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. Right at Your Door
    Chris Gorak grabs the viewer by the throat in the first few minutes, but quickly fritters away involvement by concentrating almost exclusively on two characters who are both annoying and boring.
  2. War
    Quickly devolves into a standard-issue crime drama laced with routine martial artistry.
  3. The Invasion
    A slick but forgettable, characterless thriller.
  4. Balls of Fury
    Relentlessly silly in spoofing martial-arts movie conventions, Balls of Fury has roughly enough laughs for a first-class trailer but wheezes, gasps and finally goes flat through much of its 90 minutes.
  5. Hatchet
    Joel David Moore leads a cast full of token minorities and bickering bimbos, whom writer-helmer Adam Green dispatches with knowing glee and an obvious love for genre conventions that almost overcomes the derivative scripting.
  6. Romance & Cigarettes
    Chockfull of ideas and with an irreverence that irresistibly recalls late '60s American cinema, thesp John Turturro's third outing in the helmer's chair, Romance & Cigarettes, alternately shines and sputters.
  7. Dragon Wars: D-War
    A feast of A-grade f/x married to a Z-grade, irony-free script.
  8. In the Valley of Elah
    Too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations.
  9. Ira & Abby
    Starts off deliriously, is derailed into reality, and finally settles into something in between.
  10. Eye of the Dolphin
    There's a pleasantly dreamy quality to much of Eye of the Dolphin, and that goes a long way toward enabling audiences to ignore the formulaic plot and enjoy the laid-back charms of this innocuous indie.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sydney White
    Result should satisfy Bynes fans looking for a pleasant, innocuous follow-up to her last vehicle.
  12. The Man of My Life
    A drama that steadily succumbs to self-conscious artiness, drunk on its own sense of contrived poetry and cloudy existential reflection.
  13. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Never completely takes off, yet somewhat overestimates the surrounding zaniness. Still, any opportunity to witness the improvisatory skills of Sarah Silverman, Bonnie Hunt and Amy Sedaris should not be missed.
  14. Lust, Caution
    Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½--hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns.
  15. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Slick, good-looking, cluttered pic won't please fans of novelist Susan Cooper's original "The Dark Is Rising" sequence. But then, they are mostly grown-ups by now, and this very Hollywood-style adaptation of a very English book is aimed squarely at tweens.
  16. 30 Days of Night
    Excels at bloodthirsty action, though dialogue and human-interest aspects are a tad anemic. Result is a mixed bag but has a catchy premise and quite enough splatter to satisfy gorehounds.
  17. Rendition
    By underplaying the melodrama in the presumed hope of seeming subtle when Kelley Sane’s script is so baldly melodramatic, the “Tsotsi” helmer drains the life out of an obviously explosive subject.
  18. Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
    There's something clumsily charming about Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour.
  19. Bella
    Mexican-born helmer Alejandro Monteverde's debut will be remembered as a curious case of a mediocre film that wows crowds.
  20. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    Thanked and vilified from coast to coast, Carter remains steadfast in his belief that Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories are unjust and counterproductive.
  21. The Final Season
    There's not quite as much corn in The Final Season as there is in the Iowa farm fields that run through it, but it's close.
  22. Sleuth
    The results will be received with a large, loud yawn by all but the most loyal fans of Pinter and hard-working co-stars Michael Caine and Jude Law.
  23. Bee Movie
    Amiable but no more, Bee Movie puts a hiveful of potent talent at the service of a zig-zigging, back-of-an-envelope story that's short on surprise and originality.
  24. Saw IV
    Even by the standards of the recent "Saws," which have enjoyed considerably larger budgets than the first pic, the new edition is more frenetically cut (by editors Kevin Greutert and Brett Sullivan), more dimly lit (by lenser David A. Armstrong), sweatier in terms of perfs by the grimly serious cast, more madly packed with micro-incidents and action, and more brazen in requiring suspension of disbelief.
  25. Slipstream
    Apparently needing to release some private thoughts, musings and images to the world, Anthony Hopkins takes a leap into stunning self-indulgence with his directorial debut, Slipstream.
  26. I'm Not There.
    Stylistically audacious in the way it employs six different actors and assorted visual styles to depict various aspects of the troubadour's life and career, the film nevertheless lacks a narrative and a center, much like the "ghost" at its core.
  27. The Mist
    Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile"), Frank Darabont's screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.
  28. 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.
  29. Teeth
    A game, disarming lead performance from Jess Weixler, who won a jury acting prize at Sundance, goes some way toward making palatable this mish-mash, whose provocative nature could carve out a certain commercial niche.
  30. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Despite a magnificent performance by Javier Bardem, the film not only falls short of the novel's magic, but fails to generate much of its own.
