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. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    No-frills talking head docu eschews vintage photos and period footage, rendering visually static pic of greatest interest to history buffs, fests and the tube.
  2. Amen.
    Despite fine performances and the care lavished on the production, Amen. is never as emotionally powerful as it should be.
  3. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    This well researched, detailed examination of the life and work of the legendary avant-garde filmmaker, writer and dancer, Maya Deren, should provoke renewed interest in her -- she emerges as a beautiful, willful, wayward talent with an exceptional vision and a great love for life and for the avant-garde world.
  4. Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
    Using archival material and fresh interviews — including testimonials from at least two of his former lovers — Kates and Singer underscore Rustin’s matter-of-fact courage and self-effacing pragmatism.
  5. Da wan
    Pic is an obvious but highly accessible entertainment that manages to josh its subjects without being condescending to either Eastern or Western auds.
  6. En kærlighedshistorie
    It often resembles John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence," but just as often devolves into a series of bravura acting exercises strung together by an increasingly sketchy narrative theme.
  7. Divine Intervention
    Always imaginative, often arresting, but sometimes just too clever by half.
  8. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Lacking the knockout lead perfs or more whimsical tone that might have transcended script's dubious logic, pic comes off as a so-so theatrical stunt delivered via the wrong medium.
  9. A Guy Thing
    Does get slightly better as it goes along.
  10. National Security
    Comes off as a retro reprise of those slam-bang, buddy-buddy action-comedies that proliferated throughout the '80s in the wake of "48 HRS."
  11. Kangaroo Jack
    For auds unwilling or unable to grapple with the subtle nuances of "Scooby Doo," Warners now gives us Kangaroo Jack, a shrill and silly farce.
  12. City of God
    The impressive filmmaking craftsmanship and sharp storytelling skills make this two-hour-plus epic fly by.
  13. Crimson Gold
    Succeeds as a universal account of frustration applicable to any urban center where the gap between haves and have-nots is tauntingly visible.
  14. Close, Closed, Closure
    Israeli filmmaker Loevy questions in voiceover whether one can ever really see the other's side, and the strain of this divide is felt in over-dramatic attempts to highlight individual victims.
  15. Just Married
    The filmmakers themselves betray a lack of knowledge about the Old World, while unfailingly repeating physical hijinks one time too many.
  16. The Slaughter Rule
    Strong performances, a few dramatically potent scenes and a vividly specific evocation of locale barely offset hackneyed and muddled elements in a script that plays like a first draft.
  17. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    A powerful and creative film.
  18. Love Liza
    Todd Louiso's directorial debut emerges at once as compelling and as a bit of a specimen due to the entirely singular nature of the protagonist's behavior.
  19. Sonny
    Besides "Midnight Cowboy" and "American Gigolo," there aren't many mainstream movies centered on straight male prostitutes. Sonny is a worthy, if indie-style, addition to the list.
  20. Nicholas Nickleby
    A delightful experience.
  21. Max
    The film is ultimately too glib in its suggestion that Hitler's discovering his career path was a matter of sheerest chance, even an accident.
  22. The Hours
    Considerable intelligence and strategic finesse have been brought to bear on this handsomely mounted adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was hardly a natural for the bigscreen.
  23. The Pianist
    Surprisingly lacks a feeling of personal urgency and insight that would have made it a distinctive, even unique contribution to the considerable number of films that deal with the war in general and Holocaust in particular.
  24. Chicago
    First-time feature director Rob Marshall and Oscar-winning "Gods and Monsters" screenwriter Bill Condon have spun the dark tale of two murdering floozies into a widely palatable entertainment, but the long-gestating film comes up short in rhythm and personality.
  25. Pinocchio
    The spirit of the late Federico Fellini -- with whom Benigni talked of doing the project together -- surfaces repeatedly. But that spirit fails to enliven a film substantially lacking in personality, energy, magic and humor.
  26. Catch Me If You Can
    Like a trot around the track for the thoroughbreds involved, and one of the results is that it takes them far too long to get to the finish line.
  27. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Balances intelligent humor, slapstick, Blighty reserve and Yank spunk along with environmentalism.
  28. Smokers Only
    A walk on the "dark side" that moves far more slowly than limited character insight requires.
  29. Thorns
    An involving, often kinetic 2½-hour ride for auds who can accept their entertainment overboiled as well as just hardboiled.
  30. Two Weeks Notice
    An affable but undernourished romantic comedy that fails to match the freshness of the actress-producer and writer's previous collaboration, "Miss Congeniality."
  31. Spider
    This slow but brilliantly sustained journey into madness is fronted by a remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes and superb backup from Miranda Richardson in a triple role.
  32. Narc
    A darkly textured, powerfully suspenseful genre piece.
  33. Gangs of New York
    Bears all the earmarks of a magnum opus for Martin Scorsese: Fascinating and fresh material about his beloved New York City, an epic reach, an equally epic gestation period, a dynamic criminal element, combustible socio-political-religious elements, outstanding actors and sophisticated allusions to cinema history that inform and enrich the experience.
