Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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 2.4 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Anniversary
    Even as it thrusts itself into an electrifying, bloodied thriller of a final act, the film doesn’t land any of its social commentary: Its satire remains much too obtuse, its parable much too diffused.
  2. Nuremberg
    The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today. But Nuremberg, competent and watchable as it is, isn’t big on psychological tension or insight.
  3. Bad Apples
    Ultimately, this odd, wicked little amorality tale winds up siding with no one: The children are indeed the future, we’re left to conclude, but will they make it any better than the present?
  4. The Choral
    Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee, veddy English trappings — is that it largely takes his side.
  5. Fuze
    The action is entertaining enough in the moment, but not especially memorable.
  6. Sacrifice
    There’s a virtuosity to Gavras’ filmmaking, which yields some surprising laughs and thrills along the way.
  7. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.
  8. Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl
    At once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.
  9. People We Meet on Vacation
    What keeps things diverting, and sometimes even interesting, is the genuine but necessarily tentative chemistry between its stars, one staging an all-out charm offensive and the other projecting a flintier allure.
  10. Reminders of Him
    Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.
  11. H Is for Hawk
    It’s a rare privilege to spend so much time with Helen and her charge, and the footage of Mabel (filmed by Mark Payne-Gill in the wild and DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen in dramatic scenes) hunting pheasants and so forth mesmerizes. But there’s arguably too much of it, dominating the film’s slightly excessive run time.
  12. Stitch Head
    Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.
  13. Hokum
    Buoyed by Scott’s level-headed turn — he doesn’t transform into a scream king — Hokum is a proficient horror exploit, which hinges on atmosphere instead of gore, even if its many frightening threads feel disjointed, like rooms in distinctly different hotels.
  14. Solo Mio
    The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.
  15. Shelter
    None of these elements feel very fresh, least of all in Ward Parry’s formulaic screenplay. But they’re executed with sufficient slick professionalism to make for a passable if unmemorable diversion.
  16. Idiots
    Sure, the case can be made for this contrast between scatological humor and serious insight working as a mirror for how quickly a person’s reality can shift from joy to sorrow, but the overall effect is puzzling.
  17. Carousel
    In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.
  18. The Weight
    While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
  19. Paper Tiger
    The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.
  20. undertone
    Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.
  21. Giant
    It leaves a lot to the audience to figure out about Hamed beyond what’s publicly known, as it’s clearly more interested in Ingle. While far from being a knockout, the film lands enough solid punches to leave a mark.
  22. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.
  23. Buddy
    Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.
  24. Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wuthering Heights
    Dramatic episodes are vividly etched, without benefit of lightness. It’s heavy fare throughout.
  26. Rosebush Pruning
    Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.
  27. Pizza Movie
    Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.
  28. Backbeat
    This energetic, dramatically potent look at the band's Hamburg days has quite a bit going for it in the way of cultural and musical history, but lacks a crucial, heightened artistic quality and point of view that would have given it real distinction.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lady Sings the Blues
    The film serves as a very good screen debut vehicle for Diana Ross, supported strongly by excellent casting, handsome 1930s physical values, and a script which is far better in dialog than structure.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea
    The series’ fourth season is still being rolled out through the summer, making “Azure Sea” play like a long-weekend getaway as opposed to a true feature-length fable. The fans are sure to clock in for its extra nuggets of lore, but there are few reasons for a non-Slimehead to take the plunge.
  31. Gentle Monster
    Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.
  32. Butterfly Jam
    Balagov, however, remains the star attraction of “Butterfly Jam,” his fluent, adventurous command of sound and image keeping the film interesting even when not much is happening on screen, and tangibly atmospheric when the narrative pendulum swings too far in the other direction.
  33. The Players Club
    Ice Cube continues his evolution from hard-core rapper to multihyphenate filmmaker with "The Players Club," a messy but lively B-movie that recalls the more spirited comedic dramas of the '70s blaxploitation era.
  34. The Mirror Has Two Faces
    The narcissism on display is astonishing to behold, and veteran Barbra watchers will have a field day. Beyond that, pic does deliver a number of laughs, deep-dish luxury on the production side and an engagingly enthusiastic performance from Bridges, who represses his studly side behind a bow tie and a naive, then overly logical, then totally flustered demeanor.
