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. Dear Frankie
    Material that might have turned to standard dysfunctional family treacle in other hands is given stirring poignancy, warmth and emotional insight in Shona Auerbach's assured first feature.
  2. Face
    A well-meaning but schematic drama about three generations of Chinese women in America.
  3. Gunner Palace
    Put together by Tucker and his co-director/editor wife Petra Epperlein without a hint of artifice, docu offers up its sounds and images bluntly, and they are very much sounds and images worth having as part of the record.
  4. Intimate Stories
    Endowed with captivating simplicity, gentle humor, rich humanity and infectious generosity of spirit.
  5. Walk on Water
    Attempts the miraculous but achieves the adequate.
  6. Whisky
    A whimsical piece of deadpan drollery, Whisky plays like Aki Kaurismaki, South American style.
  7. The Best of Youth
    At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.
  8. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    This amusingly light (but oh-so-gut-busting) reverie on one man's titanic efforts to rise to the top ranks in the very unofficial sport of competitive scarfing goes down quickly as a good example of documaking on freakish behavior and freakier subcultures.
  9. Cursed
    Except for Eisenberg's superb comic timing and his ability to make the familiar seem interesting, the high school scenes play like "Scream" outtakes.
  10. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
    An ungainly hodgepodge of vaudeville-style comedy, turgid soap-operatics, and joyful epiphanies of gospel-flavored uplift.
  11. Man of the House
    More than passably amusing.
  12. Up and Down
    A vibrant, immediate treatise on love and cultural identity in a complex new world of fluid borders and deep suspicions in the stunning new Czech drama Up and Down.
  13. 10 on Ten
    A self-contained master class on cinema.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Other Side of the Street
    A diverting, if unspectacular, Brazilian drama centered on an aging female detective.
  15. Sexual Dependency
    Has more flash than finesse.
  16. Turtles Can Fly
    Ghobadi in this pic displays a complete command of his art as he shifts between -- and even blends -- wrenching tragedy and amusing comedy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Because of Winn-Dixie
    Uneven though it is, Because of Winn-Dixie, based on Kate Di Camillo's novel, is tough to dislike.
  18. Constantine
    This adaptation of the graphic novel "Hellblazer" blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle.
  19. Son of the Mask
    The net result is a truly numbing experience.
  20. Alexandra's Project
    The punishment seems out of all proportion to the "crimes" committed, so that the film becomes no simplistic pro-feminist tract but is, on the contrary, more complex and disturbing.
  21. Nabbeun namja
    The most emotionally satisfying pic to date by Korean iconoclast Kim Ki-duk.
  22. Bigger Than the Sky
    Unconvincing poser.
  23. Downfall
    Not so much a Hitler movie as a portrait of a totalitarian machine's spiritual and emotional collapse, Downfall is a cumulatively powerful Goetterdammerung centered on the last 10 days of the bunkered Fuehrer and those around him.
  24. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Small but charming film.
  25. Her Majesty
    Despite its faltering touch with the story's darker, more melodramatic threads, Her Majesty nonetheless proves winning overall thanks to a predominant emphasis on nostalgia, whimsy (heroine's royal audience fantasies include one full-on production number) and droll-to-broad humor.
  26. Cinévardaphoto
    Varda renders the political personal and the personal universal.
  27. Ong Bak
    Strongly recalls Hong Kong kung-fu movies of the late '60s and '70s, with physical grit, over-the-top heroics and inventive fight choreography providing the entertainment.
  28. Bride & Prejudice
    Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.
  29. Hitch
    Considerably heavier on romance than comedy, Hitch stitches together relatively few laughs but generates enough goodwill and energy.
  30. Inside Deep Throat
    Has a gaudy pop-culture personality that perfectly suits its subject.
  31. My Mother's Smile
    In the central role, Castellitto's powerfully focused performance manages to keep the complex drama grounded.
  32. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    A charming look at the mildly eccentric man who gained modest feature-page celebrity for his familiarity with San Francisco's tropical parrot flock.
  33. 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.
  34. Unscrewed
    An often genuinely funny mockumentary.
  35. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    An especially dramatic, if needlessly frantic, work of polemical reportage on racism in America.
  36. Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
  37. Boogeyman
    Trendy influence of insidiously creepy Japanese horror pics is felt in almost every frame of Boogeyman. The effectively atmospheric and unusually involving thriller tells the story of a distraught young man's protracted duel of wits with the eponymous evildoer.
  38. The Wedding Date
    An intriguingly racy premise -- plays out to listless, unsatisfying effect.
  39. Emile
    A routine memory piece about long-buried family secrets that bubble back to the surface to wreak havoc.
  40. 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.
  41. The Nomi Song
    An absorbing homage to obscure but fascinating late '70s-early '80s German stage artiste Klaus Nomi.
  42. Swimming Upstream
    Distinguished by some unusually fine performances, but the lack of a satisfactory third act diminishes overall result.
  43. Sunset Story
    Tender, sensitive Sunset Story sidesteps a maudlin tone for a wide-ranging account of two fragile but opinionated retirees.
  44. Assisted Living
    A noteworthy piece on a difficult subject.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Daybreak
    One of the most impressive films to come out of Sweden in the past year. Ace acting, powerful direction and engaging storylines.
  46. Freak Weather
    Fiction writer and debuting helmer Mary Kuryla is clearly after a Big Statement on abuse and strength of character, but falls short by creating a self-destructive monster in lieu of a sympathetic protagonist.
  47. Fear X
    A supremely elegant, meditative thriller.
  48. Travelers and Magicians
    Although writer-director Khientse Norbu breaks no ground in unfolding two parallel stories about young men seeking fresh horizons, he creates believable characters -- and has the great benefit of living in a country that provides seldom-seen locations at the top of the world.
  49. Alone in the Dark
    Fans of the source material probably won't be switching platforms to catch this bizarre Lions Gate pickup, and non-fans definitely won't.
  50. Hide and Seek
    A routine haunted child psychothriller gussied up with A-list casting.
  51. Aliens of the Deep
    Documentary's visual wonders and well-pitched enthusiasm happily outstrip its clunkily ingenuous ain't-science-fun narrative.
  52. Fascination
    Glacially paced, self-consciously acted and narratively risible.
  53. Lost Embrace
    A general lack of drama, a low-budget documentary feel and an ultraslim storyline are more than compensated for by a sterling script and performances.
  54. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    Pedantic, humorless and one-sided -- qualities that won't encourage exposure beyond the activist left.
  55. Army of One
    Riveting and timely.
  56. Are We There Yet?
    Are We There Yet? traps the affable Ice Cube in a dismal kiddy slapstick saga that even his considerable charisma can do little to enhance.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beautiful Boxer
    Sweetly entertaining but bland biopic.
  58. Head-On
    Fine, gritty, contempo love story.
  59. Monsieur N.
    An intricate, fetchingly lensed tale of historical speculation framed as a plausible thriller.
  60. Watermarks
    Snappy, affecting documentary.
  61. She's One of Us
    While the director's penchant for extended silences and stagy character positioning make it all seem rather studied, the drama nonetheless is compellingly unsettling.
  62. Arakimentari
    Offers a fast, efficient and richly satisfying look at an iconoclastic artist and his groundbreaking work.
  63. Assault on Precinct 13
    In an era when similar genre pics increasingly resemble videogames, musicvideos or glossy commercials, the blunt, brawny simplicity of helmer Jean-Francois Richet's storytelling style seems positively novel.
  64. Machuca
    Richly human in focus, the drama steadily cranks up its political and emotional charge.
  65. Coach Carter
    Both an inspirational sports movie and an unexpected multi-level urban drama that plays by its own clock.
  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. Racing Stripes
    Frisky and funny enough to please pre-teens, but still witty enough to amuse even those parents who don't recognize Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg and other notables among the unseen vocal talents.
  68. 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"
  69. Appleseed
    Craft connoisseurs won't be disappointed with the splendidly executed result. However, everyone else is likely to wonder what the fuss about given the plot's dated cyborgs-and-supercomputers hijinks.
