Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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  1. Moonlight Mile
    A movie at war with itself -- tuned into its characters' vicissitudes one moment, stumbling with awkward stabs at goofiness the next.
  2. Can't Hardly Wait
    A mediocre attempt to recapture the exuberance and candid portraiture of such high school movie classics as "American Graffiti," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Dazed and Confused."
  3. Pitch Black
    Mildly scary but not particularly engaging on any other level.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Green Butchers
    Will be either a turn-on or turn-off, depending on one's sense of humor.
  5. Bring It On
    Succeeds in displaying the physical drive and demands of cheerleading.
  6. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Ultimately implodes, letting down the 'hood, hip-hoppers and Jamie Kennedy fans looking forward to his first major starring role.
  7. Ju-on: The Grudge
    A haunted-house one-trick pony.
  8. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Pic's not-so-hidden agenda is to promote the fusion of science and New Age religion, making it a close cousin to ventures as Bernt and Fritjof Capra's "Mindwalk."
  9. Big Fish
    The imaginatively illustrated but precariously precious film offers up a string of minor pleasures but never becomes more than moderately amusing or involving.
  10. NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    Surprisingly, the large format and three-dimensional technology do little to heighten the excitement of the races. In the end, docu is less a film with real behind-the-scenes insight and more a serviceable, if routine, promo package for the (very) bigscreen.
  11. A Walk to Remember
    A glossy teen-weepie romance that often plays like an inspirational indie skewed toward Christian niche market.
  12. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    Penn's magnetism and hesitant line delivery create what interest there is, although the whole picture suffers from a central figure who can never get it together on any level.
  13. The Forgotten
    A spare, streamlined thriller for the conspiracy-minded, Area 51 crowd, The Forgotten perhaps wisely leaves more questions than it answers and for the most part manages to maintain its suspense.
  14. Ella Enchanted
    The glue that holds the sweet teen-fantasy together is star Anne Hathaway, who continues to evolve into a luminous young lead.
  15. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Despite some imaginative packaging too often proves a drag in more than the sartorial sense. Taking Mitchell's sketchy book far too seriously, the movie grows leaden between its terrific songs.
  16. Alexander
    At best an honorable failure, an intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement.
  17. Anastasia
    Lacks the special creative spark needed to lift it to an uncommon imaginative level.
  18. The Cat in the Hat
    Attractively designed, energetically performed and, above all, blessedly concise, this adaptation of one of the most popular American kids' books of all time walks the safe side of surrealism with its fur-flying shenanigans. The younger the viewers, the better reactions are bound to be.
  19. Flight of the Phoenix
    Shows both how far Hollywood's tech departments have advanced in 40 years and how shallow the pool of solid action thesps has become.
  20. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    Consistently silly and intermittently laugh-out-loud funny spoof.
  21. The Life of David Gale
    Punches the expected buttons without being entirely convincing.
  22. National Treasure
    Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.
  23. The Polar Express
    This visually impressive yet emotional frigid fable could perhaps more accurately be tagged "The Bipolar Express."
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raise Your Voice
    Duff makes an engaging heroine, but her immaculately coifed blonde locks and undiminished lip gloss remind viewers just how much of a star vehicle this actually is.
  25. Remember the Titans
    Earnest and well-intentioned.
  26. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    Kang remains a superb technician, but somewhere the movie forgot to pack any genuine emotion along with its ordnance and K rations.
  27. Benji: Off the Leash!
    A mildly pleasant, aggressively retro kidpic that should please undemanding moppets without unduly boring their parents.
  28. Wicker Park
    All of this was more enjoyable when Bellucci, Cassel and Bohringer were the stars. Hartnett is overly methodical here as Matthew, and Kruger, as in "Troy," is beautiful but lacking in dramatic intensity.
  29. Wimbledon
    A fanciful tennis-themed romance that compounds the old dilemma of "Will he get the girl?" with "Will he get the trophy?" But the answers are too predictable and laughs too scattered for this middling Universal release to generate much in the way of humor or suspense.
  30. Without a Paddle
    An unstable -- if mostly painless -- mix of low comedy, stabs at higher silliness, and schmaltz.
  31. I, Robot
    A humans vs. robots saga that feels machine-made, I, Robot looks to have been assembled from the spare parts of dozens of previous sci-fi pictures.
  32. Peter Pan
    Handsome, respectable and well cast, elaborate production lacks the excitement and magic that would elevate the film to beloved status, and sheer abundance of CGI work weighs on it too heavily.
  33. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    The effect is often soporific.
  34. Meet the Fockers
    Te laughs "Fockers" generates are the type you feel embarrassed about almost immediately afterward.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    High School High
    Like a student who studies hard but just doesn't have the smarts, this joyless send-up of the "Dangerous Minds," "Stand and Deliver," idealistic-teacher-in-a-ghetto-school genre plods along earnestly with barely passing grades.
  36. Beautiful Girls
    A great title in search of a movie to live up to it, this startlingly uneventful compendium of thick-headed boy-talk and female tolerance squanders a fine cast on incredibly ordinary characters and situations.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    These guileless airheads with the outrageous vocabulary are obviously a beloved creation, and filmmakers might have gotten more mileage if they'd rooted their adventure a bit more in reality.
