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. The Last Sin Eater
    Michael Landon Jr.'s respectfully sincere but only fitfully involving film.
  2. Samoan Wedding
    The big, burly Samoan Wedding is a shrewdly written, impeccably timed and audaciously played romantic comedy.
  3. Black Friday
    Despite its large cast and complex criss-crossing from past to present, the movie rarely catches fire as an involving human drama.
  4. Notes on Marie Menken
    Handsome tribute is paid to the eponymous experimental filmmaker in Notes on Marie Menken, the fourth feature by Austrian docu helmer Martina Kudlacek, who previously made "In the Mirror of Maya Deren."
  5. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.
  6. Burning Annie
    Pic relies on nerdy world-weary irony to carry the day, but doesn't convincingly draw its characters.
  7. The Decomposition of the Soul
    A thorny subject is handled with care in this meticulous reconstruction of life inside the East German police state, as boiled down to the experiences of just two ex-inmates -- one man and one woman --- of a notorious Stasi prison. Overall effect is poetically thought-provoking, not depressing.
  8. Because I Said So
    An exercise in canned cuteness, Because I Said So pushes its normally appealing stars, Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore, over the edge of sitcom hysteria.
  9. The Messengers
    Though the Pangs prove culturally adaptive on a visual level, they seem completely clueless as to the tonal modalities of Mark Wheaton's admittedly undercooked, all-American script.
  10. The Situation
    Undeniably topical but the lack of emotional investment in its characters renders it more intelligent than engaging.
  11. Fired!
    Modestly amusing in fits and starts, Fired! proves most potent when on-screen interviewees are playing for keeps, not for laughs.
  12. Puccini for Beginners
    While it tips its hat to screwball comedy, Puccini for Beginners owes more to contemporary sitcom. It also has way more in common with "Sex and the City" than "The L Word." None of that is entirely a bad thing in a film that never really soars but has enough breezy humor.
  13. Constellation
    Exceptionally strong cast is pictures beating heart.
  14. East of Havana
    The temptations of allowing a promotional video to seep inside a genuine non-fiction study nearly overtake East of Havana and its look at a bubbling hip-hop culture in Cuba.
  15. In the Pit
    Leo Heiblum's pulsating music and Samuel Larson's dense, fascinating sound editing rewardingly compliment Rulfo's electrifying visuals.
  16. Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
    Although the outcome is public record, picture is undeniably gripping as it reveals a distressing degree of voter complacency.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Writer-director Choi Dong-hoon, whose grifter dramedy "The Big Swindle" was an unheralded gem two years ago, considerably ups the ante in his second feature, a long-limbed yarn centered on a bunch of ruthless professional gamblers. But involving characters and devil-may-care tone make the long running time hardly a stretch.
  18. An Unreasonable Man
    A basically admiring if critical portrait, documentary by Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan (strangely, both standup comics and TV comedy writer-producers) finds more than enough absorbing material to hold interest through nearly three-hour runtime.
  19. Room 314
    Pic feels like a cross between an anthology of ambiguous short stories and a string of acting-class exercises. Thesping is first-rate across the board.
  20. Blood and Chocolate
    The entire star-crossed scenario is conveyed with the narrative simplicity of a musicvideo, lingering in an almost fetishistic manner on sensual details (boxes of chocolates, a blood-red ribbon) while compressing important elements of the story into clumsy montages.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Catch and Release
    A so-so romantic dramedy.
  22. Epic Movie
    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.
  23. Smokin' Aces
    Smokin' Aces blows some cool smoke rings until it makes the very un-cool mistake of overstaying its welcome.
  24. Seraphim Falls
    Aside from spasms of brutal violence, however, there's nothing rousing or new here.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shockproof
    While never credible, story does point up the standard melodramatics and good playing to keep it all interesting. (Review of Original Release)
  26. Funny Money
    Greif obviously ascribes to the Blake Edwardian school of comedy, laying out gags with commendable topographical precision. But, unlike Edwards' unique mixture of sophistication and slapstick, Funny Money falls squarely in the tradition of pure farce, itself an anomaly in this age of aggressively abrasive personality comedies.