  35. Valentine's Day
    As gooey and lacking in protein as a chocolate holiday bonbon, Valentine's Day plays like a feature-length commercial produced by the Friends of the Valentine Promotional Society.
  36. From Paris with Love
    To his credit, Travolta hams it up with the kind of laissez-faire irony that might have made the film a tongue-in-cheek pleasure, had his attitude extended to the filmmakers.
  37. Dear John
    Ultimately, the story feels as if it's killing time before throwing the next hurdle at the couple.
  38. The Book of Eli
    Some mordant comic touches would have been welcome throughout the picture, which has a somber tone that suffers a bit from lack of modulation and nuance.
  39. When in Rome
    Predictable but pleasant comedic fantasy.
  40. Darkness Falls
    It's an instantly disposable and shamelessly derivative piece of work -- call it petit guignol, and you won't be far off the mark -- but first-time feature helmer Jonathan Liebesman shows a savvy flair for atmospheric visuals.
  41. Extraordinary Measures
    Doesn't reach far beyond its smallscreen genotype as a disease-of-the-week telepic, despite the star power of Brendan Fraser as the desperate dad and Harrison Ford as an eccentric, ornery researcher.
  42. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    The film is offbeat, silly, disarming and loopy all at the same time, and viewers will decide to ride with that or just give up on it, according to mood and disposition.
  43. The Princess and the Frog
    This cheeky update of a classic fairy tale boasts almost as many talking points as merchandising opportunities.
  44. Old Dogs
    Too bad this shrilly tuned comedy doesn't demand more than clock-punching effort from everyone involved.
  45. AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    Provides enough cheap thrills and modest suspense to shake a few shekels from genre fans before really blasting off as homevid product.
  46. Public Enemies
    Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious.
  47. Watchmen
    The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.
  48. The Box
    Kelly's trademark mix of sci-fi, surrealism and suburbia occasionally entertains.
  49. Armored
    A so-so heist-gone-awry thriller, light on the thrills, Armored doesn't exactly take its audience captive.
  50. Love Happens
    Excise the love story, and there's a pretty good movie buried within Love Happens struggling to get out, mostly to little avail.
  51. Julie & Julia
    This middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it.
  52. Twilight
    A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.
  53. Whatever Works
    This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.
  54. Funny Games
    The film is shocking and upsetting, but never truly gets under the skin the way this kind of material often can. Whatever reservations are prompted by Haneke's approach, his direction is controlled and edgy. [20 May 1997, p.52]
    • Variety
  55. Thirst
    An overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.
  56. Burn After Reading
    Nothing about the project's execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.
  57. I Love You, Man
    A Judd Apatow clone that's one of the few recent R-rated raunch fests the ubiquitous auteur of larky crudeness actually had nothing to do with, I Love You, Man cranks out the kind of lowball humor that makes you gag on your own laughs.
  58. For My Father
    Israeli helmer Dror Sahavi's well-meaning but simplistic terrorist melodrama, gingerly counterbalancing religious fanatics on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, utilizes a lyrical "Romeo and Juliet"-type encounter between a reluctant suicide bomber and a Jewish escapee from Orthodox closed-mindedness to plead mutual tolerance.
  59. My Sister's Keeper
    Unsubtle, uneven and undeniably effective, this take-no-prisoners cancer weepie poses a fascinating moral quandary.
  60. The Informers
    The film is banal by obvious intent. The only question, as with other Ellis adaptations including "American Psycho," is whether auds will appreciate the aggressively shallow depiction of an aggressively shallow milieu, or mistake the pic's implicit critique for the crime itself.
  61. V for Vendetta
    Suffers from many of same problems as last two installments of producers Andy and Larry Wachowski's "Matrix" franchise: indigestible dialogue, pacing difficulties and too much pseudo-philosophical info.
  62. Pirate Radio
    Picture generally stays afloat on the strength of its characters but sometimes threatens to sink under its overlong running time and vignettish structure.
  63. Sunshine Cleaning
    Director Christine Jeffs, who previously helmed "Rain" and "Sylvia," tries to strike a balance between the yarn's dark currents and offbeat comedy, but the result is often uneasy, with the humor receding as things progress.