  38. Dante's Peak
    Physicality of the second half, then, will keep the audience going, but it is not quite sufficient to camouflage the elemental silliness of storyline.
  39. Event Horizon
    Despite game efforts from a first-rate cast and acres of impressive production values, Event Horizon remains a muddled and curiously uninvolving sci-fi horror show.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Excess Baggage
    Director Marco Brambilla does a serviceable job, without adding much distinction to the piece, and the script --- credited to Max D. Adams, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais --- seems patched together, consisting of a series of scenes lacking a strong narrative hook.
  41. A Life Less Ordinary
    Part kooky romance, part screwball comedy, part quirky fantasy and part Roadrunner cartoon, this is a movie that has everything except an involving storyline and characters.
  42. Mad City
    In actuality, however, what unfolds onscreen is a simplistic and obvious expose about the manipulative power of the news media that by now is so familiar that its cynical perspective is not likely to upset or provoke anyone.
  43. Prefontaine
    This first dramatic feature by "Hoop Dreams" director Steve James has one foot still squarely planted in the docu aesthetic and notably lacks any psychological interest or emotional depth.
  44. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    Lacking the manipulative structure of "Speed," which shrewdly interspersed rousing set pieces throughout the story, Speed 2 is vastly uneven, trying in its second hour to recoup energy and compensate the audience for all the exposition of the initial reels.
  45. The Substance of Fire
    But what presumably was powerful in Jon Robin Baitz's play has been diluted in opening it up for the screen.
  46. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
    An overinflated mishmash that compels the audience to sift through a lot of rubble for the few requisite thrills, this second "Die Hard" sequel leaves a lot of creative wreckage in its wake.
  47. Jumanji
    The screenplay, however, denies the film a solid foundation. Jumanji is diverting in a splashy , eye-catching manner, but is about as substantive and durable as filigree.
  48. Eraser
    Compared with high-powered action specialists like James Cameron, director Charles Russell seems content to accomplish just one thing per shot, getting the essentials on the screen but creating no special dynamic or look.
  49. Dangerous Minds
    Pfeiffer tackles the part with obvious dedication, but she's thwarted from the get-go by the heavily proscribed nature of the role as written.
  50. Dead Man
    Like his previous efforts, Jarmusch's sidelong take on Western conventions relies upon quirky tone, hipsterish performances and a highly refined visual style to put it over.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Guarding Tess
    Comedy, pathos and thrills alternately collide, creating problems in both pacing and developing a consistent tone.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wayne's World
    Director Penelope Spheeris, with her first major studio assignment (and eight-figure budget), delivers a colorful but uneventful picture.
  53. Romeo + Juliet
    Although arresting in spots, it falls far short of bringing out the full values of the play, and doesn't approach the emotional resonance of Franco Zeffirelli's immensely popular 1968 screen version.
  54. Clockers
    A study of the urban dope-dealing culture and its toll on everyone who comes in contact with it, the picture has an insider's feel that is constantly undercut by the filmmaker's impulse to editorialize.
  55. Rob Roy
    This handsome, not unappealing look at a Scottish legend of nearly 300 years ago is too solemn, wooden and dour for its own good, and feels oddly of another era.
  56. This Boy's Life
    Unfortunately, after a relatively promising warmup, pic actually proceeds to flatten out the characters in the latter sections and to make them less dimensional and interesting than they initially seemed.
  57. Rumble in the Bronx
    Though Chan wins his usual stripes for death-defying... the movie ends on a dramatically unsatisfying note.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mary Reilly
    [A] muddled mix of melodrama and horror.
  59. White Squall
    Director Ridley Scott's lavish production isn't totally satisfying, coasting aimlessly at times before suddenly leaping to a more intense dramatic plane.
  60. The Basketball Diaries
    The Basketball Diaries is a weak-tea rendition of Jim Carroll's much-admired cult tome about his teenage drug addiction. Leonardo DiCaprio's committed lead performance deserves a better context than this gloss on the source material.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is an uneven, convoluted, certainly dispute-provoking study of sexual passion in which Marlon Brando gives a truly remarkable performance.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Porky's
    If, by chance, Porky's should prove to be Melvin Simon's swan song in the film industry, it will either be perceived as a thunderously rude exit or a titanic raspberry uttered to audiences everywhere.
  63. Party Girl
    This trifle about a dizzy downtown New York scenester who gets a grip on her life is energized by several attractive characters and enough youthful pep to put it over as an upbeat diversion for teens and twentysomethings, though it has no more substance than bubblegum music.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Doors
    This $40 million look at Jim Morrison's short, wild ride through a rock idol life is everything one expects from the filmmaker - intense, overblown, riveting, humorless, evocative, self-important and impossible to ignore.
  65. The Distinguished Gentleman
    Uneven but occasionally quite funny political satire.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hoffa
    This grimly ambitious biopic goes no deeper than that, offering hardly a trace of psychology, motivation or inner life.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hamlet
    Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet is bland.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Two Jakes
    This oft-delayed sequel proves a jumbled, obtuse yet not entirely unsatisfying follow-up to Chinatown, rightly considered one of the best films of the 1970s.
