Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    One of the world's great cities comes vibrantly alive through its music and musical denizens in Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.
  2. Bombón: El Perro
    A natural crowd-pleaser.
  3. The Heart of the Game
    Compelling but traditional feature.
  4. Autumn
    Francophile film buffs and obsessive deconstructionists might be amused, but less indulgent auds will find derivative pic artificial and mannered.
  5. Slow Jam King
    Rambling road-trip comedy Slow Jam King offers agreeable shenanigans as three mismatched characters find themselves stuck together on a long drive from New York City to Nashville.
  6. Psychopathia Sexualis
    Psychopathia Sexualis exists in the gray area between ponderous stylization and campy affectation.
  7. The Omen
    Will a movie that scared the bejezus out of moviegoers 30 years ago pack the necessary wallop and carnage to satisfy fans of blood-soaked modern horror? The answer is a qualified yes.
  8. The Break-Up
    Sporadic rays of sunshine emanate from the broad and gifted supporting cast, but the core story is almost relentlessly unpleasant, like sitting through a dinner party where the host couple does nothing but bicker.
  9. District B13
    Fast, dumb fun.
  10. The War Tapes
    The picture's deepest fascination lies in the soldiers' complicated reactions to the war, perceived simultaneously as funny, horrific, stirring and traumatic.
  11. The Conrad Boys
    Justin Lo is -- in descending order of competence -- producer, director, editor, writer and star of debut feature The Conrad Boys. He should've hired a better actor for the lead, but then this low-budget indie would lack its vanity project raison d'etre.
  12. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
    Thoughtful, incisive, controversial.
  13. Peaceful Warrior
    Mere recitation of homilies for better living -- which is what Nick Nolte's gas station guru imparts to a struggling young gymnast -- and a half-baked account of the athlete's comeback are no substitutes for a complete movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    La tropical
    Offers a rarely seen view of the barrio in Havana and demonstrates the importance of dance and music in dealing with pervasive racism and crippling poverty.
  15. Coastlines
    A melodramatic step backward for writer-director Victor Nunez after his last two pictures, the first-rate "Ruby in Paradise" and "Ulee's Gold."
  16. X-Men: The Last Stand
    The result, though it delivers only in fits and starts, is still sharper and more inventive than most comicbook-adapted fare, and eventually gets the job done as far as action buffs are concerned.
  17. Cavite
    For a guerrilla-style, no-budget Yank indie to even tackle issues of jihad terror and naive Western thinking is noteworthy in itself, but Gamazon and Dela Llana inflame the issues with a gutsy, athletic filmmaking package that shows what can be done with a minimum of tools.
  18. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    The title alone should alert auds that The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress is a hatchet job on the controversial politico known as "The Hammer."
  19. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    Director Hrvoje Hribar gives a lively professional look to this good-humored film.
  20. An Inconvenient Truth
    A straightforward record of the lecture Gore has toured for years, juiced by elaborate graphics. An excellent educational tool, picture may prove an awkward fit for theatrical distribution.
  21. La Moustache
    Viewers who like their conclusions tidy may rebel, but those who relish outstanding performances in the service of an intriguing idea will be entertained.
  22. Stagedoor
    By turns comical and compassionate.
  23. The Da Vinci Code
    Director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn't exactly dull but comes as close to it as one could imagine with such provocative material.
  24. Over the Hedge
    Despite a sprinkling of laughs and eye-catching moments, this adaptation of a popular comicstrip reps a middling effort from the house that "Shrek" built, a rather narrowly conceived tale that makes only modest hay from the overworked conflict between wildlife and encroaching humans.
  25. See No Evil
    Throats are ripped, heads are crushed and limbs are severed with brutal efficiency throughout See No Evil, but that's not nearly enough to dispel the sense of deja vu that pervades this generic slasher thriller.
  26. The King
    The story of a veritable devil who comes to test and destroy a family of faith, The King is a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.