  64. Spider-Man 3
    A sense of strain envelops the proceedings this time around. One can feel the effort required to suit up one more time, come up with fresh variations on a winning formula and inject urgency into a format that basically needs to be repeated and, due to audience expectations, can't be toyed with or deepened very much.
  65. 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.
  66. Elektra
    Elektra proves no more than fitfully satisfying, a character-driven superhero yarn whose flurry of last-minute rewriting shows in a disjointed plot.
  67. The Chorus
    No stereotype is left unheralded and no heartstring left untugged in this freely adapted remake of Jean Dreville's mostly forgotten "La cage aux rossignols"
  68. Harry + Max
    Munch's usual stylishness and casual storytelling tenor lend persuasion to this curious drama about two brothers, both teen music idols, who demonstrate an incestuous attraction.
  69. Hitch
    Considerably heavier on romance than comedy, Hitch stitches together relatively few laughs but generates enough goodwill and energy.
  70. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen, Pooh's Heffalump Movie likely will play best with toddlers and pre-schoolers easily amused by bright colors, merry songs and lovable, huggable toon animals.
  71. Constantine
    This adaptation of the graphic novel "Hellblazer" blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle.
  72. Sexual Dependency
    Has more flash than finesse.
  73. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
    An ungainly hodgepodge of vaudeville-style comedy, turgid soap-operatics, and joyful epiphanies of gospel-flavored uplift.
  74. Face
    A well-meaning but schematic drama about three generations of Chinese women in America.
  75. Walk on Water
    Attempts the miraculous but achieves the adequate.
  76. Ice Princess
    The most sparkling aspect to Ice Princess is Juliana Cannarozzo, a real-life, nationally ranked skater.
  77. The Ring Two
    Half-intriguing, half-tedious.
  78. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    Lame and inoffensive.
  79. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Well-wrought individual scenes and sharply focused acting provide Rebecca Miller's third feature with a measure of gravity, but too much abrupt, even melodramatic behavior and undigested psychological matter leave nagging dissatisfactions.
  80. Nina's Tragedies
    An amiable, but cluttered dramedy.
  81. Sahara
    Saddled with more industry/celebrity baggage than a high-class safari voyage, Sahara is a rousing and only occasionally ridiculous adventure yarn.
  82. Kung Fu Hustle
    Devoid of genuine inspiration or involving character development.
  83. Smile
    Well-meaning but dramatically lopsided tearjerker bogs down in generic teen angst and domestic squabbling.
  84. Major Dundee (re-release)
    More evident than ever the film is inherently a deeply flawed work that was far from fully realized in both script and shooting.
  85. The Amityville Horror
    Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.
  86. State Property 2
    Slicker, funnier and more professional than its predecessor, State Property 2, with Damon Dash at its helm tones down the original.
  87. House of D
    David Duchovny scores considerably higher as director than as screenwriter.
  88. The Girl from Monday
    Unconvincingly attempts to update the futurist dystopian traditions of Orwell, Huxley and William Gibson.
  89. Madison
    Inspirational but uninspired sports movie.
  90. xXx: State of the Union
    You'd half expect the Xbox logo to pop up on the credit roll for XXX: State of the Union, since what's on view is closer to a videogame than a movie. While that will be music to the ears of young gamers, it's noise to anyone hoping for a coherent action movie.
  91. Writer of O
    Hodgepodge of archival, re-enactment and staged fictive elements.
  92. My Mother
    Director Christophe Honore's respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille's posthumous novel.
  93. Modigliani
    Can't overcome a didactic script.
  94. Lords of Dogtown
    It's a wipeout once the pic skids into melodrama and an overly schematic sense of how success tore the group apart.
  95. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    It's a fantastic-looking picture in search of a decent script.
  96. The Honeymooners
    Just funny enough to mollify purists and amuse the uninitiated.
  97. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    There's little chance of grabbing teens (or even many tweens) during summertime playdates. Still, small fry will be enchanted by this rambunctious action-adventure.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wild Side
    Sex frequently disguises itself as friendship and love in Wild Side, a morbid and self-important homosexual "Jules & Jim" for the new millennium.
  99. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    Despite its merits, is neither an art movie nor an out-and-out, propulsive actioner like "Shiri."
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