Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Ciao America
    Never less than pleasant and genteel, but rarely more.
  2. The Experiment
    A solid slice of entertainment without reaching the psychological depths promised by the subject matter.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elvira's Haunted Hills
    Must-see fare for fans of the bosomy camp horror queen.
  4. Quitting
    What gives Quitting its freshness is its setting in a country that often denies it has such problems and the decision to anchor the film strongly within the Chinese family fabric.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dogwalker
    There's an infectious, spry quality to much of The Dogwalker, an indie that benefits from amusing characters, strong thesping and taut situational humor.
  6. The Children of the Century
    A generally old-fashioned costumer that runs out of gas even faster than does the tempestuous love affair between writer George Sand and poet Alfred de Musset that it so devotedly recounts.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Igby Goes Down
    Young Kieran Culkin holds his own against a stellar ensemble in Igby Goes Down, a family comedy so dark it turns "The Royal Tennebaums" into latter-day Bradys.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barbershop
    A rousing celebration of the family-run small business, this Ice Cube-topped ensemble comedy, without offering anything especially new or exciting, provides a springboard for high-voltage comic exchanges that double as wisecrack-coated lessons in community relations.
  9. Stealing Harvard
    Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.
  10. Ted Bundy
    Looks set to unsettle as many conservative auds as it will delight nihilistic film buffs.
  11. The Pinochet Case
    It's hard to walk away unaffected from this heartfelt, well-researched, feature-length documentary.
  12. Swimfan
    A chiller resolutely without chills, in which even the pool water always seems heated. And inasmuch as the pic never owns up to its own trashiness, it's not even enjoyable camp.
  13. City by the Sea
    De Niro's reunion with helmer Michael Caton-Jones doesn't stoke the same fire as their previous pere-fils drama, "This Boy's Life," partly because De Niro's latest portrayal of a troubled cop feels so familiar.
  14. The Execution of Wanda Jean
    At its best, Garbus' account quietly depicts a set of wasted lives, and a closing image of Allen's plywood casket carted away by a bulldozer is emblematic of the tragedy.
  15. In Praise of Love
    The film offers a frequently obscure but (for fans) always watchable look at history, memory and -- in the most rarefied sense -- love.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Hospital
    Tries to combine romantic comedy, soap-opera parody and murder mystery, but the disparate elements never gel, and the film, about homicide at a daytime television serial, bounces around with no clue of how to reconcile or intertwine its genre conventions.
  17. Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    A knockout documentary with a renegade personality ideally suited to its anarchic subject matter.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Carnival
    Billy Wilder's direction captures the feel of morbid expectancy that always comes out in the curious that flock to scenes of tragedy.
  19. FeardotCom
    Never quite realizes its potential to evoke the real horror of the Internet -- Yet, Malone has given the film a distinctive atmosphere and occasional flashes of his perverse sense of humor.
  20. *Corpus Callosum
    Watching *Corpus Callosum and marveling at its sprightliness, its joyous, imaginative air, its effortless attenuation to all that is wonderful and horrible and comical about modern technology, makes you want to jump up and shout for joy, too.
  21. Undisputed
    With Undisputed, writer-director Walter Hill is back in contention as one of Hollywood's last defenders of the muscular, no-nonsense genre movie.
  22. Little Secrets
    What you end up with are a bunch of kids acting not like kids, but how adults who've lost all sense of what it was like to be a kid think kids behave.
  23. Serving Sara
    Little more than a mall movie designed to kill time.
  24. S1m0ne
    Attempts to delve beneath the surface of Hollywood's rampant narcissism and fascination with technology, but ultimately feels like just one more in the long line of films this year about the business of making movies.
  25. One Hour Photo
    This immaculately made first feature from noted musicvid and commercials director Mark Romanek provides Robin Williams with one of his creepiest, atypical roles, and the comic star responds with an unusually restrained performance that is, in the end, quite moving.
  26. Going By
    Pleasantly watchable.
  27. Long Time Since
    Intense but inscrutable tale involving a woman's gradual remembrance of a long-suppressed trauma.
  28. Possession
    LaBute has had middling success at best, having come up with a passably engaging time-jumping romantic melodrama that at least grapples seriously with one of the novel's most potent themes.
  29. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    The proper mix is never found. Ill-conceived and expensive project that winds up looking like a bunch of talented thesps slumming it.
  30. Mostly Martha
    A charming relationships comedy about food, gourmet cooking and emotionally chilling out. Anchored by a career-best performance from German thesp Martina Gedeck.
  31. Blue Crush
    All the trappings of an energetic, extreme-sports adventure, but ends up more of a creaky "Pretty Woman" retread, with the emphasis on self-empowering schmaltz and with the big-wave surfing that gives pic its title seemingly an afterthought.
  32. Katakuri-ke no kôfuku
    An unexpected departure off the map, flinging together elements of Alpine musical, ghoulish Jan Svankmajer-style claymation and a family portrait so hokey it makes the Brady Bunch look hip.
