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. Inception
    If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it's also a metaphorical one: It's hard not to draw connections between Cobb's dream-weaving and Nolan's filmmaking -- an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.
  2. Standing Ovation
    At once annoyingly hyper and underwhelmingly dull.
  3. Alamar (To the Sea)
    A lovely, soulful feature from multihyphenate Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio that plays on the border between documentary and fiction.
  4. To Age or Not to Age
    Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.
  5. Valhalla Rising
    With very little dialogue, and even less plot, five chapter stops lend the movie a skeletal structure: "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land" and "Hell." But any discussion of the Dark Ages conflict between paganism and Christianity is reduced to just grunts or insults.
  6. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.
  7. The Kids Are All Right
    Sparked by wonderfully lived-in performances from Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right is alright, if not up to the level of writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's earlier pair of new bohemian dramas, "High Art" and "Laurel Canyon."
  8. Predators
    Perfs are adequate in a movie lacking much use for better ones, though Brody disappoints by using the stock sotto voce rasp of the uber-macho action hero who really, really means business.
  9. Despicable Me
    There's nothing like a little world domination to melt the most dastardly evildoer's heart. Since villains so often steal the show in animation, Despicable Me smartly turns the whole operation over to megalomaniacal rogue Gru.
  10. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    This subpar Nordic crimer, leaves ample room for improvement for the inevitable U.S. remake.
  11. Winnebago Man
    A curious young helmer tracks down the profanity-spewing subject of a two-decade-old viral video with results at once scabrously funny and uncomfortably poignant.
  12. [Rec] 2
    A sequel to the Spanish cult hit that offers an explanation for something that was far more effective when left largely unexplained.
  13. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    Will interest Rivette admirers at fests and in the niche arena but will do nothing to broaden his appeal.
  14. Great Directors
    Some viewers will doubtless argue over Ismailos' choices or balk at her adherence to a romantic single-vision theory of a highly collaborative art. Still, her eclectic pantheon weighs in with entertaining anecdotes and illuminating comments, illustrated with well-chosen samplings of the artists' work.
  15. The Last Airbender
    This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action "Avatar" adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense.
  16. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Employing a bigger budget, better effects and an edgier director ("Hard Candy's" David Slade), Eclipse focuses on what works -- the stars.
  17. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    Veering wildly between paranoia (being judged by "12 people who voted for George Bush") and self-aggrandizement (modestly comparing himself to Da Vinci, Bach and Galileo), Spector makes a fascinating subject.
  18. Love Ranch
    A tawdry look at the early days of Nevada's legalized brothel business that plays more like Lifetime fodder than the Martin Scorsese pictures that serve as its model.
  19. Grown Ups
    Grown Ups delivers precious few laughs for the sheer volume of comedy talent on offer.
  20. Dogtooth
    The Greek helmer's sophomore picture does exude a strange fascination throughout.
  21. Restrepo
    But despite its remarkably intimate footage of war and loss, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's documentary suffers from the same problem as the ongoing U.S. drama in Afghanistan: a lack of narrative coherence.
  22. Wild Grass
    The picture is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier.
  23. South of the Border
    The documentary offers little genuine information and no investigative research, adopting a style even more polemical than Stone's earlier docus on Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat.
  24. Knight and Day
    A high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy that labors to bring a measure of wit, romance and glamour to an overworked spy-thriller template.
  25. Jonah Hex
    The film's noisy, slam-bang approach and lack of imagination in all nonvisual departments will keep it from rounding up a fresh generation of thrill-seekers.
  26. Cyrus
    Think of Cyrus as the Duplasses for the masses, as the keenly observant sibs upgrade their scrappy, relationship-based formula to work with movie stars and a Fox Searchlight-size budget without sacrificing the raw, naturalistic feel of their first two features, "The Puffy Chair" and "Baghead."
  27. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    For sympathetic outsiders, on the other hand, it covers a lot of ground in a short space, not always in the most organized way, but on enough fronts to spark an informed dialogue.
  28. I Am Love
    In every sense, I Am Love is a stunning achievement.