  31. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Sprinkles in charming moments but ultimately doesn't evoke enough wonderment to overcome its tongue-twisting title and completely win over adults along with kids.
  32. Redacted
    Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing "fictional documentary" -- inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad -- has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form.
  33. The Golden Compass
    Impressively rendered but oddly uninviting adventure.
  34. Billy the Kid
    One of the more irresponsible eruptions in the current rash of populist nonfiction cinema.
  35. Maurice Richard
    Boasts dazzling hockey action, but its off-ice piousness makes for tough sledding for non-Canucks.
  36. Look
    Conceit often stretches -- and breaks -- the limits of what the tales can handle, though the implication of viewers as voyeurs gives pic a subversive edge.
  37. Cassandra's Dream
    Like a tragic overture played at the wrong tempo and slightly off-key, Woody Allen's London-set Cassandra's Dream sends out more mixed signals than an inebriated telegraphist.
  38. Steep
    Like its sister films in the surfing-movie genre, the extreme-skiing movie Steep is less a documentary than a sales pitch -- not for a product or a place, but for a sport, one its practitioners feel requires pugnacious self-promotion.
  39. Cloverfield
    Despite its indie-flavored shooting style, first-rate visual effects, reasonable intensity factor, nihilistic attitude and post-9/11 anxiety overlay, this punchy sci-fier is, in the end, not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it.
  40. The Eye
    This slick effort is effectively creepsome until it bogs down somewhat in plot explication.
  41. 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.
  42. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Ungainly titled, overlong, intermittently funny.
  43. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    An in-your-face double helping of fat jokes, crude slapstick, wacky Southern-black stereotypes and occasionally inspired improv.
  44. 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.
  45. London to Brighton
    Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.
  46. 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.
  47. Penelope
    The whimsical ugly-duckling fable becomes more uneven as it proceeds, straining too hard to manufacture its quirky charms.
  48. College Road Trip
    This overplayed, underachieving laffer feels thoroughly manufactured to Disney specifications.
  49. Blind Mountain
    Low on drama and originality, and high on deja vu, sophomore outing by writer-director Li Yang ("Blind Shaft," 2003).
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. Stop-Loss
    A wildly uneven drama, by turns sincere and synthetic.
  54. 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.
  55. Leatherheads
    Arch and funny in equal measure, this looks like a theatrical non-starter that Clooney fans and football devotees might be tempted to check out down the line on DVD or on the tube.
  56. My Blueberry Nights
    As much a trifle as its title suggests, My Blueberry Nights sees Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar Wai applying his characteristic visual and thematic doodles to a wispy story of lovelorn Yanks.
  57. Dark Matter
    Never fully succeeds in burrowing under its protagonist's skin, despite conspicuous effort.
  58. The Forbidden Kingdom
    On its own terms, it's a handsome albeit unexceptional juvenile adventure shot on some magnificent Chinese locations.
  59. Kiss the Bride
    Formulaic gay comedy delivers its share of grins on the way to an (arguably) unexpected ending.
  60. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    Morgan Spurlock, of the "Super Size Me" phenom, serves up a rehash of others' 9/11 reportage, bin Laden biography, Islamic theology and suicide-bomber psychology, in a tone so aghast you'd assume he knew nothing about the War on Terror -- which should make pic very appealing for those who know nothing about the War on Terror.
  61. Zombie Strippers!
    The kind of entertainment perhaps better suited to drinking games than full viewer attention.
  62. Bra Boys
    Opening with a bright history lesson about poor suburb Maroubra and its place in Sydney beach culture, the docu then fails to adequately answer any charges as members and sympathetic locals line up to praise the outfit for rescuing troubled youth.
  63. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    While roving interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals.
  64. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Another superficial film about music from Scott Hicks ("Shine"), picture runs a distant second to the superior new film on John Adams and Peter Sellars, "Wonders Are Many," which really captures how a composer works.
  65. Standard Operating Procedure
    Adds relatively little insight to the public understanding of wayward military behavior more incisively analyzed in "Taxi to the Dark Side."
  66. Fugitive Pieces
    The cool hand of Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa proves a disappointing match for Fugitive Pieces, a generally dull and unmemorable adaptation of Anne Michaels' extraordinary prose-poetry novel.
  67. The Babysitters
    It ultimately fails to deliver on the audacity of its premise. Neither truly original nor a guilty-pleasure genre spin, the picture lacks a hook for general audiences who may find the subject matter distasteful as presented.
  68. The Fall
    This convoluted, arbitrary, overlong whimsy will strike most grown-ups as childish, and is far too violent and pretentious for kids.