  33. All My Loved Ones
    Clearly inspired by, though not in the same dramatic league as, "Schindler's List," pic is marred by uneven perfs and lacks the intensity.
  34. I'm Going Home
    Elusive and elliptical as it is, this is one of the most accessible films in Oliveira's recent repetoire.
  35. The Château
    Modest but engaging.
  36. Scarlet Diva
    A repetitious, borderline-silly vanity project.
  37. Secret Ballot
    An enjoyable absurdist comedy.
  38. xXx
    A brawny commercial attraction strategically tapping into the auds for extreme sports, spy pix, thrill rides, popcorn actioners and anyone looking to see Diesel kick butt, blow stuff up and/or take his shirt off.
  39. 24 Hour Party People
    A rough, gritty, often scabrously humorous tribute.
  40. Blood Work
    The 72-year-old star, who is centerscreen throughout, makes this rather far-fetched yarn go down much more easily than it otherwise might have.
  41. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    The moments of inspired originality are all too infrequent. There's enough eye candy and marvels on screen, however.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Caravaggio
    Much of the joy of the film is to be found in the way Jarman and his team recreate the look and color of the original paintings.
  43. The Good Girl
    This one comes up short in terms of visual flair. But it delivers amusingly observed characters, consistent laughs underscored by the poignancy of unfulfilled existences and winning performances from a terrific cast captained by Jennifer Aniston.
  44. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    By turns defiant and apologetic, gleefully raunchy and anxiously defensive.
  45. Full Frontal
    Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.
  46. One Last Kiss
    Craftily combining elements that speak directly to three different generations, this accomplished ensemble piece is shaping up to be the surprise homegrown hit of the season.
  47. The Master of Disguise
    Vehicle for Dana Carvey as a chameleonic crime-fighting imbecile is noisy, colorful and fart-gag-filled enough to amuse undiscriminating auds under the age of 10.
  48. Signs
    All smoke and mirrors. With his third straight excursion into the supernatural, M. Night Shyamalan has begun revealing the hand that works his spooky tricks so much that the lack of substance is plainly seen.
  49. Gaza Strip
    Takes the viewer deep into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the powerful immediacy of raw images, some of them very hard to look at.
  50. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    A treat, a delicious blend of perversity, playfulness and deadly passion concealed beneath the tranquil, moneyed surface of the Swiss bougeoisie.
  51. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    Opulently produced, fittingly enough, and quite entertaining as a surface ride through the up, down and somewhat up again life of one of the New Hollywood's most colorful characters.
  52. Lan Yu
    Might spark controversy in mainland China, not only because it deals with a homosexual relationship between a member of the Chinese establishment and a peasant, but also because it touches on events such as the 1989 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. However, pic is unlikely to raise eyebrows anywhere else.
  53. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    May leave itself open to charges of being little more than a promo feature posing as a documentary, but pic nevertheless is a warts-and-all look at a group of musicians -- and the music biz -- likely to make most record label flacks flinch.
  54. The Country Bears
    Toddlers and pre-teens will be entertained, and parents will be pleasantly surprised, by this more-than-just-bearable musical road movie.
  55. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    A convoluted comic caper that labors to affect a lighthearted, off-the-cuff feel, and winds up being a copy of a copy of a bad Tarantino-Elmore Leonard forgery, with Tim Allen as a glib cinephile hitman.
  56. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    A picture that, even more than the previous two, feels like a bunch of gags tossed together. The laughs are here, to be sure, although even some of the best of them are retreads and the Swinging '60s recycling act is now feeling a bit past its zeitgeist prime.
  57. Happy Times
    Small but delightful tale about a dyed-in-the-wool spieler who develops a soft spot for a blind girl dumped in his care.
  58. K-19: The Widowmaker
    Obediently follows the verities of the submarine movie and its true story origins but without the imagination needed to refresh the genre.
  59. Lansdown
    Recycles familiar ideas, with just enough droll wit to score as a nifty normal-folk-doing-stupid-deadly-things comedy a la "Fargo."
  60. Stuart Little 2
    Slight but lively sequel. Aimed squarely at moppets with piddling attention spans.
  61. Tadpole
    A smart sex comedy that successfully swims upstream to spawn and score.
  62. Eight Legged Freaks
    This update of 1950s drive-in sci-fiers finds the right balance between icky, funny and scary, with sheer energy compensating for a script that could have used more parodic panache.
  63. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    For all its digressions and occasional flat moments, Iwai's movie is a remarkable, acutely involving one, working on an emotional level that can only really be expressed through music -- a strong component in all of Iwai's pics.
  64. My Wife Is an Actress
    A sporadically amusing but ultimately very slight showbiz story about being married to a celebrity. Most of the jokes and situations are predictable, and the film is saddled with irritating supporting characters.
  65. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    A perfectly respectable kid-friendly family offering.
  66. Reign of Fire
    An uncommonly satisfying mix of medieval fantasy, high-tech military action and "Mad Max"-style misadventure.
  67. Sex and Lucia
    A slickly made, intense and powerfully visual take on time-honored problems such as identity and the body's power over the mind.