  29. Let It Rain
    Despite an initial forecast of smart laughs and witty tete-a-tetes, the French dramedy Let It Rain winds up being a partly cloudy affair that lacks the cohesiveness of Agnes Jaoui’s two previous features, "The Taste of Others" and "Look at Me."
  30. Toy Story 3
    This tertiary adventure delivers welcome yet nonessential fun, landing well after its creators have grown up and succeeded toying with more sophisticated stories.
  31. Wah Do Dem
    Slight but winning and often funny, the scrappy Amerindie Wah Do Dem is a fish-out-of-water comedy driven by Sean "Bones" Sullivan's offbeat performance.
  32. 45365
    A seductive, fascinating tapestry of small-town life.
  33. Stonewall Uprising
    In astounding detail, Stonewall Uprising recalls the now-famous three-day riots in June 1969 after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, as homosexuals finally, openly fought back.
  34. The Karate Kid
    It's a sign of that pic's dramatic durability that "Kid" manages to be as absorbing as it is, despite its nearly 2½-hour running time.
  35. The A-Team
    Best enjoyed (a la the "Mission: Impossible" franchise) by simply admiring the explosions and silliness without dwelling too much on the skeletal plot.
  36. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    Mixing hilarious standup footage with admiring if not exactly cuddlesome behind-the-scenes glimpses.
  37. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    On a dramatic level, Dutch-born helmer Jan Kounen's hyper-stylized, emotionally vacuous film is like a pair of designer pants that look great but don't fit, or a rare vinyl recording that keeps skipping at the best parts.
  38. Winter's Bone
    Raw but utterly enveloping.
  39. Reel Injun
    The tone of Reel Injun is respectfully serious, though well short of angry, while focusing on how the stereotypical depictions of marauding redskins affected the self-images of Native Americans.
  40. The Lottery
    Advocacy to the point of propaganda.
  41. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage
    Endearing documentary, winner of Tribeca's audience award, should delight devotees and intrigue nonbelievers.
  42. Ondine
    A decidedly specialized affair that will appeal only to certain tastes, but there's plenty to appreciate if you let it seep in.
  43. Splice
    Vincenzo Natali's outlandish sci-fier sustains a grotesque and funny fascination throughout its slightly protracted runtime.
  44. Get Him to the Greek
    Barring a few lapses, the gags fly by in rapid-fire fashion, and enough of them connect -- thanks in part to the amusing mix of Hill's hang-dog demeanor with Brand's lanky, relentless hedonism.
  45. Killers
    Bullets fly and jokes land with a thud in Killers, a deadly dull hubby's-a-hit man farce that alternately resembles a knockoff of 2005's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and a rehash of "Knight & Day" avant la lettre .
  46. Marmaduke
    With extended closing credits, Marmaduke clocks in at 88 minutes and feels longer.
  47. Cropsey
    Cropsey has all the trappings of a true-crime TV special, but with an undercurrent of cultural exposition that is intelligent, profound and unsettling.
  48. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    With rare candor and a refreshing lack of piety, first-timers and combat-weary veterans exhibit their camaraderie, euphoria and burnout as the camera documents their struggles with logistics, horror, death and self-doubt.
  49. Finding Bliss
    This mildly amusing, resolutely inoffensive outing lacks serious sexual tension -- which might just make it a viable compromise date pick in limited release.
  50. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
    A horror comedy much closer to the actor-riffing drollery of Edgar Wright and Christopher Guest than "Scary Movie"-style splatstick, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead is one sly slice of the ridiculous.
  51. Whiz Kids
    Nominally structured around the Intel Science Talent Search, Whiz Kids traces a dual process: the empowerment of economically challenged students who otherwise might not realize their potential, and the empowerment of the nation through the problem-solving efforts of its best and brightest.
  52. Burzynski
    Despite its infotainment look, Burzynski ultimately proves convincing.
  53. Mademoiselle Chambon
    Mademoiselle Chambon offers a touching, soft-spoken portrait of two adults fighting to contain their carnal passions from spilling over into a full-blown affair.