  27. G.I. Jesus
    A bold, often clumsy, but always intriguing piece of work.
  28. From Other Worlds
    Picture's leaps into the fantastic and rampantly farcical tend to be overextended, but finally don't detract from what is a well-judged, light entertainment.
  29. China Blue
    Bleakly Dickensian as all this sounds, much of China Blue is charming, because its subjects are.
  30. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    Sixty years after World War II, descendants of a prominent Nazi responsible for implementing Hitler's policies in Slovakia reignite debate over their heritage in emotional docu 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him.
  31. The Hitcher
    In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.
  32. Regular Lovers
    Regular Lovers evokes the '60s pretty well just through dialogue and rhythm -- better, in fact, than Bernardo Bertolucci's more reverently detailed "The Dreamers." However, the film's slow tempo induces the feeling one is living through the whole of 1968 in one sitting.
  33. The GoodTimesKid
    Building his dry comedy out of a basic confusion of names, an Army recruitment slip and one man's curiosity, Jacobs creates a droll, meandering and defiantly uncommercial film.
  34. Alpha Dog
    Writer-director Nick Cassavetes' sprawling dramatization recklessly blurs the line between reconstruction and reality in ways that are admittedly interesting, if more than a little artistically suspect.
  35. Primeval
    It's not exactly good, but it's not bad, and far from boring.
  36. Stomp the Yard
    The dancing is more dynamic than the plotting in Stomp the Yard, an energetic if formulaic underdog tale about warring black fraternities specializing in an intensely competitive style of step dancing.
  37. God Grew Tired of Us
    Although shot over a longer period of time than "Lost Boys," God Grew Tired is a softer, less complex version of essentially the same story, far less troubling in its explorations and implications than "The Lost Boys," but with far greater commercial potential.
  38. Tears of the Black Tiger
    Fun, if finally too silly.
  39. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    Looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.
  40. Guru
    Strongly cast, long-limbed yarn contains some of Ratnam's best stuff in its first half but script weaknesses mar the later going and film's overall impact.
  41. Ever Since the World Ended
    Continually tickles the mind while leaving a heavy lump in the chest, establishing and sustaining a unique low-key tone of mystery and dread.
  42. Comedy of Power
    While the picture may be too subtle and oblique in places for more general audiences, it remains enjoyable as a sardonic glimpse of unspoken codes at the intersection of politics and business.
  43. Happily N'Ever After
    Colorful, crowd-pleasing toon.
  44. Freedom Writers
    It takes the bold approach of being earnest, honest and unafraid to be called naive. As a result, it's extremely affecting.
  45. Code Name: The Cleaner
    This is an especially limp star vehicle that delivers a few widely spaced moments of frivolity before what should be a quick mop-up trip to the DVD aisles.
  46. Thr3e
    Indeed, you could argue that weighty questions about the nature of evil and the allure of sin figured more prominently in the similarly titled "Se7en," one of several other, better suspensers dimly echoed here.
  47. Pan's Labyrinth
    There's plenty of blood -- both literal and figurative -- coursing through the veins of Pan's Labyrinth, a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
  48. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic.
  49. Miss Potter
    Renee Zellweger, in another Blighty role, struggles to make Beatrix credible.
  50. The Dead Girl
    More ambitious than her 2002 debut, "Blue Car," Moncrieff's new film maintains her focus on women, expanding to include a range of ages, circumstances and psychologies. Picture's drama, however, is deliberately fractured into a quintet of stories that vary considerably in their overall impact.
  51. Factory Girl
    The wild, unhinged life of Andy Warhol's favorite "superstar," Edie Sedgwick, is refashioned in Factory Girl as a tame biopic with little feel for the 1960s New York Underground.
  52. The Flying Scotsman
    Helmer Douglas Mackinnon does what he can to make the most of emotional bullet points and gloss over the lack of connective tissue.
