Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Charlotte Gray
    A bland and dour screen version of Sebastian Faulks' highly engrossing bestseller.
  3. 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.
  4. Jet Lag
    Stays resolutely grounded thanks to miscasting of Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno as the leads and a script that contrarily breaks every rule of the genre.
  5. Godzilla 2000
    A classically low-tech monster mash.
  6. Teknolust
    While it's stylishly designed and shot in startling colors on digital high-definition cameras, this feels like yesterday's futuristic news, and it's more likely to surface as a video/DVD curiosity than a theatrical draw.
  7. Teddy Bears' Picnic
    Despite its intelligence and a great, funny concept for a movie, this "Picnic" never gets past the appetizers; pic lacks the development needed for a full-length feature and, following a hilarious opening sequence, it becomes tiresomely one-note.
  8. 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.
  9. Suspended Animation
    A psychological drama cum genteel shocker that's long on ambition and short on delivery.
  10. Riding in Cars with Boys
    The result under Penny Marshall's direction is a film with genuinely serious intentions that falls considerably short of its intentions.
  11. All About the Benjamins
    Boilerplate crime comedy.
  12. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Saddled with a sentimentally "sincere" subject and lacking the stylistic and humorous cachet of the recent computer-animated smashes.
  13. Hard Ball
    There's no cork inside Hardball, but there's more than enough corn. Everything about the movie is geared for maximum uplifting and tear-jerking effect, and seems designed, in the end, to question the old saw that there's no crying in baseball.
  14. Kill by Inches
    The atmosphere is properly bizarre and in moments even scary, but there's no involving story or characters to sustain the feature-length narrative.
  15. The Middle of the World
    Debuting helmer Vicente Amorim provides a determined forward movement, which, while lacking in cultural explanation, gives the saga uplift and punch.
  16. 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.
  17. Head of State
    So beneath the considerable talents of its star, Chris Rock, it's dismaying to note Rock is also the movie's director, producer and co-scenarist. Not unlike Richard Pryor a generation ago, Rock has yet to land a movie vehicle that captures the sparky energy and subversive bent of his excellent stand-up performances.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Head Over Heels
    A mildly amusing trifle.
  19. Kedma
    A largely dull history lesson…stripped of any backgrounding, peopled with archetypes rather than fully-drawn characters, and features self-consciously arty direction that gets in the way of story-telling.
  20. Enough
    The latest model in the recent spate of underwhelming female star vehicles, Enough, a thriller detailing how a good wife gets back at an evil, possessive husband, is never provocative enough to generate strong emotional response.
  21. Along Came a Spider
    Weaves a humdrum plot that's never ahead of the audience until three-quarters through.
  22. 15 Minutes
    A thriller more contrived than it is exciting.
  23. My Baby's Daddy
    Isn't an embarrassment. Rather, it's an acceptably executed, thoroughly routine time-killer.
  24. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Beyond the participants' friends and co-workers, it's hard to imagine an audience for this professionally packaged exercise in navel gazing.
  25. How to Deal
    A bland romance that suffers from choppy development, dramatic overload and dearth of personality.
  26. Planet of the Apes
    Largely listless and witless, this extensive reworking of the 1968 sci-fi favorite simply isn't very exciting or imaginative; most surprisingly, given the material, it's also Burton's most conventional and literal-minded film, the one most lacking in his trademark poetic weirdness and bracing flights of fancy.
  27. By Hook or by Crook
    No movie like this about friendship between two young lesbians and their various adventures, punctuated with laissez-faire jump-cutting, should be this boring.
  28. Stigmata
    A fiery, convoluted finale fails to deliver any satisfying payoff.
  29. Twelve Monkeys
    Gilliam's work is long on sensibility, short on sense.
  30. 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.
  31. Windtalkers
    A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.
  32. Duplex
    Somewhere along the line, the comedy turned from dark and playful to mean-spirited and sophomoric. A waste of the considerable appeal and comic talents of leads Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore.
  33. The Trip
    The cataclysmic changes in attitude and lifestyles the characters pass through at irregular intervals from 1973 to 1984... seem to consist wholly of changes in hairstyle that look as wildly stereotyped and inauthentic as the gestures and lines that accompany them.