  27. Lemming
    Spooky, intellectually titillating and darkly funny picture is definitely the kind of film where the less you know going in, the better.
  28. Mouth to Mouth
    Emerges an uneven, occasionally vivid, ultimately unsatisfactory treatment of themes that should've packed more punch.
  29. Twelve and Holding
    Deals in sometimes queasy areas of underage sexuality and emotional extremes; again, deftness and confidence ultimately put across a screenplay (this time by Anthony S. Cipriano) overloaded with sensational incident.
  30. Poseidon
    Thanks to its simple construction, Wolfgang Petersen's large-scale liner moves reasonably well, though anyone with the faintest memory of its 1972 predecessor will wonder where most of the plot went.
  31. Just My Luck
    Helmer Donald Petrie seems at times to be making the modern-day equivalent of a Doris Day comedy, setting the pic in a lacquered fantasy New York, piling on cutesy-coy dialogue and mining a fluffy premise for all manner of far-fetched cleverness.
  32. Goal! The Dream Begins
    A slickly mounted slice of can-do nonsense.
  33. Dead Man's Shoes
    Film plays as a quirky Brit riff on everything from U.S. slasher pics to revenge oaters but without Meadows' usual psychological complexity.
  34. Giuliani Time
    Chock-a-block with incisive commentaries both pro and con, pic's sole drawback is its quick finish on that fateful September day without updating Rudy's subsequent rise and fall.
  35. Keeping Up with the Steins
    A sure-fire audience-pleaser, Scott (son of Garry) Marshall's winning comedy bow could have been titled "My Big Fat Jewish Bar Mitzvah."
  36. Saving Shiloh
    May be naive and narratively simple, but it's prime fare for the always underserved family audience.
  37. Wah-Wah
    Flavorsome performances by a seasoned cast, held in check by Grant's traditional but well-crafted, always cinematic direction.
  38. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Lucid and engaging, Sketches of Frank Gehry provides the enormously gratifying opportunity to spend an hour-and-a-half with an artistic giant.
  39. Light from the East
    Generates genuine suspense as it follows a group of American actors in the former Soviet Union during a fateful period of the Perestroika era.
  40. Russian Dolls
    Viewers who thought the protags were superficial and annoying first time around will find little to change their minds here, but original pictures fans will probably embrace the now-scattered group's marginally more mature dilemmas centered on work and romance.
  41. Mission: Impossible III
    For all its far-fetched formulations, this new entry maintains more of a dramatic throughline and has the bonus of a villain played with unsparing meanness by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
  42. Art School Confidential
    Despite a soulful leading performance from Max Minghella, pic feels insubstantial, echoing without equaling both the coolly ironic edge and heart of "Ghost World" and the incisive art-world outsider portrait of the director's docu feature, "Crumb."
  43. An American Haunting
    A well-made, good-looking movie it is, but between the non-stop tumult and the sense of deliberateness about its period authenticity, An American Haunting produces a lot of screaming, crying and cruelty, but not much drama.
  44. Hoot
    Squeaky-clean, family-friendly opus.
  45. Down in the Valley
    Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.
  46. The Proposition
    Hillcoat and Cave have here found their most fertile ground yet for allegory-rich examinations of life and death in remote, pressure-cooker environments.
  47. One Last Thing...
    Plays closer to an after-school special (with HBO-standard dialogue) than a satisfying feature film.
  48. The Mistress of Spices
    Beautiful but lifeless, poetic but unelevated, The Mistress of Spices reps a brave but flawed attempt at that most unforgiving of contemporary genres, magical realism.
  49. How I Killed a Saint
    Though weak in the drama department, the story of a brother and sister who love each other but have different political ideas and personal agendas effectively captures the tension of the time.
  50. United 93
    The result is a tense, documentary-style drama that methodically builds a sense of dread despite the preordained outcome.
  51. Stick It
    Bridges gives the movie its only genuine pulse as a gym coach known for his hard and manipulative ways.