  69. Nightwatch
    The new outing - which retains the essential twists of the original, a hit overseas that was never released Stateside - has been physically enhanced with American production values and a marquee cast, but much of the earlier film's humanity and mordant humor have been lost in translation
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Popeye
    It is more than faint praise to say that Popeye is far, far better than it might have been, considering the treacherous challenge it presented. But avoiding disaster is not necessarily the same as success.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Purple Rose of Cairo
    Tale is a light, almost frivolous treatment of a serious theme, as Woody Allen here confronts the unalterable fact that life just doesn't turn out the way it does (or did) in Hollywood films. For all its situational goofiness, pic is a tragedy, and it's too bad Allen didn't build up the characters and drama sufficiently to give some weight to his concerns.
  72. Sex and the City 2
    Part of the action occurs in the desert, which inadvertently proves apt, since the oases of enjoyable moments -- and they do exist -- suffer from being spaced too widely in what's otherwise a long, arid trek.
  73. Eat Pray Love
    Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.
  74. Takers
    A respectable but watered-down heist movie that, given the Los Angeles setting, either owes a debt to director Michael Mann or suggests an unusually violent and action-packed episode of "Entourage."
  75. Knight and Day
    A high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy that labors to bring a measure of wit, romance and glamour to an overworked spy-thriller template.
  76. Piranha 3-D
    The 32-year-old carnivorous fish franchise has lost none of its bite, serving up a fresh batch of spring-break revelers for the fearsome creatures to attack.
  77. The Killer Inside Me
    A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.
  78. Survival of the Dead
    Steeped in fan-pleasing gore but woefully thin on ideas, originality (beyond new zombie-offing methods) or directorial flair.
  79. Shrek Forever After
    The reputed swan song for the series and its first entry in 3D, pic contains a respectable number of laughs, but also borrows its storyline from the oft-recycled "It's a Wonderful Life," and if that's all its creators can do, it's best to put Far Far Away far far away.
  80. The Joneses
    If The Joneses were pure farce, which it isn't, Borte could have gotten away with a lot. Likewise, the picture might have succeeded if it were all a bit funnier and a little less mean-spirited about spending, debt and envy.
  81. The Back-up Plan
    This tepid romantic comedy falls somewhere between a weak sitcom pilot and a second-tier Hallmark movie.
  82. Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures
    Has a terrible fascination that glues viewers to the screen. At the same time, audience patience is tested.
  83. Twilight: Los Angeles
    The camera's closer scrutiny doesn't flatter this unique theatrical reportage.
  84. Freshmen
    There's nothing remotely original about Freshmen, but this somewhat formulaic comedy-drama about four college newbies has a lot of charm and sincerity going for it.
  85. Garmento
    Michele Maher's Garmento appears more shocked at the fashion industry's cynical side than moviegoers are likely to be, making its drama of corruption a preordained snooze.
  86. Daydream Believer
    An unusually bright, inspired look at the perils of breaking into the acting business.
  87. Morning Sun
    Admirably balanced production that pulls the curtain back slightly on a little-charted period of modern Chinese history.
  88. Last Party 2000
    Insufficiently focused but undeniably intriguing.
  89. Acts of Worship
    An earnest drama that's never quite as raw or moving as it means to be.
  90. Hidden in Plain Sight
    A relentless excoriation of the School of the Americas.
  91. Justifiable Homicide
    Film makes a strong case for some form of miscarriage of justice and subsequent high level cover-up in the Rosario shootings.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Made-Up
    While the whole may be less than the sum of its parts, those parts are individually commendable. Shalhoub has an eye for composition and a strong sense of pacing.
  93. The Blonds
    Treads a delicate line between documentary and fiction to reconstruct the kidnapping and murder of director Albertina Carri's parents during the military dictatorship.
  94. Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
    The kind of tale where even viewers who didn't miss a frame will feel as if they entered in the middle, muddled but amusing account of an adorable yet profanity-prone feline who travels through time and space is fueled by irony and incongruity.
  95. Firedancer
    Film struggles to balance its past-present memory drama and a rather standard take on an American immigrant family. Although accented by fine cinematic flourishes, pic is harmed by an abrupt conclusion and technical glitches.
  96. The Path to Love
    Has stubborn charm, suggesting onward-and-upward career prospects for helmer/coscenarist Remi Lange.
  97. L'autre monde
    First hour is an often gripping look at the realities of modern Islam ("You can do anything you want, as long as it's not in public," says a soldier's wife), before silliness takes over.
  98. Small Voices
    Latest pic directed by Gil M. Portes, could be called "To Madam With Love"; vet Filipino helmer is out to open maximum tear ducts with sentimental tale.
  99. Venus and Mars
    Thesping and production values are solid and sometimes even attractive, but pic's overall American-style gloss becomes extremely odd and discomforting given the setting.
  100. Persons of Interest
    Seldom boring but also rarely electrifying.
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