  34. Varsity Blues
    An unappetizing mix of raucously vulgar comedy and teen-angst melodrama.
  35. Love the Hard Way
    Doesn't ring true as a love story between a cocky scam artist and a clever biology student, despite a game effort by Charlotte Ayanna in an impossible role and Adrien Brody at his loosest.
  36. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
    Amiable rather than genuinely funny.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    At First Sight
    Although it's notoriously difficult to play a romance involving one partner's disability or illness without resorting to sentimentality, Kilmer acquits himself admirably.
  38. The Fifth Element
    Ultimately a mess of diverse ingredients that sorely could have used a rigorous screening process to eliminate all the chaff.
  39. Bolivia
    A dignified second film for Caetano.
  40. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    If drive-ins still existed, this film would rule there for weeks.
  41. U.S. Marshals
    Stuart Baird's new thriller is inferior to the Andrew Davis movie in every respect: script, acting, rhythm and even tech credits.
  42. The Anarchist Cookbook
    An ill-conceived effort that starts OK but quickly goes off the rails.
  43. The Transporter
    So second-hand and disposable is it in every respect.
  44. High Crimes
    Judd now is top-billed, but her performance is so resolutely humorless and businesslike that Freeman's gruffly affectionate warmth becomes doubly valuable, though not nearly enough to lend this generic project any special character.
  45. Rock Star
    Feels particularly like old news after the risks of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle were laid out for the previously uninformed in last year's "Almost Famous."
  46. Life or Something Like It
    A deeply metaphysical film by contempo Hollywood standards, this middlebrow trifle may engage the emotions of a certain tier of young professional women.
  47. Palmetto
    Surprises are reserved for the final half-hour, at which point the slow-paced Palmetto has long since fossilized as a routine exercise in ceiling-fan, sweaty-forehead noir-by-numbers.
  48. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    The gambits in Ghost Dog seem simply like literary and cinematic games devoid of any larger meaning.
  49. Heartbreakers
    Overstays its welcome by at least a half-hour after never getting very high off the ground in the first place.
  50. Picture Perfect
    A well-upholstered but hopelessly contrived romantic comedy, Picture Perfect is too ineffectual to tickle either the funnybone or the heartstrings.
  51. Celebrity
    The spectacle of Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis doing over-the-top Woody Allen impersonations creates a neurotic energy meltdown in Celebrity, a once-over-lightly rehash of mostly stale Allen themes and motifs.
  52. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    Strikes too many false notes on the dramatic side to add up to a satisfying emotional experience.
  53. Big Trouble
    A genially amusing ensemble farce that doesn't quite achieve enough momentum for liftoff.
  54. Beloved
    At nearly three hours, however, it rather overstays its welcome, trying the patience even as it sustains intrigue regarding its final revelations.
  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. A Guy Thing
    Does get slightly better as it goes along.
  57. The Independent
    Would have worked better with a few more ersatz coming-attraction trailers and considerably less filler. More than likely, it would have worked best of all as an hourlong special on Comedy Central.
  58. 50 First Dates
    Schneider hams it up as a paunchy middle-aged Hawaiian stoner in an eyebrow-raising ethnic caricature that more than once calls to mind Mickey Rooney's unfortunate Japanese turn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
  59. SLC Punk!
    Energetic but poorly structured.
  60. The Anniversary Party
    Too familiar in its basic trajectory to be fresh or compelling.
  61. The Guru
    A generally entertaining but rather old-fashioned romantic comedy.
  62. 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.
  63. Snow Dogs
    Small children will be amused by the frenetic antics of Cuba Gooding Jr. Grownups, however, will be far less enchanted.
  64. Miss Congeniality
    Stumbling its way down the comedy runway, Miss Congeniality is yet another miscalculated vehicle for the ever-feisty Sandra Bullock.
  65. Desperado
    Could scarcely be more dazzling on a purely visual level, but it's mortally anemic in the story, character and thematic departments.
  66. Daddy Day Care
    Scarcely more amusing than spending 90 minutes in a pre-K classroom.