  68. Never Again
    A hugely enjoyable romantic comedy that dares to suggest that love can bloom -- and, more important, hormones can rage -- after 50. Smart, sassy and slickly packaged.
  69. Halloween: Resurrection
    More uselessly redundant and shamelessly money-grubbing than most third-rate horror sequels.
  70. Road to Perdition
    Sam Mendes' much-anticipated second effort after his Oscar-winning "American Beauty" finds him working in a very different key while displaying an even more pronounced attentiveness to tone, genre variations and artistic niceties.
  71. Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defenders
    At first a little tabloid in tenor and editorial style, pic soon distances itself from the myriad court TV shows with a fine balance of everyday detail and verite drama.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    It's plotted in the form of an epic poem, each stanza dedicated to a member of the group.
  73. Me Without You
    The two appealingly played central characters and the film's enjoyable evocation of the 1970s and '80s keep it buoyant and diverting.
  74. Read My Lips
    Engaging chemistry between leads Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel.
  75. Tattoo Bar
    Simple tale is made unnecessarily complex by script's desire to give everything a metaphysical flavor, characters are across-the-board disagreeable and portentous art-school atmospherics are barely redeemed by occasionally good dialogue and a strong visual sense.
  76. Like Mike
    The court action contains only a fraction of the hoops energy one would expect from a pic co-produced by NBA Entertainment -- and film suffers from the conspicuous absence of the title's Michael Jordan.
  77. Men in Black II
    Elaborate, sporadically amusing but awfully lightweight followup, which has close to the same tone as its predecessor but makes one realize that freshness had a lot to do with its impact.
  78. Songs from the Second Floor
    One of the most highly crafted pics in recent memory, and certainly the most original in vision of the 23 features competing at Cannes this year, Songs From the Second Floor rapidly wears out its welcome after the first few reels to finish up as a perplexing objet d'art.
  79. The Powerpuff Girls
    Small children who will accept it as rock-'em, sock-'em excitement with a touch of gender-specific empowerment, and hipper teens and grown-ups who can appreciate the whole thing as a semisatirical hoot.
  80. Lovely & Amazing
    Engaging, intermittently insightful but too glib to wring full value out of its subject matter.
  81. The Cockettes
    Joyously re-creates the brief but resplendent reign of the legendary freakadelic drag troupe.
  82. The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
    Feels entirely a part of an already faded go-go era. Pic is too late by a mile and rightly dumped in a few theaters by Fox, which will doubtless send it to video bins faster than you can say gigabyte.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Women
    Absorbing moody and often compelling story.
  84. Hey Arnold! The Movie
    Has surprising hipness and good humor to spare, all put across with a funky, low-tech vibe.
  85. Harvard Man
    Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.
  86. Pumpkin
    Begins as though the filmmakers imagine that they're making a daringly anti-p.c. serio-comedy, but long before it's over, the picture is wearing its bleeding liberal heart all over its sleeve.
  87. Mr. Deeds
    A perfectly dreadful film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Money Buys Happiness
    Camera compositions are curious, even poorly framed at times, but helmer's gift is in directing actors and building scenes around physical actions, much like silent filmmakers.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Me, Stupid (re-release)
    Wilder, usually a director of considerable flair and inventiveness (if not always impeccable taste), has not been able this time out to rise above a basically vulgar, as well as creatively delinquent, screenplay, and he has got at best only plodding help from two of his principals, Dean Martin and Kim Novak.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Gutsy, unconventional, bursting with raw urban energy, this surprisingly suspenseful drama portrays New York Hell's Kitchen residents whose lives are governed by the immutable circumstances of their tawdry existence.
  91. Juwanna Mann
    Bringing absolutely no fresh angles to a time-tested formula that's seemed particularly overworked of late.
  92. Dahmer
    Jacobson produces a remarkably creepy piece of cinema that disturbs by suggestion, nuance and ambiguity.
  93. Sunshine State
    Falco, light years from "The Sopranos," is exquisitely vulnerable and her scenes play well with Hutton, in his finest role in years as a good man who knows he's sold out.
  94. Lilo & Stitch
    Has a casual, freewheeling nature in contrast to the creeping grandiosity of some of Disney's A-list animated titles.
  95. Minority Report
    May be a shade too serious and contemplative to completely enchant the thrill-seeking masses, while simultaneously seeming too mainstream-minded and genre-bound to be entirely embraced by highbrows.
  96. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Tough, cogent and resonantly chilling, this slow-burning drama continues the vein of harsh realism seen in recent Gallic cinema including "La Vie de Jesus" and "More Than Yesterday."
  97. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Pleasant rather than rollicking entertainment.
  98. ZigZag
    Evidencing savvy visual flair and compelling storytelling skill, Goyer infuses heart and vigor into material that could have come off as overly familiar at best, sappily improbable at worst.
  99. Windtalkers
    A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.
  100. Gangster No. 1
    Often nastily violent, and defiantly foul-mouthed in a realistic but dramatically unnecessary way, this portrait of a ruthless young hood in '60s London has several fine qualities but dilutes them with disorganized direction.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »