Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. Along Came Polly
    Writer-director John Hamburg does everything he can to pair up Ben Stiller's stiff, safety-first corporate man with Jennifer Aniston's free spirit in Along Came Polly, but the two are so fundamentally incompatible that story loses credibility long before the gags stop coming.
  2. Tokyo Godfathers
    With its masterful grasp of comedy, pathos, social commentary and mystical weirdness, Tokyo Godfathers takes anime to a whole new level.
  3. My Baby's Daddy
    Isn't an embarrassment. Rather, it's an acceptably executed, thoroughly routine time-killer.
  4. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    It's the interviews with Aileen herself that steal the show as she insists her mind is being controlled by radio waves -- her Mad Hatter personality beyond the scope of Broomfield's disingenuous tone to interpret.
  5. Chasing Liberty
    Inoffensive adolescent escapism laced with surprising amounts of genuine charm.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Battle of Algiers
    It's a dedicated effort with importance as a 'document.' (Review of original release)
  7. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Companion piece to Teboul's "Yves Saint Laurent -- Time Regained" nicely complements that excellent film but is less riveting as a free-standing experience.
  8. Secret Things
    There's plenty for both the eyes and intellect to groove over in Secret Things, a taut, juicy, low-key feast of sexual and office politics filtered through helmer Jean-Claude Brisseau's customary blend of expedient formality and all-stops-out baroque behavior.
  9. Millennium Mambo
    A slow, empty, over-mannered snoozer that shows Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-hsien asleep at the wheel.
  10. Japanese Story
    Develops into a powerfully emotional experience thanks to a career-best performance by Toni Collette.
  11. The Company
    Robert Altman takes an elegant, appealingly unemphatic look at the world of ballet.
  12. Paycheck
    Uninspired star turns from Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman suggest something less than full belief in this quickly forgettable thriller.
  13. The Young Black Stallion
    A visually opulent but dramatically undernourished prequel to the 1979 hit of almost the same name.
  14. Cold Mountain
    A grim picaresque odyssey across a beautiful scarred landscape laced together by private romantic longing. Handsomely made and vividly acted.
  15. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Unfortunately knows no tone between schmaltzy/gooey and slapstick/gross-out. Pic is as far from the original pic and its autobiographical memoir source as it can be while retaining the same title.
  16. 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.
  17. Monster
    Gritty and compelling as Monster is, the script's not entirely satisfying elaboration of the central relationship and Ricci's somewhat ungiving performance limit the material to that of a superior telemovie rather than something emotionally richer, like "Boys Don't Cry."
  18. Children of Love
    The daunting logistics and emotional juggling act of child custody and visitation rights post-divorce are examined via spot-on acting and deft helming in docu-styled Children of Love.
  19. Calendar Girls
    Though the film is never dull, and playing by the cast is spirited, it's actually a surprisingly gentle movie, with no big "Full Monty"-like finale to send auds buzzing into the street.
  20. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Errol Morris delivers a compelling, thoughtful and entirely involving documentary in The Fog of War.
  21. The Butterfly
    A solidly entertaining, cross-generational two-hander, The Butterfly strikes the right balance between humor and observational bite.
  22. Mona Lisa Smile
    An appealing female cast gives the hollowly formulaic Mona Lisa Smile more dignity than it perhaps deserves, yet it's Julia Roberts in an ill-suited starring role that represents one of the film's chief shortcomings.
  23. House of Sand and Fog
    A faithful, powerful and superbly acted adaptation of Andre Dubus III's international bestseller.
  24. The Hebrew Hammer
    Although amusing as often as not, the material remains more comedy-sketch fodder than a fully developed feature.
  25. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    Represents that filmmaking rarity -- a third part of a trilogy that is decisively the best of the lot. With epic conflict, staggering battles, striking landscapes and effects, and resolved character arcs all leading to a dramatic conclusion to more than nine hours of masterful storytelling.
  26. Power Trip
    Made with deft evenhandedness, Paul Devlin's accomplished film plays almost like a fictional drama, containing suspense, comedy and some colorful characters.
  27. Hotel Room
    Spanish writer-director Cesc Gay and Argentine co-director Daniel Gimelberg cook up one or two agreeably tart episodes in this uneven pic, but ultimately, it plays like "Four Rooms" without a budget.
  28. AKA
    Always watchable yet ultimately self-defeating in terms of its tonal/aesthetic choices.
  29. The Statement
    Lackluster pic fails both as suspense and as character study.
  30. Prisoner of Paradise
    An important and smoothly mounted meditation on moral choices within the entertainment biz.
  31. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    Stuffed with attitude but just as hackneyed as the original, Love Don't Cost a Thing brings a year of exceptionally lame youth comedies to a fitting conclusion.
  32. Stuck on You
    A one-joke affair about conjoined twins that feels like it bypassed the scripting stage and was filmed directly from the pitch, the comedy remains resoundingly unfunny.
  33. Something's Gotta Give
    Jokes about impotence, menopause and other middle-aged maladies reside where a screenplay ought to live.
  34. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    An intelligent, visually ravishing adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel.
  35. 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.
  36. Man of the Year
    Ensemble proves improvisationally capable, but film overall is rather conventional, a Hollywood idea of an experimental film presented with a heavy serving of showbiz-type cynicism.
  37. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Unshaven and twinkling-eyed, Sharif is professionally light and entertaining in the title role.
  38. What Alice Found
    By turns disarmingly amusing and dramatically blunt.
  39. Honey
    With less than five minutes of screen time but with more humor and sassy attitude than the remaining cast combined, Missy Elliott separates hip-hop royalty from riff raff in the otherwise lackluster Honey.
  40. The Last Samurai
    As rich in period and historical background as it is deficient in fresh dramatic and thematic ideas.
  41. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Timely and thought-provoking, if a bit rambling.
  42. En la ciudad sin límites
    The pluses outweigh the minuses: Pic is thought-provoking, visuals are spot-on, and the heavy-duty cast pulls the film round even in its wobblier moments.
  43. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    An engrossingly detailed if perhaps inevitably enigmatic portrait of the elusive, outrageous provocateur.
  44. My Flesh and Blood
    One leaves My Flesh and Blood with admiration for the lenser's craftsmanship, and for her ability to remain an unobtrusive observer during moments of extreme emotional turmoil.
  45. Valley of Tears
    Fascinating assemblage combines strike footage first shot in 1979 by Perry when he was working for the Texas Farm Workers Union with film and video lensed over the ensuing 20-plus years.
  46. Kal Ho Naa Ho
    Another slam-dunk from vet producer Yash Johar.
  47. Timeline
    Lacks the consistent tone, pace and point of view for either a science fiction thriller or medieval war adventure.
  48. The Cooler
    Wayne Kramer's sexy and often humorous feature directorial debut surrounds its sweet center with the energy, flash and risk of the gambling capital. Sterling performances by William H. Macy and Maria Bello as the long-shot lovers and Alec Baldwin as a temperamental casino operator.
  49. The Haunted Mansion
    Mansion's drab comic strokes and narrative render the movie almost superfluous.
  50. The Triplets of Belleville
    Almost completely dialogue-free but graced with terrific sound design and a swell score.
  51. In America
    Warm and borderline sentimental...also brimming with true and privileged moments, as well as an optimism in the face of tough circumstances that serves as a corrective to some of the more fashionably grim modern accounts of similar stories.
  52. Bad Santa
    First-rate talent and a uniquely dyspeptic mood separate this effort from more routine, populist stabs at tasteless yukkage.
  53. El bonaerense
    Not exactly a police corruption thriller, the film is more a study of innocence betrayed, though its insights into Argentine law enforcement are pretty scary.
  54. Blindness
    The ability not to see the obvious in both a literal and a metaphoric sense imbues the indie feature Blindness with dramatic potency.
  55. El leyton
    Despite its crude, willfully naive style, this comedy of transgression, judgment and revenge becomes steadily more appealing as it progresses.
  56. The Big Empty
    Hobbled by uninspired stabs at cleverness and surreal narrative curlicues, The Big Empty goes nowhere, replete with a question mark of an ending that isn't worth answering.
  57. Blue Gate Crossing
    High on charm but extremely low on content, Blue Gate Crossing is a half-hour short stretched to feature length.
  58. 21 Grams
    Ambitiously structured in non-chronological fragments that form a fascinating puzzle, this raw drama about grief, guilt and redemption becomes ultimately overextended and overwrought in its final stretch.
  59. Gothika
    Hampered by thinly developed characters and pedestrian plotting.
  60. The Barbarian Invasions
    A full-bodied, funny and gloriously unpretentious ode to family, friendship and the meaning of life, The Barbarian Invasions is solidly entertaining, sharply written and genuinely touching.
  61. 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.
  62. Acts of Worship
    An earnest drama that's never quite as raw or moving as it means to be.
  63. Mail Order Bride
    Dismally unfunny cross-cultural farce posits stupidity as the universal language.
  64. The Missing
    Ron Howard has never before made a picture this raw and alive. At the same time, this tale of the desperate pursuit of the kidnappers of young women makes for a fundamentally grim and unpleasant experience.
  65. Ticket to Jerusalem
    Attempts to meld reality and artifice but to uninspiring results.
  66. The Singing Forest
    Provides scant entertainment value, intentional or otherwise.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    One from the Heart (re-release)
    A hybrid musical romantic fantasy, lavishing giddy heights of visual imagination and technical brilliance onto a wafer-thin story of true love turned sour, then sweet. (review of original release)
  68. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    Dramatically powerful, surprising in its strong narrative differences from previous cinematic tellings of "the greatest story" and bold in the extent to which it presents Jesus as a confrontational and threatening figure in the Judean context of the time.
  69. Tupac: Resurrection
    Lazin has without question skillfully assembled an entertaining, strongly narrative nonfiction package.
  70. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    A not-inventive-enough romp that belches out gags at a rapid-fire clip but connects so sporadically as to leave the audience enervated but only sparingly entertained.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Federico Fellini, long a scripter, in his second feature film satirizes the 'wastrels', the do-nothing sons of middle-class Italian provincials whose life ranges from schoolroom to poolroom.
  72. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Rare proof that a gigantic production in contemporary Hollywood can possess a distinctive personality and its own approach to storytelling, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World proves as bracing as a stiff wind on the open sea.
  73. Anything But Love
    A low-budget musical so steeped in nostalgia that accusing it of being too old-fashioned is like accusing "Gone With the Wind" of being too Southern, (Standard Time-as this film was once titled) wears its heart, intentions and limitations on its sleeve.
  74. Hukkle
    A true original…Beautifully shot, full of droll humor and at 77 minutes never overstaying its welcome.
  75. A House on a Hill
    Pic's air of connoisseurist homage overwhelms a haphazard screenplay and characters who are hard to warm up to.
  76. Mango Yellow
    Like characters out of some Carnival hell, a macho butcher and his born-again wife, a forlorn barmaid, a sinister sadist and the gay manager of a flophouse called the Hotel Texas run in and out of each other's lives in a film as sloppy, sluttish, scruffy and vital as they are.
  77. My Architect
    This fascinating portrait of an eccentric visionary and his chaotic triple family life is an accomplished, enormously satisfying non-fiction work.
  78. Martin & Orloff
    Extending skit comedy into full-length form is a tricky and, despite lots of snappy acerbic wordplay and inspired zany moments, pic works only intermittently.
  79. In My Skin
    Delves far more deeply into grisly physical manifestation than psychological motivation, making it seem something of an actorish vanity piece. But the drama is directed with arresting spareness and control.
  80. Love Forbidden
    Torpid, academic vanity project for helmer-thesp Rodolphe Marconi.
  81. Billabong Odyssey
    Narrower focus may lend this less crossover appeal than "Step Into Liquid," which was practically a recruitment poster for the surfing lifestyle. But such a tight focus might also make Billabong a repeat must-see for more dedicated boarders and wannabes.
  82. Gloomy Sunday
    The iconic '30s song "Gloomy Sunday" gets a distinctive celluloid setting in this well-played, cleverly scripted pic in which music and character are inextricably combined.
  83. Elf
    Will Ferrell graduates to his first solo leading role with flying colors in Elf, a disarming holiday comedy about a clueless innocent who saves Christmas and fosters a renewed sense of family in his reluctant father.
  84. Love Actually
    A roundly entertaining romantic comedy, Love Actually is still nearly as cloying as it is funny…its cheeky wit, impossibly attractive cast and sure-handed professionalism are beguiling.
  85. Hidden in Plain Sight
    A relentless excoriation of the School of the Americas.
  86. The Matrix Revolutions
    You can virtually see the mystique peeling away while beholding the turgid melodrama, patchy plotting, windy dialogue and, yes, spectacular combat effects of this grand finale.
  87. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    A superior example of fearless filmmakers in exactly the right place at the right time.
  88. Suspended Animation
    A psychological drama cum genteel shocker that's long on ambition and short on delivery.
  89. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Doing for the cheesier Ross Hunter-style bigscreen soaps of the early/mid-'60s what "Far From Heaven" did for the plush Douglas Sirk melodramas of a decade earlier -- albeit with tongue planted much further in cheek -- writer/star Charles Busch's Die Mommie Die! is an enjoyable genre homage-cum-parody.
  90. Shattered Glass
    Credibly and absorbingly relates the tale of journalistic fraud perpetrated by young writer Stephen Glass at the New Republic five years back.
  91. The Human Stain
    Powered by two eye-catching performances.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    Director Georges Franju has given this some suspense and not spared any shock details. But the stilted acting, asides to explain characters and motivations, and a repetition of effects lose the initial impact.
  93. Girlhood
    Grim but engrossing.
  94. Sister Helen
    Riveting portrait of a straight-talking, tough-loving Benedictine nun in charge of a South Bronx home for recovering substance abusers.
  95. The Singing Detective
    Potter's genius for wrapping black humor, poignancy and fantasy in utterly original story concepts lends this "Detective" an immediate fascination that doesn't begin wearing off for some time.
  96. Radio
    "Inspired by a true story" it may be, but inspired it's not.
  97. Brother Bear
    A very mild animated entry from Disney with a distinctly recycled feel.
  98. Elephant
    Achieves some glancing poetic effects during its first hour, but becomes gross and exploitative during the shooting rampage of the final act.
  99. Scary Movie 3
    Results here are just middling funny, with no truly memorable high points and a sum impact that goes poof!
  100. Beyond Borders
    Star-driven, high-minded claptrap that, fatally, can't even rig a rooting interest in its central love story.
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