Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. The Three Musketeers
    A very 2011 take on Alexandre Dumas' classic that feels weirdly dated already. Although adequately entertaining thanks to lavish production values and game supporting perfs, this anodyne adaptation lacks a killer hook that would help it cross over to a demographic beyond action buffs and fanboys.
  2. The Whale
    When a baby orca strayed from its family pod near Puget Sound and showed up 200 miles away in Canada in 2001, it became the center of a long-running human drama by turns cute, inspirational, ludicrous and tragic, as documented in The Whale.
  3. A Bird of the Air
    Unable to establish a consistent tone, picture goes derivatively screwball one minute and stickily sentimental the next.
  4. Limelight
    Watching Limelight, about the rise and politically engineered fall of onetime Manhattan nightclub kingpin Peter Gatien, is like looking through a family album: If you're in the family, you might be interested.
  5. There Was Once...
    Hungarian schoolteacher Gyongi Mago's campaign to raise awareness of her hometown's once-vibrant, now conspicuously absent Jewish population is captured in the superior docu There Was Once ...
  6. In Search of God
    Poorly conceived 60-minute picture might have fared better as a more straightforward documentary.
  7. Journey from Zanskar
    Surprisingly entertaining.
  8. White Wash
    Covering familiar ground from an unfamiliar angle, Ted Woods' oddball documentary White Wash examines the history of African-American disenfranchisement from a black surfer's viewpoint, in the process countering the racist myth that black people don't swim or surf.
  9. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    Oddly, the director's personal connection with his subject adds little warmth, filmmaker Carl proving nearly as unemotional as his deadpan dad.
  10. Abduction
    Aside from such dutiful fan service, the film is a haggardly slapdash "Bourne Identity" knockoff, never rising above the level of basic competence.
  11. Toast
    Like the lemon meringue pies and shrimp cocktails it features throughout, Brit comedy-drama Toast is tasty, hearty and rather conventional.
  12. Dolphin Tale
    Though garnished with some heavy dollops of cheese, Dolphin Tale is a surprisingly solid, earnest family picture.
  13. Weekend
    Earnest and understated, Weekend has the intimate look and feel of a two-character stage play that has been opened up -- but only slightly, with minimal addition of supporting players -- for a mostly faithful filmization.
  14. Thunder Soul
    Mark Landsman's spirited Thunder Soul offers a heaping helping of uplift while documenting the past triumphs and recent reunion of a predominantly black Houston high school's singularly accomplished jazz stage band.
  15. Puncture
    Though conceptually intriguing, the mix of downward drug spiral with uphill struggle for good never really coalesces.
  16. Red State
    This sloppily constructed horror-thriller lacks the satirical bite and action chops to skewer extreme-right-wing zealots with the gusto Smith clearly feels they deserve, instead evincing the verbal incontinence and slack tension that have long dogged the writer-director's work.
  17. Machine Gun Preacher
    While the result is yet another story of African suffering told from a white do-gooder's perspective, this particular do-gooder is intrinsically fascinating enough to warrant attention, albeit more nuanced attention than he receives here.
  18. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Finding a pulse only in the band's late-reel performance of "Alive," a lusty passage that would've begun a pic intent on making a case for the group's greatness, "Twenty" simply counts the years from 1991 via sludgy backstage and onstage footage whose rarity can't forgive its inclusion. Crowe's critic mentor, the late Lester Bangs, would cringe.
  19. Prince of Swine
    Incompetent on every level, from its haphazard staging to its amateurish sound mix.
  20. Trespass
    Helmer Joel Schumacher and a game cast headed by Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman do their damnedest to build and sustain suspense while trying, with some degree of success, to breathe fresh life into a formulaic, even generic scenario.
  21. 50/50
    Will Reiser's semiautobiographical script initially prescribes too artificial a story treatment for its characters but is rescued by a genial, low-key vibe that builds in sensitivity and emotion up through the final reels.
  22. One Fall
    Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.