  67. Jeepers Creepers
    Emerges as the most conventional and least imaginative of the recent crop of high-class fright movies that includes "The Others," "Session 9" and "Wendigo."
  68. Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
    Pic's busy direction and bright performances partly compensate for a script that goes in too many directions at the same time.
  69. A Dog of Flanders
    This Dog won't hunt. Although well crafted and handsomely mounted, pic lacks sufficient sizzle.
  70. My First Mister
    Lahti's feature directorial debut walks an innocuous middle line between the story's maudlin possibilities and its meaningful potential.
  71. Jim Brown: All American
    A model of cohesion and clarity as long as it's dealing with Brown's exemplary public achievements. However, pic quickly becomes mired in tedium and confusion when it turns to Brown's scandal-ridden private life.
  72. The Ninth Gate
    This is really a shaggy devil story whose giddy, ironic tone may throw viewers expecting a scary movie.
  73. Millennium Mambo
    A slow, empty, over-mannered snoozer that shows Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-hsien asleep at the wheel.
  74. Bad Boys II
    As overblown as it is overlong, Bad Boys II is an enervating case of more is less.
  75. Driven
    Director Renny Harlin has unfortunately adopted a let's-try-anything attitude that translates into a chaotic and unattractive visual style.
  76. Soul Plane
    Begins as a high-spirited romp before running out of gas and ideas about halfway up the tarmac.
  77. The 13th Warrior
    Bloody but anemic story.
  78. Impostor
    Imposter is a penny-pinched "Blade Runner," a stubbornly unexciting ride into the near future.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Y Tu Mamá También
    The film's biggest limitation is its oversexed, underdeveloped male duo. Playing like a south-of-the-border version of Beavis and Butt-head, the teenagers have but one thought in their heads.
  80. Shallow Hal
    Could use a little extra comic poundage. The Farrelly brothers' latest sees the team tapping a sweeter, milder vein of humor than their outrageous norm.
  81. The Tigger Movie
    By far the least ambitious, and certainly the least interesting, animated feature to come out of Disney in quite some time.
  82. 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.
  83. The Rage: Carrie 2
    As generic in every aspect as Brian De Palma's original was inventive.
  84. Sweet November
    A contrived but entirely workable premise is given a well-tooled treatment in Sweet November, a femme-slanted doomed romance with a heavily calculated feel to it.
  85. Radio
    "Inspired by a true story" it may be, but inspired it's not.
  86. Ravenous
    Essentially approaches its subject seriously, but does take stabs both at horror and grotesque comedy, neither with much success.
  87. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    Like "Waiting to Exhale" except more so, film jerks from scene to scene with little sense of rhythm, continuity or dramatic shaping.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Female Trouble (re-release)
    Camp is too elegant a word to describe it all.
  89. Against the Ropes
    Think of Against the Ropes as a "Rocky" story -- if, that is, the vintage is somewhere between "Rocky IV" and "V," and the action centered around the Burgess Meredith character as played by Meg Ryan wearing "Barbarella" outfits.
  90. Catwoman
    The lure of Halle Berry as the leather-clad feline should help this mangy misfire claw out a decent opening before a quick slink to DVD.
  91. Mean Machine
    OK entertainment but nothing more.
  92. Coyote Ugly
    The latest and most calculated re-do on the formulaic fantasy of an innocent conquering Gotham.
  93. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    Pic maintains a likable, breezy tone throughout but looks increasingly threadbare of real inspiration or originality as it proceeds.
  94. Ed Gein
    A disappointingly mild re-creation of true events.
  95. Love Me If You Dare
    Valiant attempt to create a modern fairytale ends up being frustratingly creepy instead of haunting and memorable.
  96. 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    Hamill is not enough of a dramatic actor to carry the plot load here, especially when his partner in so many scenes is really little more than an oversized gas pump, even if splendidly voiced by James Earl Jones.
  98. Timeline
    Lacks the consistent tone, pace and point of view for either a science fiction thriller or medieval war adventure.
  99. Sweet Home Alabama
    Revives the format but not the fun of classic Hollywood screwball comedies about rediscovering the virtues of a former mate.
  100. The Time Machine
    Breaks down when it gets to the distant future, which in this case isn't a good place to be stranded.
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