  52. Akeelah and the Bee
    This earnest weepie plays like "The Karate Kid" with a pro-literacy agenda, pushing all the right emotional buttons yet hitting quite a few wrong ones in the process.
  53. RV
    RV works up an ingratiating sweetness that partially compensates for its blunt predictability and meager laughs.
  54. Guys and Balls
    A by-the-numbers ensemble dramedy that hits every underdog and gay-fish-out-of-water cliche on the nose.
  55. The Lost City
    A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.
  56. Water
    Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.
  57. The Whore's Son
    Cool, stylized lensing by onetime Fassbinder d.p. Jurgen Jurges lifts The Whore's Son above simple meller status, but uneven character development mars this otherwise commendable feature debut by Michael Sturminger.
  58. Lady Vengeance
    A wildly inventive, highly cinematic director's showcase that looks likely, at least in the West, to enthuse fans of Asian -- especially Korean -- genre movies more than general auds.
  59. Killer Diller
    Premise is formulaic and execution is predictable, but Brock maintains a lively pace while eliciting first-rate work from thesps.
  60. Havana Suite
    The surprisingly watchable delight strikes universal chords.
  61. Police Beat
    Distinctive, physically ravishing indie is a natural for fests, but it's questionable whether this sometimes involving, sometimes obscure pic will have appeal beyond the specialty market.
  62. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Picture's dour take on the dehumanizing process of medical treatment is leavened by black humor and dialogue that always rings true.
  63. Three Times
    Less accessible than recent "Cafe Lumiere," picture will appeal strongly to fans.
  64. American Dreamz
    Combining a gallery of targets including President Bush, "American Idol," the Iraq War and the overarching theme of a nation of citizens held in the thrall of phony dreams, pic and its ambitions are undermined by insistent cartoonishness and comic ineptitude.
  65. The Sentinel
    A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia, The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.
  66. Silent Hill
    In the end, Silent Hill degenerates into an overblown replay of all those "Twilight Zone" and Stephen King stories in which outsiders stumble upon a time-warped location from which there's no escape.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Somersault
    Sexual compulsion accelerates adolescent angst in the arty Down Under drama, but while Shortland shows a notable eye for detail, her distracted approach to narrative and an attitude to her characters that's cold as the movie's snowfields make pic most likely to be embraced by serious-minded fest auds.
  68. Mongolian Ping Pong
    A charming but overextended yarn about some prairie tykes who mistake a table-tennis ball for a glowing pearl from the gods.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Repulsion (re-release)
    Repulsion is a classy, truly horrific psychological drama in which Polish director Roman Polanski draws out a remarkable performance from young French thesp, Catherine Deneuve. (Review of Original Release)
  70. The Celestine Prophecy
    Celestine Prophecy demands all skepticism be left in the lobby. That's a leap few may be willing to take -- few beyond those millions who bought the book, that is.
  71. In Her Line of Fire
    With Mariel Hemingway a credible Sapphic Stallone, this passable action trash should satisfy as fun original programming for gay-targeted Here! cable net.
  72. Standing Still
    Surfing the crowd in Altman-lite style, pic skims the surface entertainingly but goes limp in its stabs at seriousness, especially in the final scenes, which all but drown in emotional confrontations and hasty happy endings.
  73. Stolen
    A documentay that should appeal not just to the legion of Vermeer fans, but to lovers of good mystery.
  74. Scary Movie 4
    Scary Movie 4 finds horror parody overshadowed by ho-hum groin blows, C-list celebrity cameos, slapstick child abuse, soon-to-be-forgotten hip-hop personalities, plus scatalogical and gay jokes; real laughs are few.
  75. The Wild
    Uninspired character animation and obnoxious banter aside, The Wild is ultimately done in by the persistent stench of been-there-seen-that.