  53. Arthur and the Invisibles
    Haplessly blends live-action and visually repellent computer-animated work.
  54. The Tiger and the Snow
    Like an Iraq-war mirror image of "Life Is Beautiful," actor-director Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow re-runs the successful structure and comic persona of the 1998 Oscar-winning film in a trippy fantasia about a poet who follows his love to hell and, in this happier ending, back.
  55. Notes on a Scandal
    The riveting interplay between Dench and Cate Blanchett draws blood with every scene, thanks to a precision-honed script and Eyre's equally incisive direction.
  56. Children of Men
    Picture more than delivers on the action front -- not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.
  57. Black Christmas
    It's debatable whether the original 1974 "Black Christmas" is, as its most rabid fans claim, the mother of all slasher movies. But there can be no argument regarding the scant merits of its slapdash, soporifically routine remake, suitable only for the least discriminating of gore hounds.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Good Shepherd
    Robert De Niro's second film as a director adopts a methodical approach and deliberate pace in attempting to grasp an almost forbiddingly intricate subject, with a result that is not boring, exactly, but undeniably tedious.
  59. Night at the Museum
    This rambunctious, "Jumanji"-style extravaganza is a gallery of special effects in search of a story; rarely has so much production value yielded so little in terms of audience engagement.
  60. We Are Marshall
    Full of good intentions, We Are Marshall has a game plan that's hard to fault, but as with any playbook, a scheme is only as good as how well it's executed.
  61. Venus
    Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.
  62. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Zhang Yimou's strangest and most troubled film, abounds in hysterical, mannered Tang Dynasty-era palace intrigue and dehumanized CGI battle sequences.
  63. Letters from Iwo Jima
    Taken together, "Flags" and "Letters" represent a genuinely imposing achievement, one that looks at war unflinchingly -- that does not deny its necessity but above all laments the human loss it entails.
  64. The Painted Veil
    Intelligent scripting, solid thesping and eye-catching location shooting aren't enough to make a compelling modern film of The Painted Veil.
  65. Rocky Balboa
    The time away from the ring has done Rocky and the franchise some good, although it takes pic a good long while to gather momentum and clout before a surprisingly satisfying third-act heavyweight bout.
  66. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    Whatever audiences might have wanted to know about sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney but were too embarrassed to ask is revealed in accessible documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint.
  67. Dreamgirls
    Finally. After "The Phantom of the Opera," "Rent" and "The Producers" botched the transfer from stage to screen, Dreamgirls gets it right. Bill Condon's adaptation of the 1981 show about a Motown trio's climb to crossover stardom pulls off the fundamental double-act those three musical pics all missed: It stays true to the source material while standing on its own as a fully reimagined movie.
  68. The Good German
    For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn't fit either of them.
  69. Breaking and Entering
    Entirely respectable in every way, it nonetheless has a very cool body temperature and thus likely will inspire polite admiration rather than excitement among viewers.
  70. Charlotte's Web
    Nowhere to be found is any dramatic surprise, heightening of the pulse or genuine pulling of heartstrings. Gary Winick's direction consists of button pushing, and the mechanics are palpable at every step.
  71. Eragon
    Appropriating all the external trappings of big-budget fantasy but none of the requisite soul, this leaden epic never soars like the CG-rendered fire-breather at the core of its derivative mythology.
  72. The Pursuit of Happyness
    The Pursuit of Happyness is more inspirational than creatively inspired -- imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache.
  73. The Secret Life of Words
    Sarah Polley gives a wonderfully searching performance, as a woman in a state of extreme isolation, in The Secret Life of Words, a compellingly claustrophobic drama set mostly aboard an oil rig.
  74. Danielson: A Family Movie (or, Make a Joyful Noise Here)
    There is an undeniable quirky appeal to the creative world of Daniel Smith, though those who hope a behind-the-scenes look will explain his motivation or personality won't find the enigma resolved here.