  69. Noise
    Amusing but marginal diatribe against aural assault in Manhattan.
  70. The Children of Huang Shi
    Giving Jonathan Rhys Meyers the kind of manly yet paternal role Spencer Tracy once mastered, this carefully wrought international production relates the basic story of reporter George Hogg without any vibrancy, emotion or style.
  71. Savage Grace
    Scripter Howard A. Rodman's treatment of an enthralling book is more a series of vignettes rather than a fully connected work, and helmer Tom Kalin seems unable to decide how much Sirkian melodrama to introduce into the heady mix. Gone are the reasons to be fascinated with these people, merely replaced with maddeningly over-arch dialogue and struggles with characterization.
  72. A Jihad for Love
    Predicament makes the picture kin to 2001's "Trembling Before G-d," about gay Orthodox Jews. Both docs share the same fascination and limitation.
  73. Before the Rains
    Tale of an idealistic local caught in the crossfire of an illicit affair is too pat and pretty to connect with upscale audiences.
  74. Sex and the City
    Best in its small moments, the movie should find receptive gal pals congregating for the mother of all viewing parties.
  75. Kung Fu Panda
    A nice looking but heavily formulaic DreamWorks animation entry.
  76. The Happening
    In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.
  77. Get Smart
    Helmer Peter Segal's formulaic takeoff is neither fish nor fowl, not quite faithful to the show, but not quite bringing it into the 21st century either.
  78. The Midnight Meat Train
    Film isn't scary, per se, but it's mostly effective nonetheless, with Cooper capably steering his character from charming young artist to nervous wreck, evoking Ralph Fiennes' more unhinged turns along the way.
  79. Full Battle Rattle
    A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
  80. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    The warming glow of nostalgia only goes so far, with one's level of forgiveness likely dictated by where they reside along the "X-Files" fan continuum.
  81. Step Brothers
    The film is funny at times but lapses into the reflexive vulgarity that seems to be the default mechanism of the Apatow machinery.
  82. Holding Trevor
    Sometimes succeeds, but mostly comes off as a vanity project for writer-star Brent Gorski.
  83. Kabluey
    Kabluey is short on the cutes and ca-ca jokes. But it's also short on substance, despite a watchable supporting cast and an amiable overall tenor.
  84. August
    This middling drama has no glaring faults, but simply lacks the intended urgency.
  85. Garden Party
    Isn't racy enough to warrant the word of mouth necessary to make pic a sensation with its generation, the way the unrelated disaffected-twentysomething hit "Garden State" was.
  86. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    This isn't the Star Wars we've always known and at least sometimes loved.
  87. The Longshots
    While The Longshots is by no means an unpleasant experience, it feels like a project carried out by people who began with the best of intentions but weren't quite able to sustain their initial enthusiasm.
  88. Hamlet 2
    Amusing but unevenly inspired tale of a deluded high school drama teacher's attempt to stage a career-saving extravaganza has some laughs, to be sure.
  89. W.
    For a film that could have been either a scorching satire or an outright tragedy, W. is, if anything, overly conventional, especially stylistically.
  90. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    It’s a wingless exercise, despite a rather heartening attitude toward space travel that will introduce young auds to the glory that was NASA in the '60s.
  91. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
    Indie effort evidences more energy than wit, and spends too much time on set-up before a slam-bang pay-off.
  92. Henry Poole Is Here
    Picture's tendency to lecture on the power of faith and religion and on the demerits of science seems to assume an almost childlike audience that needs to be spoon-fed Pablum.
  93. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Basic joke wears off after five minutes, and many bystanders will start to head out of town. But genre/Asian buffs prepared to ride shotgun for two hours will be rewarded with some classy action sequences and densely accoutred widescreen lensing.
  94. Young People Fucking
    Uneven but not unpleasant.
  95. Bangkok Dangerous
    Without the technical nastiness and fatal realism that made the initial film so compelling, the remake feels like a hollow excuse to present the myriad ways in which a bullet can pierce a cranium, rather than an edgy portrait of Third World violence.
  96. Towelhead
    Towelhead is transgressive without being effectively subversive, gutsy to no particular end. It simply lacks style, which counts for so much in this sort of thing.
  97. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Filmmakers underline the immediate relevance of their conclusion: In matters of war and peace, who we elect president is crucial.
  98. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    A quiet work with Ozu-like structure and concerns, but remains more an intellectual exercise than one from the heart.
  99. Appaloosa
    Harris' first directorial outing since his impressive and entirely different "Pollock" biopic bears echoes of many genre predecessors, especially Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" -- but echoes they remain.
  100. Fireproof
    Cameron is genuinely compelling as Caleb.
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