  34. Antwone Fisher
    Washington reveals himself to be a filmmaker with a clean, uncluttered storytelling style. Too often, overtly inspirational material such as this can become strident or mawkish.
  35. 25th Hour
    Lapses into melodramatic self-importance and gratuitous stylistic flourishes that take the audience out of the action -- are outweighed by the steadily amplified emotional power of this ultimately moving drama.
  36. Devils on the Doorstep
    Has all the classic faults of a picture not only directed by an actor but by an actor who is his own producer.
  37. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Has a sharper narrative focus and a livelier sense of forward movement than did the more episodic "Fellowship."
  38. The Guys
    An adept if necessarily limited translation of uncinematic material, The Guys retains the potency of its stage original as a poignant, ingeniously simple tribute to firefighters lost in the World Trade Center disaster.
  39. Evelyn
    The star plays Doyle as just rough enough around the edges to warrant the character's setbacks, but not so unpleasant that the twinkle in his eye is extinguished.
  40. Maid in Manhattan
    Gets into trouble when it reaches for laughs.
  41. Star Trek: Nemesis
    Despite the intriguing set-up, there's something unambitious and scaled-back about Star Trek Nemesis, so that most of the time it feels like a slightly suped-up episode of the "Next Generation" TV series.
  42. Intact
    A self-aware, intriguing and technically accomplished fantasy thriller firmly in the Hollywood tradition, Intact has a confidence and expertise not seen from a Spanish tyro since Alejandro Amenabar's "Thesis" (1996).
  43. The Jimmy Show
    Pic has a stagy, boxed-in feel. Both visually and energetically, it suggests something that has been done onstage to the point of mechanized repetition. And even though Whaley is supposed to be playing a disillusioned character, it's the actor himself who seems fatigued and over-rehearsed.
  44. Drumline
    Brimming with heart and humor -- Drumline is a formulaic crowdpleaser set in the competitive world of university marching bands at predominantly black universities.
  45. The Hot Chick
    At best routinely assembled -- at worst barely competent. The slapstick is labored, and the bigger setpieces flat.
  46. About Schmidt
    Films exist for different reasons, and the indisputable raison d'etre for About Schmidt is to showcase Jack Nicholson giving a master class in the art of screen acting.
  47. Analyze That
    The novelty value is completely gone the second time around.
  48. Empire
    Choreographer-turned-filmmaker Franc. Reyes covers familiar ground without stumbling or dazzling.
  49. My Kingdom
    An intriguing spin on the British crime genre that's more a series of strong performances than a fully worked-out character drama.
  50. Equilibrium
    Misses with its blowhard treatment of a silly, obvious script. Results might hazard "Battlefield Earth" comparison if new pic were a tad more fun.
  51. Adaptation.
    All but stealing the film is Cooper, who seizes a rare opportunity as an extroverted, rather than buttoned-up, character to bust loose like an uncaged alligator.
  52. To End All Wars
    Grim in theme yet seldom effective or convincing in execution.
  53. Massoud, the Afghan
    This educational and moving film is must-viewing for anyone who craves a glimpse of the best qualities of a country that many have coveted but which has never been colonized.
  54. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    It succeeds emotionally in the cause of what seems to be its primary aim, to advance an attitudinal change in Australians not normally sympathetic to the aboriginal cause.
  55. Dead or Alive: Final
    It's a silly but enjoyable farrago from the cult quickie-meister, again set in an amoral universe-on-a-budget.
  56. Russian Ark
    Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.
  57. They
    They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.
  58. Extreme Ops
    Action pics rarely come much more blandly generic than Extreme Ops, an instantly forgettable snow-and-stuntwork extravaganza.
  59. Solaris
    Despite its undeniably pure and earnest intent, Solaris is equally undeniably an arid, dull affair that imposes and maintains a huge distance between the viewer and what happens onscreen.
  60. Eight Crazy Nights
    This is a dark, vulgar, brooding turnoff of a movie, minus the steady laugh quotient needed to appease Sandler's core constituency.
  61. Die Another Day
    Sports some tasty scenes, mostly in the first half, but also pushes 007 into CGI-driven, quasi-sci-fi territory that feels like a betrayal of what the franchise has always been about.
  62. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Impresses with the originality of its observation, storytelling techniques and filmmaking style.
  63. The Emperor's Club
    A rather stodgily directed pic by Michael Hoffman which extols the virtues of Greek and Roman thinking in the guise of Kevin Kline's classics teacher.
  64. The Quiet American
    One of Caine's meatiest roles, and he handles it with power, humanity and remarkable emotional fluidity; from the opening moments, an enormous amount comes through his eyes alone.
  65. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Offers a lively introduction to the highly articulate political dissident and to his controversial views on 9/11.
  66. Talk to Her
    An engaging, well-crafted and imaginative meditation on solitude and communication.
  67. Friday After Next
    Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.