  75. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
    Richly layered picture dramatizes a landmark doctor/patient showdown, chronicles a classic case of transgenderism and reveals how aspects of Schreber's story prefigured Nazism.
  76. Resilience
    Arthouse audiences who welcome challenging material will find sustenance in film's fractured narrative and unflinching characterizations.
  77. Automatons
    An unwieldy mix of self-conscious camp and heavy-handed allegory, Automatons plays like a cheesy '50s no-budget sci-fier with serious delusions of grandeur.
  78. Apocalypto
    Mel Gibson is always good for a surprise, and his latest is that Apocalypto is a remarkable film. Set in the waning days of the Mayan civilization, the picture provides a trip to a place one's never been before, offering hitherto unseen sights of exceptional vividness and power.
  79. Blood Diamond
    Africa's enduring sorrow is ripe for drama, but Blood Diamond is, finally, a fitting metaphor for the gems: Potentially brilliant from a distance, but upon closer inspection, one likely will see the flaws.
  80. The Holiday
    A lavishly overstuffed gift basket of a movie.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unaccompanied Minors
    It's a crowdpleaser -- at least for crowds aged about 6 to 12.
  82. Off the Black
    Anchored by a terrific performance from Nick Nolte as a grizzled umpire who gets an unexpected second chance at fatherhood, this easygoing comedy-drama plays out slowly but assuredly, infusing a conventional story about a blossoming relationship with welcome reserves of honesty and humor.
  83. Screamers
    A noble cause does not a good movie make. Pic repeatedly drowns its impassioned message with music, creating an awkward hybrid between history lesson and concert documentary.
  84. The Empire in Africa
    Infused with a strong sense of moral outrage, The Empire in Africa provides more heat than light while attempting to explain the motives and methods of combatants who waged the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.
  85. I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
    Since the documentary will likely find its home in the educational market, a more balanced approach might have made it more insightful and educational.
  86. Family Law
    A deft, witty and emotionally rewarding study of a thirtysomething man in his roles as father and son.
  87. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky.
  88. The Bergman Trilogy
    Ingmar Bergman lays his soul on the line in Marie Nyreroed's gentle, intimate and thorough documentay.
  89. Days of Glory
    Committed performances and strong widescreen lensing carry the message with a righteous, if heavy weight.
  90. Hermanas
    A solidly-built but somewhat airless debut from the assistant director of "The Motorcycle Diaries."
  91. The Lives of Others
    Superbly cast drama… that looks to be a solid upscale attraction wherever the special chemistry of good writing and performances is appreciated.
  92. The Nativity Story
    Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story.
  93. Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
    The four-years-in-the-making, badly recycled (not to mention awful) sequel might stain the honor of the Lampoon label if it hadn't already produced several even worse films.
  94. 3 Needles
    3 Needles is a great discussion tool for World AIDS Awareness Day that never achieves coherent shape as a three-paneled drama.
  95. 10 Items or Less
    Interplay between a jaunty Freeman as an unemployed movie star and the magnetic Paz Vega as a no-nonsense grocery store checker gives pic humanity and lift.
  96. Turistas
    The "Hostel" similarities may strike some as too close for comfort, not only in plot outline but also in general mix of xenophobia, sexploitation, sadism and gore.
  97. Two Weeks
    Picture veers unsteadily between melodrama and light comedy, with no confidence in either.
  98. Dreamland
    Jason Matzner's woozily romantic, gorgeously lensed directorial debut about a trailer park love triangle seems to unspool in a dream of its own, and despite some sketchy story elements, much of it is pretty intoxicating -- that is, until the unambiguous life lessons bring pic down to earth with an earnest splat.
  99. Four Eyed Monsters
    Fascinating if overly self-involved Slamdance entry is among the few U.S. pics that deliberately smudges the line between non-fiction and invention as it tells how Crumley and Buice meet online and develop a relationship.
  100. Highway Courtesans
    Earnest but prosaic.
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