  54. Micmacs
    Turning the volume of his slapstick surreality down from 11 to 10, Gallic auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Amelie") hits the sweet spot with Micmacs.
  55. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Bruckheimer's passably enjoyable, antiquity-themed epic should satisfy its young male core demographic well enough, but won't connect with other auds on the level of Bruckheimer's "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
  56. Survival of the Dead
    Steeped in fan-pleasing gore but woefully thin on ideas, originality (beyond new zombie-offing methods) or directorial flair.
  57. Father of My Children
    Marked by moments of remarkable stillness amid its emotional tumult, the film's classy, perceptive treatment of potentially maudlin material merits wider arthouse attention than it's likely to receive.
  58. Agora
    The mother of all secular humanists fights a losing battle against freshly minted religious zealots in Agora, a visually imposing, high-minded epic that ambitiously puts one of the pivotal moments in Western history onscreen for the first time.
  59. Sex and the City 2
    Part of the action occurs in the desert, which inadvertently proves apt, since the oases of enjoyable moments -- and they do exist -- suffer from being spaced too widely in what's otherwise a long, arid trek.
  60. Shrek Forever After
    The reputed swan song for the series and its first entry in 3D, pic contains a respectable number of laughs, but also borrows its storyline from the oft-recycled "It's a Wonderful Life," and if that's all its creators can do, it's best to put Far Far Away far far away.
  61. MacGruber
    How much mileage can a comedy get from a single joke? Quite a bit, judging from the guffaws-to-groaners ratio in MacGruber.
  62. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    An energetic, nicely balanced documentary containing all the necessary elements for sports reportage with the added advantage of meatier issues attached.
  63. Holy Rollers
    Asch's first feature is intelligent, respectable yet curiously muted in tone and impact, never fully catching the viewer up in either its crime saga or its account of individual rebellion within an insular religious community.
  64. John Rabe
    Despite the emotive subject matter, picture is often too sluggish dramatically, and never knits together its stock Western characters into a satisfying whole.
  65. Kites
    The deliriously entertaining and shamelessly derivative Hindi Kites owes more to Hollywood than Bollywood, though director Anurag Basu borrows plenty from both, aiming to give Indian song-and-dance pics the same sort of crossover success "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" did for Asian martial-arts movies.
  66. Racing Dreams
    The perceptively balanced "Dreams" transitions seamlessly from domestic drama to 70-mph heats.
  67. Solitary Man
    A movie of no small generosity: It offers audiences the pleasures of a screenplay whose every acerbic line is firmly rooted in character, and it hands Michael Douglas one of his best roles in years.
  68. Two in the Wave
    The demoralizing slide of the relationship between Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, from artistic comrades-in-arms during the thrilling creation of the nouvelle vague to name-calling enemies from the early '70s onward, is charted in overly academic and constricted fashion in Two in the Wave.
  69. Robin Hood
    Impressively made and serious-minded to a fault, this physically imposing picture brings abundant political-historical dimensions to its epic canvas, yet often seems devoted to stifling whatever pleasure audiences may have derived from the popular legend.
  70. Letters to Juliet
    Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan's script relentlessly piles on goopy conversation-stoppers like "Do you believe in destiny?" and "I didn't know that true love had an expiration date."
  71. Just Wright
    Painting by numbers often gets a bad rap: While it takes little originality to fill in the romantic-comedy blanks, even a simple, competent job can sometimes feel like a breath of fresh air.
  72. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.
  73. Here and There
    Slight, extremely likable picture, a sly variant on recent immigrant movies like "The Visitor" and "Goodbye Solo."
  74. Touching Home
    Despite the tale's real-life basis and a solid Ed Harris as their fictive equivalents' alcoholic dad, Touching Home emerges as a formulaic triumph-over-odds tale with too little distinguishing detail.
  75. Looking for Eric
    As in many of Laverty's scripts, problems of overall tone and character development aren't solved by Loach's easygoing direction, though when it works, "Eric" has many incidental pleasures.