  23. Position Among the Stars
    As with his previous pics about the brood, Dutch-Indonesian helmer Leonard Retel Helmrich deploys an expressionistic, quasi-soap-opera approach to produce striking results, thanks especially to use of Steadicam. But the protagonists seem to be playing to the cameras more this time round, making "Stars" a less charming effort than earlier installments.
  24. Silent Souls
    Beautifully assembled, but emotionally inert despite its focus on bereavement and love's endurance, Russian art film Silent Souls reps at the very least a significant step up for its helmer, Aleksei Fedorchenko.
  25. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Alternately hilarious and discomfiting, and finally rather poignant.
  26. Happy, Happy
    Picture ultimately pulls off a fairly ambitious narrative agenda with a wrap both credible and crowdpleasing.
  27. Berlin 36
    The picture sports a strong lead cast but is diminished by TV-style helming and production qualities.
  28. Straw Dogs
    Though competently crafted, Rod Lurie's wholly unnecessary 2011 remake is a film with few notions of its own, and representative of its time only in the commercial sense that home-invasion thrillers are now more prevalent at the multiplex.
  29. The Weird World of Blowfly
    Hanging out with a 1970s cult figure of raunchy R&B "party records" is less fun than one would expect in The Weird World of Blowfly.
  30. Restless
    At once delicate and clumsy, tender and twee, Restless wraps the pain of grief and impending mortality in the balm of a teenage love story.
  31. Jane's Journey
    A worshipful tribute to the life and work of Jane Goodall.
  32. The Mill and the Cross
    Neither conventional costume drama nor abstract objet d'art, this visually ravishing, surprisingly beguiling gamble won't fit any standard arthouse niche. Still it could prove the Polish helmer's belated international breakthrough.
  33. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Sarah Jessica Parker's myriad fans will doubtless appreciate her frazzled warmth in a part she energetically inhabits, but the picture at times feels out of step with contemporary reality and humorless in its adaptation of a comic bestseller.
  34. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    One of the most astonishingly unfunny films of this or any other year.
  35. Mere Brother Ki Dulhan
    Engaging leads, high-end production values, wedding preparations, energetic musical numbers and a familiar story should ensure healthy biz for Mere brother ki dulhan, a lightweight, unambitious three-way romantic comedy whose utter predictability may be its greatest asset.
  36. The Ides of March
    Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.
  37. Moneyball
    While a hopelessly awkward-looking Hill provides fish-out-of-water laughs, Pitt gives a genuinely soul-searching performance.
  38. Killer Elite
    A macho, adrenaline-fix suspenser that plays like the bigscreen equivalent of those pulpy spy novels that once clogged grocery-store checkouts.
  39. Inside Out
    Veering crazily in tone, Inside Out might fail to catapult its star into wider acceptability, but should delight fans of lightly absurd actioners.
  40. A Kiss and a Promise
    Philip Guzman's film offers plenty of intriguing elements, even if the central characters eventually feel too underexplored to fully satisfy.
  41. Brother's Justice
    It's an easy watch that nonetheless consistently feels like a grazing blow rather than a knockout.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shaolin
    Well-mounted Chinese-Hong Kong martial-arts co-production Shaolin elevates enlightenment above brute strength, but weak helming undercuts the pic's punch.
  43. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    For most of its running time, Fordson wanders far from the gridiron to offer overall impressions of a close-knit community of Arab-Americans who, in the wake of 9/11, often have found themselves targeted and stereotyped as militant Islamists or worse.
  44. Grave Encounters
    The picture's creepiness factor is sufficient to rate this a notch above genre average.
  45. Echotone
    There's a potentially fascinating and appreciably more concise 60-minute documentary to be found somewhere amid the uneven and unfocused 88-minute hodgepodge that is Echotone.
  46. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Assembly is brisk and high-grade, allowing for the variable quality of archival materials.
  47. Where Soldiers Come From
    Covering their lives with intimate access from before boot camp to the difficult return home, Heather Courtney's documentary packs a savage but understated punch.
  48. We Were Here
    We Were Here concentrates on the impressive way a collective of disenfranchised individuals came together to support one another in this time of crisis. In that respect, the title has dual meanings, referring to both the film's "Shoah"-like survivors' testimony and the fact that the gay community was there for one another at a time that government and medicine were slow to respond.