  68. Better Housekeeping
    A triumph of indie casting of unknowns, Good Housekeeping is knee-deep in delicious thesping.
  69. Hell House
    Hell House is a slice of contempo life many viewers will find bizarre and disturbing, not necessarily in the precautionary-moral way its subjects intend. Briskly paced docu is well handled in tech departments.
  70. The Way Home
    Utterly unsentimental but profoundly moving,The Way Home" is a tiny gem from South Korea.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film works on both a human-interest level -- focusing on the travails of the band members now finally receiving their well-earned due -- and as a slice of Motown's early history.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interview with the Assassin
    Satisfying picture that like a pot of water on the stove keeps heating up until it explodes.
  73. Half Past Dead
    In recent years, Steven Seagal has been steadily losing any firm standing as even a B-grade actioner icon, and by the genre's most basic standards, he now displays a visible fatigue and lack of interest that proves deadlier than any of his hero's skills.
  74. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Respectably crafted to avoid lurid excess, feature is nonetheless a bit potboilerish in its pileup of sexy, violent, duplicitous circumstances that plague the consciences of latter-day clergymen.
  75. Revolution #9
    Looks with fresh eyes at a new millennium in which, seemingly, the entire world is bought and sold in neatly wrapped packages engineered for mass consumption.
  76. Ararat
    Egoyan's pedantic, lecturing approach makes the film a bit of a slog, although the basic material has an intrinsic interest that makes one at least want to know more about the historical events.
  77. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Darker and more dramatic, this account of Harry's troubled second year at Hogwarts may be a bit overlong and unmodulated in pacing, but it possesses a confidence and intermittent flair that begin to give it a life of its own apart of the literary franchise, something the initial picture never achieved.
  78. Bánk bán
    While it creaks along at times, director Csaba Kael's new film version of a Hungarian opera masterpiece, Ferenc Erkel's Bank Ban, is ultimately an invaluable entry in the opera-on-film library.
  79. Hush!
    Meandering melodrama about gay relationships, friendship, loneliness and the elastic notion of family is considerably overlong and hampered by too many superfluous scenes.
  80. The Rising Place
    An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.
  81. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    Choppy and fragmented to the point of irritation, pic overuses blackouts between scenes, self-conscious camera movements, narrative ellipses and other jangly techniques.
  82. The Bread, My Sweet
    Lightweight but likable.
  83. Far From Heaven
    An accomplished marriage of elaborate style and content.
  84. 'R Xmas
    Despite some hazy plot points, the tough, compelling drama comes together quite satisfyingly, standing alongside 1996's "The Funeral" as perhaps the most controlled and cohesive of Ferrara's uneven work of recent years.
  85. 8 Mile
    The rough power, as well as the humor and sensitivity, of pop phenom Eminem is delivered intact in 8 Mile.
  86. Leela
    Succeeds only as a cultural exchange of cinematic cliches.
  87. Femme Fatale
    An extravagant suspense cocktail of wacky and lascivious ingredients that goes down fine.
  88. Strange Fruit
    Where pic excels is in the depiction of a rich leftist movement, with several cultures interacting expressively in the 1930s and '40s.
  89. Justifiable Homicide
    Film makes a strong case for some form of miscarriage of justice and subsequent high level cover-up in the Rosario shootings.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Treasure Planet
    The film's total appeal may be undercut by a script that rarely feels inspired.
  91. The Weight of Water
    Despite recurrent narrative and dramatic problems, each of Bigelow's pics provides a visual treat, and this film is no exception.
  92. Love in the Time of Money
    This kind of episodic chain of interlocking encounters has become a formulaic favorite in American indie cinema, and Mattei's take on the genre is narrow and schematic.
  93. Daughter from Danang
    An intelligent, well-observed and ineffably poignant study of an Amerasian woman's attempt to trace her roots by journeying back to Vietnam.
  94. The Santa Clause 2
    Festooned with cute, mugging kids; lots of jazzy redos of beloved Christmas tunes on the soundtrack; and enough tug-at-your-heartstrings moments to make an entire theater feel warm on a blustery winter afternoon.
  95. I Spy
    It's precisely the lineup of familiar past work that makes I Spy pretty dull goods, invigorated mainly by the sharp interplay between Murphy and Wilson, both of whom shine best when they have a sidekick to work with.
  96. Santa vs. the Snowman
    The lively visuals, busy story, zippy pace and TV show running time will make this go down very easily with the target moppet audience.
  97. Food of Love
    Pons has aimed for a performance-driven drama whose virtues are of the small-scale, low-key variety, with the director working within narrow dramatic limits as always but here doing so brilliantly.
  98. The Bank
    Will connect with anyone who ever had a bad experience with a bank or finance company, and provides a satisfyingly loathsome character in Anthony LaPaglia's engaging protrayal of a corporate shark.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    In every respect it is outstanding.
  100. Time Changer
    There is something sweetly naive about pic's astonished contention that this is because morals were taught in a nonreligious context. But it's not a compelling argument for the Apocalypse.
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