity has him playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs between upstart Anton Yelchin and alcoholic principal Robert Downey Jr. that could fuel a chemistry lab.
  63. The Signal
    Borrowing heavily from the current trend in zombie comedy and apocalyptic horror but shifting it away from the usual undead norms, pic carves out a fresh angle in the crowded indie horror universe while blatantly stealing ideas from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse."
  64. Be Kind Rewind
    It's a quick trip from whimsy to silliness in Be Kind Rewind, a notably ephemeral work by Michel Gondry, whose flights of fancy can't overcome the egregious illogic of the premise.
  65. The Counterfeiters
    The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.
  66. Vantage Point
    A 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.
  67. Witless Protection
    If you need a GPS unit to find your own backside, you'll be laughing uproariously at Witless Protection, a movie that's far more interesting politically than dramatically -- or, God knows, comically.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Duchess of Langeais
    Rivette uses intertitles (including some direct quotes from Balzac) to move the plot along and underline the dry wit. Helming is both leisurely and exact, offering auds ample opportunities to intimately observe the selfishness and folly of two people who would rather fight than switch.
  69. Jodhaa Akbar
    A long-limbed story that is utterly simple in structure, but decorated with enough character interplay and side plots to keep the movie ticking over to a powerful finale.
  70. Diary of the Dead
    Gripping, intimate genre triumph.
  71. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    Sensitive, delicate and involving.
  72. Definitely, Maybe
    A pleasingly non-formulaic romantic seriocomedy, Definitely, Maybe has charm and some depth.
  73. Jumper
    Director Doug Liman churns out a serviceable sci-fi thriller/videogame template that plays like "The Matrix Lite" and, finally, isn't nearly as cool as its trailer.
  74. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    A work of both modest enchantment and enchanting modesty, grounded in a classically Spielbergian realm where childlike wonderment crosses paths with the tough realities of young adulthood.
  75. Step Up 2: The Streets
    Rather than mixing classical and modern styles the way "Step Up" did, this hip-hop-powered sequel is all about new moves, which should keep the kids coming back after the pic's initial Valentine's Day crush.
  76. Ezra
    A passionate, harrowing drama about rebellion, atrocity and child soldiering in Africa, Ezra is raw and violent. There's no denying the film's power, or its frankness regarding the ongoing tragedy of Africa.
  77. The Band's Visit
    A warm and delightful take on cross-cultural relations that proves that sometimes a light touch is just what's needed to address serious topics.
  78. Fool's Gold
    A listless romantic comedy that, almost out of desperation, turns a little more violent than necessary near the end.
  79. The Hottie & the Nottie
    Paris Hilton has already ushered a remarkable three features into the Internet Movie Database's "Bottom 100." The Hottie and the Nottie will make it an even four.
  80. In Bruges
    Closer to pics like “The Hit” and “Miller’s Crossing” than to McDonagh’s bristling, funny plays, this half-comic, half-serious account of two Irish hitmen who are sent to the titular Belgian burg to cool their heels after a job is moderately fair as a nutty character study, but overly far-fetched once the action kicks in.
  81. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Ungainly titled, overlong, intermittently funny.
  82. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    An in-your-face double helping of fat jokes, crude slapstick, wacky Southern-black stereotypes and occasionally inspired improv.
  83. London to Brighton
    Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.
  84. A Walk to Beautiful
    Competently made, precisely shot and buoyantly humanistic.
  85. Spiral
    The film toys with audience expectations and perceptions by playing fast and loose with circumstances and clues, while leading to an almost unavoidable and dismayingly obvious conclusion.
  86. How to Rob a Bank
    Amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery.
  87. Caramel
    Fresh from commercials and musicvids, novice helmer (and star) Nadine Labaki gathers five women around a Beirut beauty salon to address a range of issues facing Lebanese women -- from extramarital affairs to religious dictates. Low on calories and not especially original but always diverting.
  88. The Eye
    This slick effort is effectively creepsome until it bogs down somewhat in plot explication.
  89. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    Movie picks up momentum midway through, when Cyrus is joined by the three Jonas Brothers, who know exactly how to play the crowd and the cameras. As 3-D goes, watching them criss-cross in space proves more engaging than observing one strutting performer.
  90. Over Her Dead Body
    Even the weakest "Desperate Housewives" episode packs more heat than this tepid romantic comedy-fantasy, whose basic plot gimmick has been done as far back as "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."
  91. Praying with Lior
    What makes this involving beyond its subject's slightly freakish fascination is helmer Ilana Trachtman's capturing of a complex family dynamic in which Lior isn't the only intriguing personality.
  92. Shrooms
    By-the-numbers item, in which five American college students literally get wasted while tripping out on magic mushrooms in rural Ireland, is OK vid fodder with few real scares and not an ounce of originality.
  93. Strange Wilderness
    Obviously the product of minimal effort by all parties involved, Strange Wilderness is a slovenly, slapped-together stoner comedy.
  94. The Witnesses
    Despite its grim subject, the powerful storytelling projects the strongly affirmative message that it's a miracle to be alive and bear witness to those who did not survive. This memorable film, one of Techine's best, is in no way limited to gay viewers.
  95. The Silence Before Bach
    Arguably stronger conceptually than visually, surreal mix of the unexpected and the banal is definitely not to everybody's taste. But the music is inarguably sublime.
  96. Rambo
    Stallone (who looks fit but mostly keeps his shirt on) has no intention of bogging the action down, but it's still a notably cheerless exercise, without knowing winks or stabs (pardon the expression) at humor. It is in all respects, rather, a completely workmanlike effort.
  97. How She Move
    Title refers not only to its heroine's physical gyrations but also her moral maneuverings as she strives to break out of her lower-class surroundings in this moody, intelligent take on conventional material.
  98. Meet the Spartans
    Lazy, lame and painfully unfunny, Meet the Spartans is yet another scrambled-genre parody.
  99. Untraceable
    Unfolding like a better-than-average episode of a first-rate TV police procedural, Untraceable is a satisfying slice of solidly crafted meat-and-potatoes filmmaking.
  100. Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    Functions swimmingly as both a bigscreen inflation of smallscreen icons and a fairly hilarious stand-alone.
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