  49. Tanner Hall
    Refigured from a never-made TV pilot, this shallow boarding school-set coming-of-ager traverses familiar territory without offering anything fresh.
  50. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Like any mixtape, it offers some truly transcendent moments alongside a smattering of filler, and never quite assembles its pieces into a cohesive whole.
  51. Drive
    Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, Drive takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.
  52. Contagion
    Without fully rounded characters, it's hard to care who lives or dies in what amounts to an extended procedural on how disease prevention organizations might respond to such a scenario.
  53. Love Crime
    Picture initially suggests a sort of Gallic "Damages," with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in the Glenn Close and Rose Byrne roles, but the corporate catfight soon gives way to a cleverly designed whodunit.
  54. Saving Private Perez
    The horrific events in Mexico are proving fertile ground for black comedy, and though Saving Private Perez is certainly not the blackest, it may well be the funniest.
  55. Apollo 18
    Despite stretches of skillfully sustained suspense, Apollo 18 ultimately comes across as little more than a modestly clever stunt.
  56. Shark Night 3D
    Unlike his "Snakes on a Plane," director David R. Ellis' sharks-in-a-lake thriller displays little sense of its scenario's camp potential. Gore, too, is in short supply on account of the pic's PG-13 rating, which renders the attack scenes nearly toothless.
  57. Bodyguard
    Indian helmer Siddique delivers a middling melange of action, romance, music and slapstick in his hotly anticipated Hindi version of "Bodyguard."
  58. The Debt
    The remake ups the adrenaline factor, and features strong performances across the board, yet feels bogged down by a weighty love triangle and a subject that merits more than the old-school good vs. evil approach.
  59. Seven Days in Utopia
    Provides little more than a pleasantly passable Christian sports parable delivered as a sort of Texan golfer's version of "The Karate Kid."
  60. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    An inventive marriage of ancient China and Agatha Christie, Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame is a lavishly overwrought historical whodunit.
  61. Burke and Hare
    The film struggles to match the original Ealing's quality benchmark, and its unapologetically old-fashioned sensibility may have trouble connecting with contempo audiences.
  62. Warrior
    An improbably effective and affecting mix of raw emotions and exciting smackdowns.
  63. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Both evocative and faithful in its depiction of the famed French singer's lascivious life, "Gainsbourg (vie heroique)" offers up a feast of memorable chansons and an almost endless parade of drop-dead-gorgeous muses.
  64. Iron Crows
    Virtually an experimental film -- the humanity is rich, but pure image and sensation are what makes it tick.
  65. Stripped Down
    Lacks the delicate tonal control and subtle smarts required for such an intended half-surreal exercise.
  66. Chasing Madoff
    Chasing Madoff is a useful reminder that all is far from well with our financial institutions, which continue to lobby for less regulation rather than more. But the human element of the film is so weirdly distracting it often deflects from its primary target.
  67. Tales from the Golden Age
    Though Mungiu's presumed two shorts have the most individual feel, the other helmers -- Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hoefer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu, all feature novices -- show a plethora of styles within the so-called "Romanian New Wave."
  68. Special Treatment
    Again co-written by and co-starring writer-thesp Richard Debuisne, picture has some of the duo's trademark sharp dialogue but again fails to fully come together on a narrative level.
  69. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Despite the preposterous, kissing-your-sister premise of A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy, a very likable cast and some terrific sketch-style comedy should please (if not deeply satisfy the lustful yearnings of) audiences lured by the film's title.
  70. Redemption Road
    A lightly enjoyable road picture about a circuitous road to redemption, Black, White and Blues offers simple, down-home pleasures while spinning an undeniably familiar but emotionally satisfying tale.
  71. Higher Ground
    A satirical yet sensitive portrait of life in an evangelical Christian community, Higher Ground marks a startlingly bold directing debut for actress Vera Farmiga.
  72. The Family Tree
    Suffers from severe problems of tone, a surfeit of undeveloped plot points and characters, and bland direction.
  73. Brighton Rock
    Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.