  76. Kinky Boots
    A London drag queen and a bunch of Midlands working stiffs find common ground and, uh, mutual respect in Kinky Boots, a slick, cross-tracks Britcom whose stride is hampered by its desire not to offend.
  77. Hard Candy
    A spectacular performance by teenage thesp Ellen Page elevates this disturbing slice of designer shocksploitation into a film that's impossible to dismiss on principle.
  78. The Notorious Bettie Page
    A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, picture feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject.
  79. Look Both Ways
    An imaginative, humorous and truthful contemplation of human reaction to the inexplicable.
  80. Abominable
    Abominable goes completely over the top into an Ed Wood-meets-"Rear Window" subspecies of giddy, gory amateurish abandon.
  81. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    The film is the portrait of a kind and giving man open to all positive ideas that come his way.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mountain Patrol
    Exquisite to behold and with a stimulating storyline that mixes guns with ecological consciousness, picture is a considerable change of pace for director Lu Chuan.
  83. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    Soapy melodrama and a small-screen cast undermine the first-time director's efforts.
  84. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Superbly crafted documentary is strong enough to make believers out of non-metalheads, and inside enough to get the devil's-horns salute from the most diehard followers.
  85. Nathalie...
    An intellectual-cum-sexual teaser whose twist is apparent far too early on.
  86. The Sisters
    Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.
  87. Preaching to the Choir
    While the film looks good, sense of place is never very convincing. Over time, however, director Charles Randolph Wright and screenwriters Kevin Heffernan and Peter E. Lengyel do manage to create well-defined characters, whose flaws are as important as their gifts.
  88. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    The deliberately jittery hand-held lensing enhances the mockery in this mockumentary.
  89. Sisters in Law
    Documentary has the fascination of watching an African "Judge Judy" with a more important case load. It also offers the satisfaction of seeing the law being used to change patterns of social injustice.
  90. Lucky Number Slevin
    Thoroughly -- and sometimes justifiably -- infatuated with its own cleverness, this mistaken-identity thriller delights in narrative complication and Tarantino-esque self-awareness.
  91. The Benchwarmers
    Under Dennis Dugan's rote direction, Schneider winds up playing straight man to Spade, who once again relies on his snarky coward shtick, and Heder, who comes across like someone doing a bad imitation of ... well, Heder himself in "Napoleon Dynamite."
  92. Phat Girlz
    Mo'Nique, a vet standup and sitcom performer whose sassy, brassy shtick isn't nearly enough to support material this insubstantial.
  93. Take the Lead
    Well-intentioned, feel-good urban tale.
  94. Friends with Money
    Stealing the show is Jane, whose rage-fueled rants and scarcely concealed mutterings are loaded with sarcastic bon mots that are delivered to the hilt by McDormand.
  95. Simon
    Eddy Terstall's mild brand of humor and predictable throat-catching weepiness works strictly along boob-tube illness-of-the-week lines, with plentiful shots of topless women.
  96. On a Clear Day
    By turns whimsically humorous and intelligently sentimental, but also infused with a pungent air of working-class realism.
  97. When Do We Eat?
    Success depends on the degree to which Jewish auds connect with the broadly drawn stereotypes; gentiles and others are sure to pass over this culturally specific comedy altogether.
  98. 4
    Its bawdy comedy, bravura sound design and uncanny atmosphere will turn on auds with a taste for deeply oddball fare and baffle others.
  99. Free Zone
    Amos Gitai's most satisfying pic since war drama "Kippur." Schematic set-up is given a human face by fine performances and a physical journey that's often more interesting than the characters' emotional ones, which are weakened by the Israeli auteur's tendency toward convenient doctrinaire-ism and chunks of expository dialogue.
  100. One Last Ride
    Though it lacks the sheer, depraved intensity of similarly themed pics like "The Gambler," Ride shares much of the sunlit sadness of "Save the Tiger," also populated by desperate, middle-aged men plying their trade in Los Angeles' garment district.
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