  70. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Casual, engaging documentary doesn't attempt a Hinduism 101 lesson, instead going for an impressionistic mix of on-the-fly spectacle and human interest.
  71. The Hunter and the Hunted
    A leisurely and lovingly observed character study about a detective, his home life, and a crook who plays cat-burglar-and-mouse with the cop.
  72. About Baghdad
    The writer discovers a people physically and psychologically worn down by decades of dictatorship, sanctions, war and occupation.
  73. White Noise
    An unsatisfying supernatural thriller with an effectively unsettling build-up and a frustratingly muddled pay-off.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Solitude
    Despite good thesping, particularly from Belton, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend time with this trio.
  75. Murder-Set-Pieces
    Pic's nastiness is so insistent, one-dimensional and excessive it risks self-parody.
  76. Sky Blue
    The pic plays like one long chase. Nevertheless, fashioned with ultra-sophisticated means, Sky Blue will be a must-see for anime fans around the world.
  77. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    A pedigree cast elevates old-fashioned material and lackluster screenwriting.
  78. 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.
  79. The Merchant of Venice
    Despite a series of disclaimers about the treatment of Jews in the 16th century, there's even less disguising onscreen than onstage that this is an uncomfortably anti-Semitic play and somewhat problematic for contempo audiences.
  80. In Good Company
    An often lively comedy-drama that lands some nice jabs at the mega-corp ethos, In Good Company makes for pretty good company until going soft when it counts.
  81. Fat Albert
    fFat-footed and ham-handed in its attempt to reconstitute a popular '70s TV cartoon show as a full-length, family-skewing feature.
  82. Darkness
    Though pic boasts decent perfs, potent atmospherics and eye-catching visuals, both psychology and plot are bargain-basement.
  83. The Woodsman
    A stunningly crafted work from first-time feature director Nicole Kassell.
  84. The Keys to the House
    Radiates a warm humanity and uplifts the spirit. Subtle rather than sentimental, it lacks easy tears though attentive viewers will find it lacerating enough.
  85. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Documentarian Jessica Yu employs everything from animation and voiceover thesping to archival documents and eyewitness accounts while examining Henry Darger, a self-taught artist who has been posthumously lionized as a visionary genius.
  86. The Phantom of the Opera
    Sumptuous pic version, which evokes the original show while working as a movie in its own right, is lit by a radiant, vocally lustrous perf by teenaged Emmy Rossum.
  87. Meet the Fockers
    Te laughs "Fockers" generates are the type you feel embarrassed about almost immediately afterward.
  88. Hotel Rwanda
    The genocide of some one million Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors remains a disgraceful and too-little-known episode in recent world history. Alas, Terry George's ineffectual Hotel Rwanda only partly rectifies that problem, taking what ought to have been a complex, powerful inquiry and simplifying it to a story about the resilience of the human spirit.
  89. Imaginary Heroes
    The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.
  90. Open My Heart
    Has a perverse fascination, despite some technical clumsiness and stiff thesping.
  91. Beyond the Sea
    It's raffish, flashy, energetic, entertaining and not very deep.
  92. 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.
  93. The Sea Inside
    A dramatic triumph.
  94. Spanglish
    Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium.
  95. The Aviator
    An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama, The Aviator flies like one of Howard Hughes' record-setting speed airplanes.
  96. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Snicket's macabre tale of three newly orphaned siblings has been lavishly visualized. But for all its elaborate splendor, production pic lacks the feeling and imagination that have distinguished the best recent kidpics.
  97. Million Dollar Baby
    Staying at the top of his game when most of his contemporaries have long since hung up their gloves, Clint Eastwood delivers another knockout punch with Million Dollar Baby.
  98. Santa Smokes
    A meandering, semi-improvised tale of a terminal Gotham loser who works as Santa when he bombs as an actor.
  99. A Talking Picture
    A film destined to divide Manoel de Oliveira's fans but also to win him new ones, A Talking Picture is his simplest, most linear story in memory.
  100. Dolls
    Despite an excessively meandering final act, the drama's three intertwined stories have a cumulative impact, their affecting sadness matched by meticulously composed visual poetry.
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