  76. Metropia
    The characters at first seem photorealistic, but their faces barely move. There are good, basic sci-fi ideas in the script, but they're not satisfyingly developed.
  77. Iron Man 2
    Isn't as much fun as its predecessor, but by the time the smoke clears, it'll do.
  78. Happiness Runs
    Sherman's personal wounds feel fresh, which makes for a superficially beautiful but otherwise bitter story.
  79. The Lightkeepers
    Such predictable pap is generally better suited for romance novels or Lifetime movies. Here, it's elevated somewhat by a decent cast.
  80. Mother and Child
    An insightfully observed and exceptionally acted ensemble piece precisely about what the title suggests.
  81. Multiple Sarcasms
    Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily.
  82. Ocean of Pearls
    This mix of tepid hospital intrigue plus underdeveloped cultural/relationship conflicts feels like a routine TV episode stretched to feature length, with little dramatic urgency or cinematic style to render its good intentions compelling.
  83. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    Jean Dujardin pulls off a charming, Peter Sellers-esque performance as he bumbles his way through retro cloak-and-dagger intrigue, displaying his character's uncanny ability to insult anyone -- and, especially in this episode, women and Jews -- who's not 100% Gallic, male and a diehard Charles de Gaulle fanatic.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Babies
    Babies is refreshing in its methods, impressive in its scope and remarkable in its immediacy. That said, it's also an occasionally frustrating documentary that deprives the viewer of the comforts of exposition and cultural context.
  85. Trash Humpers
    Pity the festival-going fool who stumbles unawares into Harmony Korine's patently abrasive, deliberately cruddy-looking mock-documentary Trash Humpers. All others -- that is, those familiar with Korine's anti-bourgeois oeuvre and know what they're in for -- will have a glorious time.
  86. The Infidel
    The Infidel takes some all-too-predictable detours into moralizing and sentimentality, but remains consistently sharp as long as it sticks to its acerbic tone and saucy comic sensibility.
  87. Road, Movie
    A modestly amusing dramedy that is all the more pleasant for its fleeting detours into cheeky fantasy.
  88. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
    Paul Viragh's script is too bitty to hold it all together, and filigrees of technique fail to disguise the weaknesses in helmer Mat Whitecross' first solo flight.
  89. The Trotsky
    Both cartoonish and cerebral, and studded with in-jokes referencing multicultural life in "la belle ville" and classic cinema, the colorful pic stretches its premise a bit thin over nearly two hours.
  90. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    While the 1984 film has aged, its now-familiar jolts still pack more punch than this pic's recycled ones, which sometimes register so tepidly as to cause snickers.
  91. Furry Vengeance
    This undistinguished picture qualifies as an endangered species. As a digital babysitter, however, it may prove sufficiently efficient to generate fair-to-middling homevid sales.
  92. The Good Heart
    A picture too simplistic and sentimental for art seekers and too rough for general audiences.
  93. Harry Brown
    Bleak, gripping, sporadically exciting drama.
  94. Mercy
    Its modesty is what makes its very real virtues -- a tart, literate script, an adroit balance of humor and pathos, a memorable onscreen collaboration between star-scribe Scott Caan and his father James -- so cumulatively impressive.
  95. Please Give
    Keener, so deliciously nasty in Holofcener's "Lovely and Amazing," is no less engaging here in what is, surprisingly, the film's least bitchy role.
  96. The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
    Only real payoff is seeing the monstrosity assembled, and though that will surely earn the Dutch writer-director a cult reputation on the genre circuit, "going there" does not a movie make.
  97. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    This worthy follow-up to Kosashvili's brilliant "Late Marriage" should delight auds worldwide.
  98. The Back-up Plan
    This tepid romantic comedy falls somewhere between a weak sitcom pilot and a second-tier Hallmark movie.
  99. The Losers
    The Losers is the sort of pyro-heavy exercise parodied in "Tropic Thunder," and no amount of production polish can hide the hollowness beneath its junk-food high.
  100. A Shine of Rainbows
    Irresistibly good-natured even when it's cheesy.
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