  74. Colombiana
    The Olivier Megaton-directed Colombiana may not be the brainiest of actioners, but one of the merits of producer Luc Besson's latest brainchild is that fanboys worldwide will come away with a scrap of horticultural knowledge as well as a pretty good time.
  75. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    A cheap-looking, vaguely depressing echo of Robert Rodriguez's well-loved kidpic trilogy, assembled with minimal imagination or effort.
  76. 5 Days of War
    Set during the brief, brutal 2008 flare-up between Russia and Georgia, the drama has some exhilarating moments, but they're dampened by concessions to conventionally bloviating music, overly theatrical dialogue and inadvertently comic slo-mo.
  77. One Day
    On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away.
  78. Conan the Barbarian
    The well-executed picture solves the biggest challenge facing those hoping to breathe new life -- however nasty, brutish and short -- into the 79-year-old franchise by finding an actor capable of filling Ah-nuld's shoes.
  79. A Horrible Way to Die
    Where helmer Adam Wingard's prior "Pop Skull" used a jittery style to convey its delusional, possibly meth-addled protagonist's mindset, here, too much handheld camera wobble and wavering image focus only alienate the viewer from this somewhat sluggish tale.
  80. Programming the Nation?
    Being pissed off isn't enough to convince in a film that reveals very little that's new; the picture's personalized approach and kitchen-sink structure don't help, either.
  81. The Journals of Musan
    Though it cries out for trimming, "Musan" is a welcome, substantive marker on the current cinema landscape.
  82. Griff the Invisible
    The Melody-Griff evolution is the sweetest part of "Griff the Invisible," and has a certain charm. But anyone looking for a superhero movie is going to be disappointed.
  83. Mozart's Sister
    Feminist without the arrogance of 20-20 hindsight, vividly precise in its depiction of 18th-century pre-revolutionary France (the filmmakers were allowed to shoot inside Versailles), alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.
  84. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Rather than trying to frighten adults, this entire R-rated exercise feels engineered to emotionally scar any younger audiences who should happen to see it -- much as the original did del Toro back in the day.
  85. Our Idiot Brother
    Picture needs every ounce of goodwill it can wring from Rudd's likable lead performance to offset a sour, borderline misogynistic streak for which scattered snickers offer only modest compensation.
  86. Flypaper
    Strenuous and just fitfully amusing.
  87. Amigo
    Good intentions can't breathe fresh life into cliches or dispel the overall impression of schematic didacticism.
  88. Damn!
    Even at 73 minutes, the film is, well, too damn long.
  89. Aarakshan
    While its questions of affirmative action and charter schools could theoretically resonate with American audiences, the picture's corny theatrics, talky, preachy approach and taxing 164-minute running time will not translate.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    You might leave Glee 3D feeling a little gooey all over, but that slushie does taste kind of sweet.
  91. Final Destination 5
    This latest entry in the 11-year-old horror series duly adheres to tradition by providing inventively grisly demises for various characters.
  92. Bad Posture
    Bad dialogue and bad acting might convince some of the authenticity behind Bad Posture, but there's no getting around the tedious navel-gazing of Malcolm Murray's fiction debut.
  93. Summer Pasture
    A remarkably intimate documentary woven out of tradition and change, and the endearing subjects who contend with both.
  94. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Though treating women's oppression as a political issue isn't exactly new, the clarity with which it's spelled out in Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story is both bold and brave.
  95. The Last Circus
    Loud, tedious and unattractive in every sense, this barrage of blood set during the Franco regime combines the helmer's customary cartoonishness with horror and ups it a thousand notches.
  96. Senna
    Footage from an onboard camera thrillingly places the viewer in Senna's lap, and soberingly includes the accident that claimed his life.
  97. Littlerock
    Well-crafted picture has a nice sense of place and rudderless youth, though in the end, simply too little happens for the story to have much resonance.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    Audiences get an eyeful of flesh, served with sadistic, spasmodic laughs.
  99. Habermann
    More soap opera than high drama, the film is confused and confusing, and tedious to boot.
  100. The Help
    A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white audiences, The Help personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963.
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